LITMIR.BIZ

      This was, I believe, my Grade 2 class at Earl Grey Public School. I’m third in the row on the right.

      and other children, I was able to get that respect in a variety of ways. I can’t fight anymore, of course, but as a kid I would often have to fight, and I’m not ashamed to say that I had my fair share of entanglements. I wish it could have been otherwise, but at the time I had to stick up for myself. That taught me to always walk tall, and with a certain bearing, so people knew I meant business.

      In the 1920s and ’30s, there were several hundred (although some estimates put it as high as seven thousand) blacks in Toronto, and racism was simply a grim fact of everyday life. You could be confronted with it anywhere from your job, to school, to out on the street. I felt I had to make it clear that I would not accept being called any of those insulting names — nigger, coon, whatever. If those issuing the insults couldn’t accept that, I had to resort to duking it out, and I can recall throwing the first punch, commonly known as a sucker punch.

      When I started high school in Toronto, I went to Riverdale Collegiate, and, not surprisingly, yet again I was one of only a handful of black students. I was often singled out for name-calling and other insults, and that meant I again had to fight for respect. The results of these altercations were always the same: I’d win because no one else could fight like me. Of course, what’s wrong with that picture is the fact I had to fight at all. From that time to the present, I’ve been required to take whatever measures were necessary to assert my dignity and my right to respect — from scrapping in the schoolyard to calling out the dean of my law school for a public racial slur. Like it or not, confronting racism is a lifelong enterprise in which I have been engaged both personally and at the organizational level.

      When I was young, I started piano lessons, essentially because my dad wanted me to be the next Duke Ellington. I wonder what he would have thought about me meeting Count Basie and the Duke in Harlem and then later on in Toronto. My father loved music and he loved the jazz of those years. I can’t recall whether he was disappointed to learn I just didn’t have any interest in the piano. I imagine he must have been somewhat let down. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t musical. In fact, I can say without boasting that I do have a musical bent, not with an instrument but with my voice. That has been evident from time to time, such as during my 1960 trip to Africa when my fellow travellers and the native Africans couldn’t seem to get enough of my singing. But as a youngster, propped at the piano plunking away at boring scales, I’d look out the window and see the other boys playing softball and all kinds of other sports. Sitting in front of the piano was the last place I wanted to be when there was a ball or puck in sight. Some people have the right combination of talent and drive to play the piano, but I didn’t. I was fortunate enough to realize that and to give it up. I’d like to be able to play the piano now, but I’d have to practise a lot, and I am not interested in taking the time for that. You have to want it more than I did.

      Instead, as youngster, I was very involved in extracurricular activities. I loved sports, to the detriment of piano. I used to run the hundred-yard dash in track, and I also played soccer, hockey, and softball — I even boxed. I loved it all, though I recognized I wasn’t all that gifted an athlete. I was tall and skinny with big feet, and as a result my co-ordination may not have been my strongest athletic asset. I was pretty good at sports, but, as a gangly youth, I didn’t excel. Nevertheless, even today I have a real love of sport because I think there’s great value in challenging yourself. Sport does that. It makes demands of you, and that can’t be a bad thing.

      I can remember as a child being out on an outdoor rink in Toronto all by myself. I loved to skate, loved to hear the sound of the blades cutting and slashing through the ice. I liked crossing over my feet making turns and hearing the crunch of the ice. I eventually got a very good pair of CCM skates, which greatly enhanced my regular visits to the outdoor ice palaces. I liked to stickhandle the puck, too. Moving in and out with that rubber disc, zigging and zagging at top speed — well, my top speed — was such a thrill, with that brilliant winter air filling my lungs. It’s quite likely that the attraction was that being on the ice, with fresh air, speed, and exhilaration, delivered a fantastic sense of freedom.

      I also tried lacrosse, but in recent years my greatest sports interest has become basketball, which is natural given my involvement with the Toronto Raptors Foundation, of which I am the chairman.

      As kids, we used to walk from Chatham Avenue over to Riverdale Park to bobsled in the winter. We’d carve tracks out of hills and go careering like crazy, defying mortality. During the hot summer days, we would take that daredevil attitude and apply it to the track, where we raced our homemade go-karts. We’d make them out of old crates with roller skates for wheels, and we’d race them on the streets. I also did a lot of cycling when I was a kid. The point is that I was a pretty active youngster, as I think most children were at the time, and I worry that today children are not encouraged to get out and be active. One thing I can’t do athletically is swim. I went