Raymond J. de Souza: Terry Fox was ‘a thread stitching the country together’

Terry Fox running in the Marathon of Hope. File photo.

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It is something of a golden age for the sports documentary, beginning with ESPN’s 30 for 30 series in 2009 — the first episode was on the Gretzky trade from Edmonton to Los Angeles. A masterpiece of the genre is currently in theatres now. “Run Terry Run” is the story of an originally unknown athlete whose audacious vision and sheer physical courage reminded a country of who it was.

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I remember Fox’s 1980 run, which happened when I was a boy. We would get updates at elementary school. I doubt I realized then that he was running during the first Quebec referendum, an issue about which the 21-year-old from B.C.’s Fraser Valley only spoke of in passing. Fox was focused on raising money for cancer research. Yet his Marathon of Hope established him as the most heroic of Canadians, a figure of inspiration and unity at a fractured time. Canada exists as a bond stretching across a vastness; the Marathon of Hope was the 1980 equivalent to the Canadian Pacific Railway a century earlier.

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Run Terry Run is like watching a long home movie of that extraordinary summer, fitting enough because Fox ran through the hometowns and straight into the hearts of the nation. While the film includes more recent voice-over interviews, all the footage is archival, recorded in 1980 and 1981. The film never steps into the present; it remains, as Fox does, locked in 1980.

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Somehow lost over the decades, the footage was discovered only a few years ago. Thus, those alive then can remember it as it really was, and those who weren’t can see how it looked, felt and what it meant. Both will watch it through teary eyes.

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The film concludes with a new addition, an original song, understandably saccharine, by fellow British Columbian Bryan Adams.

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“One leg of bone, one leg of steel,” Adams sings in The Ballad of Terry Fox. “If there ever was a hero, if there ever was a saint. He ran through fire and through pain. Any lesser soul would faint… He ran for everybody, and he ran for me and you.”

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The documentary reveals that Fox knew even before he set out to run 26 miles a day that his heart had been damaged by the chemotherapy following the amputation of his right leg. He denied any symptoms to the doctors who cleared him to run.

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He set out from Newfoundland. In Canada, the winds generally blow west to east, so he ran daily into the wind. Before the crowds came out to watch him, to cheer him, to run with him and to cry with admiration, he was alone with his best friend from high school, Doug Alward, just the two of them out on the highway. Friction arose between them due to the stress of it all, and so Terry’s 17-year-old brother Darryl joined them to make it a happier trio.

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“I am no different than anyone else,” Fox would repeat to the crowds he addressed at his many stops along the route. But of course, he was different, so very different and so much better. He ran 21 miles on the day he had to go to hospital near Thunder Bay, discovering that the cancer had spread to his lungs. The run was over. He returned home.