The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 77

ENTERTAIN! vLENT E6 I-DITOR I l'CY HYSI.OP 604-605 2037 FAX 604 605 2521 E-mail Ihyslop The Vancouver Sun JUNE 26, 2002 Eco-Challengl not just for fitness buffs Alex Strachan After a brush with death, Martino finds serenity 1 Get fit, watch TV. Or rather, as in the case of B.C.'s fast-growing expedition- AT THE JAZZ FESTIVAL racing community, get Fit, do an expedition race and possibly see yourself on TV one day. (' Two years ago, Kimberley, B.C. resiJ, dent Adrian Rothwell bore down and l.iJ.1 11 lasted tne course in nor- neo as a memoer oi me vancouver-Dasea Team Advil. Today, Rothwell free of the leeches and intestinal parasites that plagued competitors following the Bor neo race has assembled his own Van1' couver-based racing squad.

Team John' Henry the Bicycle Man is named after the North Shore bike shop that is the team's primary sponsor, and Rothwell is of expedition racing, beginning with next month's Sea2summit Panorama and culminating in the inaugural Eco-Challenge Canadian Championship, Aug. 10-17 in Golden, B.C. The winners and runners-up in Gold1 en automatically qualify for lenge 2002, which will take place in Fiji in October. Eco-Challenge 2002 will be filmed by race founder Mark Burnett the creator and producer of Survivor for USA Networks and CBS in the U.S. "A-.

is- 1 and CTV's Discovery Channel here in Canada. Rothwell's John Henry racing colleagues include Carolyn Daubeny, an elementary school teacher, competitive cross-country skier and course volunteer for the Vancouver Sun Run and Harry Jerome track meet; Dave Howells, competitive mountain-bike racer and a summit patrol director for Grouse Mountain: I L. i nu -cui umaine, a veieran suuasn The guitar great successfully battled his way back after an aneurysm left him with music amnesia By MARKE ANDREWS Every music journalist who interviews Pat Martino eventually gets around to The Subject Martino's near-fatal brain aneurysm and his 14-year recovery, during which he had to learn to play the guitar all over again, the resulting amnesia wiping out his memory, musical or otherwise. Martino has every right to be tired of the subject, to just say: Can we talk about something else? He doesn't, however, and speaks eloquently about a painful period in his life. During the 1960s and 70s, Martino was one of the brilliant young players on the scene.

His playing on records by saxophonist Eric Kloss and organists Don Patterson and Jack McDuff had the jazz world talking. Then, in 1980, Martino suffered a brain aneurysm that almost killed him. Recovering, he realized all memory had been wiped out. Martino, who had been playing professionally since his early teens (at age 15, he travelled from his Philadelphia home to New York to "make it as a jazz not only could not play the instrument, he didn't want to play music. "I had forgotten everything, and I had no desire to play the guitar," says Martino, over the phone from his Philadelphia home.

What got him back on the musical trail was the computer. "It didn't so much get me back to music as it got me closer to wanting to be creative," he says. "The computer was something to take my mind off the depressive states of recovery. It was a form of therapy. Built into that computer, which was one of the original Apples and had 127 no memory at all, it was exactly like me was a little music program.

It was like a toy, and the more I played with that toy, the more it began to reignite subliminal things that moved to the surface again." It wasn't until late 1983 that Martino played in public again, at a small club in New Jersey. He followed that up with an engagement at The Bottom Line in New York. "It wasn't ready yet," says Martino, 57. "There were just so many problems, both physical and psychological. So I went back into silence again for player and competitive mountain-bike i i vt i -l latLi wn au lliv.

1--1 L1I Illt U-tll- iiuiii-aiiy, uiuugu uie d.v. exp cumuli racing fraternity is growing as last as local ratings for past-paced, youth-dri- ven, outdoor-oriented TV fare last fall, GlobaPs Xtreme Sports joined CTV's Outdoor-Life Network as a 1 1 -outdoorsall-the-time programming alternatives most of the sponsorship money and adventure-racing bureaucracy revolves around central Canada, even though many of the best athletes, for obvious reasons, make B.C. their home. "In the East, adventure racing is what a lot of people in Toronto do to get out and enjoy themselves in a quote-unquote extreme environment," Rothwell said. "Whereas out here you've got back-country skiing, climbing, mountain bikingi kayaking you name it.

You have every outdoor sport imaginable, and adventure racing is just another pastime." The only way B.C. expedition racers can get attention, Rothwell says, is to win Pat Martino returned to playing full-time in 1994, 14 years after he suffered a brain aneurysm. seemed to have been. It seemed to have been such a crisis, a negative experience. Over a longer period of time, I began to see it from a distance, and see the necessity of it.

