The Brandon University Gymnasium, which housed Bobcat teams for 47 years, looked bare on Monday with the banners of decades past having been taken down for good.
The first victim of nostalgia is fact.
When scrolling through the memory bank, it’s quite easy for historical reality to become skewed because, after all, the fish never gets smaller as the years go on.
And so when considering my own two-plus decades of memories from the soon-to-be-no-more BU Gymnasium, I can’t say for certain that every image I have stored away is precisely as it was and, in some cases, I’m quite sure I’ve greatly altered the reality the more times I’ve told the tale.
While the 47-year-old brick box will still stand, it will no longer house university competition as the home to the Bobcats, who will move into a new adjacent facility next season, leaving behind a relic that housed the moments that fill BU’s history books and had its most poignant goodbyes two weeks ago with the last basketball games.
The banners — all 40-plus of them — were taken down on Monday, leaving the place a bare shell, an old scoreboard in one corner and the expansive Bobcat logo on the stage doors among the only things remaining. There were GPAC championship banners — a lot of them, too — mixed among those that told of national success stories, reminding of the days when Brandon was the juggernaut of Canadian basketball as “the powerhouse on the prairies.”
A small school from a small town winning a national title in Canada is not nearly the daunting task it is in the NCAA, but Brandon’s years hovering at or near the top of the CIAU/CIS was nevertheless a feather in the cap for a town that has long decried its oft-forgotten status in this province, its screams for attention routinely going unnoticed by the big-city neighbour to the east. BU was put on the map by those basketball teams and, like it or not, the Bobcats forced you to take notice.
To be fair, it was volleyball that provided some of the most recent clips for the highlight package, in February, 2009. The Brandon men’s team qualified for its first ever national tournament with a thrilling five-set victory over UBC that went to 24-22 in the fifth and allowed the Bobcats to sweep the best-of-three series, which eventually led to the program’s first ever national medal, a bronze in Edmonton. The lasting images are of Joel Small and Andrew Korol running along the sidelines, arms flailing to uplift the packed gymnasium and high-fiving fans as the Bobcats posted the historical and unlikely victory. The noise level was as high as any basketball game had produced and, as classics go, it belongs in the BU Top 10.
The BU Gym, its physical state of being, is as uninspiring as the name afixed to it for the past 47 years. The particoloured walls are where off-white meets mustard yellow, and on those walls two-inch thick mats fastened by velcro are the only things protecting you from brick. The north end of the gym is a stage that has been used as a glorified storage shed for years, although it has also housed rabid fans who were shuffled there during particularly robust sell-outs.
It is a university facility, but it comes with no more grandiose features than any high school you’ve ever been in — the wooden bleachers are more 1912 than 2012 and, with a seat in the balcony, you were a good vertical leap away from hanging among the banners in the rafters. Then there’s the floor — those stubborn lines for badminton and handball and other sports of little regard to the school’s interuniversity athletics — lines that never went away and turned the BU hardwood into a geometry worksheet.
The Langley Events Centre is home to the Trinity Western Spartans and is one of the most impressive facilities in Canada West. Charm and character, however, is usually the victim as the trend of sprawling state-of-the-art fieldhouses takes over.
And all of that — the almost laughable litany of shake-your-head shortcomings — is what makes the place so ironically endearing. In terms of sheer esthetics, the BU Gym cannot think to compare to the facilities in virtually every other Canada West community but, then again, those other places don’t come close to Brandon’s charms. In its imperfections, lies its beauty.
In the summer, large fans are slid in to make the temperatures livable for a human of the northern hemisphere. The gym is a sweatbox when its full of life, a cramped quadrangle with a capacity that has been tested hundreds of times over its four decades of service. Not every game within those walls has been a masterpiece but, the ones that were? The pictures remain indelible because of the backdrop — a combination of confined quarters, little-guy pride and smalltown passion.
