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It’s the third inning of a 1982 Little League World Series semifinal in Williamsport, Pa. Five-time defending champion Taiwan — representing the Far East in those days — is on the ropes. Its 2-0 lead against Canada is in danger.
Taiwan has two outs with star pitcher Huang Yao-Chung on the mound. Canada has runners on second and third, and the next batter is a tall, gangly preteen.
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Young Pierre Turgeon is at the plate.
Facing a count of one ball and two strikes, Turgeon drives the ball into left field, resulting in a two-RBI double. Canada had only tied the game, but they celebrated like they’d won. Turgeon smiles as he watches teammates’ exuberance from second base.
Canada’s next hitter, shortstop Martin Lafrenière, gets a hit into right field. Turgeon crosses home plate and celebrates with his teammates as Canada takes a 3-2 lead over Taiwan in front of a frenzied Williamsport crowd.
One of the first teammates to greet Turgeon after giving Canada the lead: pitcher Stéphane Matteau.
“Against Taiwan, it was over 20,000 people,” Turgeon said of the attendance at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. “It’s crazy. You’re 11 years old, you’re looking around, you’re thinking, ‘Wow, that’s nuts.’”
Forty-three years ago, Turgeon and Matteau were pieces of a ragtag, small-town Quebec team that made it to the Little League World Series final four and put a baseball dynasty on the brink of elimination. (Taiwan won a hard-fought game 10-7.)
Turgeon, the biggest player for Canada and arguably the most talented, ultimately became Turgeon the Hockey Hall of Famer. Matteau permanently traded his bat for a stick and won a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers 12 years after his Little League World Series appearance. Rangers fans and hockey historians will remember Matteau’s iconic series-winning goal in double overtime that lifted New York past the New Jersey Devils in the 1994 Eastern Conference final.
But in 1982, two grade-school standouts from Rouyn, Quebec, and their teammates were the talk of a town for the summer.
“Our little team from Rouyn accomplished a miracle, an extraordinary feat,” Matteau said. “And to do it with school friends, our childhood friends, our hockey friends that we played with in the winter … it was a magical summer.”
Rouyn is a town in western Quebec that straddles the provincial border with Ontario, as part of Quebec’s Abitibi-Témiscamingue region. It’s known today as Rouyn-Noranda, as the two townships merged in 1986.
Matteau and Turgeon — and other youngsters in Rouyn — enjoyed two seasons each year: hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer. They had grown accustomed to seeing snow on the ground until the end of April and would play hockey for most of the calendar year until the snow melted. They’d prepare for baseball season with the Rouyn Rotary club in their school gyms before playing ball in nearby parks.
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If they weren’t watching the Montreal Canadiens play hockey on television, they were watching the Montreal Expos baseball team. The Expos made the playoffs for the first time in franchise history in 1981, with players like Gary Carter, Tim Raines and Andre Dawson becoming household names across the province.
“Those Expos teams were like All-Star teams back in those days,” Matteau said.
Rouyn hoped to emerge as Canadian Little League champions in 1981 while boasting four pitchers who’d go on to have NHL careers: Matteau, Turgeon and the duo of future defenseman Éric Desjardins and goaltender André Racicot, who both won a Stanley Cup with the Canadiens in 1993.
They fell short that year. The following year, however, would be their time, and Matteau was counted on as one of their aces.
Former #NHL #Hockey player Stephane Matteau pitched in the 1982 Little League World Series. #Baseball https://t.co/dZswsI7vjo pic.twitter.com/HZXtkJ6twk
— Home Run Hockey (@HomeRunHockey) October 7, 2017
“Stéphane was very intense,” said Richard Jolicoeur, a former baseball teammate who grew up on the same street as Matteau. “He was our Maurice Richard, but when he went out to pitch, he wanted to be the best pitcher.”
All the while, Turgeon was doing double duty, going back and forth between Montreal for hockey camp and playing baseball with his team that summer. If Matteau was the team’s Maurice Richard, Turgeon was its Wayne Gretzky, playing pitcher, shortstop and center field. He wanted to be where the ball was.
“Pierre was a monster,” Matteau remembered. “He was a warrior. He was 12 years old, but he had the maturity of a 15-, 16-, 17-year-old.”
“We knew he was good, but he was so big and strong compared to the rest of us,” Jolicoeur added, as Turgeon, now standing 6-foot-1, was listed as a 6-footer during Little League play. “He really had a physical advantage. But he was also a good guy who wanted the team to win. He was super nice to all of us.”
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The climb to the Little League World Series was arduous — and that was just the travel. It meant long bus rides for the squad and staying with families who weren’t their own. Rouyn Rotary first won a district tournament in Timmins, Ontario, over 2 1/2 hours west of their hometown. (The result of being so close to Ontario towns led to them being part of the Ontario baseball system and not Quebec’s.) After that, they traveled to Stoney Creek, Ontario, near Hamilton, for the provincial championship.
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Jolicoeur, who spoke French, remembered staying with an English-speaking family all by himself during the provincial championship.
“One morning, I got asked a question, but I didn’t understand much,” Jolicoeur said. “They asked me if I ate, and I always said, ‘Yes.’ The only English word I knew was yes. They brought me to the ball park, and then I told the manager that I didn’t eat, and he found me a muffin.”
After winning the provincial title, one final step was needed before reaching the Little League World Series: Rouyn needed to win the Canadian Region Tournament in Boucherville, Quebec. They finished round-robin play with the second-best record behind Maritime champion Glace Bay, an eastern Nova Scotian town. Rouyn lost one of their pre-knockout stage games to Glace Bay but hoped to get their revenge as both teams reached the tournament final.
