Two Choices

A voice at a ball field forces a decision twenty years in the making

IT WAS A LONE VOICE. He heard it before he saw the face. It boomed from outside the fence, past the autograph line, on a soft Victoria, B.C. evening after one of those first softball tournaments. “Hey, Dave. Hey, Dave,” the voice invited.

Grammy-winning music producer David Foster looked up into a face he had spent twenty years trying not to think about — and thought about every day anyway. The man outside the gate, yelling? He had bullied David in Grade 8 gym class. Every class. Until David invented reasons not to go.

“He probably had no idea that he did that to me,” David says. Now that same man was calling his name like an old friend, and David, thinking fast, had half a second to decide who he was going to be.

“I could, like, retaliate — or make his day,” David says.

So he made his day. The fellow, it turned out, was homeless and living in his car. David had him brought through the gate, invited him to the event that night, and when the man said he had no clothes to wear, told him: “Well, let’s get you some clothes.” He came. He sat beside David all evening. And not one person in that room knew they were watching a reunion — with the happiest of endings.

“It was a great teaching moment for me,” David says, “because I had thought about him for 20 years. And then I realized that he had had a tough life.” Raised by his grandparents, carrying his own private wreckage, one row over in the same classroom. Then David tells you where the story came to rest, exactly where it should have: “And that actually was a happy memory.”

Born With It

So where does something like that come from? David is honest enough to say he does not entirely know. “Well, grace and generosity might very well be something you’re born with. I don’t know, but I probably think I learned it from my family at a very early age. Most people would agree that giving is better than getting.”

Whatever it is, it has become an extraordinary amount of practical good. The David Foster Foundation turns 40 this year — four decades on from the first pitch of the first softball tournament in 1986. It helps Canadian families whose children need organ transplants by paying the bills nobody thinks about. Not the medicine. The mortgage. The flights. The hotels. The rental cars and rental houses.

Ask David what the foundation does, and he does not reach for a mission statement, because mission statements are furniture. He reaches instead for a family story. “I like to say that our foundation is the only bright spot in a parent’s worst day.” Forty years on, that line has not worn smooth, the way river stones do.

Tears Are Not Enough

To understand why, go back to the headwaters: a small house in Victoria with nine people breathing inside it. Six sisters. Two parents. One boy. And a budget you could fold into a coat pocket. “I think at the height of my father’s career, he was making $90 every two weeks,” David says. “And we just did it.”

What that house lacked in money, it made up for in traffic and noise. “There were always people over. We were like the neighbourhood hang, because my parents were great hosts.” No money — and yet: “Somehow they always managed to put sandwiches out.”

Asked for one word for each parent, he did not have to hunt. His father: steadfast. His mother: hard-working. Two words that explain the boy who became the busiest man in a business overrun with busy men.

He calls his childhood perfect, then allows that his six sisters “might argue about our childhood a little,” and offers one memory at his own expense: toast for the girls, while their mother woke her only son gently with a plate of bacon and eggs. Every morning. “So I was treated like a king. But my sisters never minded.”

There was a stubbornness in him too — a refusal to become the cautionary tale the music business collects like souvenirs. “I honestly never wanted to disappoint my parents, so I just stayed away from the drinking and the drugs.” One confession, comically small: “Sadly, I smoked for a few years, but I quit when I was 30.” Hold that detail lightly. It comes back.

You’re the Inspiration

Before the giving, though, an honest admission: he wasn’t always a generous man. Before any of it — before the tens of millions raised — he was a working man, and the work was the whole horizon. “I was so busy working up into my mid-30s that I really didn’t pay attention to the things I should have,” he says. “I wasn’t a generous person. I wasn’t giving to charity.” A rare thing to say at 76, with your own name on the letterhead of a national foundation.

That changed with a simple ring of David’s telephone. It was his mother in Victoria, asking a favour for somebody else’s child. A girl in a Los Angeles hospital needed a new liver. Would he go and sit with her for a while? “And I did,” David says. “And it just changed instantly.”

The whole architecture of a man’s life, rearranged in an afternoon, by a woman who had spent thirty years teaching him how. He asked the girl if there was anything he could do for her. She did not say a miracle. She said her sister, back in Victoria, whom the family could not afford to fly down to southern California. So David bought the ticket. The two children met in that room, the world tilted an inch, and it has never tilted back. “The light bulb went off, and that’s how the foundation was started.”

