Good morning!
A week ago Friday in West Springfield, a late model Cadillac parked on the dirt shoulder of Front Street next to the railroad tracks. Ted Shore stepped out, reached into the back seat and carried a box through the front door of Steve’s Sports in the rehabbed industrial building.
Ted’s an inch or two taller than his famous father the hockey Hall of Famer, and Steve’s Sports is where he and the rest of the hockey old-timers like to hang out. “That’s his reserve spot,” smiled Steve Bordeaux. “He had some extra pizza.”
The 88-year-old Shore hung up his whistle years ago, but I reminded him of reffing our last men’s league game at the West Springfield Olympia. Shore had disallowed the game’s only goal and Lunt Silver escaped with a 0-0 tie.
We finished 0-23-1, and Shore smiled when I said he had salvaged our season. He excused himself, took the pizza out back and returned a moment later. “If I said it was no goal, it was no goal!” he bellowed.
Steve was wearing a red Laval Rocket t-shirt. “We were up there for a game and I grabbed a T-shirt because I’m a hockey guy,” he said.
Indeed, the Bordeaux brothers, Steve and Lou, who manages the skate shop at the Greenfield rink, founded the Springfield Heritage Hockey Society. Their trove of gear in the back of the store is a veritable pro hockey museum. “We had the Calder Cup here for three weeks,” said Steve, referring to the AHL’s 82-year-old championship trophy. “It was supposed to be here only a day, and it started making me nervous. What if there was a fire?”
Amongst the goalie pads and face masks, old jerseys and hockey pucks, Bordeaux took a typed letter off the shelf and laid it on the table. It was a missive from owner to player, written by Eddie Shore and addressed to Bruce Cline in Drummondville, Quebec.
Cline scored 142 goals in four seasons for Shore’s Springfield Indians from 1959-1963. “I would appreciate it very much if you would make sure you are in condition and down in weight,” wrote Shore, who showed he was man before his time by exhorting Cline to tap dance. “Most all of you fellows have been able to tap dance and therefore lets (sic) make sure that you are doing some every day or at least every second day. A few minutes each day will do a lot to get your legs in good shape.”
The letter and other memorabilia will be on display next Saturday at the society’s eighth annual Hockey Day in Springfield. The event will be inside the Young Building at the Big E and include a catered lunch. Throwback T-shirts will cost $12, prizes will be up for auction and fans will sit alongside players who banged along the boards inside the old barn. Tickets are $22 and must be purchased in advance by calling Steve’s Sports at 413-746-1696.
“We’re hoping to get 400 people here,” said Bordeaux, who promised that Ted Shore will be there but without any leftover pizza. “You want to eat, we’ll have a good lunch,” he laughed.
In Brookfield last Friday, Deerfield native Rick Macdonald lifted the framed photo of his half sister Janet Kastberg off the shelf inside the Pillsbury Funeral Home, and it revealed a sliver of the life she loved.
Kastberg was driving Michael Schumacher around a race track in her 1965 Austin-Healey. She wore a blue baseball cap and wrap-around sunglasses and had both hands on the steering wheel while the world champion race car driver stood in the back of the car and waved to his fans.
“This was on CNN,” said Macdonald. “They said she was the first woman to ever drive a Formula 1 driver on the track.”
Hundreds had come to mourn the 60-year-old daughter of former Franklin County Sheriff Fred Macdonald. Two weeks earlier, she was murdered, allegedly by her estranged husband, at her home in Holland, Mass.
Kastberg wanted to take her grandchildren to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown this summer, but the abuse prevention order and friends who stayed overnight with her were useless deterrents against a madman. It was a shocking reminder that anything can happen in a tenuous world.
The last time Brian Wadman was shining a light in my eyes at Vision Source of Greenfield, he mentioned he’d be competing in the 2018 IRONMAN in Lake Placid.
Sunday’s race is composed of a 2.4-mile swim, a 122-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile marathon. The 3,000 entrants go into the lake at 6:30 a.m., and anyone who stays in the water longer than two hours and 20 minutes gets a DNF. The last of the runners must cross the finish line by midnight.
It’s hopeful Wadman finishes somewhere in between and comes home in one piece.
SQUIBBERS: UMass is a 19-point underdog against BC in six weeks. Now’s the time when the program misses having a conference affiliation. While players and staff from Boston College were in Charlotte and UConn will be in Newport for their respective conference media days, at UMass everyone stays home. … Oh, the things you can see on high-def TV, like the tattoo on the bottom of Indians pitcher Mike Clevinger’s arm that says Penelope. … FIFA fined England $69,900 for wearing non-approved socks at the World Cup. According to en.annahar.com, team officials had been warned to stop breaking World Cup marketing regulations. … Eight years ago the Rays gained eight games in the final three weeks to slip past Boston and win the Wild Card. If they did it then, they can do it this year against Seattle. They trailed the M’s by 8 1/2 games at the All Star break. … … To win at the Spa, toss out the longshots and bet the trainers — Todd Pletcher in the 2-year-old races, Linda Rice in turf races and Chad Brown when he’s saddling horses making their first start off a layoff. … A year ago today the Red Sox were 55-43 and led the upstart Yankees by 3½ games. … Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher on playing in the SEC: “This league, it challenges your manhood.” … Chase Utley’s tired refrain he’s quitting baseball to spend more time with his family recalls last year’s headline in the Onion: “Coughlin retires from family to spend more time with team.”
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached by email at sports@recorder.com.