Bob Hindmarch, hockey coach and former University of British Columbia (UBC) professor.Martin Dee/UBC Public Affairs
Over six decades, Bob Hindmarch was on deck, behind the plate, on the court, in the huddle, on the field, behind the bench, and always in the middle of the action.
Mr. Hindmarch, who has died at 90, concluded a career as a student athlete at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver by becoming a celebrated coach and sports administrator.
He served as general manager of Canada’s first national hockey team in 1964. Nine years later, he led a team of university hockey players on an unprecedented tour of China at a time when the communist colossus was still closed to most Westerners.
In 1984, Mr. Hindmarch was named Canada’s chef de mission at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina).
He was a key figure in Vancouver’s long attempt to host an Olympics, culminating in a successful bid for the 2010 Winter Games. He also helped organize wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen’s Man in Motion world tour to promote accessibility and inclusivity.
Generations of coaches and athletes at the university knew the affable father figure as Dr. Bob.
In 1980, Vancouver Sun columnist Denny Boyd told the story of an anonymous student who faced criminal charges for selling drugs.
“Prof. Hindmarch taught me Phys. Ed. 361 and he’d always seemed like an open guy, so I went to him,” the student told the columnist. “I told him I wasn’t emotionally able to take my exams. You know what he did? He took me to the Faculty Club and talked to me for two hours, telling me to hang in, not to quit on myself. He kept buying me coffee and he offered to buy me breakfast, but I hadn’t been able to eat for a week, I was so scared. But he talked to me. He told me he believed in me and that if I needed him he’d come to court and testify for me. He told me he’d tell my other profs what I was going through. After that day, he kept in touch with me regularly.”
A tall man with deep-set eyes and a head as prominent as an Easter Island statue, Mr. Hindmarch was a familiar figure on campus. His weekly routine was to stroll past the coaches’ offices in War Memorial Gymnasium on campus every Monday. He paid special attention to encouraging those coaches whose teams had a poor weekend showing.
“He simply had the ability to make you feel appreciated and by the time he left your office you had a new positive outlook on the week,” said Kevin Hanson, who has been the university men’s basketball coach for more than 20 seasons.
Mr. Hindmarch was keen to keep athletes in Canada, often assisting them in finding work as coaches and administrators. He encouraged Dave Chambers, a defenceman he knew from the university’s varsity team, to become a hockey coach at the University of Saskatchewan, the start of a career that would see Mr. Chambers lead the junior national team to a world championship in 1988 before becoming a head coach of the Quebec Nordiques of the National Hockey League.
Field hockey player Jean Forrest was a recent kinesiology graduate in 1983 when she told Mr. Hindmarch she was considering moving elsewhere for a graduate degree. “Don’t do that,” he told her. “Stay in Vancouver and I’ll get you a job.” He hired her as sport co-ordinator for the Vancouver Centennial Commission, the beginning of a long career in sport and recreation management.
A joke-telling, sometimes goofy persona captured a Joe College persona from student days as a Big Man on Campus. He created an informal club for acolytes called the International Order of Floaters (as in flotsam and jetsam), who would gather a few times a year. Since Mr. Hindmarch was notoriously late, all members knew to arrive at least an hour after the posted start time.
Robert George Hindmarch was born on May 27, 1930, to the former Margaret Robinson and a coal-mining father who gave him his name. The boy’s paternal grandfather and two sons immigrated to Canada from England’s Northumberland coal country in 1912. They settled near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, where, just 63 years earlier, a Snuneymuxw chief had told the Hudson’s Bay Company about coal deposits. The Hindmarch men all worked in the coal mines, as did the Robinsons.
Young Mr. Hindmarch played basketball for the Nanaimo Taximen and baseball for the local White Owls team. He was also the champion sprinter at John Shaw High School.
At university, he was a three-sport star. He was catcher for the school’s inaugural baseball team in 1950. He played basketball for the UBC Chiefs in senior men’s action against such teams as the defending national champion Vancouver Clover Leafs. He was also a top scorer for the varsity Thunderbirds, who competed against colleges in Washington State.
He made his name as a 60-minute, two-way player for football coach Hjalmer (Jelly) Anderson. Mr. Hindmarch was a left end on the offensive line known for his good hands in catching passes. He also was a superb defensive lineman.
On the afternoon of Oct. 20, 1951, Mr. Hindmarch played in a game witnessed by Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. To the delight of a crowd of 6,000, UBC defeated the Eastern Oregon Mountaineers by 13-8. The team presented the Prince a signed football after the game before a delirious crowd tore down the goalposts.
