Rudi Payer

Rudi Payer has influenced soccer immensely in the 30 years that he has lived in South Glengarry. The 63-year-old Williamstown native has been involved in the sport his entire life.

Payer was born in Vienna, Austria in 1936. In 1958, Payer was selected to the provincial under-23 handball team for Styria, Austria. A year later, Payer emigrated to Australia where he lived for 10 years. Payer married Suzanne Austin of Brisbane, Australia in 1962 and celebrated the birth of his first of four daughters, Susi, the next year.

That same year, Payer co-founded the Goulbourn Inter-United Soccer Club. In 1965, the Payers welcomed their second daughter, Ingrid, into the world. Payer played for Cooma United in the Australia Capital Territory Semi-Pro League and continued to for the next two years.

The next move for the Payer family was across the Pacific Ocean and North America to Montreal. There, Payer played semi-pro soccer with the Montreal Hakoah in the Quebec Ligue Majeure. The family hit the road once again a year later. This time they would land in a small town located in South Glengarry called Williamstown.

A year later his arrival, he co-founded the Char-Lan United Soccer Club with the help of Robbie MacLachlan. Payer also co-founded the Char-Lan District Minor Soccer Association with MacLachlan and Howie Lauber.

Payer played forward for the Char-Lan United team in the Glengarry Soccer League Senior B Division. The Payer family had a third daughter join their family that year. Maria was born in Alexandria.

Char-Lan United was promoted to the Senior Men’s Division of the GSL the next season. Payer won the best forward award.

Starting in 1973 Payer and the rest of his Char-Lan United squad would play in the Ottawa District Soccer League. When the four-year term in the Ottawa league ended, the team joined the newly-formed Cornwall District Soccer League.

Payer was the founding vice-president of the league. In 1979, Char-Lan United won their first of many CDSL championships. In March of 1981, Payer organized spring training and exhibition games for two Char-Lan United men’s teams in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Payer’s last year on Char-Lan United’s first division team came in 1983. Payer was 47. The next year he established Rudi Payer Sports, a soccer pro shop in Williamstown. The youngest of their four daughters, Katrina, was born that year in Cornwall. Payer founded the Char-Lan Indoor Soccer League in 1987. The league was the first of its kind in SDG.

Payer now coaches the Char-Lan Magic Bantam girls of the GSL and sponsors several teams throughout Glengarry.

We would like to thank The Glengarry News for their permission to reprint the following article by Margaret Caldbick which appeared in the November 9th, 2011 edition. We are grateful for their consideration.

Soccer pioneer Payer passes on at age 75
BY MARGARET CALDBICK, News Staff

A towering figure in the local sports community, soccer legend and Glengarry Sports Hall of Famer Rudi Payer, “the man who brought soccer to South Glengarry,” died on Oct. 30 at Ottawa General Hospital. He was 75.

Rudi Payer was born in Vienna in 1936 and grew up in Fohnsdorf, a municipality in the district of Judenburg in Styria, Austria. He studied liberal arts before enrolling at the Graz College of Technology, graduating in 1955 with a diploma in electrical engineering. An all-round athlete, he excelled at soccer and many other sports during his lifetime, including as a top-tier handball player in Austria, qualifying for the provincial under-23 men’s Styria (Austria) team in 1958. He was a strong alpine and cross-country skier (he enjoyed ski racing on television all his life), and at one time or another played tennis, water polo, golf, and basketball – all with great skill.

In 1959 when he was 23, Mr. Payer moved to Australia where he found work designing switching stations for the State Electricity Commission in Melbourne and Goulburn. In 1960 he met his wife, Suzanne Austin of Brisbane, Australia, who was working as a laboratory chemist at Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, in Melbourne. The couple married in 1962 and a year later celebrated the birth of their first of four daughters, Suzanne (Susi), and in 1965 their second, Ingrid. Both were born in Goulburn. It was at this time that Rudi returned to the game of soccer following a break of several years, playing on a state team in Melbourne, and in Goulburn co-founding the Inter-United Soccer Club. In 1965, the Payers moved to Cooma in Australia’s Southern Alps where Rudi worked for the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority on one of the largest water and hydro-electric engineering projects ever undertaken in the world, the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Living in the headquarters of the huge project was an exciting time for the young family. The project employed more than 100,000 people from more than 30 countries, and Suzanne soon found herself teaching high school mathematics in a makeshift classroom in an army Nissan hut where more than 50 languages were spoken by the student population. During their time in Cooma, Rudi played for three years for Cooma United in the Australian Capital Territories semi-professional league.

Beginning in his teenage years, Rudi, a passionate reader with a wide range of interests from philosophy to the visual arts to architecture, wrote poems, short stories, and articles for different magazines and newspapers in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and Canada. At 18, a poem and feature article he wrote about Fohnsdorf, the coal-mining town where he was born, were published in a major Austrian paper, and the poem was later adapted into a song. Rudi was also a fine photographer, bringing his cameras with him on his explorations and developing his own high-quality black and white prints that he submitted with his magazine stories. When he arrived in Australia at age 22, he began a series of exciting feature articles about Australia’s Gold Coast that were published in Europe and included his photographs. Rudi and Suzanne decided to leave Australia in 1968 and opted for the adventure of a lifetime, travelling as passengers with their two young daughters on a cargo ship from Brisbane, Australia, to Willemstad, Curaçao, in the southern Caribbean. Stopovers included New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, and other remote Pacific islands where Rudi took photos and collected notes for the travel articles he would eventually publish. The family eventually arrived in Montreal where Rudi’s strong writing skills and technical background found him employment as a freelance scientific translator for the Government of Canada, a career he pursued until 1994. In Montreal, Rudi played semipro soccer with Montreal Hakoah in the Quebec Ligue Majeure; he also played with the Pointe Claire Dynamics.

