Timber!: The Story of the Lumberjack World Championships

A Festival of Sawdust

For a guy with sawdust in his blood and showing his years through the white in his hair and beard, Rick Halvorson was feeling pretty good. His muscles weren’t quite as hardened as they once were, but his competitive attitude was just as fierce. So when Halvorson teamed up with Alastair Taylor in a masters event in 2009 he was happy they placed well as he was closing in on the opportunity to qualify for Medicare. Not bad for a guy with two heart surgeries on his résumé. “I feel young,” Halvorson said. “I met a lot of my friends.” Halvorson was no longer considered a prime contender in the open sawing events, but when you pass sixty and you have undergone more delicate slicing by a surgeon than you ever performed with a hot saw, your attitude changes. Halvorson looked comfortable sitting in a lightweight chair under an awning as action paused at the Lumberjack World Championships’ fiftieth-anniversary gathering in 2009. Halvorson had every right to feel proud following the two-man masters competition with Taylor. “We hadn’t sawed together,” he said. “To win the master’s category, boy, any time you can win anything here it’s pretty tough.” Halvorson and Taylor completed sawing the discs off their logs in 7.84 seconds. Pretty good for old guys. In comparison, the team of Dave Jewett and J. P. Mercier won the open class in 5.54 seconds, three-tenths of a second ahead of the duo of Jason Wynyard and Mike Slingerland. 129 A Festival of Sawdust A Festival of Sawdust Mostly, the masters competition was a Hayward blast from the past with such names as Napoleon Mercier, Arden Cogar Sr., and Laurence O’Toole Sr. sprinkled among the entrants. “I haven’t been here in twenty-three years,” said O’Toole, of Australia, who did indeed win the standing block chop in 1987. Laurence O’Toole Jr. joined him in the 2009 competition. Besides being a world championship, the Hayward competition is in some ways a three-ring circus. Over the years organizers have fine-tuned the schedule to eradicate lulls for spectators. Yes, they want the visitors to eat cotton candy and hot dogs and drink the local beer, but they don’t want to bore them. The competition is tightly packaged now, with finals following semifinals in quick order and the preliminaries taking place in daytime sessions. For three days solid, the activity hardly ever ceases, and subplots play out at times when fans are not even in the house. The athletes doomed to finish back in the pack might not perform in front of the biggest crowds. The prime-time athletes get the prime-time audience. Old-timers who starred in the Lumberjack World Championships in the 1960s have stayed with the sport, even into their seventies in the case of Dave Geer, if only to enter masters events for the fun of it. They are not in awe of the younger generations that have followed them, but they are pretty impressed with the advancements made in technology. “Power saws get better and better,” Geer said of the incredible power harnessed in the new handheld saws, which cut wood like a hot knife cuts butter. But that doesn’t mean he and others from the start-up days believe all current athletes are better than they were. “I’ve done some winning,” he said. Napoleon Mercier, one of three generations of Merciers competing, said it’s natural for equipment to evolve. After all, he is from a family that tries to build a better mousetrap, or chainsaw, for a living. Testing it in highlevel competition is one way to learn how good a new piece of equipment is. “The tools improve,” he said. The tools that slice and dice logs are sharp edged and require caution when carrying them about. Just as a baseball player does not want an interloper handling his favorite glove and bat, a sawyer doesn’t want anyone messing with his saw and an axman doesn’t want anyone touching his cutting tool. Lack of care around the implements of wood destruction can result in loss of blood. 130 A Festival of Sawdust Yet the lumberjack championships are a family-friendly event. The snack booths smack of a county fair. There are some sponsor booths promoting Stihl products, but kids can also pose...