I was sad to learn that Bob McKillop, former University of Waterloo football coach and great friend of the Warriors Band, passed away last week at 83. I hadn’t seen him in several years, but he fought cancer to the end. Just like I’d expect.

Bob had quite the athletic career - a star football athlete at Waterloo, he later coached the hockey team to one of Waterloo’s rare national championships, and coached football for a while too (although not quite as successfully) and was VERY big in the Ontario baseball scene and even played in the Chicago White Sox organization. Quite the multi-talented guy.

He was a worthy member of the University of Waterloo Athletic Hall of Fame, (a hall of fame which includes a few we-ran-out-of-ideas members)

But I knew him best as a great friend to the University of Waterloo Warriors Band. There’s even a tune in the Warriors Band book dedicated to Bob. (You would, of course, yell “McKillop” to rhyme with “Tequila”.)

not exactly championship calibre football

Bob coached the hockey team to the national championship - ranked #2 on the Waterloo athletics all-time top moments list - and took over football in 1982 but wasn’t quiiiiite as successful. I don’t want to dwell on exactly how unsuccessful, but if you want to read more, I once wrote up a whole history of Waterloo football for the alumni magazine, which you can read here.

There were, of course, highlights. The occasional win over Laurier, some oddball scores here and there (Waterloo beat RMC 1-0 once when Bob was playing), and everybody generally accepted that losing 24 games in a row was just how it was going to be.

Waterloo’s president once told me that he took a sort of weird pride in the football team’s lack of success, because it showed that Waterloo was obviously concentrating on academics, or something.

But I know the players were trying hard. And the coach was doing his best.

this one time vs. western

So, the Warriors Band was, and remains, a pretty rag-tag ensemble, full of people blowing off steam and blowing out music. Contrast this with the Western Mustang Band, who we always felt took everything too seriously.

One year, Western was playing at Waterloo, and both the Warriors and Mustang bands were honking away in the seats at Seagram Stadium.

Shortly before halftime - I don’t remember the score, but Western was probably leading by six or seven touchdowns at that point - we in the Warriors Band noticed that the Western Band had left the seats and was marching around the running track to the other side, presumably to get ready for their highly-polished fancy halftime show.

Of course, our thought in the Warriors Band was “Wait - hang on - what are they doing? This is OUR stadium. They didn’t clear this with us first!”. And we scrambled out of the seats, lickety split, and started high-tailing it around the track the other way so that we could … well I don’t know what we thought we were going to do other than get there first or get in the way or something.

So you had this one precision band, marching around one end in a sort of precision way, and you had this rattletrap ensemble screaming around the other end, and meanwhile the football game was still going on.

Coach McKillop told me afterwards that he saw and immediately realized what impending musical catastrophe was about to happen, and said “I had to cover my face with my clipboard, I was laughing so hard. I wanted people to assume I was still thinking about football.”

early days of the band

I don’t know if this is true, - and I wish I could have asked Bob …. but there was a rumour that Bob had tried to help the Warriors Band get started and made arrangements for a trip to a closed Royal Canadian Air Force base to pick up some musical instruments their band had left behind, only to be told upon arrival that that whoever he talked to definitely did not have permission to be giving away these instruments and he’d best turn around.

early days of me at Waterloo

I didn’t know anything. Somehow I took over the band as a second year student in 1978 after making a strategic error of not paying attention when they were voting for a new Chief Centurion.

I got to know Bob, the hockey coach (at the time), Wally Delahey (football coach), Carl Totzke (athletic director), Paul Condon (sports information director) and Don McCrae (basketball coach) pretty well. The band played at ALL the home football, basketball and hockey games, and all these gentlemen were very friendly and encouraging and helped me figure out what exactly it meant to be a Waterloo student. I made frequent visits to their various offices, to persuade them to beg their counterparts at other schools for tickets to let the band in free, and to see what I could do to help promote sports on campus.

They were all friendly and supportive but it always seemed that Bob was the one who really appreciated whatever it was the band was trying to do. The national hockey championship that he won was before my time, but I know the band would make a huge supportive racket at their games at the old Waterloo Arena.

Bob got what we were doing.

I wish he’d had more success on the football field, but it just wasn’t clicking.

bob’s final day as coach

The band loved Bob.

We knew he was probably on the way out as football coach after yet another 0-7 season, and if I remember right, the band made the trek down to Windsor for what was probably Bob’s last game as coach.

We wanted to thank him somehow for all his support. We had bought a beer stein and had it engraved “Thanks, Coach, from your friends, the Warriors Band” and presented it to him after that final game in Windsor.

The team had lost, and everybody was kind of grumpy, but Bob sent me a kind note a week later, apologizing for not saying something at the time but thanking the band for all its support. That meant a lot to me too.

last time I saw Bob

UW Athletics had a sixty-year celebration in 2017 and they invited members of the Hall of Fame to return to Waterloo for a gala dinner. It was fun seeing everybody but I made a point of going over to Bob - who was carousing loudly with football alumni about the good times they’d some how had in spite of their record - and let him know how much his friendship meant to me.

There’s Bob at the left end of the front row, and me in the back, wondering what the heck I’m doing here. But I wondered that too when I first wondered in to Bob’s coaching office in 1978. He made me feel welcome.

I hope UW honours him somehow.

I hope Bob was pleased that not only did a few of his football players make it to the CFL, his bandleader did too.

ps

I had no idea what the Athletic Department rated as the #10 all time Warrior achievement until I started looking for info about Bob and hockey. A pleasant surprise.