Peter Young

Football (soccer) is my first sport since I was born in England and lived there until almost age 10, but I quickly acquired a love of ice hockey on immigrating to Canada in May, 1953, just in time to see the Canadiens' first dynasty team in action. Despite my love for football, I have never loved a team in any sport as much as the Montreal Canadiens or an athlete in any sport as much as Maurice Richard. More than anything I want England to win the World Cup again, but just behind that I want the Canadiens to win the Stanley Cup again. While I recognize neither is likely in the near future, I cheer on my teams nonetheless. At least my hometown football club, Manchester United, has had some recent successes. Most of my family's four years and three months in Canada was spent in a small cottage with a pump in the front yard for water and an outhouse in the back yard (no indoor plumbing) near Keswick, Ontario by Lake Simcoe, about 50 miles north of Toronto. Our one modern convenience was electricity. We had a 50-foot television antenna, which brought in Hockey Night in Canada, in its infant years, just fine. I also got to see the Canadiens play live at Maple Leaf Gardens. We left Lake Simcoe in September, 1957 and spent about a year living in Toronto. The only redeeming quality of my time in that city is that I was able to get to Maple Leaf Gardens more readily and, now age 13, by myself. I saw the Canadiens play and also went to a lot of junior OHA games and Montreal Junior Canadiens games, which featured many future NHL players. Then came the dark years. My family emigrated from Canada to the USA in 1957, when I had just turned 14, over my vociferous objection because it ended my hockey-playing days and took me far away from my Canadiens, and, stuck in NHL-barren California, I had to follow the Canadiens from a distance, via the Hockey News and occasional telecasts, until 1965. That year, having gained my BA degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I was editor of the student newspaper and played on the varsity football (soccer) team, and forsaking my budding career as a newspaper journalist, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard Law School, just in time to see the Canadiens' second dynasty team play seven times a season at the old Boston Garden. I hated law school, but I loved hockey at the Boston Garden, and I got three seasons of it. I even went to see the New York Rangers play the Bruins a few times because they had Bernie Geoffrion on the roster. On finishing law school in 1968, I returned to California, settling in Los Angeles, just after that city gained an NHL franchise. Fortunately, the Los Angeles Kings were in the same division as the Canadiens for most of the 1970s, and I was able to see my team play live quite a bit during their third dynasty years and through the 1980s. Fortunately, I got a computer and access to the Internet earlier than most folks, in 1994, and the Internet and satellite television have enabled me to follow all my teams from a distance more closely than I ever would have thought possible in my lifetime. And so, after years of grasping for news of my teams from afar, the past 15 or so years have been a time of bliss for me. I get to watch every game played by my three teams--the England national football team, Manchester United and the Montreal Canadiens--and I am in instant touch with the latest team developments. It's a miracle I can still hardly believe, and I am full of gratitude for it every single day. As for my life outside sport, I was admitted to the bar in California in January, 1969, I began my career as a poverty lawyer in Watta and then by the ocean in Venice, and, afer three years of that, I took on a series of huge political trials and appeals during the 1970s, including the celebrated Pentagon Papers trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Tony Russo, in which I was junior counsel for Russo. My political views are quite far to the left--I considered myself a radical in the 1960s and 1970s--and they remain intact, having survived the horror years of the Reagan and Bushes presidencies. I strongly supported the candidacy of Barack Obama from its beginning. For 40 years I practiced primarily criminal, constitutional and civil rights law although I often ventured outside those areas to take on a wide variety of cases. I am recently retired at age 66 and spend quite a bit of time following my teams in hockey and football. I also like athletics, or track and field as it is called here. My living partner of 20 years, Priscilla, who has brought deomestic stability to my life and given it considerable light, is most understanding about my sporting obsessions. I would love her dearly anyway, but I love her all the more for that. I still keep up on my areas of interest in the law, and may return to practice on a part-time basis if the right kind of case comes my way and if my health permits. I hope to write a book about the legal struggles of the 1960s and 1970s in which I was involved. I have very little in the way of material possessions--I never tried to make money and didn't--but I am content, a good place to be.