Karn Dhillon started the cancer fundraiser after his sister, nephew and friend were diagnosed, but the B.C. basketball embraced and amplified it, turning it into an annual money-raising dynamo
Karn Dhillon was beat. Dog-tired. It had been a long week, full of long hours, as he and the other referees officiated the dozens of games being played during the provincial championships at the Langley Events Centre.
But when he got a text during the junior boys’ gold-medal game, asking him to stop by the season-ending banquet for the Riverside Rapids to pick up a donation, he dutifully picked up his money bucket for his Pink Whistle ‘Call A Foul On Cancer’ campaign and trudged over to see longtime Rapids coach Paul Langford and his team.
“When I get there ... they've actually dressed up as referees. They've got black and white striped shirts they're wearing at the dinner table. And I have a big smile on my face and go ‘Oh my god, this is too funny,’” the longtime basketball referee and current supervisor said. "It was just a great gesture by a bunch of kids who understand why all the referees are doing this."
They posed for a picture, dropping money in his donation bucket ... then stood for another one — with the girls giving Dhillon pretend technical fouls.
“Great photo,” he said, chuckling. “That's the whole spirit of what sport is supposed to be. Let's have some fun."
“Yep, that was just for fun,” Langford added. “The girls always like to have a theme. Last year they went Hawaiian. And this year ... a lot of them ref after school, and they just wanted something that would sort of unite them all.
“When they talked about it, they said you can't mock reffing, you've got to celebrate it. You've got to come out in a positive way. And one of the positive things that's going on is the Pink Whistle campaign.”
The campaign to raise awareness and money for research is now in its 15th year, an initiative that's become a powerful symbol of hope and empathy but was born out of tragedy. After Dhillon’s sister Amanjit Payer was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, the hits faster than a Floyd Mayweather combination.
"We had never had cancer in our family, and then literally two or three weeks (after Amanjit's diagnosis), we found out that my nephew, who was 34 years old in Toronto, had brain cancer. And then literally another two weeks later, one of my fellow referees in Richmond, he had brain cancer," Dhillon recalled. "And when you get when you get a left hook, you get a body blow and you get an uppercut thrown at you in rapid succession, you get winded. I was wallowing. I've used that term a lot to kind of describe what I was feeling. And at some point I decided we have to do something. And I've also come around to saying you just can't do nothing."
At the halftime of the recent girls 4A championship game, Dhillon and his fellow referees handed over a giant check for $48,000 to the B.C. Cancer Foundation. It pushed their 15-year total to more than $260,000.
The campaign's official annual run is the first three weeks of February, but you can donate continue year-round. By the time the senior boys' provincials wrap up at the Langley Events Centre, Dhillon fully expects to have cracked the $60,000 mark for the year.
The past four years have seen the campaign exceed the previous year's totals, and this one looks to be no different. The $51,000 total from 2023 has been matched already, even before the final week of insanity at the LEC.
It's a huge leap from the first year, when they raised $2,000 — and that was a resounding success. It continued to grow in fits and starts, but has become a fundraising monster in recent years.
"This started out as a basketball referees' initiative. And what it's turned into is the entire basketball community following it," said Dhillon. "Overall, I cannot say enough about the group of people that we refer to — I don't know who came up with the term — 'Karny's Army.' The army is so vast because of includes over 600 referees in B.C., who are carrying this torch.
"I can't say enough about the way all the referees in B.C. have had latched on to this. But the other part of it is the new recruits in the last four years. All of the coaches. All of the players and fans who get it. This is not about just the refs doing this. They all feel a part of this. And that's what's grown this thing. Not one person."
In 2009, Dhillon asked his supervisors for permission to use pink whistles, and they green-lit his purchase of a 100 from Hamilton-based Fox 40 — "the best whistles in the world," he asserted. The next year it was 200, then 400. Now, it's 800, and provincewide, from Keremeous to Courtney, from Prince George to schools on King George in Surrey.
The pink lanyards soon followed the whistles. But after about six years, it started to "fizzle." The responsibility and workload was too much for a single person — it's now an organizing committee of 12 (Alex Ngai, Lee Brien, Gino Bondi, Brent Sutter, Sean March, Mike Porteous, Todd Prodanuk, Fred Gunn, Jason Cook, Mike Craig, Eric Kuntz) — and Dhillon stepped away. There were some lean years, including a zero-donation one.
But then came COVID, which shut down sports in the entire province, but it gave them a chance to regroup, reorganize, and rededicate. With gyms shuttered, the refs went digital, blasting out emails, and produced their best year in history, raising just shy of $30,000 ($29,700).
At a socially distant meeting around beers the next year, he and fellow official Fred Gunn made a request of Dolphin Classic founder Taj Johal (T.J.). He'd supplied referees with special shirts every year — from neon green, bright organize, to fluorescent orange, but they had something else in mind.
"Do you think there's a possibility that you can actually make pink and black striped shirts for us? I got into the second sentence of that request and he put his hand up and he goes, 'Say no more. I got this. I know exactly where you're going with this,'" said Dhillon. "That year, we had every referee at Dolphin Park wearing pink and black stripes outdoors. And everybody comes up to us ... going 'Wow, you guys look great!' The next season was coming up, and I pre-ordered 200 of them ... and it's become our absolute signature."
Johal's reaction is near universal in the basketball community. Everyone wants to help or donate.
Dhillon's elementary school teacher donated $62, an understandably specific number: $2 for every year she's been cancer-free.
Four Winds Brewing jumped on board along with Parkside Brewery to produce a Pink Whistle beer — a pale ale steeped with rose petals, camomile, and hibiscus — and donated proceeds from it to the campaign. It sold out in cans quickly, and kegs were running short as well, in places like Courtside Bar in Mount Pleasant, The Magnet Bar, and Bells and Whistles (on Fraser).
The campaign's growth has caught the eyes of other officials, too.
"And now other sporting areas, like soccer and volleyball refs, have sent in some requests to me to say, 'Hey, how do we start this on our own?" Said Dhillon. "We're not selfish. If that's what your overall goal is ... Let's go!
"When I started the campaign, I had no vision that we would be raising more than a quarter of a million dollars. Now, they see you walking the hallways, they know who you are, if you've got a pink bucket and or you're wearing your pink lanyard in the hallway or something. People know what you're doing. You don't you don't need to canvass, you don't need to say 'hey, do you want to make a donation?'
"I like the word exponential rather than 'it's on steroids,'" Dhillon said of the campaign's rapid recent growth. "It's grown on the 'give a damn' from the people that get it."
You can donate to the Pink Whistle campaign through donation buckets at games, e-transfers (pinkwhistlelegacyfund@gmail.com) or through the BC Cancer Foundation's donation site (https://tinyurl.com/2z53kwpt).
Comments