Summer Games stir memories of TCC

By MEL ROTHENBURGER/ The Armchair Mayor

“You got me into this,” Henry Pejril joked at a Western Canada Summer Games do this week.

Pejril, who’s president of the Games, was talking about the fact I asked him to take on the same job for the 2006 B.C. Summer Games.

The Games we’ll be enjoying over the next week and a bit bring back memories of the beginnings of our Tournament Capital of Canada initiative so you’ll forgive me for some reminiscing.

In 2000 and early in 2001, Coun. Dave Gracey and I — a rookie councilor and a rookie mayor — started talking about doing something bigger with the Tournament Capital of B.C. designation created in the mid-1980s. Dave saw it as more than a lifestyle issue; he figured there was a lot of room to increase economic benefits.

The 1993 Canada Summer Games had proven that. He thought the next natural step was to call ourselves the Tournament Capital of Canada.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that we might easily have been scooped on that name by Brantford, Ont., which had copied our earlier label by calling itself the Tournament Capital of Ontario.

But we one-upped them by quietly copyrighting the Tournament Capital of Canada, claiming the title forever.

That September — a little more than a decade ago — we unveiled a new City logo and announced we’d gotten the B.C. Summer Games with Pejril as president.

We now had a grand name, but what about venues? Alexander Watt, chair of a group called the Kamloops Community Society for Sports Excellence, came into my office one day to pitch an idea for a major new sports “field house.”

I remember the conversation well. It could be done for $10 million, he said, and we’d get all the money from federal grants and private investment.

I was totally excited by the idea — it fit perfectly with the Tournament Capital of Canada, which needed bricks and mortar to fulfill the dream.

Early in 2002 we announced a joint feasibility study to look at an indoor track, gymnasium, sports-medicine centre and other indoor facilities at UCC’s (now TRU) Hillside Stadium.

The rest is history, as they say, but not quite. At one point negotiations with UCC almost fell apart when I declined to guarantee that the field house would be built at Hillside until other options were considered.

In a hardball response, the university board walked out of a partnership meeting, so I proposed to council that we build the entire facility on McArthur Island.

When I informed university board chair Ron Olynyk that we were going ahead without UCC, the university was quickly back at the table.

There’s a lot more to the story, but we got the deal done, got the largest federal grant ever, and received taxpayer approval for a $37-million plan spread between UCC and McArthur Island.

I proposed we call the UCC facility the Tournament Capital Centre and rename the expanded McArthur Island complex the McArthur Island Sports and Events Centre.

Fortunately, we have people like Henry Pejril who have the skills and talent to take full advantage of our fine facilities — many of the key committee members Pejril recruited for the 2006 B.C. Summer Games form the nucleus for the Games that were officially opened last night.