Vaira hit all the right notes in his vibrant life

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This article was published 24/04/2018 (2823 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Those who watched the Brandon University Bobcats men’s basketball team play in the early 1970s will remember Mike Vaira for many things.

His work ethic and fitness level was hard to match (he won 88 consecutive sprint races on the team and could run for six miles while pacing a five-minute mile for its entire duration). He was a trash talker on the court (he often told rookies covering him that he would score more points on them that night than they could dream about scoring in their careers). He was a pure scorer (averaging 26.5 points in 1973-74 and 24.5 in 1974-75).

Two things that may stand out even more was that he was the first Bobcat athlete to be named an all-Canadian and he wasn’t on the floor or bench for his final home game at BU. During the penultimate home game in 1975, he went to jokingly kick an official in the butt as he was calling a foul on him, but the referee turned around and Vaira made contact with him, resulting in a technical foul, ejection and suspension for Mike Vaira Night, when he was honoured for his five-year career.

It’s the second-team all-Canadian honour that did a lot. It gave Vaira the validation he wanted after coming up from Oregon to spend five years in Brandon, and it also gave the Bobcats the mindset that they deserved to compete on the national level.

“He handled it with a tremendous amount of grace and humility and at the same time, I think it validated his belief in his own abilities,” said Murray Rodgers, who played with Vaira in 1974-75 and was one of his best friends. “As a teammate, it was an unbelievable thing to witness and be a part of. We knew how talented he was and how hard he worked and it was validation for all of us.

“The Bobcats at that time really were pretty well at the bottom of the heap. We were the smallest team in the country and we were the fittest team in the country, (head coach) Gary Howard made sure we could outrun anybody in the country, but we were small and weren’t overly gifted with talent.

“We looked up to Mike and we all admired him completely. He helped us believe in ourselves too.”

Vaira left his mark at BU and hoped to relive some of his memories at its basketball teams’ reunion from Oct. 11 to 14, but that won’t happen as he passed away in his B.C. home on April 14 at the age of 66.

Although he wasn’t from Manitoba, the five years he spent in the Wheat City meant the world the Vaira. It’s where he received one of the highest honours in his basketball career, it’s where he got his teaching degree and it’s where he first met Rodgers and began a friendship that continued on until Vaira’s passing and that included playing guitar on stage together and just for fun.

“Everything he did was built and formed from his history in Brandon,” said Vaira’s son Mario. “He loved it. He was an American who went up to study and play ball. He made lifelong friends that he talked to all the time. All I’d hear was legendary stories from Brandon constantly throughout his life. Anyone who talked to dad, he was a storyteller and joke teller and entertaining guy, but half of his material was probably from Brandon because it was such a big part of his life. The joy and the love and camaraderie never left his heart for sure.

“Playing ball and being that leader and having that confidence, that’s where that was formed. That’s literally a forge that started him on this path to adulthood was at Brandon.”

Vaira’s path took him all over Western Canada and into the territories, and a lot of that was because of Bill Warren.

Warren and Vaira joined the Bobcats the same season and formed a backcourt that featured the oldest player in the league, Warren at 30, and the youngest in Vaira, 17. They were two very different people with Warren being conservative and Vaira a trash-talking and outgoing person who had no filter on what he said.

Yet the pair got along well. Vaira lived with Warren and his wife during university and followed Warren, a teacher and administrator, for 14 years. The pair played basketball and worked in the same school.

Warren admits that Vaira may not be what some people expected to see from a teacher. His writing on the board was messy and his spelling wasn’t perfect, which Rodgers says was due to his dyslexia. Vaira often taught in classrooms with troubled or mentally-challenged children, but that was where his personality really shone.

“Mike was like a pied piper for kids,” Warren said. “He played guitar, his academics would not have gotten him academic all-Canadian, but you don’t need academics to be a teacher, you need to connect with kids and he could do that. He could stay in a more-or-less isolated place and we’d play basketball 365. We travelled to Hawaii, Washington State, Seattle and we would go to two or three tournaments a year.”

“The kids loved him. He saw people for what they were and he’d call them names and all that stuff,” Warren continued. “I was his principal for a couple of times and this one time the superintendent would come over from Prince Rupert to evaluate him. His writing on the board was crappy and that, but they never saw him. This one little girl saw the superintendent had a deformed hand, so this little girl said, ‘Look at your hand, look at your hand,’ and wouldn’t shut up. So the superintendent left and Mike gave her $10 for getting rid of him.”

Since he often vocalized unfiltered thoughts both in and out of the classroom, Vaira would occasionally get himself into trouble. But the impact he had on the kids he taught was unmistakable.

“I phoned some of the players he was coaching from Fort Simpson on the West Coast and told them that he passed and they all said, ‘Wow,’” Warren said. “I got a number of calls back saying they’ll miss that guy. These are people I haven’t spoken to in 37 years that miss him. His influence was wide. His influence with his good nature and good heartedness.”

Whether it was his good nature getting rewarded or not, there was no debate that Vaira had a lot of luck that followed him during his life.