One plane ticket. A small event in 1985, the first softball tournament in 1986, and then everything else. The ordinariness is the whole sermon — nobody cured anything that day; somebody noticed the one thing a family could not do for itself, and went and did it. That is still the business model. When a child needs a transplant, the medicine is covered — everything else is not. “When a family gets clobbered with this, one of the parents has to move to a hospital far, far away,” David says. “There’s the mortgage. There’s the car payment. There’s the kids back home. There’s the job.”

Then he lands the plane: “I think we give people a comfort zone so that they can do what they’re supposed to do, which is take care of the sick child.” Take one stone off the pile so a mother has the strength to carry the one that matters.

Winter Games

Forty celebrities, a small hometown, and a man with no idea what he’d agreed to

If the phone call was the spark, the summer of 1986 was the fire — and it was, of all improbable things, softball. Three tournaments. Forty celebrities. One small hometown, Victoria. And a man in his mid-thirties with no idea what he had agreed to carry.

“I probably was just ignorant — I didn’t know how hard it was,” David laughs. “It just felt like the right thing to do to invite 40 celebrities to your hometown. I mean, good lord.” He had spent fifteen years inside recording studios by then, so he called his friends, and his friends got on airplanes.

Read this list slowly, because it has no business belonging to a ball diamond on Vancouver Island: Celine Dion. Olivia Newton-John. John Travolta. Michael J. Fox. Gene Hackman. Sam Kinison. And Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. “It was a great, glorious weekend.” Why did that work then and not now? “Everybody was younger back then. Now when you ask somebody to do a three-day weekend, it’s tough, because that’s three days of your life.”

He also had a blueprint, and a Canadian sports legend deserves his flowers. David had gone east to a celebrity event Wayne Gretzky ran in his Ontario hometown; he arrived as a guest and went home as a student. One of Gretzky’s people, Brian Cooper, became the foundation’s first chairman. And David admits a second, truer reason he kept saying yes to benefits: “I honed my skills as a live performer, so I’m indebted to all those benefits.”

After the Love Has Gone

But every story with forty years in it has a movement in a minor key, and this is his. There was a stretch — fifteen or twenty years ago, he figures — when he took his eye clean off the ball. “I just sort of lapsed and went back into my regular life,” he says. “And we got down to $49,000 in the bank.”

Forty-nine thousand dollars. For a national foundation with a superstar’s name on the door and hundreds of Canadian families leaning against it.

“That was a big wake-up moment for me. We have a responsibility to these families. How could I let that happen? And I got on the stick after that, and never looked back.”

Stop the music for a moment, and speak to every volunteer board member at a kitchen table. The most valuable thing in this interview is not the guest list. It is a beloved man admitting his own charity nearly ran onto the rocks the moment he stopped watching the water. Attention is the donation nobody gets thanked for.

The rebuild had a name: Mike Ravenhill, hired as CEO, whose leadership “propelled us into, like, the big time.” At a board meeting out west, with the account all but empty, member Jeffrey Latimer — manager of The Tenors — said something ridiculous out loud. “He said, let’s do 30 by 30.” Thirty million dollars in thirty years, proposed by a man staring at a rounding error. “And I just scoffed at it. I was like, ‘That’s impossible, Jeffrey.'”

But a seed does not care whether you laughed at it. “We took it, we ran with it. And of course, we’ve far exceeded that now.” His verdict on forty years is not a victory lap; it is a warning label. “You have to work really hard if you really want a solid foundation. Somebody has to work hard.”

The Prayer

Given all that hard work, it is fitting that David’s catalogue soundtracked half the weddings and most of the slow dances in the Western world. Ask which of his songs describes his charitable work, and he does not need a moment. It is “The Prayer,” written with Carole Bayer Sager for Andrea Bocelli and Celine Dion.

“I’ve had so many people tell me that they played it at their wedding, that they played it at their funeral, that they played it at the bedside of somebody who was dying,” he says, “and that they’ve played it when somebody was getting better.” That is a complete map of a human life, and one melody has been walking every road on it.

“‘The Prayer’ is maybe where I would feel that I have a spiritual part to my life,” he adds. “Lately we’ve been going to church. Of course I believe. I believe in the universe, and a spiritual life past that.” A man who has spent forty years in hospital corridors at three in the morning has earned the right to be careful with the big words.

His working theory of music is simple: “Music heals people. Everybody has songs that they can relate to.” Everybody, that is, except the man who handed the world several hundred of them. “I don’t really have that, because I was always making music.” He was in the room where the thing was built, hearing the scaffolding instead of the cathedral. That was the trade, and it means we hold those memories on his behalf.

