The Icelandic Canadian - 01.03.1981, Síða 31

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
29
SPORT IN THE ICELANDIC HERITAGE
by Hal Sigurdson, Sports Editor, Winnipeg Free Press
What I tried unsuccessfully to explain to
Terry Tergesen when he asked me to write
something about the sports achievements of
Manitobans of Icelandic descent is that he
was talking to the wrong guy.
It’s true I’ve been earning a living writing
about sport for perilously close to 30 years
and it’s also true my own heritage is proudly
Icelandic. Nevertheless, I have never made
any special effort to document the achieve-
ments of athletes of Icelandic ancestry as
they moved across our sporting stage.
The historian in our family was my late
father, Einar. Unfortunately, not much
rubbed off, despite the enormous patience
and effort he exercised in his attempts to
drum a proper appreciation of Icelandic his-
tory and tradition into an offspring with a
distressingly brief attention span.
Many of these lessons were conducted
with the pupil perched atop a hay rack. That
gave the teacher the opportunity to refocus
his attention by dumping a forkfull of hay
over his head when it became apparent he
had become distracted by the flash of color
offered by a passing oriole or goldfinch.
It must have been an effective teaching
tool. I can still remember my father assuring
me Iceland has more poets per capita than
any other nation in the world; that Icelandic
society deems knowledge should give its
owner a higher social status than mere
wealth; that you can hardly find a gun on the
entire island; that virtually every Icelander
over the age of six can read and write; that
the althing, Iceland’s parliament, is the
world’s oldest.
He even assured me our family is some-
how related to Jon Sigurdsson, the poet-
tumed-social-reformer whose statue now
graces Manitoba’s legislative grounds. But
apart from confessing a fondness for “the
glima” and soccer in his own youth back in
Iceland, we never discussed Icelandic heri-
tage in terms of sport.
Not that sport wasn’t frequently dis-
cussed, because it was. Our log farmhouse
north of Churchbridge, Sask., did not come
equipped with many of the amenities of life
our children take for granted, but it did have
a magnificent radio — a marvelous instru-
ment which could bring the world into a tiny
farmhouse that had neither electricity nor
running water.
Friday nights were spent listening to Don
Dunphy describe the Friday Night fights for
Gillette. Saturday nights in winter meant the
voice of Foster Hewitt coming to us from the
gondola in Maple Leaf Gardens. Early
October afternoons meant listenting to Mel
Allen or Red Barber describe the drama of
the World Series.
But it was just sport, not sport with an
Icelandic accent. Sports discussions with
father were more likely to centre around his
firmly held view that cheering for the New
York Yankees was like cheering for U.S.
Steel rather than in reliving the glories of
Frank Fredrickson.
So frankly, I grew up thinking Icelanders
were people who spent all their time either
reading books or writing poetry when they
weren’t fishing or raising sheep. As nearly
as I could determine the closest thing to a
traditional Icelandic sport was the naked
spirit. This, I gathered, was performed im-
mediately after a steam bath had been fol-
lowed by a roll in the snow.
A lot of Icelandic-Canadian kids of my
generation, one suspects, grew up with
similar notions. The “cerebral” nearly always
ranked ahead of the “physical” in their
parents’ conversations.
Later, of course, I came to realize the
famed Winnipeg Falcons were perhaps the
most gifted hockey team every produced