Hamilton’s First Family of sports — Canada discovers what this city has known for decades

The genes, obviously, tell a large part of the story. But DNA alone can’t account for it all.

This narrative of success is interwoven with a number of other strong threads. Among them: solid and kind role models within the extended family; a spoken and active love; a palpable sense of encouragement, expectation and accountability; communication and honesty; a focus on character and the responsibilities of talent; a willing embrace of repetitive hard work; robust, but supportive, family competition; an extra layer of toughness and determination from experiencing various forms of discrimination.

Over the last couple of years — and particularly through the past nine months — Canadians and a significant part of the international sports world have discovered what we’ve known in Hamilton for the better part of a half-century.

The close-knit Nurse family overflows with elite athletes.

Consider, for instance, just these six first cousins.

The eldest, Tamika Nurse, the daughter of Richard and Cathy Nurse, was a basketball trailblazer, leading St. Thomas More and Transway to provincial titles, playing on Canadian national teams, and starring at two Division 1 U.S. colleges when that kind of high-echelon recruiting was still relatively rare in this area.

The youngest, Isaac Nurse, the son of Roger and Michelle Nurse, was the energy source of the 2018 OHL champion Hamilton Bulldogs, was team captain in 2019-20, and this season helped his University of New Brunswick to a long stretch as the nation’s top-ranked men’s hockey team.

Tamika’s younger brother is Darnell Nurse of the Edmonton Oilers, one of the best defencemen in pro hockey, a world junior champion and a lock to play for Team Canada had the NHL not pulled out of February’s Winter Olympics. Their sister, Kia, is 12 months Darnell’s junior.

Kia Nurse is the most recognizable female basketball player in this country, has been prominent in the last two summer Olympics, and was the linchpin of Canada’s 2015 Pan-Am Games gold medal win over the heavily-favoured U.S. She’s a WNBA all-star, was MVP of the Australian pro league and is an entertaining and incisive commentator on TSN’s basketball telecasts.

Isaac’s older brother, Elijah, better known as E.J., was an inspirational hard-skating force in local Jr. C hockey until he recently hung up the competitive blades, and his sister is Sarah Nurse, who burst into global prominence during February’s Beijing Games, setting a record for most points in a single Olympics as Team Canada won the gold medal and was widely anointed as the best women’s team ever. Sarah is also a high-profile member of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association striving to establish a sustainable women’s pro league and, like the rest of the Nurses, is a tireless champion of causes around inclusion and accessibility.

“When I was growing up my parents did everything possible, they took multiple jobs, so that my brothers and I could eat well and play hockey and really participate in whatever sports we wanted at whatever level we wanted,” Sarah says. “We saw what they did and I know it’s not only myself that got me to where I am, it’s my support system, my family. Which I’m so grateful for.”

When those cousins get together, even a parent admits to a sense of wonder.

“Absolutely,” Richard Nurse told The Spectator, “You look at them: Olympian, Olympian, national champion, national teams, first round NHL draft, junior hockey stars. And you’re amazed.”

The sports dynasty didn’t start, and likely won’t stop, with these two sets of cousins.

Cathy Doucette Nurse, Tamika’s, Darnell’s and Kia’s mother, was a talented and forceful star basketball player at McMaster and Richard spent six seasons as a wide receiver for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. His brother, Roger, was a great lacrosse player, is still one of the game’s best-known referees and is a Bulldogs’ broadcast commentator. Their younger sister Raquel, nicknamed Roxie, was Syracuse University’s athlete of the year in 1997 and was twice MVP of the basketball team. She’s married to Donovan McNabb, who played in the NFL for 13 years and quarterbacked the Philadelphia Eagles into the 2005 Super Bowl. Their daughter, Lexi, who grew up in Arizona, will play basketball at her parents’ alma mater Syracuse next fall and is just finishing her high school career at Hamilton’s Lincoln Prep, run by Richard and Cathy.

And Tamika and Darnell are now parents, so a third generation is on its way.

“There’s a pretty extensive history of sports and I think it all stems from our parents and grandparents,” Isaac Nurse says. “When my dad and his siblings came from Trinidad, their parents wanted them to get adjusted to Canada and meet people. Be Canadians. And putting them in sports was an opportunity to do that. And whatever we needed to do that, they worked hard to provide. ”

Arlie and Marjorie Nurse immigrated to Hamilton in 1970 with their eight children, four boys and four girls. Richard and Roger, then four and two years old, are the fourth and fifth children, Roxie the youngest. Richard laughs that the mere size of the family meant there was always competition, “for food, for bikes,” and that “Roger and I grew up with no excuses. So, we’re big on accountability.”

