Diller was the heart and soul of Peterborough sports
Longtime CHEX-TV sports director kept the Peterborough sports community connected
It’s heartwarming to read all of the tributes pouring in upon the news of former CHEX-TV sports director Gary Dalliday’s passing on Friday.
And it’s a good reminder that there’s no bigger contribution one can make during your time on this planet than to give back to your local community and make it better than you found it.
In addition to being a husband, father, grandfather, brother and son, Gary was an athlete, a broadcaster, a journalist. But more than anything I think he was simply an incredible Volunteer with a capital V. Someone who’s calling ended up being so much more than a job.
No one goes into small town media for the money or fame. What he did in terms of keeping the Peterborough sports community connected, informed, confident, proud and passionate over a timespan measured in decades, is a legacy that I hope he understood while he was with us. If not I’m sure he will now as he looks down on us and hears how his beloved community shares their own Diller tales with each other.
I described his life’s work with the word “volunteer” to put emphasis on the role he played that really never stopped. And that was driven as much by his love for community sports as it was for anything. The sheer number of hours you must put in to do the job he did would have been mindboggling. There was nothing nine-to-five about Gary.
The successes a community has in sport are not just about the talent of its people. Rather, the secret sauce is how people who are good, who have promise, can rise up and gain confidence and take their achievements to a new level.
And it happens not just on the field or the pitch or the course, it happens in how we handle the in-between time. How we talk about our accomplishments. What makes it to the TV, the radio, the newspaper and to your phone. How we get the word out about who’s on fire and who you must see. Gary was an important piece to that puzzle for more than 40 years.
My good friend Steve, who played at Kawartha, and I teamed up to win a provincial bestball championship when we were 16 or 17. On the CHEX-TV sports broadcast that night Gary was nearing the end of his show and he says something like this, and it was repeated on the radio in the same way for the next 24 hours, “Cross-town rivals Steve Stanlick and Paul Hickey teamed up to win the Ontario Junior Bestball title….”
I still remember being not only proud to have done this with my “rival,” but surprised that Gary found out, as neither us or are
parents were the types to share such news. And the headline was perfect.
Although we lived around the corner from each other, we were competitive with each other, and Gary knew that. And he knew that our home clubs were rivals too; it was just such a clever, colourful way into a sports score that otherwise would have been boring. That was Diller.
He was a longtime member of PGCC, so he had his finger on the pulse of golf. His kids were very active in minor hockey and lacrosse, so he knew the scene. He not only reported on the Petes, he was at every game home and
away. Calling the game for radio listeners, not just watching.
We have Gary to thank for the way our two big amateur golf invitationals not only grew but blossomed. His early years covering the Peterborough Invitational and the Molson’s Kawartha Invitational ensured that those two tournaments and the competitors who duked it out year after year, were familiar names and faces to the local golfing community.
Younger generations feel that we haven’t given anything up as the media landscape has changed and we all get our sports news on our phones. But we truly have
lost a lot.
Sure you can watch Tiger Woods contend in a major on your TSN app on your iPhone, but locally we miss the days when a single personality, be it a news anchor or a sports director like Gary, could be THE personality that shared it all. Interviewing a champion or reporting in from in front of the scoreboard.
Diller helped fuel the fire that burns inside the entire sports community here. He will be missed.