Greetings PE Nation! Ever wondered how a simple trip across the border can turn into a memorable adventure? Join me as I take you back to my youth growing up near the Canadian border in Buffalo, New York. From concerts to baseball games and even a wild post-college trip to Toronto, my experiences highlight the connection to Canadian culture that I developed over the years. I'll also share my embarrassing tale at the border! But this episode is not all fun and games. I pay tribute to the late Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip, a band whose music has left an indelible mark on me. Despite not being Canadian, I found a profound connection in their lyrics and performances, especially after Gord’s passing on my birthday. You’ll hear about my obsessive music tendencies, the emotional impact of songs like "Ahead by a Century" and "Bobcaygeon," as well as a personal invitation to explore Downie’s work and the documentary "Long Time Running." Take a listen and let me know what you think.
Greetings PE Nation! Ever wondered how a simple trip across the border can turn into a memorable adventure? Join me as I take you back to my youth growing up near the Canadian border in Buffalo, New York. From concerts to baseball games and even a wild post-college trip to Toronto, my experiences highlight the connection to Canadian culture that I developed over the years. I'll also share my embarrassing tale at the border! But this episode is not all fun and games. I pay tribute to the late Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip, a band whose music has left an indelible mark on me. Despite not being Canadian, I found a profound connection in their lyrics and performances, especially after Gord’s passing on my birthday. You’ll hear about my obsessive music tendencies, the emotional impact of songs like "Ahead by a Century" and "Bobcaygeon," as well as a personal invitation to explore Downie’s work and the documentary "Long Time Running." Take a listen and let me know what you think.
Hello and welcome to the Supersize Phys Ed podcast. My name is Dave and I'm here to talk about another game changer. Yes, I have not done this in a little while, so I want to give you a game changer today who you may or may not have heard about, but I'll give you a clue. If you're Canadian, you've definitely heard about this guy. If not, I want to educate you about him today. So, without further ado, here we go. All right, welcome in PE Nation. So today I have a funny story to tell you. At first, because I want to get you in the mood If you're not Canadian.
Speaker 1:
I grew up near the Canadian border, near Buffalo, new York, which is about 30 to 45 minutes away, depending on where you live. Where I lived was about 45 minutes from Niagara Falls and the Peace Bridge which leads into Canada. So I grew up going to Canada quite not quite a bit, but a little bit here and there for concerts. I saw In Excess there, which I'll never forget. I saw Genesis there in Toronto. I've seen baseball games, I've seen other shows and things like that that my parents took me to. We also would go to Canada's Wonderland, which is in Toronto. It's an amusement park and things like that. On a class overnight trip in high school we stayed in Toronto and went to the Eaton Center and things like that, like the museum and it's there I can't remember the name of it Things like that. So I'm familiar with Canada as far as mostly like Toronto, the Ontario and Niagara Falls area, that kind of thing, falls area, that kind of thing. My favorite baseball team growing up was the Montreal Expos, because in the 80s we had again living in Buffalo. I would get Yankees and Mets games and eventually I became a Mets fan. That was my team because my favorite player from Montreal got traded there, gary Carter. But growing up there I would get a lot of montreal expos games. Don't ask me why it just somehow I get a hockey night in canada, things like that, and so, uh, I will never profess to knowing the entire culture of canada, but I I've always been intrigued by it and I even took a canada today class that's what it was called in college, so I got to learn the provinces a little better and things like that. I really want to do this podcast correctly and right for our Canadian audience and people that just want to learn more about this. I'm definitely a fan of the Tragically Hip which we're going to talk about in just a moment and, like I said, canadian culture.
Speaker 1:
So I'll give you a quick, really embarrassing story from my college, actually just after college, my beginning teaching days. It's funny because I don't tell this story very often and not many people know this story. And I actually used this story in one of those two truths and a lie at a party we had with our church group, bible study group, and it went over kind of crazily because people did not expect this story to come from me and they definitely didn't guess it was from me. So when I was a beginning teacher, it was after my first year of teaching in Florida, because I had just moved down here after graduation, I went back to New York Again when I say New York it's not New York City but it's the Buffalo area to hang out with some friends see, my family that was still there, that is still there and a friend of mine we went to. We wanted to go to Canada's Wonderland.
