Tributes continue to pour in for Proudfoot

MONTREAL, Que. – It used to be a kid with a strong leg would boot a football through, under or wide of the south-end uprights at Montreal suburb Pointe-Claire’s Cedar Park Heights and have to chase it down the hill that devoured fouled-off summer baseballs and was cherished as the area’s best wintertime tobogganing run.

A few blocks to the east, a hulking water tower loomed over the football field of John Rennie High School, its red-and-white checkerboard paint scheme giving it the look of a highrise package of Purina Puppy Chow.

Cedar Park’s goalposts have been torn down without fanfare; the water tower long ago was repainted solid white, emblazoned with Pointe-Claire’s familiar windmill.

But felled goalposts and fresh paint only add a splash of sepia to the memories, and surely in his final days did Tony Proudfoot recall the happiness he enjoyed at Cedar Park and John Rennie, the minor-league and high-school fields on which he learned his lifelong love of football.

Wednesday morning, Proudfoot’s remarkable, inspiring life will be celebrated at a funeral service at Cedar Park United Church, a place of worship about a mile from these two fields. Proudfoot lost his battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at age 61 last Thursday, having fought the degenerative neuromuscular disease for more than three years.

But his legacy will be profound, his courageous, selfless and emotional public struggle having created huge awareness of ALS and raised to date more than a half-million dollars for research into and treatment of so-called Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Dr. Ted Wall will be at the funeral, Proudfoot’s former high-school coach and physical education teacher driving in from his home in Alexandria, Ont.

He will remember, as he has for decades, much more than a football player who excelled for him on both sides of the line of scrimmage.

"Tony was an alive guy, a very moral guy who lived a very principled life both as a person and a professional," Wall said. "He was a hell of a guy to know, and to have learned with."

Proudfoot already was a good football player by the time he reached John Rennie’s bantam team in the autumn of 1964, having absorbed the fine coaching of George Russell with the Pointe-Claire Bombers at Cedar Park Heights.

And he was versatile. For Wall and co-coach Mel Reece on the school’s bantam and junior squads, Proudfoot played right guard on offence and halfback or linebacker on defence. With him in uniform, Rennie won the 1965 Montreal junior-class high-school championship.

"Tony was a terrific athlete – always very calm, very focused, very tough but in a very sportsmanlike way," Wall said. "He wasn’t a dirty player, but when he hit you, you knew you’d been hit."

Proudfoot’s graduation thumbnail in John Rennie’s 1966 Highlander yearbook mentions his further participation in volleyball, wrestling, intramural sports, hockey and swimming.

Wall recalls him as a superb wrestler at 167 pounds, not the swiftest kid on the mat but one who reacted more quickly than most, sizing up a situation and responding to it instantly.

What dazzled the teacher even more was Proudfoot’s artistic side, something the student alluded to in his thumbnail by suggesting his ambition was to become a commercial artist.

"Tony’s art teacher took me up to the art room on the last day of his final year and the whole back wall was filled with his work," Wall said. "It was incredible. And she said to me, `You know Tony has only one eye?’ Impossible, I thought. This guy was a fantastic football player."

Never did severely limited vision in one eye slow Proudfoot, on or off the field that would be his calling.

Wall left John Rennie not long after Proudfoot graduated, his own studies and career taking him twice each to McGill and the University of Alberta for positions of increasing responsibility.

Eventually he’d become McGill’s chairman of phys-ed and its Dean of Education, and he remains busy today with influential international work in educational leadership.

Wall got plenty of grief from the CFL Eskimos with whom he worked in Edmonton, Proudfoot famously having fathered the shoe-staple solution to the frozen-field 1977 Grey Cup.

"I took a lot of (guff) for him when I was out there," Wall said, laughing. "The Eskimos would say to me, `Son of a (gun), Teddy, you used to be his coach!’ They hated Tony, but they would have loved to have him on their team."

It was in the mid-’80s, when Proudfoot was digging into his Master’s thesis on the development of sport expertise in football, that the two men reconnected, former player becoming the grad student of his one-time high-school coach.

"Tony was one of the greatest students I ever had," said Wall, who has spent some time this week rereading Proudfoot’s thesis. "As he was working, I saw his ability to write, to find his own voice.

"In what he wrote for The Montreal Gazette (as his health declined), you could see that he got to his deepest spiritual and belief values, the things he thought were important."

It was with deep pride that Wall watched Proudfoot research and produce his enlightening 2006 book First And Goal: The CFL and the Pursuit of Excellence. Thoughtful interviews with 44 Canadian football players and coaches were conducted from a developmental perspective to reveal how these men soared above the rest.

"Because of Tony’s theoretical understanding of sport expertise, he could really probe what it is about these guys that allows them to perform at the moment," Wall said.

The two old friends had at least one soul-baring heart-to-heart in Proudfoot’s final days, a talk that tightens Wall’s voice when he mentions it now. The coach can’t imagine how difficult Wednesday’s funeral will be for himself and for hundreds of other friends and perfect strangers who will swell the church, having been touched by Proudfoot’s gentle, generous spirit.

"What Tony has done – his career, the life-saving help he provided at the (2006) Dawson shooting, his work on behalf of ALS – doesn’t surprise me a bit," Wall said. "The way Tony lived his life, and even the way he died, was with a sense of passion, a love of life, a sense of giving of himself.

"It was to contribute to the teams he was part of, the people he knew, the ones he was teaching. He took his illness as an opportunity to make a real contribution. For Tony, the disease that took his life was just another teachable moment."

On Saturday night, Pointe-Claire will celebrate its 100th birthday with a fireworks display launched from John Rennie’s football field, the water tower a backdrop for this pyrotechnic rainbow.

The colours will be painted on the sky, too, over a snowy field down the road at Cedar Park Heights where goalposts used to stand.