Athletes who can compete at the highest level in two sports are rare. Chicago Bulls wunderkind Michael "Air"; Jordan couldn't manage it. When he tried professional baseball, he was marooned in the minors.

The NFL dandy "Neon Deion"; Sanders played both major league baseball and pro football. John Ferguson and Jack Bionda played both pro hockey and lacrosse.

Canadian cyclist and speed skater Clara Hughes is the only person to have won multiple medals in the summer and winter Olympic Games, for cycling and speed skating.

Before them all came Gerry James. Within one year, he played in both the Stanley Cup and the Grey Cup.

• As the youngest player to play in the CFL, at age 17, James earned $50 per week, when it was still called the Western Inter-provincial Football Union, in 1952.
• He scored the first touchdown against the newly-minted BC Lions in 1954 at Empire Stadium.
• He was the first player to win the CFL's Schenley Award for Outstanding Canadian.
• He led the league in scoring in 1957 and won the Schenley for a second time that year.
• For 43 years he held the CFL record for most rushing touchdowns in a season (18). He set 18 CFL records and played on four Grey Cup winning teams.

In hockey, after winning the Memorial Cup with the Toronto Marlboros in 1955-by which time he was a teenage father-James played for four seasons with the Toronto Maple Leafs, epitomizing King Clancy's aphorism, "If you can't beat 'em in the alley, you can't beat 'em on the ice.";

James later became one of the most successful coaches in minor league hockey, voted all-star coach seven times in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, and tutoring the likes of NHLer Brian Propp.

Gerry James has been inducted into the CFL Hall of Fame and the Saskatchewan and Manitoba Halls of Fame-along with his father, Eddie "Dynamite"; James, who was a football star with the pre-war Blue Bombers-but who is he now?

You have to remember the glory days of the Canadian Football League and the hockey broadcasts of Foster Hewitt to even recall his name. Fortunately his golfing partner on Vancouver Island, former book publisher Ron Smith, knows and understands sports better than most sportswriters. Upon his retirement, Smith decided James was worthy of an in-depth biography.

Kid Dynamite: The Gerry James Story is not a quickie rehash of career highlights and stats-although it certainly does provide extensive records of James' twin sporting careers. Smith, no slouch himself as an athlete, has spent years gathering information for an intimate portrait of how a very naïve, gifted and angry young man evolved into a complex, argumentative and inordinately proud enigma.

Although he's clearly respectful, Smith does not try to make Gerry James likeable. The result is a compelling narrative that will prompt even the most ardent sports fan to realize sports can be over-valued in society, and that success in sports is invariably a double-edged sword.

gerry is a nickname. he was born Edwin Fitzgerald James in Regina, in 1934, but the James family, including one older brother, moved to Winnipeg-leaving Edwin in the care of his aunt in Broadview, Saskatchewan, for the first year of his life.

Reunited in Manitoba, Gerry's asthmatic brother Don, four years older, beat and oppressed him for as long and often as he could. "He had no stamina at all,"; James recalls. "I think when he saw that I could do all the things he couldn't do, he was jealous. I think he feared that I would become Dad's favourite.";

At age 14, Gerry was strong
enough to finally pummel his brother, remorselessly, into complete submission. The brothers barely spoke for the rest of their lives. (Don settled on the east coast; Gerry would eventually gravitate to Vancouver Island with his wife, Marg.)

Sibling rivalry and the cruelty of an older brother were certainly catalysts for James' fiercely competitive nature, but he was also determined to rival his ex-sports-hero father, who was less than heroic at home. "Gerry remembers many occasions when he leapt on his father's back to try to stop him from striking his mom,"; Smith writes.

His parents divorced in 1947, after his father, a chronic drinker, had returned from the war. To this day James' favourite memory of boyhood was taking a bath. "A simple bath,"; he told Smith. "Can you imagine? Warmth is a precious luxury, an almighty luxury, especially for someone who grew up on the prairies.";

Outspoken, but rarely one to indulge in introspection, James once noted, in 1981, "It was either sports or jail, one or the other."; By grade ten in Kelvin High School, he was a sports celebrity in Winnipeg, excelling as a sprinter.

A Canadian Press story predicted he might exceed his famous father. Soon enough, sports announcer "Cactus"; Jack Wells dubbed him Kid Dynamite, in much the same way as Henri Richard became known as the "Pocket Rocket"; in reference to his older brother Maurice "Rocket"; Richard.

James lost his two front teeth while playing baseball at age 15, in St. Boniface, against grown men, when he was sucker-punched by a rival first baseman. "That was probably the shortest fight I was ever in. For two days I kept quiet and hid my mouth because I knew my mother would be upset and I knew she couldn't afford the additional financial burden of replacing them. I never did find the teeth.";

James was once offered an NFL contract by the New York Giants, but in those days the CFL paid more. Eventually the Leafs demanded that James not play football in 1956 if he was contracted to play hockey. James has vivid memories of the Original Six. "For all-round skill, Gordie Howe was the best,"; he says, "but for sheer entertainment value, the Rocket would get my vote.";

Smith devotes more than half the book to chronicling James' athletics, then deals with his coaching years, which included a stint coaching Special Olympians.

james and his wife visited
Vancouver Island during a trip to B.C. to attend Expo 86. They bought a lot near Nanoose Bay in 1989, arrived to live in B.C. in 1994 and took possession of their present home in 1997. Not long afterwards, he met Ron Smith on the putting green of the Fairwinds Golf Course. It might have been one of the luckiest breaks of James' life.

Kid Dynamite: The Gerry James Story is a rarity-a sports biography that does its subject the favour of being warts 'n' all. It resurrects Gerry James as a fascinating personality, not simply an exceptional athlete.

An anecdote towards the end of the book serves as a case in point. James firmly believes the two sexes are wired differently. He doesn't believe that men can write about what women think, so he skips over any parts of a novel that purport to reveal the female mind.
"Once I thoroughly enjoyed a particular work of detective fiction,"; he recalls, "skipping the female parts as usual, only to come to the end of the book and discover the author was P.D. James. I was so pissed when I saw P.D. was female. I threw the book down on the floor. I felt like I'd been
tricked.";

Despite his feisty nature, James remains genuinely modest about his accomplishments. When his biographer told him he held the record for most appearances in CFL post-season games (36), James wasn't even aware of the record.

"I played in the days before the big money in sports,"; he tells Smith, "and I looked at it as a way to support my family. Marg and I had three children by the time I signed to play two sports, and our family kept growing.";
Smith notes that Gerry James' ascendancy in two pro sports in Canada is not unprecedented. An obscure athlete named Elwyn (Moe) Morris played pro hockey and pro football. Lionel Conacher won a Grey Cup with the Toronto Argonauts in 1921 and successive Stanley Cups with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1934 and the Montreal Maroons in 1935-and was named Canada's greatest athlete of the first half century (20th) for doing so.

Nowadays, once a week, Marg drags Gerry along to the soup kitchen at the Salvation Army to serve as a volunteer, and every Christmas, for several weeks, Gerry can be seen outside the Petro Canada station on the main island highway, attending to his Salvation Army donation kettle. People donate-cuz they don't want to get punched in the nose.
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