It produced temperance, and it produced other virtues. It produced a need for self-esteem as a force to be able to gain the power to move forward. It produced decisions. "Now whpn I look back at that, I see that everything that took place was a necessity for a greater enjoyment in living. Given the end result, I can't take four years." In 1987, he tried again, recording The Return live at Fat Tuesday's in New York.

But a string of personal problems kept Martino from touring and recording full-time until 1994, 14 years after his illness. Speaking of that experience and his life since, Martino sounds like a Zen master, serene and all-embracing. "I came away from that experience with optimism with regards to seeing beyond the initial appearance of what it anything negative from it." Martino's father played guitar as a hobby, and Martino began playing as a way to emulate his father, who actually discouraged his playing. "He forced me to avoid it, to not touch his guitar. He finally allowed me to get involved when I was 12." His father turned him on to jazz, and took him to meet such icons as John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Johnny Smith and Stan Getz.

See MARTINO THRIVES E8 some of the smaller races that lead up to the main events. This year's inaugural Eco-Challenge Canadian Championship is a huge step in that direction, and the recent success locally of No Boundaries 128,000 viewers in Vancouver and Victoria tuned in to watch the show's May 8 finale provided the outdoor-TV genre a much-needed shot of adrenaline. fco-Chak'nge and No Boundaries scored particularly well among women aged 54, and men and women aged 18-49, kijVj demographic targets tor high-end adver-' Kid McDonald's pet menagerie includes Stitch tisers, including the makers of offroatf vehicles and outdoor-clothing manufai. 1 llll CI b. While Fontaine is not one to stay glued I to the set for daytime talk shows or late-night sitcoms he is not, for example, an avid devotee of The View, and Just Shoot Me is more likely to be something he'll say at the end of a long expedition race TV like No Boundaries and Eco- Challenge is making a difference, and not just with fitness buffs.

In Eco-Challenge, a five-day expedition race that traverses different kinds of terj rain, the difference between winning ana losing often comes down to who can get by on the least amount of sleep. a "I was back in Edmonton this past weekend," Fontaine recalled, "and mf -brother-in-law who's a great guy, kit he's this frumpy, fairly sedentary guy4A said, "Oh, I'd be great at that. I can sttiU" up all night. I don't need sleep. No protij lem.

It's easy, I want to do something like that." So maybe the show throws Out there that anybody can do this if they to a certain physical level. It's a good adventure. It allows people to be able td test their strengths, and not put them- selves in a really dangerous environ-' ment." Howells concurred. A 1 "Everybody that I've talked to, who has i watched Eco-Challenge and No Bound- aries on television and these are not racers, they're not necessarily competi- tors have all loved the shows, found, from another planet. But in typical McDonald fashion, he claims that Stitch reminds him of one of his own animals but not one of the three dogs in the household.

"Clark, my little cross-eyed cat reminds me of Stitch." McDonald lives in Los Angeles with girlfriend Breanne Munro. Clark is part of a household menagerie that consists of three dogs and five cats all of them rescued animals. "We also had two birds, but they passed away recently. They were lovebirds and lovebirds really do love each other, so when one bird died, the other died of loneliness." McDonald and his girlfriend belong to an animal rescue group. "Two of the dogs we found on the street, and we fell in love with them.

Then we found a third dog in a parking lot and we fell in love with him and kept him too." In the case of the cats, four of them were rescued from the apartment of a disturbed woman who had 50 felines on her premises. "We found homes for 46 and kept the other four because they seemed to love us too much to give away." When he's not tending to his menagerie and doing animated voices, McDonald works in live-action features, and helps dream up new Kids In The Hall outings. He hopes the troupe will follow up this year's tour with a TV special, a TV mini-series and a movie. By JAMIE PORTMAN In Disney's new animated hit, Lilo Srirch, Canadian comic Kevin McDonald supplies the voice for a one-eyed, three-legged alien named Pleakley. And he's delighted with the way he looks.

"They really captured my face," rhapsodizes McDonald, screwing up his countenance to show what he means. "They did take one of my eyes away, but they made the other one bigger in order to compensate. They also took away one of my teeth and one of my fingers but basically they captured me honestly." McDonald, perhaps the most hyperkinetic member of Canada's Kids In The Hall troupe, recorded Pteakley's voice in a high-pitched falsetto, which delighted veteran Disney animator Ruben Aquina who in the past created the adult Simba in The Lion King and the villainous Ursula in The Little Mermaid. Aquina says the versatility of McDonald's vocal contribution gave his animation team "lots of great material to work with." McDonald loved his Disney experience, and he also loves the finished movie especially his character and the character of Stitch, a distinctly weird dog who's actually another alien a genetic experiment gone wrong 7 i Lllo Stitch narrowly missed out on the top spot at the box office. See FITNESS FIX E8 i 4.