An avid fisherman, Vaira once lost his wallet in the Pacific Ocean while fishing. A few days later he received a phone call from someone who caught it while fishing for salmon and returned it to him. Another time up in the Northwest Territories he caught a big trout, but the line snapped and the trout got away. A few days later, Vaira went back out on the lake and caught a big jackfish, which he decided to smoke. He cut it open and found the trout that got away inside with his lure.

Shortly after moving to the West Coast in 1983, Vaira won $1 million in the lottery. However, his family didn’t have any money and had to get a loan at a bank to afford a flight to Winnipeg to claim the winnings. Vaira’s wife at the time made the trip and was picked up at the airport by Rodgers who took her to claim their prize. The pair went out for lunch afterwords and Rodgers bought the meal because she didn’t have cash, only a certified cheque for $1 million.

Vaira was also a talented musician. His father Mario, who Vaira named his son after, was a professional old-time jazz and funk guitar player. Vaira idolized his father and started playing guitar in Brandon around the same time Rodgers met him and started playing guitar as well. The pair would play on road trips and continued playing together through till Vaira’s passing.

Rodgers, who talked to Vaira three times a week and feels like he lost a brother, described his friend as someone who could play any style of music at the highest level.

“Mike could be a top guy in Nashville if he wanted to be,” Rodgers said. “I’d say to him, you should have gone to Nashville. He’d go ‘I’m too lazy and I don’t like to travel anyway.’

“If you could talk to anyone who knows him or played with him, they’d go ‘Wow.’ He could play any style at a masterful level with energy, fire and creativity. Blues, country, rock and roll, finger style, swing, jazz, the whole deal. He was just a consummate musician, plus he wrote hilarious songs.”

Mario, Vaira’s son, said his dad was labelled as a gunslinger or hired gun who would go out and spice things up on stage, but wasn’t fully recognized as a songwriter and artist. Then Mario, an award-winning, Juno-nominated composer, songwriter, producer and multi-intramentalist himself, started recording Vaira for an album.

“Rootbound” was released in January and shows off Vaira’s personality perfectly. There’s songs in which Vaira pokes fun at himself like “Nobody Loves Me But My Cat” and “How Did I Get Here From There,” but there’s also incredibly touching songs like “Halfmoon Bay” about his father and “Drive The Moon,” which features Vaira’s daughter Jess, who is also a musician. There are a pair of tracks named after his grandchildren, Aria and Zai, as well. There aren’t any vocals on those two, just Vaira playing his guitar.

“I knew it was something that if I didn’t get it out that I’d regret it forever,” Mario said of the album. “It wasn’t that I was expecting the end to come anytime soon, but it was just the time was right. Dad had been playing forever and I’d been playing for years and years and recording for years. I think once he retired from teaching, he had all these song ideas and snippets of stuff and he started putting them together into full songs.

“I had been recording him on and off for maybe 10 years and I think we used maybe two of those songs for the album,” he continued. “He finalized all these songs over the last couple of years here and we recorded them over maybe the last 18 months. He’d come up for a day or two and I’d put a mic in front of him and he’d just go have lunch and play with the kids. It was just really casual.

“In November, we realized how close we were, so he came up and we recorded three or four more and mixed it, pressed it and sent it to him for Christmas and made sure he had some for Christmas presents and he was on top of the world.

“It was a long time coming, but it was also the perfect time. It was him fully realized as an artist and songwriter that he was.”

Vaira’s album can be found at mikevaira.bandcamp.com.

One thing that made Vaira so memorable to so many people was his heart of gold. There may be barbs thrown out during conversations, but nothing was ever meant to hurt.

He also loved to share his passions with other people. He taught basketball. He taught people about how to fish and different spots to fish. And he shared his passion for music, and not just with his two children.

He gave lessons to anyone who wanted to learn and once a week for the last couple of years, Vaira would travel with some friends to put on a concert with mentally-challenged kids. They would let the kids sing whatever song they wanted and would back them up with music.

Vaira’s passions included Brandon. Vaira, who loved to spend time with family, didn’t like to drive more than an hour away from his place, but he was so looking forward to attending the basketball reunion that he was talking about driving to Calgary to fly to Brandon.

His absence at the reunion will be noticeable, and there are talks of people paying tributes to him there. Rodgers was thinking about bringing his guitar and playing some of Vaira’s songs and BU’s athletic department is looking at building a tribute to Vaira in its Wall of Fame.

Mario is touched with the response and is thinking of coming out to the reunion to represent his late father.

“First reaction is it’s amazing and beautiful,” Mario said about BU looking at building a tribute to Vaira in the Wall, which Vaira was inducted into in 1996. “Even if it doesn’t happen, just the fact that people talked about it makes me realize what an impact he had on the people around him, which makes me happy.

“As a son, your father is always larger than life, but when you see that same effect on the people around him that he grew up with or learned with or learned from or taught or just played with, it means a lot. To see that decades later is very moving.”

» cjaster@brandonsun.com

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