In the wake of the Great White North’s junior world championship, Olympic and women’s hockey success, Murray Costello should get a loud stick tap.
“I was sick and tired of going overseas and hearing, ‘Canadians can’t play this game, they’re just slugs and cornermen’,” the president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association recalled in 2005 when he was named a Hockey Hall of Fam builder.
He was a key proponent of the Program of Excellence in the 1980s and, beginning in ‘88, Canada would win 18 world junior titles to date — including five straight between 1993-97 — which led to Olympic success in the 2000s.
“The program got us out the gate and brought us back to respectability. We had to teach our kids to play the tenacious Canadian game, but always with control and discipline. The kids responded and we got back on track.”
Hockey Canada, which has since merged with the CAHA, announced Monday that the former NHLer, born in South Porcupine, Ont., had passed at age 90, surrounded by family.
“Murray was a very kind man who supported women’s hockey long before so many did,” posted player/broadcaster Cassie Campbell-Pascall of his efforts to launch a world tournament in 1990.
Costello was a member of the International Ice Hockey Federation council from 1998-2012, named to that group’s Hall of Fame, and a Member of the Order of Canada.
One of the goals he strove to accomplish was to keep the game affordable and equitable.
“There is a tendency in Canada for parents to want their kids to play up in higher competition, thinking they will learn more,” Costello said in 2005. “They should come at their own level. They won’t be bypassed, because the scouts will find them.”
Costello also was worried that an emphasis on year-round preparation for young players would lead to burn out, however families with resources and kids driven to make the NHL continue their present-day efforts.
“Eleven months of playing, I don’t care how young you are, can turn you off of the game,” Costello had said. “If we could end our season in March and April and put our kids into soccer and baseball programs, the skill sets they learn there will benefit them when they come back refreshed in September.
“(Hockey) is expensive. We really cater to the upper half of our society. We have a wonderful advantage (in Canada), but the growth of our game is really limited because of a lack of facilities.
“So in the IIHF, we’re embarking on getting arenas built in developing nations.”
That part of his vision certainly came to fruition.
In a statement, the NHL saluted “a seven-decade career (that) fundamentally impacted the game … we send our deepest condolences to Costello’s family and his friends around the world.”
Murray was the younger brother of Les Costello, who played briefly for the 1948-49 Maple Leafs, retired to the priesthood in Kirkland Lake and Timmins, Ont., and later organized the Flying Fathers charity team.
Les convinced him to enroll in St. Michael’s College School in Toronto, where he was signed by the Chicago Blackhawks and later traded to Boston and then Detroit.
Murray ended his four-year big-league career by joining the Windsor Bulldogs seniors and stayed there to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, becoming a lawyer and on to an administrative career in the Western Hockey League.
One of Costello’s favourite stories was, as a 15-year-old, trying to get home from a road game on an ice-covered road four miles from his house in Schumacher. No cars or buses were possible.
“We decided that rather than showering in the arena we’d just skate down the highway. The coach was a little concerned, but he knew there’d be no cars on the road. We showered in our own dressing room back home. And we won the game.”
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