n today's climate of highly-paid, specialized professional sports, we don't hear much about "all-around" athletes. Deion Sanders might play football and baseball, but who could imagine one person excelling at football, hockey, baseball, lacrosse, boxing, and wrestling? Lionel Conacher (1900-1954) was an all-star in each of these activities, an ironman of organized sport.

One of ten children of a Toronto teamster, Lionel quit school after Grade 8 to help support his family. He soon realized that sports offered a way - maybe the only way - out of poverty. With characteristic drive, he pursued athletic success. At sixteen he was the Ontario wrestling champion in the 125-pound (57 kg) class. At twenty, he was the Canadian light heavyweight boxing champion. He played baseball for the Toronto Maple Leafs, winning the Triple A championship in 1926. He played lacrosse for the Toronto Maitlands, winners of the Ontario Amateur Lacrosse championship in 1922. For eleven years he was an outstanding defenceman in the National Hockey League with the Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Americans, Montréal Maroons, and Chicago Black Hawks. He was a league All-Star and his teams won the Stanley Cup twice, yet hockey was Big Train's weakest sport. He didn't even strap on skates until he was 16 years old, and had to develop cunning defensive strategies to overcome his limited skating abilities.

But hockey was one sport that paid well. His real love, football, did not. One of the most famous football coaches of the era, Carl Snavely of Cornell University said Conacher "was probably he greatest athlete that I have ever coached in football or in any other form of athletics…. I don't believe I ever had a fullback who was a better runner in an open field, or was a better punter, or who so fully possessed all of the qualities of speed, skill, dexterity, aggressiveness and self-control…"

When Conacher starred with the Toronto Argonauts, football was really rugby. His record was legendary. In a game in 1922, he gained 120 yards in three downs. In one game against Montréal he ran for 227 yards. He scored fifteen points in the Argonaut's 23-0 Grey Cup victory over the Edmonton Eskimos in 1921.

He had to have endurance, too. One day in 1922, he hit a triple in the final inning to give his Toronto Hillcrest baseball team the Ontario baseball championship, then jumped into a waiting car and crossed the city to join his Maitland lacrosse team in their championship game against Brampton. Maitland was trailing 3-0 when Conacher arrived, but he scored four goals and assisted on another to lift his team to a 5-3 victory.

He retired from professional sports in 1937. He was a battered veteran with 600 stitches - 150 on his face alone. His nose had been broken 8 times. But he didn't rest. He became the provincial MPP and, later, federal MP for the Toronto neighbourhood in which he was born, representing the interests of his poor constituents.

In 1954, Lionel Conacher went to Ottawa to play in the annual softball game between MPs and members of the parliamentary press gallery. In the sixth inning, he hit a long fly ball into left field and sprinted to third base. Then Conacher collapsed with a heart attack. Within twenty minutes, the greatest all-around athlete that Canada has ever produced was dead.

In 1950, sportswriters selected Lional Conacher as Canada's male athlete of the half-century. Will anyone challenge his right to be male athlete of the whole century?