Guelph Sports Hall of Fame Class of 2020 finally inducted
GUELPH – The Guelph Sports Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020 are now official members of the Guelph Sports Hall of Fame.
After a ceremony delayed two years by the pandemic, the class was inducted Wednesday night during the return of the Kiwanis Club of Guelph’s annual Sports Celebrity Dinner at the Italian Canadian Club.
Members of the class are hockey players Paul Brydges and Brad Pirie, standardbred (harness) horse trainer Ben Wallace, the 2014 U16 AA Guelph Sodrox Predators ringette team and our own Rob Massey.
Brydges was captain of the 1986 Memorial Cup-champion Guelph Platers and an assistant coach with the 1997 Guelph Gryphons, the last team to be handed the national university men’s hockey championship trophy, the University Cup, on Maple Leaf Gardens ice. Read more about Paul here.
Wallace is an extremely successful standardbred horse trainer who’ll be inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame as a member of its class of 2020 in August. Obviously 2020 was to be one heck of a year for honours for him. Read more about Ben here.
Brad Pirie played major junior hockey for the Peterborough Petes and university hockey for The Gryphons. With the Petes, he played in the world junior championship when Canada’s representative was one of its CHL teams. He also played for the Canadian Olympic team and scored against Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak in the 1980 Games at Lake Placid, the Miracle on Ice Olympics.
The U16 AA Predators put together an unbeaten season in their age group, winning every game they played at both the national and provincial championship tournaments. They actually lost once all season – to a U19 AA squad in an exhibition game at that year’s Guelph tournament. They said that win, about three weeks before the provincial championships, was a good thing as it grounded them in time for their main focus of the season. Read more about the team here.
And if you’re a regular visitor to this website, you know Massey’s writing and photography as it’s all his. He started GSJ about six months after the closing of the Guelph Mercury daily newspaper where he had been in its sports department for almost 30 years, most of it as the paper’s sports editor.
Each of the inductees received a copy of the plaque that will hang in the Hall. This year those plaques will be in the prominent spot on the wall near the drug store where they’ll stay until the next class is inducted. The plaques of the previous class have occupied that space since 2019. When the next class is inducted, hopefully in 2023, the 2020 class’s plaques will be moved to their permanent locations somewhere down the hall toward Gate 1.
All members of the Hall were nominated as that is the main requirement for a person or team to be considered for induction.
More on the Hall, its members and the nomination process can be found on its website.
Apologies to all of the other inductees, but we just had to use the portrait off Rob’s plaque.
- Guelph Sports Journal