Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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where have you gone? much more successful one in the NFL and the Canadian Football League. O���Connor���s touchdown catch in the 1952 Grey Cup (Canada���s Super Bowl) sealed a win for his Toronto Argonauts and became an iconic play in the league���s early history. He later became the voice of the Grey Cup, providing color commentary for the CBC for a quarter century���s worth of games. Announcing was a side job for O���Connor in his post-playing career. Most of his time was spent as the head marketer for the national sporting goods division at Sears in Canada. It was in that role that he traveled to northern Ottawa for a company camping trip and met Hillary, who was nearly two decades removed from becoming the first man to stand on top of the highest mountain in the world. Their inconveniently large feet (both men wore size 14 shoes) and a mutual distaste for bourbon forged a friendship on that trip that would dramatically change both of their lives, and the lives of many others, too. Hillary wasn���t ready to exit eastern Nepal after he summited Mt. Everest in 1953. He continued to travel to the area to introduce Western medicine and education to the sherpas, an outcast group in their society, who had guided him up the mountain. Twenty years to the month after that famous climb, Hillary brought O���Connor and a handful of other Sears executives to the region for a two-week tour to show them his work and ask for their help in funding other projects. ���I really didn���t even like it the first time I went. It was so difficult because I���m not in the climbing community,��� O���Connor said. Eventually, though, the rough trekking and debilitating altitude sickness subsided, and the region���s natural beauty sunk its roots into the former football star. ���I���ve never really been overly interested in flowers and trees, [but] the rhododendron trees are 40 feet high and magnolia trees are about 60. The flower parts were almost a foot in diameter. I had never seen anything like this.��� O���Connor agreed to establish the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation when he returned to Toronto. The plan was to provide four years of financial support for Hillary���s projects and then move on. But toward the end of that window, Hillary���s wife and one of his children died in a plane crash, and the two families were pulled closer together. Hillary���s surviving son and daughter began calling O���Connor "Uncle Zeke." O���Connor���s three children grew used to seeing ���Ed��� on the family farm during his annual trips to Canada. Hillary, a native New Zealander, visited often to give speeches and raise funds. He stayed in O���Connor���s home each time. In the morning, the unusually tall pair would eat their breakfast in a crowded McDonald���s up the road, and O���Connor would shake his head as he shared a McMuffin with a worldwide celebrity. ���I���d sit there with him and think, ���Jeez, if these people ever knew who they were sitting next to having breakfast they would die,������ he said.