Speaker 1:
Like I said, it's an amusement park in Toronto. We were going there for the day and just coming back and he brought along two friends and one of them I knew pretty well from school, and the other one I didn't know at all and that was the, the friend's brother. I don't think I ever met him before, so I just thought it was a regular day going to canada, going to canada's wonder, riding the rides, having fun, and what they do at the border if you've never been there but it's probably obvious is they you know you go through and you say where you're going and they check your driver's license or passports, and then you either are let go or they tell you to pull over and they check your car even more, or they tell you to pull over and they check your car even more. So of course they say it's random, but we were four kids, let's just say, or barely adults, driving a really nice kind of souped-up car that my friend had, and I don't think it was random. I think they just said, oh, let's check these kids out for just to be sure, and I thought there was nothing wrong, because I don't do that kind of stuff, I don't do any kind of drugs. I'd never have, I never, I never got drunk in my life. I'm just telling you all that truthfully right now. Um, but they, they found a, a bong in our car and they had us go into a room and, uh, it was not mine, it was the friend of a friend, like the brother's friend that I didn't know.
Speaker 1:
I guess he thought going to Canada meant doing other things and we all had to get strip searched at the Canadian border. So there's more to it than that. I'll just say that that is my story and I'm sticking to it. Yes, I got strip searched at the Canadian border. I was really I'm not kidding you. I was worried I was going to lose my job as a teacher. I mean, I was again first year teacher. I thought it was going to go. You know it was going to be. I was gonna be arrested and all sorts of stuff. Fortunately, they let us go. They told us that for the day we could not go to Canada, we had to turn around, but they did not arrest us, which is very fortunate for me. And yeah, that's a true story. Again, I don't tell pretty much anybody that and I'm telling all of you. So that is my Canadian story, at least one of them. And yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1:
So now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about, I guess, canada in general versus United States versus, I guess, anybody else that's listening. I do appreciate it. By the way, I've looked at my stats and seen people from all over the world listening to this podcast, which just blows me away. So again I want to do this justice, again living near Canada, at least growing up near Canada not now I'm in Florida, but I do appreciate the Canadian culture and I don't think you can get anybody's culture just by talking about it or reading about it or looking at a documentary on it. It'd be like I was telling my wife like when we first met, you know she knew I was from Buffalo, you know she's from Iowa originally, but she moved around a lot and she's like, oh, I just love snow, I want to go to Buffalo and live in Buffalo.
Speaker 1:
Let's go back home and live there, and because we'd visit there in the summer and I'm like, well, you don't understand what winter really is like in Buffalo, and since then we have been up there for skiing and things like that, and she understands that it's just not the same. I mean you could talk about, oh, I've been in snow before, but if you've never lived in Buffalo and never seen an NFL game get moved because of the snow and things like that, then you just don't get snow, at least in my opinion and you don't get the Buffalo wings. You know down here, oh, I go to Buffalo wild wings, yeah, I get, I love those wings. Well, it's not the same, it's just not. And so for me to say, well, I understand the Tragically Hip and I understand Gore Downey. I don't, but I have an appreciation for them and for him and I want to get that out today.
Speaker 1:
It's just something that's been on my mind a lot. I've been listening to a ton of Tragically Hip lately. It's kind of like ridiculous. My wife thinks well rightfully so that I obsess over things. If I'm in a Beatles mood or I just finished a Beatles biography or Led Zeppelin or whatever, it doesn't even matter, I'll just go deep. I'm like I do deep dives and all this stuff and I'll be obsessive for weeks. So I put together this summer playlist of different songs I liked during the summer and I really haven't listened to that a lot. I've listened to the tragically hip the past few weeks, which has driven my family crazy.
Speaker 1:
So I'll start by saying that the same friend of mine that got me in trouble at the border, he got me into the Tragically Hip, which actually they got a little bit of following in Buffalo back in the 90s and even now there's still some following there. But the Tragically Hip, even though they were a Canadian treasure, I mean they were like Canada's band. I mean really they were like what I'd say is how U2 is to Ireland. They were to Canada and, I believe, still are. They're just phenomenal up there and and it's just hard to get it it's hard to understand if you're not from there and I'm not. So I had one of their.
Speaker 1:
I had their biggest at time CD, fully completely that came out in the mid 90s and I liked it. I didn't I don't think I loved it, I just I liked a couple songs on it. I was was always like, wow, what's that hockey song about? That's pretty cool. Some guy scored the winning goal in the 50s and then tragically disappeared and you know it's like, oh, that's a cool song. And there's a couple other songs I really liked back then. But I just kind of lost touch with the band for a while until I heard about Gord Downie. He was the lead singer of the Tragically Hip. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain cancer. They couldn't do anything about it. He came out in 2016 and announced that His doctors were on TV everything like that. I didn't see it at the time. I think I read about it. Since then. I have seen the footage of it.
