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“I was delighted,” Bronfman said about the honour. “Any time that you’re recognized for things that you never thought you’d be recognized for it’s a pleasure.”

As a young man in his 20s, Bronfman’s mother, Saidye, wanted him to get involved in supporting Montreal’s symphony orchestra and museums, but as he told Jonah Keri in his excellent book Up, Up, & Away, “I didn’t like symphony orchestras too well at that time.”

Bronfman also didn’t like museums, but he did have a love affair with baseball that started with the old Montreal Royals during the 1940s.

“I remember my brother and I would sit at the lunch table at home on a Sunday and one of us would ask our mother if we could leave the table and go to the ball game. And if she said no, we would ask our dad,” Bronfman recalled with a laugh. “If she said yes, we wouldn’t ask anybody (else). And we’d take the No. 17 streetcar down to beautiful Delorimier Downs and we would see both ends of a doubleheader … we were ball fans.”

In 1969, at age 38, Bronfman became a baseball owner — even though he had never actually played a baseball game in his life — bringing Canada its first major-league team, with a price tag of $10 million. He told Keri it was a chance for him to do something for “his city and province and country.”

However, Bronfman’s decision didn’t necessarily go over well with his parents at the time. But he said if they were still alive today they both would be very proud to see him enter the Montreal Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.