Love Lights the World

Not every act of grace makes it into a gala program, and a second small story runs in the same key as the man at the fence. A fellow named Norm Jackson wanted to quit smoking. David had quit at thirty — you were holding on to that — and figured that qualified him for something useful. “There’s no harm in just putting in a phone call every week,” he says. “And I did.”

Every week. A telephone call. No cameras, no cheque, no gala. Learning mid-conversation that Norm never lit another one, he sounds like a man who has won an award he actually wanted: “You tell me you still quit? That’s great news. Cheers.”

Four decades of black-tie galas and eight-figure totals — and this is the story he tells first. The big rooms get the headlines. The small rooms get the man.

Because You Loved Me

Now 76, and father to a five-and-a-half-year-old son named Rennie and grown daughters besides, David has run this foundation for the entire lifetime of every child he has. “I’ve seen so much tragedy in our foundation,” he says. Then comes the turn, because with David there is always a turn. “But on the flip side, I’ve seen so much goodness. And just — people are incredibly resilient.”

Still, he refuses to be romantic about what these families endure. “What these families have to go through, it’s no joke. It’s as serious as it can be.” What it leaves behind is a permanent, low-burning gratitude: “I’m constantly reminded that when you have healthy children, it’s really a blessing.” If your kids are healthy tonight, that sentence is the entire reason this piece exists.

Has chairing the foundation made him a better man? He answers by describing proximity rather than virtue. “When you rub up that close to sadness and uncertainty and sometimes tragedy, and then sometimes huge victories, I think it has to make you a better person. I think you’d be a robot if you weren’t.”

Which brings it back to where it started: a kid from a crowded house in Victoria, where the sandwiches somehow always appeared.

The Power of the Dream

For all he has built, though, if David has one piece of unfinished business, it is not a figure on a balance sheet. It is an effortless tickbox to become an organ donor. “I would love an opt-out program. You’re an automatic organ donor when you get your driver’s licence, unless you want to opt out. And I think most people would not opt out.”

He puts registration near thirty per cent of the population, and the arithmetic keeps him up. “Right now, there’s 4,000 people in Canada waiting for an organ transplant,” he says. Then the line you cannot un-hear: “That number could be zero if 100 per cent of the people were organ donors.”

Zero. He also wants a myth buried — that paramedics who find a donor card will not fight quite so hard for you. “No — that paramedic’s job is to save every single person’s life, every single time. So that’s a fallacy.”

Forty years in, and he is still counting what remains rather than admiring what is done. Presumed consent does not ask any of us to be a hero — only that we stop letting our best intentions die quietly in a glovebox, a few blocks from a hospital where somebody is waiting.

The Best of Me

One more moment, my favourite, because it is a songwriter editing his own life with the tape still rolling. Asked which song describes his work, he began to answer — hope, he said, “The Prayer” gives people hope. Then he stopped himself dead. “Well, that — let me. No, sorry. Scratch that.” He reached past the beautiful word for a smaller, sturdier, truer one. Not hope. A comfort zone. Room enough for a parent to go on being a parent.

Hope is what you print on a poster. A comfort zone is a cheque that covers a mortgage while a mother sleeps upright in a vinyl chair, in a city she had never visited until three weeks ago.

At the end, David noticed I’d missed a question, and asked it himself — a very David Foster thing to do. Why do you love being Canadian? He laughed. “I just know I love being Canadian. I am a proud, proud Canadian flag waver. I always have been. I always will be.” Then he signed off like a man walking out of a studio at two in the morning: “And that’s the end of my story for now, buddy.”

So let us take him at his word, for now. Forty years ago, a mother telephoned her son and asked him to sit with a sick little girl. He said yes, then asked the child what she needed, and then — this is the part everybody forgets — he went and got it. Notice. Ask. Do.

There will be speeches this year, and there ought to be. But the truest measure is in a hospital parkade tonight, where a father sits in a cold car not worrying about the mortgage, because a stranger he will never meet took care of it.

A man in borrowed clothes once sat beside the boy who’d bruised him, never knowing he’d already been forgiven. That’s what forty years can do. It turns old hurts into old friends, quietly, without asking permission. Somewhere tonight, a young family is being told their child needs a transplant. They don’t know it yet. But somebody already made their day a little easier — years ago, on a ball field.

That’s forty years, folks. David Foster is still making somebody’s day.