Speaker 1:
Canada was just stunned by that. They were Canada's band. They were the soundtrack of people's lives. I've heard people say they played in pubs and all sorts of places all throughout Canada. They traveled the whole coast-to um kind of circuit throughout the eighties, nineties two thousands and they just became you know what Canada represented in or wanted represented in a band. You know the. The words resonated with them. They sung about things, topics in Canada. They named certain cities in Canada. They talked about Toronto and there's a song one of my favorites called Bob Cajun. That's a small town in, uh, in Ontario, and you know it's. They just talk about issues relating to that and Gord was a. He was a poet. I mean he really was a poet, and not only that, I mean he's.
Speaker 1:
He's really an acquired taste when you listen to him. There's things I always tell my again, I talk about my wife now that I wish I liked. One of them is coffee, and actually I'll throw tea in there. Coffee and tea. They smell so good and they're better for you than when I drink my energy drinks and things like that. So I've always wanted to like coffee and tea. I just don't have that taste for it. I don't know what it is. I don't have that taste for alcohol. I never wanted it, but with wine I did. We sold wine, sold alcohol at our stores that we owned, my family and I loved wheeling and dealing in wine and learning more about wine, but I never liked it. It's just weird and I've always wanted it. I know it's acquired taste. I never had that taste for it.
Speaker 1:
And I think Gord Downie his voice and his message is kind of an acquired taste. I guess, if you're not Canadian, maybe it's not your typical voice. Again, he's more of a poet and some of his lines are very interesting, let's just say, and he just has that unique voice that you could recognize anywhere really. So I didn't think much about him or the Tragically Hip after that that he was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and then he died on my birthday in 2017. And maybe that's something, I don't know. I felt a kindred spirit towards him, maybe Cause, yeah, my, my birthday is October 17th. If you want to give me a birthday present. I'm just kidding, but he died on October 17th, uh, 2017.
Speaker 1:
And so I heard about it. I'm like, oh man, that's terrible. Like again I I didn't quite get it back then and again I I'm never going to say I quite get it now what he meant to Canadians. But you know, I, I I really felt something there. I was like, oh, that's just awful for them and him and his family and his band. So even after that and, by the way, eminem, fun fact, was born on the exact same day I was born. So I've always liked Eminem's music.
Speaker 1:
Um, just as a side note, I'm a little off topic here, but I just want to say that. So I didn't I don't know what it is I kind of the treachery hip. I was kind of listening to them here and there and just kind of like, eh, I don't know. You know, um, and I reached out to Andy Vasily, a Canadian and, uh, an amazing PE teacher and just educator in general, just a great guy, and he kind of educated me on them a little bit through just talking to him and Voxer and on social media and stuff like that, and I kind of got into them a little bit. But then when I saw this documentary come out it's called Long Time Running and it's about their final tour I was hooked after watching that. So if you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth um watching it's I mean, any documentary, not any documentary, but I love watching documentaries because I love to learn more about just different people, different things, different you know, whatever topics.
Speaker 1:
So this one again, it went through their history but then documented their final tour, which was in 2016. So it did show his um, like his press conference announcing he had he was terminal, uh, terminally ill. Um, he talked about how he had um. He did have a couple of surgeries to try to, you know, relieve either tension or just get him a better quality of life, but what they did was that hurt his memory. He had trouble remembering people's names People have known for he'd known for years. He was even on a. I saw an interview, a separate interview that, uh, it was a guy. He again he knew for for years. He was even on a. Uh, I saw an interview, a separate interview that uh, it was a guy he again he knew for 30 years. He wrote his name on his hand just in case he would forget it.
Speaker 1:
Um, he just had a lot of trouble with his memory and the band was worried he was going to either forget the words on stage or he was going to just possibly, you know, die on stage. Um, just from everything. So during rehearsals he had six monitors like teleprompters to remind him of the words and it just showed the whole process of him going through that, of him trying to say goodbye on his terms. I think they actually mentioned that in there and they were talking about how many bands get to do that. I mean. Going back to the Beatles, I mean they just broke up and no one really knew that they were going to break up.
