'It was one of the most exciting times'
For about a decade starting in 1993, Hamilton was home to the 'it' building in Canadian skating. And for those who were there, it was a time of pure magic
Once upon a time, the city I now call home had big hockey dreams. As in, big aspirations to land a seat at the cool kids table in the NHL.
Hamilton showed it meant business by commissioning the construction of a 17,500-seat arena in the heart of the city’s downtown core, at a price tag of $33.5 million (chump change today, right?). Copps Coliseum, named after a longtime Hamilton mayor, opened its doors in 1985 and instantly became the shiny new toy of the Canadian hockey world. The 1986 World Junior Hockey Championship was played there (I recall spending a Saturday in the Hammer watching a tripleheader in that tournament), and the seats were filled for every Canada game.
Copps Coliseum was the primary host for the 1987 Canada Cup which, for my money, produced perhaps the finest series of international hockey I’d ever seen (yes, it was better hockey than the much more ballyhooed 1972 Summit Series, even if the political tensions were hardly the same). I speak, of course, of the three-game final between Canada and the Soviet Union. Every game ended up 6-5, including the third and deciding contest in Hamilton which produced this indelible moment in Canadian sports history (if you’re of a certain vintage, you’ll never forget it).
The Memorial Cup came to Copps Coliseum. The AHL. A parade of OHL teams. But the NHL remained ever elusive. Hamilton was in the running for a team when the NHL expanded for the 1992-93 season, but the two winning entries ended up being the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning. There have been a few flirtations with potential franchise relocations, but nothing came of it. At this point, the NHL remains little more than a pipe dream in Steeltown (especially with a major renovation about to close its doors for up to 20 months starting at the end of this year).
I’ll leave a deeper dive on that topic to those who know the full story much more intimately than I do.
Instead, I’d like to spend a few minutes of your time today reflecting upon the spectacular run another ice sport once enjoyed at Copps Coliseum (which became FirstOntario Centre in 2014). A time when it became the ‘it’ building in Canadian figure skating, when big event after big event brought thousands of fans through the doors of the building at the corner of Bay Street North and York Boulevard.
If you read my previous post, you know what I think about the 1993 Canadian championships that were held in Hamilton, which greatly changed the trajectory of my career in sportswriting. Simply put, it was a riveting, spectacular event that produced, in particular, perhaps the greatest showdown for men’s gold in the event’s history (it was peak Kurt vs. Elvis, without a doubt).
The Canadian Championships came back to Copps Coliseum twice more in 1998 and 2002, both leading into Olympic Winter Games, in Nagano and Salt Lake City, respectively. I’d call them both Olympic qualifiers, but that was hardly the case in 1998. That was the year that the Canadian Olympic Association, as it was known then, set the rigid criteria for Nagano team selection — a criteria that meant the figure skating team was essentially chosen before everyone showed up in Hamilton. It sparked a moment of outrage when a young Emanuel Sandhu dazzled the audience in the men’s free program, wound up as the silver medalist behind Elvis Stojko and had no hope of being named to the Canadian team for Nagano (for 2002, the COC handed team selection for the Salt Lake Games back to the various sport governing bodies).
Before I move on, a personal aside: Ottawa residents will no doubt associate 1998 with the Great Ice Storm, which caused widespread power outages that lasted days and even weeks in certain areas. It was also the year in which Gloucester’s Angela Derochie won her first and only senior ladies’ national title, which of course was big news in Ottawa, which hadn’t seen a Canadian champion at that level since Liz Manley in 1988. I was able to beat deadline with a decent story that night, and was pleased we’d get that news into the next day’s paper. Or so I thought. Get a call the next day from the sports editor saying ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news, really liked your story. The bad news, the power went out at the press last night, so only about 6,000 people got to read it.’ (our normal press run then was about eight times that. And the internet was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is today). Fortunately, I’d chosen to take a pass on the nightly post-event ‘social activities’ to hang around at the arena for more of an in-depth interview with Angie, which made for a strong followup column the next day. As far as I know, we had a full press run for that one.
One of the highest points of Copps Coliseum’s golden age of skating came in 1997, when the Champions Series Final came to town at the end of February (less than a month before the World Championships in Switzerland). This is the event now known as the Grand Prix Final, which is held at the beginning of December following the Grand Prix Series. It is regarded as the second-most important event of the figure skating calendar, behind the World Championships.
(From what I recall, the Champions Series moniker was originally used because of concerns that Formula One auto racing had squatting rights on the term ‘Grand Prix’).
Back then, it was completely foreign to most skating fans (the inaugural event was held a year earlier in France). Instead of full fields of skaters, this was the top six from the series, with four events in rapid fire succession (short programs on a Friday, free skates on the Saturday). Exciting for fans, absolute hell for sportswriters trying to keep on top of it all. And while the fans in the building were no doubt thrilled to see Canadian favourites Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz strike gold in dance, the big buzz was around the men’s event.
Imagine a competition in which the field included one Olympic champion, two future Olympic gold medallists, the defending World champion and another guy who would go on to claim his third World title later that season (you may have heard of him). We got to see all of that (and so much more) that weekend in Hamilton.
It was a quad fest like nothing we’d seen previously, with Ilia Kulik, then Elvis Stojko and Alexei Urmanov all landing four revolution jumps. Just a spectacular night of skating, with Stojko making history as the first skater ever to land a quad triple competition (fortunately, someone named ‘Heavenly Joy’ was nice enough to post all of that magnificence on YouTube for you to enjoy. And yes, it’s heavenly).
Back in 2012, some 15 years after the event, Stojko and I got together for a lengthy interview in which we discussed the current state of skating (a lot of which didn’t sit well with him at the time). But I could feel his juices starting to flow again when I happened to mention what happened that evening in 1997.
“That night was so magical. You couldn’t have written anything better. It just came out that way and it was so awesome,” he said. “I still remember that and it was one of the most exciting times. It was really at the height of its time. I’m fortunate that I was one of the characters, one of the players that was involved. It was a lot of fun.
“The top six guys, we all could have won. Any given day, we all could have won that event. It was so tight.”
(This led to a lively discussion in which Stojko lamented how the change in scoring systems had brought about the end of the drama surrounding the short program, which distressed him greatly. It also produced this gem of a quote: “Guys would crap their pants or get it done.” Gawd, I loved that interview).
The 2004 Four Continents Championship was also held in Hamilton, but that was it for skating in that building for more than a decade. So what happened? You’d hear concerns about a lack of acceptable hotel space (which is far from the truth anymore), among other things. Whatever the reason, big-time skating competitions went away until the International Skating Union dropped its world synchronized skating championships in the building in 2015. I went to a few sessions there more or less as a fan, and while synchro events are typically loud (they’re like cheerleading competitions in my mind in terms of the decibel level), it was just nice to hear the roar of the crowd at a skating event in that building again.
And it brought back memories of a time when the sport was huge in Canada, when CTV could put Stojko or Browning up against Hockey Night in Canada on a Saturday night and feel comfortable about the kind of rating they’d get (true story). Those were some glory days, indeed, and one helluva time to be on the sidelines chronicling it all for an audience that simply couldn’t get enough of it.