Guntis “Gunner” Obrascovs
Healer. Optimist. Husband. Father.
Born Nov. 27, 1953, in Toronto; died Jan. 18, 2025, in Guelph, Ont., from complications of Type 1 diabetes; aged 71.
Unless he was trotting onto a playing field to help an athlete, Gunner seemed content to remain behind the scenes. He worked as an outstanding athletic therapist for nearly five decades, but was humble and unassuming. Gunner stood in the back corner of many photos, often partially obscured. With at least one notable exception.
“Cutest. Baby. Ever,” he’d say about a black-and-white portrait of him at a year old, perched on a photographer’s pony, showing a sweet smile.
Guntis (“a common Latvian name,” his mother said) never took for granted how his parents, Velta and Leonids, fled the Russians in postwar Latvia and lived in displaced persons camps before arriving in Canada to provide him and his younger sister, Dace, a stable home.
He grew up in Toronto and “Oboe” Obrascovs loved playing in the band at Bloor Collegiate, except when it made him late for football practice. Though not a natural athlete, he played on and managed teams – sometimes at the same time – and gained a new, sportier nickname “Gunner.”
While studying at the University of Toronto, he worked as a student trainer with the Varsity Blues football team. He was known for keeping a positive mental attitude in the training room.
He needed that and then some when he fell ill in his first year and dropped out of school, eventually diagnosed with Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. He continued to work at U of T while studying athletic therapy at Sheridan College, becoming a certified athletic therapist.
He had a weakness for junk food and could be lax about monitoring his blood sugar levels. He often shared with hungry athletes the Oreos and jellybeans he stashed away for sugar lows.
In 1979 he became head athletic therapist at the University of Ottawa, picked up French and worked summers with national teams.
He counted as a highlight serving the late Jack Donohue’s basketball team at the World Student Games in Edmonton in 1983 when they upset Charles Barkley and company and went on to win gold. Gunner followed Donohue to Olympic Games in Los Angeles and Seoul and to daily Catholic mass all over the world, inspiring Gunner to convert before he got married.
Gunner met Greta DeLonghi in Ottawa in 1979. He taped her ankle when she was a rookie guard on the visiting Toronto Blues team. A patient man, he asked her out four years later.
The couple married in Toronto in 1985 and moved in 1989 so Gunner could work at the University of Guelph and be closer to his parents.
They had two sons, Leon and Felix. He worked heavy hours during the academic year, but shifted his hours when needed and gave up most of his international travel to help coach Felix’s baseball teams.
A laid-back dad, he tussled with his sons in the wrestling gym or asked them to walk a football player’s bulldog puppy during practices. He managed to show gentle forbearance when the boys turned on a hot tub and flooded the training room floor. Gunner also made sure they watched his favourite comedies, films by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, so much so the young boys could act out scenes.
Over his career, he treated thousands of student-athletes and calmed many a coach with his wise counsel – usually proffered with a well-positioned thumb pressing a tight muscle.
Mentored well himself, Gunner nurtured generations of student trainers, who recalled his challenging “Socratic” questioning. He proudly attended some of their weddings and was honoured when the University of Guelph student trainer of the year award was renamed in his honour.
Gunner retired, reluctantly, in 2019, after more illness. He rarely complained, even when he needed peritoneal dialysis at home, and still cooked dinner for Greta when she came home from work, including the evening before he died.
Gunner filled journals for years with notes and inspirational quotations. Ever positive, in his last entry: “When it rains, look for rainbows.”
Greta DeLonghi is Guntis Obrascovs’s wife.
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