Speaker 1:
Led Zeppelin John Bonham died tragically. The who, although they were still together, you know, keith Moon died tragically. You know, the Eagles have been doing goodbye tours since I don't know, for 20, 25, 30 years, so you never know when they're going to retire or just people like that. You just don't know. Well, they knew his time was short and they knew this was the last tour. So Canada embraced that and showed up in just droves of people at every show sellouts, sellouts, sellouts, and it was just amazing to watch. You know how he was trying to do that for the fans. He was trying to again say goodbye on his terms, and he was putting together this you know, these incredible shows for them. So, on that final show, um, that was obviously a big deal. It was in Kingston, ontario, which is where they're from, the tragically hip or, if you're in the know, you call them the hip, by the way. So the hips final show was in 2016,. It was in August, so it was about a year before he passed away. But again, they knew this was his final show and the whole nation knew that it was his final show.
Speaker 1:
And, just like in hockey or any other sport, sometimes there's watch parties and that's what they did. They broadcast it on TV. It was a sellout crowd, obviously, and even though the arena didn't hold that many people, there were people outside the arena just on picnic blankets listening. There was people all over the country. They showed. I've seen this video of people in different taverns, in parks, different arenas, just watching the final broadcast or just watching from their, you know, living rooms doing a little watch party with their families and friends, and it was just an emotional just watching the people, watching the crowd. They were laughing, crying, dancing, hugging, uh, everything, just because they knew that was it and and he represented them.
Speaker 1:
He was a man of the people and you know he was just. It was just amazing to get to know his music and although I didn't obviously wasn't there and didn't experience it and couldn't experience it that way, it was just an amazing thing to watch. I mean, even the prime minister was there in the audience. I mean that's how big of a deal it was. It was just millions of people watched it and you know just were fascinated by this band and throughout his career and their career, and especially at the end, he wanted to make a difference in the indigenous people in Canada, like their lives and bringing everybody together, like the people way up North they call it the first nation bringing them together with um, I don't know how to just you know the rest of Canada, I guess, and he really worked hard for those tribes and other people as well in cancer and, you know, raising money. And you know he was just, he just seemed like a great guy and you know they were not one of those bands that were like in trouble with drugs and alcohol and you know other women they were for the most part I in trouble with drugs and alcohol and other women. They were for the most part, I think, married I know he was and with kids. They weren't that kind of rowdy band. They represented the people well and I really admire that Again.
Speaker 1:
I've been listening to a lot of their songs lately. I'll give you a couple. The final one and probably the most famous one, the one they ended on like the last one ever, was Ahead by a Century. I love that song Again. Bob Cajun Nautical Disaster I always like Pigeon Camera. That's from that older one that I had. That CD has a pretty good one. 50 Mission Cap that's the hockey one. New Orleans is sinking.
Speaker 1:
There's a song called Poets Grace 2, as in T-O-O, there's a lot of really good ones. And actually, if you want to learn more, there's a book I'm listening to on Audible called the Never-Ending Present and that's about him and his journey and the Tragically Hip's journey. So just amazing stuff and I want to give you a quick cowbell of the day. So ready and the tragically hips journey. So just amazing stuff and I want to give you a quick cowbell of the day. So ready. Here we go, all right, everybody.
Speaker 1:
So your tip of the day usually revolves around your students. I'd say this one's more about you and me, although you could relate the story to your students. I think it's more about searching for something bigger than yourself, searching for greatness in yourself and for your students. That's just how I kind of take a look at it, or looked at his life. I've watched a lot of video on him and interviews and and just listen to the words and it just makes me want to be a better person and a better teacher and, um, you know, just to keep growing and doing better for you know, for the world. So that is my cow.
Speaker 1:
But, tip of the day, it's not not the uh, uh one I usually give kind of thing, but I think that's that's what I my take is on it. So I encourage you to do the same and take a listen to his music. Again, it's an acquired taste. You might not like it at first, but I think you'll like it, especially if you've watched the video, the documentary Long Time Running, or you just listen to the words. I love, especially Ahead by a Century and Bob Cajun. Those are my two favorites by far. So give them a listen and again, hopefully, if you're a Canadian listener.
Speaker 1:
I did this justice. I hope I did okay on this because I want to do a good job for Gord and for all of you. So that is your cowbell tip of the day. Thank you everyone for tuning in. I really do appreciate it. If you get a chance, um, and I did a good job. I made you think or laugh, or uh, especially with that story. Come on, I give you a good story I, the canadian border story. Come on, um, I'd appreciate if you gave me a quick review on the uh, the platform you're listening to. Just click the link below and help me out. Help grow this show, help get more people listening to, hopefully, I think, good, solid PE material and other material, I guess, if you're talking about this one. So, with that being said, have a great day, week, weekend, whenever you listen to this PE Nation. You guys and girls are awesome. Let's keep pushing our profession forward. Thank you.
