When Darrel Mack passed away, he was Canada’s number one boxer in at least three weight divisions.
Granted, those divisions were in the video game Fight Night Champion. To Darrel’s friends and his son, that’s a minor detail.
“That’s such a poetic way to go for him,” said his son, Brandon.
Darrel was a fighter. People fight cancer all the time – it’s the default way to describe the process of trying to survive something terrible – but Darrel really fought his, because that was the language he understood.
As a child, he stood up for others. He met the future love of his life in taekwondo class at high school. He spent weekend after weekend watching boxing and UFC with his son. The Fight Night Champion community will never see another like him.
“He approached cancer like a fight, how you would a boxing match, and he took it one step at a time. He just kept battling it for as long as he could,” said Nathan McPherson, a cousin who considered Darrel more of an older brother.
Darrel, a member of the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation, was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer in early 2021. His partner, Leela Gilday, remembers him being told he had about a two-percent chance of living for another two years.
He passed away on March 30 this year, more than four years after that diagnosis.
A celebration of Darrel’s life will take place at the Yellowknife Multiplex’s DND gym from 11am on Saturday, June 21. All are welcome.
“He loved National Indigenous Peoples Day and the Solstice,” said Leela. “Often, Father’s Day would fall on that day, so it was one of his most special days.”
A separate “feed the people” barbecue takes place in front of the city’s post office at lunchtime on Friday in his honour.
Leela watched Darrel coach the younger kids in taekwondo and, even then, noticed what she called his “fighting spirit.”
They had each been born in Yellowknife – Darrel on November 26, 1970. Darrel, though, had moved to Nanaimo aged four and spent most of his early years there before returning to Yellowknife as a teenager.
“He was sent to Akaitcho Hall to go to Sir John Franklin,” said Leela, referring to a residential dormitory for a Yellowknife high school, “kind-of to get away from some of the bad influences that were arising in his life down in Nanaimo.”
Yet the two did not become an item until more than a decade after high school. Having gone their separate ways, they reconnected when Leela, one of the NWT’s best-known musicians, was in the process of winning a Juno award for her second album, Sedzé.
She received a Facebook message from Darrel, at that point a long-lost contact. “I’m just so proud of you for following your dreams. I’ll be at your concert when you release your next record,” she remembers him writing.
Sure enough, he was there at her next Yellowknife show.
“He came up to me afterwards and he was so darned handsome,” she said. “He had movie star looks. He was handsome in high school but, overnight to me, turned into this incredibly attractive man who was so taken by my music.
“I just saw this incredible single dad who had really followed this path of integrity. He was a captivating storyteller. He was very funny. I was so blown away by what he had overcome in his life.”
Darrel had experienced plenty of racism in Nanaimo, Leela said. As the only Indigenous child at many of the schools he attended, he endured bullying – and sometimes intervened when he saw it happening to others. He told stories of getting into his first fight at the age of five because an older kid was picking on somebody his age.
But when his son, Brandon, was born through another relationship in 1998, and he subsequently met Leela, the pillars of Darrel’s life began to come together: his family and his calling as a corrections officer.
Darrel landed a role in corrections from a pool of dozens of applicants. He went on to spend 24 years in the job.
“He was always drawn to de-escalation and mediation. He was just a very calm person, you wanted him in your corner in a crisis,” said Leela.
“It was a point of pride for him to have gotten this competitive job and then maintained it and built a life for his family.”
To Brandon, he was the coolest dad.
“He was definitely more than just my dad. He truly was my best friend in so many different ways. He really did give me the life he never had growing up, and I think about that every day,” Brandon said.
“The aura he had walking into a room? You knew he was a cool guy. Growing up, I was amazed how magnetic he was. Everywhere we went, he always had a friend. He was just friends with everyone.”
Together, father and son bonded over boxing, superheroes, action movies and Darrel’s wide-ranging music taste. From the days of sporting mullets at Akaitcho Hall, he had nurtured a love of music that stretched from Jimi Hendrix and Guns N’ Roses to Mötley Crüe and Metallica.
