NEWS PHOTO RYAN MCCRACKEN
Larry Fassnidge throws a horseshoe on Friday at the Medicine Hat Horseshoe Club. Fassnidge will represent Medicine Hat as hosts of the Alberta 55-Plus Summer Games next week.
rmccracken@medicinehatnews.com@MHNMcCracken
Larry Fassnidge has horseshoes in his blood.
He may have only started playing the sport in a consistently competitive fashion a few years ago, but the 73-year-old Hatter grew up in the home of a North American champion.
“We had the trophy down in the basement and I can still smell the tarnished metal,” said Fassnidge, whose father Gordon won the North American horseshoe title in the 1940s. “I was born in ’46, so he would have (won) in ’45-’46, in there somewhere … It was just after World War II, and unfortunately there were no records from ’44 to ’48 or ’49 I think.”
Fassnidge will represent his city and the Medicine Hat Horseshoe Club – where he serves as president – when the Alberta 55-plus Summer Games descend on the Gas City next weekend.
“Surprisingly we’ve got a lot of our members to participate,” said Fassnidge. “Hopefully it’s going to stir up some interest.”
Horseshoes at the Summer Games kick off Friday at the local club – located on Stratton Way. Fassnidge will be in action on the first day for a best-of-five against Lethbridge’s Jerry Reimann.
“I’ve played him before. He kicks my butt all the time,” said Fassnidge. “It’s more of a social thing than anything else, but I’m really looking forward to it.”
Operating a facility also runs in Fassnidge’s family, as his father also set up Calgary’s first-ever indoor horseshoe club. While he would occasionally use the facility to pitch on his own, it wasn’t until shortly after Fassnidge moved to Medicine Hat in 2014 that he took on the sport in a larger capacity, and later stepped into a role as president with the local club.
“I’m just the current president, it’s a two-year term that you take and my term is up this year,” he said. “Somebody has to come in and turn the pits and rake the pits and all that, but after October it will be somebody else’s turn.”
Fassnidge added he’s partial to his own pits, which use sand as opposed to clay and cater more to his style of throw.
“I’ve played in Calgary, I’ve played in Lethbridge. I like these pits the best,” he said. “In Calgary they use clay. What that means is there’s no sliders. So if you throw a shoe that slides quite a ways like mine do then you’re at a disadvantage because you have to throw the shoe the whole distance and hit the pin.”
Fassnidge added the club hosts league nights every Tuesday, with membership fees going for $60 for the season. The club also hosts the occasional physical education class from Notre Dame and even opens to the public on Saturdays at 1:30 p.m., and Fassnidge says he’s hoping to see some more traffic at club with the 55-Plus Games around the corner.
“We want more people to understand it isn’t a life commitment to pitch horseshoes,” he said. “It’s the social aspect of it, and it’s not an expensive game, and it’s something that you can use the grey matter and concentrate on being able to do.”
