Champion for Charity Jim McPherson won’t wilt in his family-tartan kilt on Fight Night
By Jeff Hicks
CAMBRIDGE —
Jim McPherson Jr. fished a warm beer out of his bulging backpack and took a swig.
The 360-degree view from atop Devils Tower refreshed his rock-climbing soul after a gruelling ascent. He and two buddies shared a rope and etched their names in a leather-bound logbook at they gazed at his beige-striped white Winnebago, dubbed Harvey, parked about 800-feet below.
A warm Wyoming wind tussled his hair. If only he’d worn his breeze-friendly kilt.
“There’s no easy way up,” McPerson said of his 2008 gear-assisted clamber to the Tower summit. “It’s like a monolith all the way round.”
Months of training. Hours of climbing those creviced green-grey columns of igneous rock.
A lukewarm lager reward to go along with a newly-forged fear of heights.
He almost froze on a ledge during a close encounter of the practice kind.
Now, here we are 16 years later.
McPherson, 53, is one of Mandy Bujold’s 20 Champions for Charity, only weeks away from climbing into the Tapestry Hall boxing ring on April 12th to raise funds for McMaster Children’s Hospital.
Months of training. Six minutes and three rounds of fighting. A fundraising goal of $250,000 for the hospital — almost achieved — and a cold beverage waiting after a magma-hot bout.
“I don’t think I’ve trained this hard for anything,” said McPherson, president of Hero’s Fountain International commercial landlords and past-president of the Rotary Club of Cambridge, Preston-Hespeler. “I don’t think my cardio will ever be better than it is now.”
So McPherson is planning a November trip to Nepal. A little 12-dray trek to the base camp where climbers start their extreme-altitude ascent of Mount Everest, approaching 18,000 feet above sea level.
“No better time than now to try it out.” he said.
Hard to believe McPherson suffered with childhood asthma until he turned 17. Dreams of base-camp hikes seemed Far East distant in the hospital oxygen tent.
His kids have always been healthy. But he understands the value of McMaster Children’s Hospital. So McPherson is driven to box for its benefit in one of 9 fights in the Brawl at Tapestry Hall.
His 3 grown kids — Jay, Jessica and James III — plan to be there to watch. So will his partner Jocelyn. Together, they have five adult children.
McPherson, who has four sisters, will be there to watch on April 12th, as well as box.
“I’m looking forward to being a spectator too,” said McPherson, who is eager to see the camaraderie and work ethic of his Red Team of boxers in the Fight Night spotlight against the Blue Team.
Maybe McPherson will come out on fight night wearing No. 21 on his back. That’s the jersey number he use to wear in hockey. Why? For a fiery cow that once flung his dad, Jim Sr., over a fence in a fit of rage at the family cattle farm in Milton. Poor dad got a concussion. The cow ended up in the family freezer that winter.
“Guess we got our revenge,” McPherson said.
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