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From the Prince George Citizen:

Chucker McKenzie recalls his Prince George roots

by TED CLARKE Citizen staff
Collin McKenzie was born and bred in Victoria.

Despite that, fastball fans in Prince George have claimed him as one of their own.

He earned their admiration in the five years he lived in the city in the 1990s, trying to help Prince George teams win national titles. McKenzie is at it again this week, pitching for the Prince George Black Bears as they try to reel in the city’s first Canadian senior men’s fastpitch championship.

Although the Black Bears are down to their last life in the playoffs, having lost 2-1 Friday night to the first-place St. Thomas Evergreen Centennials, McKenzie remains optimistic his team will be playing in Sunday’s final.

“We’ve got three healthy pitchers,” McKenzie said. “The boys’ bats (have) got a bit flat, but I think we’ll be all right, they’ll break out of it.

“(St. Thomas pitcher) Frank (Cox) is a tough pitcher. We’ve had to go back-to-back games against him and it makes it pretty tough. He’s still hitting those inside pitches and getting that outside corner. We’ll bounce back. Our bats will come around and (with) our pitching, we’ll be fine.”

McKenzie, who turned 33 in June, works in Victoria as a steel fabricator, which keeps his six-foot-four, 225 pound body fit. He learned his trade as an apprentice in Prince George, working for Farr Fabricating. It was a job offer, and a girlfriend, that convinced him to move to the city in the winter of 1994-95. The relationship didn’t last long, but his career choice should take him through retirement. He’s enjoyed his return this week to his old stomping grounds.

“I had lots of fun living here, on the field and off the field,” he said. “I always had that feeling that I was welcome up here with every team I’ve played for. It’s just good to be back playing with these guys. I have a lot of history with this team and I know a lot of the people involved in the tournament committee. It’s good to see the team’s doing well for all the work they did putting it together.”

McKenzie led the junior Blazers to a fifth-place finish at the 1995 junior national championship, played at Spruce City Stadium, and went on to became one of the stars of the Spruce City Men’s Fastball Association.

McKenzie hurt his shoulder at work during the off-season in 1999 and moved back to Victoria to have surgery to remove a bone spur. He’d already started playing senior A for the Victoria Legends before he left Prince George and the following season switched to Victoria Fineline. The Legends became Victoria Travelers Inn, and McKenzie was with them for three seasons before the team folded in 2004. For the past two seasons he’s been playing in Wisconsin, the hotbed of fastball in the U.S. His Circle Tap team posted a top-10 finish at the ISC championship a month ago in Waterloo, Ont.

“You sure learn a lot when you play senior A — you learn you have to mix up your pitches more and pick your spots instead of just firing the ball by guys, like you think you can in junior,” McKenzie said.

It’s already been a long season for McKenzie. Two days before he flew to Prince George, he was pitching for Circle Tap in the final against Townline, Wisc., of the North American Fastpitch Association World Series. Circle Tap won the American Softball Association championship earlier in the summer.

“This has probably been the busiest two months I’ve ever had, I haven’t had many weekends off, that’s for sure,” McKenzie said. “(Black Bears pitcher Korrey) Gareau and I were coming back from the American nationals and we got stuck in Detroit for the night and we were talking about all the places the game has taken us. We’ve been to so many different places and met so many people.”

Travelers Inn folded two years ago and the trickle-down effect is obvious in the dwindling numbers of kids playing the game.

“It was tough to see Victoria fold because when I was younger, that’s where we’d go watch Victoria Payless play,” McKenzie said. “When I first got to play with them (in 1993), fastball was still pretty big, but they struggled with sponsorship and people didn’t want to give grown men money to play ball.

“At the same time, that hurts the community. We’d go and put on all these clinics on the Island and you’d get kids from places like Powell River coming to the senior team when they’re 20 years old. It’s kind of dying now because there’s no major team there to give the kids something to go for. That’s why we’re really struggling. Victoria used to be a hotbed for pitching with Nick Underhill, Gareau, (Mike) Piechnik. Now there’s not much coming up after us. It’s going to be tough when we decide to pack it in.”

Recruiting senior A-calibre pitchers might be more difficult when they find out there were 78 home runs in 28 games in the round-robin tournament. It’s been the talk of the tournament so far, but it’s not just a local phenomenon.

“They’re not just dropping over the fence, they’re going out of here in a hurry,” said McKenzie. “There been a lot of talk about the bats and the balls, and how much pop guys are getting from linedrives. I’ve seen a lot of pitchers get them in the face and guys are getting hurt. Balls are getting smashed out the park and it makes it interesting for the fans. I know the players, when it’s your team hitting them, like to see that kind of thing.”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 8:07 am and is filed under Canada, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.