Mr. Hindmarch’s season ended two weeks later when he broke his left leg during a 40-6 drubbing at the hands of the College of Puget Sound Loggers in Tacoma, Wash.
The following season he won the Dr. Gordon Burke Award as the football player best combining ability with leadership. In his senior year, he was co-captain of the football team with Cal Murphy, a future Canadian Football League coaching legend. Mr. Hindmarch took the prestigious Bobby Gaul Award as the university’s outstanding male athlete. The popularity of the Delta Upsilon brother led to his election victory over 11 other candidates as King of the Mardi Gras, a highlight of the fraternity and sorority social calendar.
After graduating with a degree in physical education, he taught gym and introduced a football program to Duke of Connaught High School in suburban New Westminster before returning to the university campus two years later as assistant football coach under Frank Gnup. He also handled similar chores with baseball and basketball teams.
He completed a science degree and an education doctorate – giving birth to the Dr. Bob nickname – through the University of Oregon.
In 1963, Reverend David Bauer, a Basilian priest, became head coach of a fledgling program to create a national hockey team to represent Canada at the upcoming Winter Olympics. A squad of amateur student athletes was recruited from across the country with Mr. Hindmarch arranging for academic credits to be transferred. He also got a dilapidated shack on campus converted for use as a dorm by the men. Hockey House included bunk beds in the living room and a housekeeper who cooked meals on a meagre budget. More than once, Mr. Hindmarch reached into his wallet to provide snack money to a hungry hockey player.
At the Olympic tournament at Innsbruck, Austria, Canada finished with a 5-2 record, tied with Sweden and Czechoslovakia behind the Soviet Union. The Canadians presumed they had won a bronze medal only to be told at the medal ceremony that a late change to the tie-breaking rule pushed them off the podium into fourth place.
Mr. Hindmarch went on to become head coach of the university’s Thunderbirds hockey team, accumulating 214 wins, including a regional collegiate championship in 1971.
In 1973, he led the hockey team on a tour of China, where they outscored their opponents 56-5 over seven games, one of which was played in freezing temperatures on an outdoor rink in a snowstorm.
As an executive with the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, he was an outspoken opponent of bench-clearing brawls and a goon-style of spearing and cross-checking that became pronounced in professional hockey in the 1970s
“There’s no question in my mind violence is ruining hockey,” he told Clive Cocking of Weekend Magazine in 1976. “Hockey is a very aggressive, tough, physical game – and that’s exciting and acceptable – but what we have to take very firm action to stop is these vicious things spreading in the game.”
He served as athletic director at the university through the 1980s and was considering a campaign to become Canadian Olympic Association president in 1990 when he withdrew from consideration owing to the amount of travel from Vancouver.
Mr. Hindmarch has been inducted into the UBC Sports Hall of Fame (1993), which he helped found. He has also been enshrined in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame (2006), the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame (2009), the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame (2012), and the Canada West Hall of Fame (2019) for collegiate athletes and builders from the four Western provinces.
In 2010, he was awarded the Order of B.C. Nine years later, when he received the Order of Canada, he invited 50 former university athletes to attend the investiture ceremony while wearing their Big Block Club sweaters in the school colours of blue and gold.
Mr. Hindmarch, who appropriately lived on Olympic Street in Vancouver, died of heart failure on Feb. 20. He was predeceased by Florence Jean (née Wilson), his wife of 62 years, who died in 2018, aged 83. He leaves sons Bruce and Dave Hindmarch, the latter a hockey forward who skated for Canada at the 1980 Olympics and who later had a 99-game career with the NHL’s Calgary Flames. He also leaves four grandchildren and an older brother, Wallace (Wally) Hindmarch, of Nanaimo.
The hockey tour of China launched several sports exchanges between the university and counterparts in Asia. The visit was captured by a film crew with the National Film Board, who recorded Mr. Hindmarch’s pep talks (“What you do, you do really well,” he told his players), as well as his being interviewed by John Burns of The Globe and Mail even while undergoing a shave with a dull razor by a barber to whom he could not speak his discomfort.
At the end of the tour, several players grabbed their coach and dumped him fully clothed into a bathtub filled with soap bubbles. The documentary Thunderbirds in China concludes with Mr. Hindmarch granting an interview while sitting in the bathtub in soaked clothes, as though doing so was an everyday event.