A giant of a student dominates the centre of the court, his hand momentarily cupped over the ball at his hip as he reads the blurred movements of the other players.
Then George Cope makes his move: a sideways pass to his guard that promptly leads to another two points on the board for the Rebels.
In the stands at Port Perry High School, two dads, Lang Cope and David Simmonds, cheer their sons' combination, then turn back to small-business talk. Their firms are rooted in a middle-Ontario town of just 3,500 souls. Yet in less than two decades, two of Simmonds' little businesses in the area will turn into keystones of Canada's fast-changing phone business.
And the man that will make it all happen is heading down the court again. Another friend on the squad, besides Gord Simmonds, is Wade Oosterman, a foot shorter and a year older than Cope. He has no idea of the journey Cope will take him on, through three companies and far over the millennial horizon: Cope, the star basketball centre, will apply the skills he learns from the two entrepreneurs in the bleachers and, working alongside Simmonds and Oosterman, score deals that earn him a reputation as Canada's wireless whiz kid, and one of the telecom industry's most astute leaders.
For the moment, however, the school's 1979 athlete of the year and student council president is still growing into his 6-foot-7-inch frame. He has already thought about starting his own business as soon as he's out of school, but he's also being scouted by several university basketball coaches.
Young Cope is a conscientious worker who drills on the court and wants to understand the strategy and tactics of the game. Unlike most kids, he wants the coach to teach him the whole court. Understanding all the positions gives his own role clarity.
"There are some students that stick in your mind 30 years on," says Paul Arculus, the boys' assistant coach and English teacher. "Cope's group was one of those waves. They were good kids, intellectually and emotionally strong, but not brilliant."
Arculus remembers Cope as an excellent player and natural leader: He raised money to buy a Universal Gym, was instrumental in having bleachers installed in the gym for basketball spectators, and rebranded the team (the Redmen became the Rebels). The young Cope never won an academic prize, it's true; he had "an average vocabulary, with the words he needed," Arculus says. But crucially, he knew how to share the spotlight with his teammates.
And to hear George Cope tell it, it was a key lesson. "My entire career," he says, "comes back to basketball." Throughout that journey, Cope has also applied an early lesson from his dad, who knew from running gas stations and rust-proofing shops that "the only cost in life is time."
That would explain the man's focus. In his first 20 months as CEO, Cope has got his arms around the beast that is BCE Inc., the classic land-line phone company threatened by new technology, the giant that was forever shooting itself in its foot, until a frustrated shareholder tried to take it private-and that effort turned into a BCE fiasco too. (BCE owns 15% of CTVGlobemedia, parent of The Globe and Mail.)
Summoned to head the company by that frustrated shareholder-Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan-the 48-year-old Cope has breathed new vitality into Bell, bringing clarity and a razor-sharp business instinct that colleagues and competitors marvel at. He has eliminated 6,000 jobs, partnered with a chief rival repeatedly to save hundreds of millions of dollars, boosted BCE's stock dividend three times, and begun to deliver on a financial strategy. BCE's revenue edged up just 0.4% in 2009, but profit nearly doubled, and Cope's profit forecast for this year exceeded Bay Street's expectations.
The job is far from complete, he admits. "Nothing ever goes as fast as you want it to go," he says. "There is some momentum in the company, for sure. I think we've done more than the market necessarily knows yet."
