Matthew Aubie has graphic designs on ‘glitz and grit’ of being a Champion for Charity.
By Jeff Hicks
WATERLOO —
Yonge Street was thick with impatient cars and impenetrable fog.
A yellow billboard glow cut through the coming night. Toronto traffic was relentless, as always.
For new parents Matthew Aubie and his wife Julie, the view from the tall towers of St. Michael’s Hospital was worrisome as they watched over their newborn Dash.
It seemed like this Christmas 2020 ordeal would never end.
Dash, bathed in blue light, was being treated for jaundice. A minor and common affliction, to be sure. But new parents in this sketchy, Covid-distorted reality didn’t know that. They wanted the world to stop for their tiny son. It wouldn’t. They felt suddenly vulnerable.
In perspective, it was nothing. At the time, it was everything.
“I would look out the window and Toronto was just happening,” Aubie recalled as he prepared to blast off some push-ups with now three-year-old Dash riding on his back.
“The world was just continuing to go on as we were in this little hospital room, watching this baby under a blue light.”
So Aubie, who owns a Toronto design studio Aubs & Mugg with Julie, is one of Mandy Bujold’s 20 Champions for Charity now.
The former basketball captain at St. Mary’s High School in Kitchener will slam-dunk his first real-life boxing match in The Brawl at Tapestry Hall in Cambridge on April 12th.
McMaster Children’s Hospital Foundation will benefit from the more than $216,000 raised so far. The $250,000 goals is within reach.
The parents of kids who need the hospital’s care will feel a little less precarious. Maybe, just a little, an empathetic world will slow down for them.
“There are really scary things happening to those families but the world is just going about itself, outside that hospital room,” Aubie said. “Now, there’s something happening outside the hospital room that’s contributing to it being a better experience. It’s a comforting thought.”
A cause worth fighting for? Aubie, with with a rosy-cheeked Dash making every push-up harder in oversized boxing headgear, knows it is.
“Just that single experience,” said Aubie, thinking of Dash’s yellow-tinged bout with jaundice.
“I’m more than willing and happy to get punched in the face a couple of times to make that a little more bearable for some parents.”
Aubie is drawing up his boxing game-plan now.
Just like the silly, surreal cartoons he drew as a kid. Big noses. Big eyes. Big artistic dreams. That’s why he jettisoned sports and high school hoops in Grade 12. The Artstore staffer needed his pen-and-pencil portfolio to wow Conestoga College graphic design scouts.
His paint-brush prowess impressed.
“When I went to college, we were one of the last graduating classes at Conestoga who didn’t use computers for graphic design in the first year,” Aubie said.
“It was all drawing. Letters, we drew. Designs, we drew. Layouts, we drew.”
Now, the date of the fight draws nearer as Aubie and company design a special poster for The Brawl at Tapestry Hall — taking inspiration from the original Foreman-Ali Rumble in the Jungle art. Six months ago, he showed up at SydFit Health Centre to get in shape. The first three letters in fatherhood were proving uncomfortably fitting. His trainer suggested he become a Champion for Charity. So Aubie shrugged and signed up for this split personality event, as he calls it.
A spectacle that promises split lips and split decisions.
Vegas-style glitz and glam with fine food and fine clothes.
“And a little punch of grit,” Aubie said.
To Support Matthew and make a donation to McMaster Children’s Hospital Foundation – Click HERE