I grew up a Bobcat fan because my sister chose to play there and her five years with the women’s program coincided with the most successful era the BU men ever recorded. During a three-titles-in-three-years stretch in the late 80s, my first memories of university basketball were formed, and they were of players like Joey Vickery, Eldon Irving, David Dominique, Whitney Dabney, et. al. The latter three all New Orleanians who arrived in the wake of the Tulane point-shaving scandal, personifying the dichotomy that long existed with the Bobcats: The tremendous success of a basketball program set alongside the underlying negative perception.
I sat in those bleachers as a young fan and watched my sister play for a team that staged a for-the-ages upset of Manitoba back in 1991. Days later they would be ranked No. 10 in the country. A week after that, they were out. And they have remained so to this day.
I also watched the very real rivalries of Brandon-Manitoba and Brandon-Winnipeg, each series a showcase of an undeniable hatred for the other. Shortly after the now-defunct Great Plains Athletic Conference changed its rules on the number of imports allowed on a roster — The Brandon Rule so named because of BU’s penchant for bringing in Americans, and winning with them — I remember the Wesmen coming to town and the locals being charged for the visitors. The main target of the fans’ ire was Wesmen coach Bill Wedlake, who was a spearhead to the import change, and the fans made no secret of who they were after. Two students walked in with a spray-painted bedsheet attached to two hockey sticks that basically made a billboard. It read:
“WELCOME TO GPAC … WHERE IF YOU CAN’T WIN BY THE RULES, YOU CHANGE THEM.”
More than 20 years later, I still find that to be among the most brilliant pieces of heckling ever found on a Canadian campus.
Through the 90s, the Bobcats continued to be successful — the 1996 national title being the last of four won by BU — and the gym’s capacity continued to be pushed to its limits, the most ludicrous example being that the school used to seat fans in behind the team benches, an area about as wide as an undersized guard’s wingspan. Most would have seen a packed gym, that lone strip the only open region and said ‘OK, we’re full.’ BU instead saw that empty space as wasted land.
The successes weren’t as forthcoming in the 2000s, but the place still had a few epic performances left in it, specifically the 2007 playoff run when it hosted a playoff sweep of Regina and a Canada West Final Four that sent the Bobcats off to Halifax and a silver-medal finish in the last CIS basketball tournament the school has participated in.
These are merely a few of the memories that have come from a building that is among the last remnants of a dying age.
The dusty, old bobcat overlooked the BU Gymnasium from its perch at the sound end. It came down on Monday as the old gym is cleaned out for the move to a new facility.
And presiding over it all? A stuffed animal.
It is indeed humourous that a carcass that once was a living member of the cat family became irreverently iconic for the BU Gym, but the bobcat that sat for years on a ledge at the top of the south end wall had its charm.
It would never be confused as an heirloom or antique of great monetary value, but it was a fixture of the building. Year after year after year passed by, students and athletes and faculty all came and went, but it stayed. Most will remember it with a laugh, the best stories stemming from the moments when countless athletes tried (and failed) to knock it down off its perch with projectile basketballs.
Portions of the wall around the bobcat may have been dented, but that cat stayed on its feet.
That dusty, old bobcat, as it was affectionately referred (even spawning a #dustyoldbobcat hashtag on Twitter the last few weeks), also came down on Monday. And while there will be many who care little about this shop closing up, fewer still who see logic in attaching any amount of affection to a dead animal on a wooden plank, that move is the most tangible sign of finality for this gym. For anyone who has an affinity for the nostalgia and memories produced there, that’s a sad fact.
The spinning wheels of progress won’t stop; the upgrade necessary and impossible to deny. In September BU’s basketball and volleyball teams will have their new home. Balls will be rolled out, practices will start, shots will go up, kills will go down.
That bobcat, by the way, is intrinsically linked to that gym. Like the room it stood guard in for years, it too has a story and, if you care to think about it, they share some similarities.
Quiet and unassuming in the present. But once upon a time, they were both known for their remarkable roar.
