HIGH ACHIEVERS: Murray Costello, Jean-Marie Leduc were champions in their sports

By Martin Cleary

A plain sheet of white ice with colourful markings here and there has many meanings to many people.

For a hockey player, it’s an opportunity to participate in Canada’s national winter sport and fly up and down the ice.

For a curler, it’s a chance to test your skills and strategy by delivering 40-pound stones up and down a narrow strip of ice.

For a figure skater, the oval ice surface is the stage to present learned jumps, spins and various artistic moves.

And for a speed skater, it’s the four-cornered venue to test your fitness against the clock or a small field of peers.

For Ottawa sports icons Jean-Marie Leduc and Murray Costello, a sheet of ice was their athletic canvass, which inspired and guided them through their highly successful lives.

Leduc never skated, preferring tennis instead. But when his son Jean-François ventured into speed skating with the Ottawa Pacers around 1980, he followed right along in a most unusual manner. While he did serve as Pacers club president in 1981-82, he was intrigued by the long-bladed skates, and with the approaching 100th anniversary of speed skating in Canada in 1986, he wondered what skates were like a century ago.

Let’s just say he took on that project with full enthusiasm and turned it into a 43-year obsession, emerging with what is believed to be the world’s greatest collection of skates from all disciplines. And to put an exclamation mark to his collection, he worked with Sean Graham and Julie Leger to write a history of skates in Canada in the 2017 book Lace Up.

Leduc passed away on Aug. 12. He was 88. A memorial mass is scheduled for Saturday at St-Sebastien Church, 1,000 Frances Street, Ottawa, at 11 a.m.

Costello, on the other hand, started skating as a young boy on lake ice in the Northern Ontario mining community of South Porcupine.

A six-foot, three-inch centre, his hockey career took him to Toronto’s St. Michael’s College, where he attracted the attention of scouts for all six NHL teams. He played for Chicago, Boston and Detroit between 1953-57, scoring 14 goals and 34 points in 163 games.

What followed was an amazing administrative hockey career, which took him to the Western Hockey League’s Seattle Totems for 15 years, saw him serve as the longest reigning president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (now Hockey Canada) for 19 years and saw him finish with the International Ice Hockey Federation for 14 years. Putting a B.A. degree from Assumption College (now the University of Windsor) and a law degree from the University of Ottawa alongside his love of hockey certainly strengthened his professional career in the sport.

Costello passed away July 27. He was 90. A funeral mass was held Aug. 20 at St. Patrick’s Fallowfield Roman Catholic Church in Nepean.

Leduc picked up his first pair of skates at a furniture store in Gatineau and spent $20 for his second set at a local bar. After Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame speed skater Jack Barber presented him with four pairs of his blades, he told former Ottawa Citizen reporter Don Butler “there’s got to be more around.”

When I last spoke to Leduc in April, 2022, the Skate Man, as he’s affectionately called, had seen his collection reach 381 pairs. Every pair of skates has been identified, coded, written about and kept in a secure vault.

The collection is fascinating with an authenticated 15,000-year-old buffalo bone blade, which was attached to feet by leather laces. Leduc bought that for $24 from an antique dealer. In his travels, he secured the first metal blades mounted on a wood stock from 1492 as well as a metre-long wooden clap skate (a river skate), which was made in 1871.

Leduc, who worked as a printer in the federal government, travelled to many long-track speed skating competitions around the world, serving as the race announcer. During the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, he was the “French voice” during the competition for the 52 television networks.

As he built his collection of skates – which also includes boots and blades worn by Gaetan Boucher, when he won two gold medals at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo, Ottawa figure skating Olympic champion Barbara Ann Scott and Montreal Canadiens defenceman Butch Bouchard – Leduc really only wanted one specific pair (the 1871 clap skate) from Bouchard, but the former Hab insisted it was everything or nothing. It took Leduc six years to raise enough money to meet the asking price for all 66 pairs of skates.

Leduc became extremely knowledgeable about skates during his 43 years of collecting and the Hockey Hall of Fame came knocking on his door one year. The Hall had 55 pairs of skates and didn’t know how to identify them.

After five days of examination, Leduc brought all the skates to life with proper identification.

Leduc shared his joy of skate collecting by having some of his boots and blades on display at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now called the Canadian Museum of History), at the speed skating site in Richmond, B.C. for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and at the NHL’s 75th anniversary season celebration in 1991-92 in Montreal.

After Costello completed an accomplished career as a hockey player, which saw him play in championship finals for St. Michael’s College (OHA in 1953), Hershey Bears (AHL in 1954) and the Detroit Red Wings (NHL in 1956) but not win a title, he attended Assumption and earned his B.A.

While Costello didn’t have the drive to sacrifice his body for a longer NHL playing career, he found a fulfilling role as an administrator in the game.

After his marriage to Denise Marie Lancop, he joined the Western Hockey League’s Seattle Totems for a year, while on his honeymoon. He remained with Seattle for 15 years in several executive roles and watched the Totems capture league championships in 1967 and 1968.

In the late 1970s, Costello brought his family to Ottawa, where he studied law at the University of Ottawa and was called to the bar at age 45. He worked in the CRTC legal department for four months before the hockey bug bit him again.

Costello worked for the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association for six months before entering law school and when the national sport governing body decided to make the job of president a full-time, paid position, he was asked to submit an application. He was the successful candidate and served as president from 1979 to 1998.

He established the program of excellence to select an all-star team to send to the world junior hockey championships instead of having Canada represented by the previous year’s Memorial Cup champ. Women’s hockey also was high on his priority list as he was a huge proponent for equality. Costello helped bring the first world women’s hockey championship to Ottawa in 1990.

He also was involved in the international stream of hockey. He served as an International Ice Hockey Federation council member from 1998 to 2012 and was the chair of many committees. During his final four years, he was the federation’s vice president. The humble Costello never saw himself becoming president.

“My job was busy and fulfilling,” Costello told me during an October, 2013, interview at a Westboro bagel shop. “The IIHF is very much a European organization. I don’t think they would give it (the presidency) to a North American or Russian. It would give Canada too much power. That’s my read on it.”

As Costello moved smoothly and successfully through his administrative career, he received a number of honours, which he found difficult to accept – induction into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame, the IIHF Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame as well as the Order of Hockey in Canada.

“This is a team game. One should not be singled out,” Costello said almost 11 years ago.

But Costello certainly was proud of his hockey career as a player, executive, scout, administrator, arbitrator and visionary.

“I often say, maybe it’s self-serving, that I fell among the modest few who have taken a childhood passion (and) turned it into a lifelong livelihood and in the end been rewarded for it,” he said.

While his career brought him in contact with many different teams, he constantly had the full support of his family team, which included six children or as his death notice called them the “original six.”

“He was our family’s anchor, our warm, gracious, good-humoured, loving Dad, who instilled in us a relentlessly positive spirit and a commitment to always be there for each other,” Costello’s death notice read.