The Register Archive: Olympic team does us proud, even in defeat
To mark The Catholic Register’s 125th year, we are digging into our archive to re-publish interesting stories from the pages of our past. As the 2018 Winter Olympics prepares to open Feb. 9 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, we look back at Canada’s hockey entry in the 1964 Games at Innsbruck, a team built and coached by Fr. David Bauer. A controversial scoring system meant Canada finished fourth and out of the medals despite a 5-2 record, but the team’s showing inspired words of comfort from columnist Fr. Tom Raby in The Register, in the Feb. 22, 1964 issue:
Fr. David Bauer was a man of the cloth, a priest of the rink
This quote from Tom Watt, former NHL and Canadian Olympic hockey coach, left me intrigued: “Fr. Bauer is a great Canadian, but I could never get it straight — sometimes when you thought you were talking about hockey, the priest came out of him and sometimes when you thought you were talking to a priest the hockey came out of him.”