All World Hockey by T. Michael Travers

It may be safe to say most of us are curious about celebrities ... What's he really like? In 1983 I got a call from a friend, "You wanna go to Florida with me for a week?"  "We'll stay with Cito Gaston.  He's the Blue Jay's new hitting coach,  just hired by the manager, Bobby Cox." I'm not much of a baseball fan. As a kid, my team was the Brooklyn Dodgers ... Campanella and "Duke" were my guys and yes my mother threw out all my baseball cards. When my "Bums" moved to Los Angeles and I grew older I lost interest in baseball. The 1983 pre-season camp was about to start in Dunedin,  Florida near Clearwater and spending a week  with one of the coaches sounded like fun. It was February. "Cito" met us at the airport in Tampa and we moved to a local Mexican restaurant  for happy hour. I knew little about Mexican food and less about Mexican drinks but you go with the flow at happy hour -- the wai

Two-Time World Series Champion, Cito Gaston Welcomes "Rocket" Roger Clemens to the Toronto Blue Jays In 1985 I became a volunteer for Special Olympics Canada. They'd created a Toronto based fundraising event, The Sports Celebrities Festival that operated at the Harbour Castle Hotel, for 28 years. I joined to help to raise money and create awareness. The event consisted of a fabulous (TSN televised) breakfast for 2,000.  And, in the evening a black-tie dinner/auction for another 1,000.  All on the same day. It took place annually, just before Christmas @ Harbour Castle. We invited a wide variety of athletes from just about every sport -- more than 350 of them attended the event over its 28-year run. Many, like Lindsay and Kennedy and Hawley and Chuvalo and McBean and the Richard brothers and Sittler, enjoyed it so much, they came back on consecutive years. No one was paid an appearance fee.  They all understood the importance of helping fellow athletes.   Special O