view . summer 2012
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This summer, the London 2012 Olympics will
command the attention of hundreds of millions
of people around the globe. The University of
Windsor’s own connection to the Olympics stretches
back to 1936 and some very muddy men playing in
the Games’ first-ever basketball tournament.
They found silver in the mud.
Irving “Toots” Meretsky and Stanley “Red” Nantais ’37
former Assumption College students (predecessor of the
University of Windsor), played
a starring role in the only
silver medal a Canadian team
has ever won on an Olympic
basketball court.
Not that anyone would have
called the rain-soaked field
that played host to the 1936
championship a “court”. It was
there, however, that a world
spotlight was shone on the
sport – just barely out of its
infancy – and on the young men
who had fought to represent
their country.
Their story began in the fall
of 1933 as the Great Depression
gripped the country. That was also the year that
Glen Sherman, Don Desjarlais ’36, William “Moose” Rogin ’37,
Meretsky and Nantais first stepped onto the basketball
court as Assumption College’s “Five Fighting Freshmen”.
The campus’ location, just a stone’s throw from the
U.S., meant access to its treasure-trove of gifted American
student-athletes who enrolled as boarders, and that
Assumption was a full-fledged member of the Michigan-
Ontario college conference in football and basketball.
Exposure to this high level of competition led to
Assumption’s dominance on the field and the courts,
according to local historian Michael Powers. The Fighting
Freshmen won the Ontario college championship in its
first year. As sophomores, the players captured the Eastern
Canadian championship, but lost in the Canadian finals.
By 1935-36, both Merestsky and Nantais had moved on
to a senior Windsor team comprised of players from local
schools including Assumption College. Other players included
Ian Allison, who had graduated
from Assumption in 1932, and
Norman Dawson, who had also
attended the college.
Known as the Windsor
Alumni, the amateur team
battled successfully for the
Canadian Senior Basketball
Championship in 1936, earning
its players the right to travel to
the Summer Olympic Games in
Berlin, Germany, that year.
It was a trip that almost
didn’t happen. The team was
broke. No government subsidy
existed for sports. Thus, there
was a real chance that the game
invented by Canadian Dr. James Naismith only 45 years
prior would have no Canadian team to represent it at its
Olympic introduction.
According to
The Olympians Among Us
, by Carl Morgan
and Tony Techko, Gordon Fuller, who helped create the
team, refused to consider such a possibility. When the
team had first begun to play, Fuller had persuaded the Ford
Motor Company to sponsor it, renaming it the Ford V8s in
the company’s honour.
“NOTHING WAS GOING TO
KEEP MERETSKY FROM THE
OLYMPICS INCLUDING THE
FACT THAT HE WAS THE ONLY
JEWISH MEMBER OF A TEAM
BOUND FOR HITLER’S
GERMANY.”
TONY ATHERTON,
WRITER,
OTTAWA CITIZEN
Assumption Grads’ Olympic Quest
SILVER STARS
Seventy-six years ago, Assumption College grads contributed to the only basketball
medal Canada has ever claimed at the Olympics.
BY JENNIFER AMMOSCATO