Roger Nurse chuckles that he and his brother are “more competitive than the kids are. Donovan (McNabb) is always laughing: ‘You and Rich have that sibling rivalry. You’re a year-and-a-half apart and you just can’t get over it. You guys compete even in how you eat!’”

Roger says that his three kids are also always competing — in a friendly and supportive manner — and his daughter agrees.

“In whatever we did there was always that competitive nature, and I think it just pushed us to be better,” Sarah Nurse recalls. “When somebody came to the dinner table and said they got a first-place ribbon, you wanted to come to the table with a first-place ribbon, too. It’s pretty easy to support the ones you love. It was a fun atmosphere growing up. Healthy competition.”

In last year’s compelling TSN documentary called “Family First,” viewers got an intimate look at Richard and Cathy and their three children around the family dinner table. It was full of humour, mutual admiration and frank talk: venturing at times into the subtle and overt racism they’d all encountered. And all five made it clear that Richard and Cathy were always determined to provide a variety of life and sports experiences but also demanded that the kids train hard and deliver their best efforts in those experiences, or they were going to hear about it. Plainly.

“Their honesty taught us resilience and helped us develop thick skin,” Kia says at one point, and Darnell adds that “a part of every athlete who performs at a high level, is that they’re tough and they’re resilient … or you’re going to break.”

Tamika smiled recalling that “everything was a competition, it didn’t matter what it was. Getting the front seat of the car was a competition.”

Mary DePaoli, who was honoured along with Sarah Nurse by women-in-sport advocate group WISE on Wednesday night, is an RBC executive, and one of the most powerful people in Canadian sport. She was on the St. Thomas More track and field team with Richard, Roger and Raquel Nurse and says, “35 years later I’m still left with the memory of two things: their incredible athletic abilities and how the family is so kind and wonderfully respectful. And now we get the next generation of children, nieces and nephews. You can tell there is a philosophy of performance excellence, hard work, deep community commitment and treating people well. It’s consistent in that family, through and through.”

Being encouraged on hard work, physical toughness and treating everyone with respect makes the Nurses more reliable teammates Isaac says. And you also could argue it makes them captain or assistant-captain material.

“We’re leaders, not followers, leading by example,” Richard nods.

Double-generation elite athletic families are not uncommon, especially in baseball and hockey, but they’re usually confined to the same sport. The Nurses all played several different sports very well — Sarah, one of the world’s best hockey players, was also in soccer until she was 18 — and while Richard made his athletic name primarily in football, Roger in lacrosse, Raquel in basketball and their sisters were in soccer and track and field, their kids are hockey and basketball stars.

But, the basic theory is the same: second-generation athletes inhale inside knowledge and can develop an almost psychic feel for the demands of sport at the highest level during the daily tutorials that are a natural part of the family life they have always known. They watch, listen and learn, and extraordinary accomplishment can be normalized for them. They “get it.” When Kia was four, she jumped for a ball during a game and called a timeout in mid air before coming down out of bounds, a strategic understanding years beyond her actual age.

Richard recalls Kia intently studying Tamika, who is seven years older, at the gym. EJ and Isaac, three and four years younger than Sarah, watched her and emulated her hard training. They are all old enough to know what their Uncle Donovan had to do to survive 13 years in the NFL and the brutal, legendary cruelty of Philadelphia fans.

Constant exposure to two generations of those close to you having success makes it seem reasonable that you could do the same. And being mentored and encouraged in all the components of that — the commitment, toughness, physical strength, nutrition and mental discipline required — helps bolster the self-confidence so essential to high-level sport. Kia knew in high school she’d attend the best women’s basketball school on the continent, Darnell said he can remember walking outside the portables at St. Vincent de Paul School in Grade 6, and already knowing he’d make the NHL.

“And when she was little, Sarah made a gold medal out of paper and ribbon in my grandparents’ basement and said she was going to win it one day,” Isaac recalls. “To finally see her accomplish that dream was incredible. No one in the family will ever forget it.”

And the second generation says they won’t forget their parents sacrificing to enable them to play and excel at sports, working extra jobs, paying for registrations in instalments, driving thousands of miles to fields, arenas and gyms, and imparting the lessons of life every day.

Richard and Roger Nurse both told The Spectator they’re proud of their children’s athletic accomplishments, but are far prouder of who they’ve become as caring people.

Darnell addressed that during the TSN documentary, when he said he’s still proud when his parents come to his games.

“You get to see what all the hard work you put in amounts to hockey-wise. And I hope that as a person I can continue to make you guys happy.”

His cousin Isaac says, “Our parents did everything so we would all have a chance to live a dream, which is to play sports as long as we could. There are just not enough words to describe that.”

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