Phyllis Bomberry

Phyllis “Yogi” Bomberry, softball player, artisan (born 1942 or 1943 in Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River, ON; died 3 January 2019). Phyllis Bomberry was a catcher for women’s softball teams in Toronto and on the Six Nations of the Grand River. She helped lead her teams to championships with superb hitting and stellar defence. As an Indigenous athlete, Bomberry was often the target of bigotry and discrimination. Bomberry was the first woman to win the Tom Longboat Award as the top Indigenous athlete in Canada (see also Tom Longboat). She was nicknamed Yogi, likely in reference to the great New York Yankees catcher Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra, as a result of her skills as a catcher and batter.

Early life

Phyllis Bomberry was the second of seven children to survive infancy born to Sadie Martin (née Johnson) and Alfred Bomberry, an employee of a gypsum plant. The couple’s first child, Frederick, died in infancy. Their other children were Martin, Phyllis, Gerald, Amy, Betty, Ivan and Marvin. The Bomberrys belong to the Wolf Clan of the Cayuga Nation, part of the Haudenosaunee.

Bomberry showed athletic prowess at a young age, playing hockey, football, lacrosse, hardball, basketball, badminton and volleyball. She also took part in gymnastics. She went hunting and shooting with her father. She also caught baseballs thrown by her father and a brother. “To be ‘in’ with the kids, you had to play with the guys,” she once told professor and author M. Ann Hall.

Softball career

Phyllis Bomberry began playing organized softball as a girl on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve. She played for a junior team in nearby Caledonia, Ontario, before joining the Ohsweken Mohawks. She was a key player when the Mohawks won provincial intermediate championships in 1960 and 1961.

In 1963, Bomberry moved to Toronto where she worked in a factory assembling radios. She became catcher for the Carpetlands, a team sponsored by a flooring company.

Bomberry was the catcher when Helen Doberstein pitched a two-hitter for a 2–0 victory over the Saskatoon Imperials. This victory won them the 1967 national senior women’s softball championship at Memorial South Park in Vancouver. Doberstein, with a record of 2–0, was named the five-day tournament’s top pitcher. Bomberry was named all-star catcher and top batter with an average of .462. The Toronto team repeated as national champions in 1968 against the Saskatoon Imperials.

The Imperials got their revenge in 1969, twice defeating Bomberry’s Carpetland team to claim the national championship in a tournament at Oakes Park in Fort Erie, Ontario. The Toronto team came to the tournament after winning the gold medal at Canada’s inaugural summer Canada Games in Halifax. In four days of action at the Canada Games, women’s softball attracted 105,000 spectators to the Halifax Common, including many who had to stand in the outfield.

Bomberry continued playing softball until sidelined by a knee injury in 1976. During her career, she was nicknamed Yogi, likely in reference to Lawrence ‘Yogi’ Berra, a popular catcher with the major-league New York Yankees.

Discrimination

As an Indigenous athlete in a sport dominated by white players and spectators, Bomberry was the target of racial barbs and discrimination. As a catcher, she never had a reprieve from verbal assaults, as she both fielded and batted within earshot of hecklers in the grandstand.

“There was little she could do, since she was playing and competing in an environment that implicitly supported racial discrimination by not taking action when it surfaced,” the academic historian M. Ann Hall wrote in The Girl and the Game, a 2002 book about Canadian women in sports. “No one on the team stood up for her when insults occurred, nor did the coaches or umpires deal with these situations in any official way.”

Later life

After retiring from softball, Phyllis Bomberry explored her cultural heritage as an artisan, including leatherwork to make purses, wall hangings and smaller items for tourists. Over the years, her works were displayed in Toronto, an arts festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and an art gallery in Buffalo, New York, among other places.

In 2009, she was among the torch bearers when the Olympic flame passed through Six Nations of the Grand River on its way to Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The relay’s original route was altered to avoid a conflict with protestors. Bomberry said the flame represented unity in athletics. “You play sports and it doesn’t matter if you’re black, orange, white, it doesn’t matter — you’re together,” she told Martha Worboy of Canwest News Service.