One Battle After Another

His head darted quickly to the left. Then, to the right and back again.

“What are you doing?” Claudia, his bewildered girlfriend, said from the passenger seat.

Not thinking about the Kitchener Rangers hockey game they had just witnessed at the Aud.

Not nervous first-day-of-spring twitches working out the winter kinks in his rugby-player neck.

MacDonald was making sure his head was off-line from an opponent’s punch.

“Just thinking about boxing.” he replied.

Becoming one of Mandy Bujold’s 20 Champions for Charity, facing your first boxing bout at a sold-out Tapestry Hall on April 24, has a way of grabbing the wheel for 16 weeks of training.

Boxing becomes all you think about when threatened with being punched in the face in your first sanctioned Boxing Ontario fight on a 10-bout night where community leaders put their glass chins on the line and aim to raise $1-Million for MacKids.

Claudia shook her head at the slipping and parrying insurance broker beside her.

She knows what Champions for Charity is really about. Claudia used to be a respiratory therapist in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at McMaster Children’s Hospital.

Newborns and infants and their families relied on their top-notch care.

MacDonald, who works for Josslin Insurance, heard all the one-battle-after-another stories from Claudia.

“It was always a battle if they had twins or triplets coming in and they all needed some care,” MacDonald, a Waterloo native, said. “How are we going to juggle all the machines and how are we going to juggle all the staff? Somehow, they would always make it work.”

Helping MacKids work better than ever before for local kids and families gives Champions for Charity a fundraising wallop like no other community event.

Last year, $650,536 was raised for MacKids, allowing the children’s hospital to purchase 3 new ventilator machines. They went from 43 to 46 machines as the Champs ran their three-event  fundraising total to over $1-million for MacKids.

Now, this year’s goal alone has risen to $1-Million.

“That’s absolutely incredible.” MacDonald said.

This year, he said the hospital has a plan for the Champions money to help purchase a state-of-the-art CT machine.

“It’s a $3-million piece of equipment that they’ll be the first hospital in Canada to have,” said MacDonald, who recently toured McMaster Children’s Hospital with other Champions for Charity. “It’s so nice to know where that money goes to.”

Until fight night, MacDonald will keep working on his head fakes.

In the office. In the truck. In the stands at the hockey game.

“This is consuming my life,” he laughed.

www.champsforcharity.ca

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