The toughest landscapes sometimes make for captivating postcards.
Wayne Sponagle looks and sounds like his profession. For half a century, he has trained boxers in his no-nonsense gym in no-nonsense towns. He started in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia and since 1978 he has been in Prince George, B.C. where he has turned scores of local youngsters into Spruce Capital Warriors.
One of those warriors was Isaiah Berra. Berra was an elite youth hockey player like his brothers before him. His father runs the PGSS hockey program and has been linked to many of the medals won by the minor hockey rep Cougars teams. The slap of stick against puck and crunch of blade cutting ice are as innate to Berra as the sound of a fiddle in the MacIsaac household in Cape Breton or the smell of grapes in the Gehringer household in the Okanagan.
Why, then, did Berra spend three years with his cameras and microphones trained on the flinty complexion and gravelly voice of a B.C. boxing figure?
"My friends were training with Wayne when I was in Grade 11. They told me about this underground boxing gym. I was just too curious. I had to see it for myself," said Berra, now a film student at Capilano University. "What I saw in Wayne was a coach. The coach. Everything a coach is supposed to be. He was there for the athletes. He was there for the kids. Everything he did was to give them more and make them better and build them up, no matter what it meant for him. I started training with him, just to be around the place, and as we started talking, this amazing life story started to tumble out - all those champions he coached, all those accomplished people who crossed his path, and his own professional career. One fight. But what a fight. He never went pro himself until he was 51 years old, and he was up against a 26-year-old."
Berra had about 10 minutes to work with in his short-film format. That's not much time to tell the story of a fascinating life like Sponagle's. It helped the young director that there was some PGTV footage of that one definitive bout, there were other visual aids like posters and the gym setting itself, and there was Frank Caffrey, an accomplished community actor in Prince George.
"You rely so much, in documentary filmmaking, on old family photos and documents and home movies, but as you discover in the film, Wayne's toughest fight was his childhood. And he had very little of that," said Berra. "Only two posters from his professional fight survived, and there was only one video of the fight, and it was found in a box on VHS. I had to take it to Vancouver to get it converted to digital, and I was petrified the whole time it would get lost or damaged or burst into flames. But it worked out."
What does that have to do with Caffrey? Everything. In order to tell the story of Sponagle's youth, Berra had little other choice but to use the technique of dramatic recreation. They had to have someone portray Sponagle as a younger man.
"I went to a play, God Of Carnage directed by Peter Maides, and one of the actors was this guy who was really, really good and also I couldn't shake the impression of how much he resembled a young Wayne," Berra said.
He tracked Caffrey down after the play and proposed the idea. Caffrey agreed and took on the scenes depicting Sponagle in his younger days, all wordless, relying solely on physical acting.
Berra also had a similar sonic epiphany when he was listing to Prince George's community radio station CFIS and heard a song that just struck him with parallels to his film project. He knew it was perfect for his purposes so he phoned the station to get the name of the musicians. It was The Cottonweeds, the duo of Jeremy Stewart and Raghu Lokanathan. Those two local music luminaries offered their support to the film endeavour by licensing their music to Berra free of charge.
"PGTV let us use their footage of that one pro fight, and The Citizen was also instrumental in my research because Wayne's life was mapped out in news articles and (Citizen sports reporter) Ted Clarke wrote 95 per cent of the stuff about him," Berra said. "It really is a made-in-P.G. film just like Wayne had a made-in-P.G. life. I was just so honoured that Wayne allowed me to take on this huge responsibility. Doing a documentary about a living person is such a huge responsibility. You have to be so true and accurate to the subject."
The film was a project for his Capilano University education program, and he was thrilled at the support he received from his fellow students, many of whom helped out in various technical ways. It is as much their accomplishment as his own direction, he said.
His primary hands-on help came from Ginny McKeown, and Erik and Jack Morin on the production side, and Prince George story consultant Mike Carson, "who showed me that Wayne's story was not about the fight inside the ring but the one taking place outside of it."
Berra credited David Brisbin, an instructor at Capilano's School of Motion Picture Arts, as the overarching hand of guidance on the project.
The title of the film is The Contender and the best verification of all, for Berra, was when Sponagle watched the documentary and appreciated it.
Now it is getting audience appreciation as well. It was selected from among hundreds of applications to be one of only 17 movies admitted to the Vancouver Island Short-Film Festival. There are no sub-categories for documentary or student criteria, it got in based on its individual merits, as compared to short-films of all kinds from all over the world. The festival runs Feb. 2-3 in Nanaimo.
Berra is working on a Prince George showing of The Contender which would ideally include a panel discussion with some of the people involved in the making of the film.