In the sixth inning (Little League games are six innings long), Rouyn’s chances looked doomed until Turgeon saved them with a home run while facing a full count. His shot tied the score at 3-3, forcing extra innings. With Turgeon and Marc Dubois on base in the top of the eighth, Jolicoeur hit an opposite-field, two-run double that gave Rouyn a go-ahead 5-3 lead.
“That was my big achievement of that summer,” Jolicoeur said.
The Rouyn team did not have long to savor their victory. An 11-hour bus ride to Williamsport awaited the group of 11- and 12-year-olds, many of whom had never left the country. Between signing autographs before and after games and recording promos for ESPN, the Rouyn boys experienced culture shock being around international teams from countries they had barely heard of.
All the while, they were representing an entire nation of their own. Canada has been represented in the Little League World Series each year since 1952, when a Montreal-based team became the first foreign team to compete in the tournament.
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Canada won its first game of the 1982 tournament, a 3-0 victory over Spain, to advance to the semifinal round. But the Canadians would face a Taiwan squad featuring players who dedicated themselves year-round to playing. Many of the Canadian youngsters trained for only a quarter of the year.
“Our sport was hockey; we were all hockey players,” Jolicoeur said. “There was one guy on the team who didn’t play hockey: our catcher, Denis Aubut. But the other guys, we were hockey players, and baseball was our second sport. It was our way of having fun in the summer.”
“(Taiwan) practiced like a major-league team,” Matteau added.
Canada’s coaches were mostly volunteers, including manager Gilles Mireault, who wrote for the local newspaper. But the players gravitated around Mireault and fellow coach Yvon St-Amant.
“We were prepared to do well, and we got pushed to do well,” Turgeon said. “We took the challenge well as a team and as young kids.”
Taiwan, which had won its last 30 tournament games, was on the verge of being upset as Canada led 4-2 entering the top of the fourth inning. A breakthrough fifth, however, aided Taiwan, as the team scored seven runs.
“No one thought that we even had a chance to go near (them),” Turgeon said. “And somehow we battled back.”
The Canadians mounted a comeback attempt of their own in the fifth, scoring three runs and cutting the deficit. Unfortunately for Canada, the comeback fell short. The team ultimately finished fourth in the tournament, losing the third-place game 7-4 against a team from Wyoming, Mich. Taiwan’s goal of winning a sixth straight Little League World Series was halted in the championship game, as it lost 6-0 to a team from Kirkland, Wash. The championship was played in front of a then-record 40,000 fans and in 2010 was documented in “Little Big Men,” a part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series.
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Jolicoeur remembers feeling “disappointed” losing that semifinal, but he took pride in competing against a perennial world-champion team.
“We made them sweat a little bit,” he said.
When Matteau returned to Williamsport 35 years after his team’s dream run, it was his chance to reconnect with faces he hadn’t seen since childhood. He had experienced the glory of an NHL career, so he was used to meeting random fans in public. At one point, Matteau introduced himself to a man who looked back with a puzzled gaze. The man was surprised that Matteau didn’t remember him.
He then said his name: Maxime Leblanc. It was Matteau’s former teammate from that 1982 squad.
“After 1982, I never ran into him once,” Matteau said. “I saw him 35 years later. Once he told me his name, I recognized his face as a young man.”
Turgeon and Matteau reunited with their teammates in 2017 ahead of that year’s Little League World Series. A decade earlier, Turgeon was inducted into the Little League Hall of Excellence, the highest honor for Little League alumni. He’s the first Canadian and first NHLer to accomplish the feat.
But Turgeon and Matteau didn’t attend to boast about their NHL exploits. They wanted to catch up with their buddies — some of whom, like Leblanc, they hadn’t seen in decades.
At a local hotel, members of the team came together over a bonfire. That’s when the stories were revisited. The teammates chatted for hours, ordered food and shared memories.
“Nobody wanted to sleep,” Matteau said. “We were sitting in a circle. We knew our teammates followed my and Pierre’s careers in the NHL, but Pierre and I were so interested in hearing everyone else’s stories. Where did they end up? How many kids did they have? Their family life, their professional life.
“It got to two or three in the morning, and we were still sitting in the hotel lobby. It was really magical.”
Some of the players’ most treasured memories came after the tournament ended. The Rouyn team was given a hero’s welcome when they landed at the local airport from Montreal. It was just the beginning of the city’s celebration. Players signed an official book at City Hall before being paraded through the streets days later, as if they were Stanley Cup champions. They even got free haircuts from a local shop in town.
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Weeks later, the team took one more bus ride to Montreal, this time as special guests for an Expos game at Olympic Stadium. The Rouyn players met the Expos before the game, shaking hands and taking photos with their baseball heroes — including Carter, Dawson, Raines, Tim Wallach and Bill Gullickson.
August 1982, and everything that came afterward, was a coming-of-age moment for many of those players, like Jolicoeur. It produced memories that have stayed with them.
“For the majority of us, there was ‘before 1982’ and ‘after 1982,’” Jolicoeur said. “That’s when I came into the world. … I became somebody after that. It breathed confidence into me. It told me anything was possible.”
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; photos: Graig Abel and B Bennett/ Getty Images; courtesy of Stéphane Matteau)
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Julian McKenzie is a staff writer for The Athletic’s NHL vertical and is based in Ottawa. He also hosts The Chris Johnston Show with The Athletic’s Chris Johnston. Julian’s work can also be found in the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, CTV Montreal, The Canadian Press, TSN 690, the Montreal Gazette, The Sporting News and in other publications. Follow Julian on Twitter @jkamckenzie
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