Still stompin' after all these years
We had just come out of the trophy room in Stompin' Tom Connors's basement, a rather stark chamber lined with framed photos, gold records and other memorabilia from a career that spans five decades. Connors was telling me about the games he plays with his band on the road: checkers, chess, Scrabble, croquet ....
Croquet? As in, "the good old croquet game, it's the best game you can name"?
"It's not the old ladies' game, the way we play it," he growled. "You need shin pads. If we hit your ball, it'll go right out of the park."
He's just as fierce about those other games, apparently. Stompin' Tom and the Connors Tone, the second volume of his autobiography, devotes a few paragraphs to the pleasure he gets from demolishing opponents on the checkerboard.
At 72, Connors is a little greyer and paunchier than the lean guy with the hard-maple voice who forced his way into our collective consciousness with songs such as Bud the Spud, Sudbury Saturday Night and Gumboot Cloggeroo. But at every stage of his life, he has been the kind of man who does everything as hard as he can, all the time.
With one notable 12-year intermission, he has been singing and writing songs professionally for 44 years. But his real calling is that of a legend-builder, engaged in what he sees as a hard, nearly single-handed struggle to celebrate Canadian lives and places in song.
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