Hesquiaht First Nation member Richard Lucas has been inducted into the Nuu-chah-nulth Sports Hall of Fame.
Lucas was nominated for the honour by members of the 1977 Hesquiaht Warriors squad who, under his direction, won the Junior All-Native Basketball Tournament. Younger brother Bruce, who was a member of that squad, said Richard has been the driving force behind generations of Hesquiaht athletes.
“We didn't have a gym in Hot Springs, but we generated a lot of great basketball players,” Bruce said. “We didn’t have a field, but we produced a lot of great ball players. Today, we’re still producing a lot of good players.”
Richard said the Good Friday 1964 Tsunami played a key role in Hesquiaht sports tradition. The flooding destroyed most of the housing in the home community of Hot Springs Cove and led most Hesquiaht families to relocate to Port Alberni.
But Richard, who was 14 at the time of the move, continued to attend Christie Residential School.
“I went to Christie until 1965, then I went to Mission,” he said. “Once you were 16, though, you didn’t have to attend residential school, so I quit.”
Richard moved back with his family, and, finding Alberni District Senior Secondary a little too big and intimidating, enrolled at Smith Memorial Catholic School. At that point, he had already been exposed to a full range of sports.
“One of the good things I had at Christie was Brother Mills. He was very sports-oriented. He had us playing basketball, volleyball, soccer, high jump. He kept us busy all the time. That was the one good thing I took from Christie.”
Richard became an organizer when he and some friends decided to move back to their home community to work in the logging industry.
“We found an empty house in Hot Springs in 1967. There were 10 of us who lived there. We started the Hesquiaht Braves team, and the only thing we did at the time to train was run.”
The young men had all played basketball in school. They ran on the logging roads twice a day in their work boots, and travelled when they were able to arrange games.
After a year, the men took possession of an abandoned house that had escaped the flooding because it was perched on 15-foot stilts.
“We used it as a half-court for shooting. We got a hoop and we got a couple of balls, so we would just shoot around. We played on the road.”
The makeshift team was an intense source of pride for the Hesquiaht community, according to Bruce, who is 10 years younger than his older brother.
“I was very young when I saw Richard play in his Hesquiaht Braves uniform, and that made me want to wear it.”
When logging work disappeared on the West Coast in the early 1970s, the young men moved back to Port Alberni. By now, Richard was a standout player in both basketball and fastball, but all too soon, while working in the woods, he suffered a knee injury that put an end to his playing career.
“That's when I started officiating basketball. I refereed for 15 years,” he said.
His refereeing career included junior and senior high school, First Nations and adult Rec League basketball, both in Port Alberni and on the road for tournaments.
“I started coaching youth teams in 1975. I put together a team for softball, the Hesquiaht Mean Machine. At the time, they had what was called the Olympiad in Victoria, and we won two championships.”
That same group of players also practiced at basketball, although they didn't get much game action until their triumphant performance, this time as Hesquiaht Warriors, at JANT 1977.
“The first game we got whupped. We were behind 38 at the half, but we came back and lost by eight. Once we got the first game out of our system, we didn't have any trouble with anybody. We beat Kincolith in the final by 30 points.”
In the late 1970s, many Hesquiaht families moved back to the new reserve at Hot Springs Cove, Richard’s included. He continued to put together teams to compete in out-of town tournaments.
In 1988, he was hired as a community planner by the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and moved back to Port Alberni with his growing family. For a time, interest in First Nations basketball was in decline, and in 2000, rather than watch them sit home, took a boys and girls squad to JANT in Terrace, largely at his own expense.
“I coached the boys. Two of them were my nephew Linus' sons. We only had four healthy players, so we picked up a player in Nanaimo, even though he had never played before.”
Although the makeshift squad “didn't fare well,” they were able to compete at JANT and create precious memories in line with that ground-breaking team of 1977.
Bruce said he and his teammates felt a debt of honour that lasts to this day.
“A lot of us that played in 1977 are now coaching and giving back,” he said.
In 2011 in Penticton, with Bruce at the helm, the Homiss Wolves took the title at JANT. The next year, he organized the memorable 2012 JANT in Port Alberni.
At around the same time as the trip to JANT 2000, former Saskatchewan Roughrider Warren Kiland had started the Sea Lions youth football program.
“I had never played football,” Richard said. “I loved the game though. They approached me to try to get First Nations youth involved.”
But Richards son Ander, now 30, wasn't interested at first, so one day, Richard told Ander and the late Barry Thompson to grab their cleats--They were going to a softball practice at Bob Dailey Stadium.
“When we got there, Ander said, ‘This is football. What's going on?’ I said ‘Let’s give it three practices, and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay.’”
Both young men turned out to love the game (as expected). Richard subsequently coached the 2009 Sea Lions Pee Wee squad and served as an assistant coach the following year.
Richard said Bruce attempted a similar bit of subterfuge to get him to attend the Hall of Fame induction. He had no idea he had been nominated.
“I got a call and he said, ‘What are you doing tonight?’” I said I had nothing planned. He said, ‘Are you going to the [Tlu-piich Games] opening?’ I said, ‘What opening?’”
Finally, Bruce had to spill the beans, because time was getting short.
“I was late getting there,” Richard said.
