Greg Adams was coming in from a road trip when he heard it — someone doing a sound check in the Hartford Civic Center at eleven in the morning. He wandered out and stood there watching a single musician move from guitar to piano to drums to bass to a fifth or sixth instrument he couldn’t quite remember. It was mesmerizing. He finally asked a security guard who the guy was. “Some guy called Prince,” came the reply. “But boy is he ever good.”
Greg laughed telling the story, and I laughed hearing it. He played ten seasons in the NHL — 545 games, undrafted, which he’ll tell you is virtually unheard of today — and somewhere along the way, between the road trips and the rink time and the locker rooms full of future Hall of Famers, something was quietly taking root. Not a plan exactly. More like a growing sense of how things work, and a question that was slowly taking shape.
The question fully formed a few years after he retired, on a blanket in a Tampa park. He and his wife Judy had taken their three boys to Disney World and swung through a one-day festival — wine and ribs, Three Dog Night, a field of people just happy to be there. He looked at Judy and said: why don’t we have this at home?
A phone call to Brian Burke turned into a connection to Bruce Allen, which turned into a name at the Feldman Group, which turned into a show at Providence Farm in Duncan — about 950 people watching 54•40 in a field. That was the first Sun Fest. Years later, the festival has hosted Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, Gwen Stefani, and Nickelback. Home is now a 16,000-seat amphitheatre on 265 acres in the Cowichan Valley that Greg built himself, because he kept outgrowing every other venue.
I admired how he talks about all of it. No bravado. He saw something in Tampa and came home and tried to build it, and it got bigger, and he kept going. “I’ve always been driven to what’s next,” he said. “How can I make something better? That’s just the way I’m wired.”
He’s equally matter-of-fact about the Lake Town Benevolent Society, which has now donated over a million dollars to community causes in the Cowichan Valley. 50/50 draws, bottle drives, ticket donations — forty or fifty thousand dollars a year from each stream, quietly adding up. “I’ve been in this community since 1965,” he said. “Giving back is just bred into us.”
The full conversation — hockey, festivals, the Crofton mill closure, and what Greg would say to the undrafted kid from Crofton if he could, can be found on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP29PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/