EACH YEAR DURING his Cordova Cup weekend, John Hogue takes a white plastic chair from the dock and plunks it in the lake. Sitting in the shallows with the water of Cordova Lake swirling around his calves, he takes in one of the in-water volleyball games being played by two of the teams vying for the highly contested championship title. In one hand, he has beer in a red Solo cup, poured from a keg on the dock. In the other, a cigar. From this vantage, off the shore of his family’s cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region, John observes the product of months, indeed years, of planning and tweaking and organizing. For five minutes, maybe 10, he savours it, listening to the good-natured chirping by the other players. He might even join in the razzing. John, after all, is captain of one of the teams competing in the tournament, and he is equally invested in winning.
And then someone asks him a question. Or the game ends. And John’s moment is over, and he resumes his role as the guy everyone relies on to pull off the annual Cordova Cup tournament, which, let’s be clear, is no ordinary cottage weekend.
What is the Cordova Cup? Well, it’s a boys’ weekend and a volleyball tournament organized by John, a 33-year-old combination of Steve Jobs, Marie Kondo, and Scotty Bowman. Planning starts around the first of January. (John disputes this, but enough people agree that we’ll consider it fact.) His oldest friend, Cam Gibson—they met in kindergarten—says it begins even before January. “John gives himself
