Honour To Carry Torch

I had the occasion to go back last January for the 2018 commemoration which took place in a little town, well I shouldn’t say little town. A town called Paschu who had built an ice rink to do for this commemoration and from this ice rink we could see where we played hockey on the Nijmegen River. We had a Team Canada formed with four players of the Vandoos, four players of the Pat’s and locals, Canadian locals in Korea to form Team Canada. And against Team Canada it was Team Corea, not Korea as we spelled it but Corea, C-o-r-e-a, which is different in the spelling in English with a “k” and so on. Of two universities, two of the highest branded universities in South Korea and that’s when I learned that hockey started officially, officially registered in 1928 between those two universities. It came up to me like that, I said oh we were not the first ones. But we can always claim that our missionaries brought hockey in Korea before that. This particular commemoration, the embassy and the Olympic committee, local committee, had arranged for the Olympic torch to go through Paschu where we were playing on the 19th of January on its way to the Olympic site. And I was greatly honoured and privileged to carry, to be a torch bearer for a hundred metres along the rink. It is something I will never forget. By the way I have turned over the torch which I brought back to Canada to my regiment museum in the Citadel Quebec City.