Brandon’s first concert, a Metallica show in Edmonton when he was 13, was an unforgettable moment shared with his dad.
“Imagine growing up in Yellowknife – NACC, Folk on the Rocks, any live music is good, right? But you go down to Edmonton, you go to a Metallica concert at 13, and it just blows your mind,” he said.
“When I think of him, I think of him outside somewhere, sitting on a dock or a deck or on a beach in the sunshine. He’s got his cowboy hat on, got his aviators on, and got a Corona in his hand, listening to Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin.”
Nathan, Darrel’s cousin, watched in awe as Darrel changed from being “a rowdy kind of person” as a younger man to someone who was “able to balance being a great dad and a great friend” with Brandon.
“I really don’t think he would have made it as long as he did had he not had something to fight for, which was his family,” said Brandon.
“He was such a family man. Finally having Leela and me, having stuff to be proud of, it really gave him something to fight for.”
In a way, Darrel was lucky to be around even to receive the diagnosis.
Leela can reel off a list of other incidents that might have taken Darrel first. The time he nearly fell out of an apartment building only to be grabbed by his ankles. The time a serial killer nearly got him. The day he almost drowned. The car accidents.
“It was no wonder to me when we got the diagnosis that after the first day of shock, his first inclination was to fight, because being alive was so precious to him,” she recalled.
Darrel treated every day after that diagnosis like a fight.
“He used that terminology with everything that we did, because he was a boxer and a huge boxing fan. For him, it made sense,” said Leela.
“That vernacular was something he really related to. All his favourite fighters came from nothing and overcame odds to triumph and so to him, in his mind, this is the fight of his life. And it lasted four years.”
Speaking with Cabin Radio in 2021, Darrel called his diagnosis “the hardest thing we’ve ever heard.” But in the same breath, even though the doctors had begun outlining palliative care, he declared: “I’m not taking it like that.”
“The last six months of his life, he was experiencing terrible pain. He was in so much pain that he broke four ribs at the end of January and didn’t notice, and it was only three weeks later that they caught it on a scan,” said Leela.
“He never spoke a word in anger because of his pain. Of course, he was angry that it’s not fair when somebody receives this type of diagnosis. It’s never fair that your life is cut short. He was angry about that but he never, ever directed a word of anger towards me or Brandon or the rest of our family.”
“Even in the last hours of his life,” said Brandon, “he was able to tell us how much he loved us. I’ve never seen anyone so strong in my entire life.”
Not only that, he was still somehow sufficiently good at Fight Night Champion – in the closing stages of a four-year cancer battle – that despite the game having thousands of active players in Canada, Darrel remained a cut above until the last.
“After he passed away, I went and stayed with Leela and I signed on and checked it out – and he was still number one in a couple of the weight classes,” said Nathan.
Not that Darrel could fool anyone into thinking he was a cold-blooded, detached fighter. He lived a life of love and humour.
“He wanted to start a YouTube series called Dadvice from Daddy Mack. We actually shot the first episode,” Leela recalled.
“He came up with a tagline for his series. It was: ‘Nothing but love.’ That’s how he wanted to sign off every episode.
“To hear this guy facing the fight of his life share that kind of spirit and generosity… he’s changed my life completely.”
He and Leela co-wrote one of her most popular songs, North Star Calling, released in 2019.
“Even though he wasn’t a musician, he was a lover of music and he loved my music, and so I always talked to him about all of my business decisions, even though he had no experience in the music world except for what he witnessed with me,” said Leela.
He contributed lyrics to North Star Calling, which Leela said captured his spirit as a human being. Those lyrics read in part:
We were born broken, though borne of love
Bearing the scars of a war we don’t speak of
Fighting our way from cradle to grave
Searching for light through darkest days
You are not alone
Solid ground below
Earth revolving
North star calls
Together we’re strong
Together we’re one
We belong
“Searching for light through darkest days,” Leela repeated.
“To me, that’s the whole message of the song and what he always did with his life.”
