BEHIND THE PLAY #87

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My 2016 summer feels like a loop completing in 2026

I talk a fair bit about intersectionality and formative experiences in this newsletter. I realized recently the start and end of these last ten years are like mid-town Manhattan in that regard. Intersections everywhere and this ten year anniversary has me circling back to re-examine those experiences in light of a special Tragically Hip milestone.

My daughter was doing a study abroad semester in Lyon in 2016. I was very happy about this. Mainly because I think independent travel is great for young people but also because when she confirmed she’d chosen France from the options she had I knew the Euro was going to be on right about the time she was wrapping up there.

So it didn’t take much to convince my wife we should go over and visit her. I suggested we meet her in the south of France and make that the base for a family trip (minus our eldest who had work he couldn’t get out of). His band, Tanglers, though played their first live show at a local bar shortly before we left. Their friends packed the place. Well over a hundred shows and two albums later the shows are now far less frequent as life has taken them to live in different parts of BC but they did reconvene to play my surprise 60th birthday party earlier this year for which I was incredibly grateful.

I’ve seen at least 40 of their shows. These may end up being the first and last shows they play.

Running parallel to the planning for the Euro trip was the news that Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer but that they were going to tour anyways. It’s still numbing to type that. If you were not in Canada at this time it’s very hard to explain what that tour came to represent. The final show in Kingston was broadcast live by the CBC. It is the second most watched TV show in the country ever. Behind only Game 7 of the Canada v Russia hockey series in 1972. Fully a third of the entire population watched the live broadcast of that concert.

This newsletter is being written the day after the CBC re-broadcast of that last show the Hip would ever play. A 29 song album of recordings from that tour was released a few days ago. I spent a good chunk of time driving around listening to all of it on Saturday.

Prior to that Kingston show they played two shows in Vancouver. As luck would have it, the President of Live Nation Canada was also a coach at our club. We got along really well and socialized occasionally. He had got me tickets for concerts in the past. Sometimes for sold out shows that I paid for, sometimes for free.

This one was different. Ticket demand for these shows was simply off the charts.

“Paul, please, I have to see this show.” He asked how many tickets I needed. I told him 16 but it climbed to 20 within another day as more of my friends found out I had access. He came through.

We all went for drinks together before the show. It was the strangest, most powerful show I’ve ever been to. The crowd was torn between tears and cheers the entire evening. Gord would complete the tour despite early rehearsals showing he couldn’t remember the lyrics to any of his songs. Nine years later my friend Dave Partridge, Shank to most, would pass after fighting a similar brain cancer.

It was a good summer for tickets. I managed to get them for five Euro games spread around Marseilles, Nice, Lyon and St Etienne.

Then, sometime in May of that year, I got an email or a call, can’t remember, saying my 2002 Boys team was being invited to fill a space in the four team Provincial A Cup tournament in early July. This was surprising, exciting and really inconvenient.

This was an excellent team that had run away with the league for the past two seasons and then opted to ‘challenge’ the higher level “Coastal A Cup” rather than the “Coastal B Cup” we would normally have entered. Entering the A Cup meant we were playing teams in the division, then called Metro, rather than in our “Gold” division, as it was called then. We did very well in the Coastal A Cup eventually losing to a very good team from Upper Vancouver Island in the semi-final and believing our season was over as only the two finalists from Coastal Cup qualified for Provincials to play a teams from further afield in the Province.

That call changed that. I was given 24 hours to let them know if we would take the spot. I negotiated that up to 48 hours which gave me enough time to discover that our top goalscorer and dominant holding midfielder were going to be away on family vacations as were two others. We added three players from the team at our club playing in the division below us and entered with the bare minimum roster size of 14.

Play started July 2nd. We got back from France on June 26. Not exactly an ideal preparation period but I made it clear we weren’t there to say we’d played in the Provincial A Cup and make up the numbers. We were there to win it (spoiler: we didn’t) and regardless of not having a full squad we would compete.

We ended up in the third place game playing the team that were defending champions and had just won the Coastal A Cup final against the Island team that handled us quite easily. They had also won the Metro division league title losing one game.

We had eleven healthy bodies by this stage of the competition.

And we won.

1-0 with a goal in the last five minutes after being battered for the previous 85. This photo was captured right after we scored. My kid, Tavish, is the one looking elated. Tiernan is the one already telling everyone it isn’t over yet and to stay focused. It was the first time a team not in the Metro division had medalled in the Provincial A Cup.

I was going to include the email I sent to the team afterwards. It’s a bit long though and this is shaping up to be long as well (The Beehiiv platform warns me when one on these is getting to the point where Gmail accounts might not get it because of size and word count).

So five games at the Euro seeing many of the best players in the world from France, Spain, Portugal and England plus being in the stadium for Shaqiri’s Goal of the Tournament as well as Ronaldo’s goal against Hungary,which was voted 5th best, was pretty fortuitous and then home to a momentous and memorable bronze medal at the U14 Provincial A Cup.

And now 2016 became about the Hip again. I’ll never see another live event, of any kind, that had as many people in tears as that show.

Driving around Vancouver listening to “Live July 22 - August 20” ten years after seeing the Hip on that last tour was a full circle moment. It took me back to a summer ten years ago that launched my eldest son’s band, a family trip to France for the Euros which has many of my favourite family photos that I’ll spare you from, an amazing performance by my U14 Boys team at Provincials, a concert that no one in attendance will ever forget and a race home from Hornby Island to catch the broadcast of the final Hip concert in Kingston, Ontario almost exactly ten years from the date of this newsletter reaching you.

I will leave you with one last intersection. One last formative experience from me. In February 2025 the Hip were approached by The Terry Fox Foundation about adapting one of their songs, Courage, for World Cancer Day. Gord Sinclair of the band said it was the fastest they ever agreed to a request for the use of one of their songs.

If you’ve lost someone to cancer it’s a hard watch. But it’s also a beautiful watch. Shank didn’t make it to 2026. He passed a few months after this video came out. Not all intersections facilitate safe passage and some formative experiences are scarring rather than nourishing. Miss you buddy.

You’ll probably get another BTP next Monday if not earlier.