Canadian Goose Egg

SALT LAKE CITY —  Billy Dawe will be looking at the mantel over his fireplace a lot more during these Winter Olympics, gazing at the 50-year-old memento displayed at his home in Edmonton and wondering about the irony of it all.

He will be glued to his television set, rooting every rush down the ice by the Canadian hockey team, pulling with all his heart that the millionaire players on the ice will be able to finally have what he has.

He laughs ruefully at the thought of the likes of Mario Lemieux, Rob Blake, Paul Kariya, Eric Lindros and Joe Sakic, NHL superstars and members of Team Canada at the Salt Lake Games, not having it. Same goes for previous Canadian superstars such as Bobby Hull, Maurice Richard, Jean Beliveau and Wayne Gretzky.

“It is inconceivable to me,” Dawe said recently, from Edmonton, “that it has been 50 years since a Canadian stood on that gold medal stand and sang ‘O! Canada.’”

It is inconceivable to just about anybody with the slightest knowledge of hockey and its origins that Canada has been shut out of the Olympic gold medal since the 1952 Games in Oslo. Especially considering that Canada won six of the first seven golds, one in Antwerp in 1920 when hockey was part of the Summer Games. In 41 Olympic games between 1920 and 1952, Canada won 37 and lost only one, with three ties. The Canadians scored 403 goals and gave up only 34, and in the first actual Winter Games in 1924 in Chamonix, France, outscored five opponents, 110-3.

But starting with the 1956 Games in Cortina, Italy, the Soviets took over, winning eight of the 10 golds in hockey through the ’92 Games in Albertville, France. The exceptions: the two miracles on ice when the host Americans won at Squaw Valley in ’60 and at Lake Placid in ’80. Angered and frustrated by the Soviet hockey teams and their apparent professional status, Canada pulled out of two Olympics--Sapporo, Japan, in ’72 and Innsbruck, Austria, in ‘76--before returning.

By the ’94 Games in Lillehammer, Norway, the Soviet Union had split up, but little good it did the Canadians. Sweden won the gold.

Then, starting in ’98 at Nagano, pros were welcomed to the hockey tournament.

Billy Dawe is 77. He was captain of the Edmonton Mercurys, a team of amateurs that represented Canada in the 1952 Games. He scored six goals and had six assists in eight games, helped the Mercurys win what was then a predictable gold for Canada and stood on the victory stand while they played “O! Canada,” his country’s moving national anthem.

“It’s been 50 years, and I still have trouble describing what that was like,” Dawe said. “You have to be there, I guess. There were lots of my teammates who were crying, and I bet there were probably a few tears in my eyes too.”

Of the 16 Edmonton Mercury players, 12 are still alive. Gone are George Abel, David Miller, Thomas Pollock and Robert Watt. Still around to share the memories with Dawe and root for each ensuing Canadian Olympic team are John Davies, Robert Dickson, Donald Gauf, Billy Gibson, Ralph Hansch, Robert Meyers, Eric Paterson, Allan Purvis, Gordon Robertson, Louis Secco and Francis Sullivan. Most are well into their 70s.

“We’ve got a couple of lads in their 60s,” Dawe said.

In the days before professionals were allowed in the Olympics, the Edmonton Mercurys typified the ideal. They played in the Senior Central Alberta League by night, and most of them worked for the car dealership that sponsored their hockey team during the day. That car dealership is still there, run by Allan Purvis’ son, with a few of the players from the 1952 team still holding small shares of the company.

According to Dawe, the real hero of the ’52 Olympics was the owner of the dealership, Jim Christensen.

When the Mercurys were at home, they would work a full day, then get on a bus bought by Christensen and travel 100 miles or more to play a game at night. Then they’d drive back, go home to sleep for a few hours, and be back at work the next day. As they became a national powerhouse, they represented Canada in world competition in London in 1949 and ‘50, spending seven months touring Europe. Christensen paid all those expenses, as well as for the team’s equipment. He also sent checks to the wives back home to keep them going.

“I would bet that Mr. Christensen spent around $100,000 on all this, including getting us to the Olympics,” Dawe said. “And that was a lot of money in those days.”

Dawe said that Christensen accompanied his team to Oslo, watched all the games and returned home with the group. But he had come down with a virus in Norway and died shortly after returning.

“You know, I have been to a lot of hockey hall of fames, and I wish I’d see more pictures in some of them of Mr. Christensen,” Dawe said.

Dawe said that, in the early ‘50s, with six teams in the NHL and joining them only a distant dream to even the top echelon of hockey players in Canada, the Olympics were as good as it got. Also, if you were playing for Canada, as big a pressure-cooker as you could find.

“When we got there, we expected it to be like the world championships,” Dawe said. “We had been through that, and we thought we were ready for everything. But when we arrived, we saw that everything was bigger, fancier. Right away, I had the sweaty palms and the nervous twits.

“We were the clear favorites. We were the Canadians. But I’ll tell you, I was sure glad when that last whistle blew and our flag went up and they played ‘O! Canada.’ You play these games and anything can happen in 60 minutes. Hockey is a slippery game on a slippery surface.”

Dawe was 28 when he returned from the Olympics. The team took one celebratory trip years later to Ottawa, where it was honored by then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

“We had kind of a receiving line,” Dawe recalled, “and when the prime minister got to me, he asked if I still played hockey. I told him that I had retired, that I had set my sights on my goal, had reached it, and it was time to retire. He stopped and laughed and said, ‘That’s a great thought. Maybe I should talk to my cabinet about that.’”

Dawe said that the Mercurys were pretty much a forgotten story until the Olympics came to Canada with the Calgary Games of 1988.

“Now, every four years, when the Winter Games come around, we get all sorts of invitations,” he said.

Among the invitations are many from junior high schools, where Dawe invariably is asked to show the gold medal he won. So he takes it off the mantel, does some show-and-tell for the youngsters, passes the medal around for all to see and answers questions.

The one he gets the most: “How much is the medal worth?”

Dawe’s answer is always the same, along the lines of the current TV commercial.

Priceless.