It’s How You Play the Game
Mel Wakabayashi is our best-known Nikkei ice player. Not because he made the big times, although he did have a brief stint with the Red Wings of Detroit. Products of the southern Ontario junior ranks, Mel and his brother Herbie saw better opportunities some 12 years ago in Japan where a fledgling league was taking shape with the well-heeled backing of a few industrialists.
Mel was back in North America this past February as coach of the Japanese national team playing in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Here’s what the Sun’s James Lawton had to say in his February 19 column about Mel and his refreshing attitude towards winning or, in his case, losing a game:
“The Winter Olympics are chaos, power politics, one professional hockey team, millionaires, amateur skiers—the American superagent Mark McCormack has had four men patrolling the slopes, contracts at the ready—and a division of assorted commercial hustlers. But the games are also, thank God, still something to do with people like Mel Wakabayashi, coach of the Japanese hockey team.
“Wakabayashi, born in an internment camp in the interior of B.C., has seen 31 goals conceded. He moved to Japan 12 years ago when Father Bob Moran, a missionary priest, sent a message back to Canada for scout Peanuts O’Flaherty: ‘Get me some Japanese Canadian hockey players.’ Peanut’s was not exactly inundated with options and Wakabayashi got a job,
“Wakabayashi was moved east as a child and brought up in a small house by the railway track in East Chatham, Ont.
“He won a hockey scholarship to the University of Michigan, played briefly with Detroit Red Wings and had a baseball tryout with the Tigers. Yesterday, after the 6-0 beating by Canada, he was telling me ‘My boys are enjoying the Olympic in spite of the scores. The Olympics are not only about winning, are they? They are also about young athletes seeing new things and learning.’ After the game he got lost in the corridors of the Olympic Centre. You could pick him out easily. He had a smile on his face.”
The Bulletin, April 1980