In 1969 the Payer family moved to Williamstown where Suzanne had been offered a position teaching math at Char-Lan District High School where she went on to teach for 30 years. In Glengarry the Payers would add two more daughters to their family: Maria born in 1970 and Katrina born in 1984.

Having noticed the moribund state of soccer in South Glengarry, in the winter of 1969 Rudi met with Robbie Machlan, a history teacher and soccer coach at Char-Lan who had turned down a soccer scholarship as a talented juvenile player in England to study law and later become a teacher. The two decided to found the Char-Lan United Soccer Club in 1970. The year following, with Howie Lauber, they created the Char-Lan District Minor Soccer Association, ensuring that local young players would receive high standards of coaching and competitive

opportunities. Char-Lan United was promoted to the senior men’s division of the Glengarry Soccer League in 1971 with Rudi winning the Best Forward trophy. The team played for four seasons in the GSL and competed in the Ottawa District Soccer League before joining the

Cornwall District Soccer Association in 1977 with Rudi as vice-president. Mr. MacLachlan recalls watching Rudi, a powerhouse with his commanding physical presence on the field, playing against GSL Hearts centre half Donald Ralph MacSweyn of Laggan (the great, big bruising hockey defenceman who played five seasons with the Philadelphia Flyers) in the early Char-Lan United days. “It was quite something; they would clash like two titans hitting one another – just the size of them! It was just so typical of Rudi.”

At Rudi’s visitation in Alexandria last week, Mr. Payer’s friends and former teammates, soccer fans, and the players he coached and mentored over the years gathered to offer their condolences to the family and reminisce. Char-Lan United player Lachlan McDonald, 26, of Williamstown, and his brother and fellow team member Scott, 23, met Rudi when they were, “say, four years of age and at Rudi’s, trying out cleats and equipment on the little soccer field beside his house,” recalled Lachlan. “He was a great, kind, and modest man,” Mr. McDonald noted, adding, “His legacy is that he organized soccer in South Glengarry, and for that matter, North Glengarry and Cornwall too. He brought soccer to SD&G. And he always had a smile and always remembered everybody’s name.”

Rudi’s son-in-law Sean Pemberton, Maria’s husband, also recalled Rudi’s kind heart and gregariousness. “He enjoyed hearing of others’ accomplishments and adventures as much as he relished regaling anyone who dared listen with his own tales of mischief. I am sure you have heard from others how he could remember the names of scores of young people growing up in the community, people he had watched grow over the years, as they came to the shop to get another season’s soccer kit. I would often hear him enquire of visitors and how they, their family, and their friends were doing.”

Vivian Franklin, president of the Glengarry Soccer League, started playing soccer for the Maxville senior women’s team when she was 15, and she remembers Rudi “as the go-to guy for all our equipment. “And the great thing was that you could go to Rudi’s [soccer shop] on a Sunday, and it wasn’t just about buying your cleats – he always had great quality, the best selection, and different styles – but it was also a social event. You went to talk to Rudi too!”

Last week, David Rawnsley, president of the Char-Lan Minor Soccer Association, had this to say of Mr. Payer: “He was Mr. Soccer of the area. For instance, you would never think of starting a women’s soccer team without Rudi being part of it, it was as simple as that.” Laughing, Mr. Rawnsley added, “I mean, it wouldn’t make any kind of sense because when it came to soccer, the first question would have to be, ‘well, what does Rudi think about all this?’” Among the mourners last week was Chris Smith, president of the Cornwall and District Soccer League, who also heads up the Rudi Payer Sport team. He and fellow former Char-Lan United teammate Mark Gareau both described Rudi as their mentor, and more than that, their “second father.”

On Saturday, the Payer family, Suzanne and her daughters Susi, Ingrid, Maria, and Katrina, and their husbands Paul, Malcolm, Sean and Matt, and the grandkids Eric, Alex, Mika, Sophie, Nicholas, and Katie, were gathered at Kangaroo Hill as the Payers call their beautiful hillside home. The grandchildren were running around on the little soccer pitch laughing as they kicked soccer balls into a net. Rudi Payer was buried in the St. Andrew’s United Church Cemetery in Williamstown, overlooking the Char-Lan soccer field. Since she retired several years ago, Suzanne Payer has become increasingly involved with running Rudi Payer Sport, and she plans to keep the business going. As much as anything else, it’s an opportunity for her to stay connected with the community and the many friends and acquaintances who she and Rudi made over the years. A Rudi Payer Memorial Soccer Scholarship is being set up at Char- Lan District High School to assist outstanding young soccer athletes.