Champion for Charity Daniel Heden grateful for McMaster revving up the spirits of son Ben
By Jeff Hicks
OAKVILLE —
Little Ben, a toy chassis between his cherubic fingers, had a third-floor vroom with a view.
Never mind the plastic tubes running down his throat or the Tiger and Monkey medical stickies on his face. This wasn’t about the nasty respiratory infection the two-year-old Oakville boy was battling at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton.
In his tiny hands, Ben gripped a Hot Wheels race car.
Three times over a week-long stay at McMaster, hospital staff brought Ben the pint-sized speedster of his dreams as he endured a toddler’s nightmare.
“He was overjoyed,” recalled his dad Daniel Heden, one of Mandy Bujold’s 18 Champions for Charity who will make their fundraising boxing debut on April 12th to benefit McMaster Children’s Hospital Foundation.
The painful memories of a parent’s helplessness. The terror Daniel, a financial planner for RBC, and wife Kristine, a middle school teacher, felt.
The lasting trauma still haunts them. In an instant, the intense anxiety seems fresh again.
But the sudden joy created a toy race car’s appearance transcends it all.
“I have to spend six minutes in a ring willingly,” Heden said of his grateful participation in The Brawl at Tapestry Hall for the same hospital that treated his son with hot meals and hot wheels.
“I know what it’s like to spend six days in a ring you just want to run from.”
Heden is not a fellow to run from a challenge.
He’s known around the office as the zany, intrepid one.
“I never say no to any adventure.” Heden said.
He and Kristine have skydived over Toronto. He edge-walked the CN Tower top bowl — although Kristine declined. Daniel held a young alligator in his hands. He even air-boated through a gator-infested swamp in the Everglades.
None of that bothered him. Not backpacking through Kenya with Kristine. Not the amorous Alpacas he spied on his way through the Sun Gate of Machu Picchu. Maybe it was just some Peruvian coca leaf hallucination. Just as dream and strange as the Northern Lights he admired once at Frobisher Bay in Nunavut.
But little Ben’s screaming and crying, five years ago, cut him deep, like an exacto knife to his banker’s box soul.
“To see the horror on his face and wish you could just take it yourself,” Heden said.
“It was a low point.”
Five years later, we are at a high point. Heden has raised $7,100 for McMaster. The Champions for Charity event he signed on for, after hearing Bujold’s inspiring talk in London, is closing in on $300,000 as Fight Night approaches.
Ben is seven now. Did we say seven? We meant seven and a half. 
Actually, he’s technically seven and three-quarters. Ben will tell you that.
“I call him The Lawyer,” Heden said of Ben.
“He’s a technical champion who is technically right all the time.”
Oh, the Hedens have been back to McMaster for more minor issues with Ben and sister Hannah, 5. But they can handle it all. Drama seems to follow them.
But that’s OK. The staff at McMaster are always in their corner.
“She’s the most laissez-faire, wonderful little girl in the world,” Heden said of Hannah.
Hannah and Ben are jazzed for his ring debut. Kristine? Not so much.
Her husband bruises too easily. That’s why fellow Blue Team boxer Esther Kong gave him the nickname Peaches. The Red Team’s Nick Benninger aims to leave him black and blue.
Heden is happy to be in the ring for McMaster, even if the conclusion is more contusions.
“This six minutes is a pleasure.”
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