The
end: Denis
He was an athlete and a
cameraman with a passion for the perfect shot, if only
in his mind's eye
Denis
Pierre Faucon was born in Blind River, Ont., near
Sudbury, on July 24, 1961, to Claire and Raymond Faucon,
a legal secretary and an accountant. Denis was the
eldest child, four years older than his brother, Al, and
five years older than his sister, Nathalie, who was also
born on July 24. From the time they were little, Al
remembers Denis as gregarious and energetic. "His alter
ego was Dennis the Menace," Al says. "He was
mischievous, but he always had a smile to get himself
out of trouble." Denis was also a natural-born athlete.
"He liked to experiment, push the envelope, in every
aspect of his life," Al says. When he played hockey as a
boy, he was a competitive forward. He learned to love
the Ottawa Rough Riders when the family moved briefly to
Ottawa, and took that love back to the Sudbury area to
become a quarterback on the Hanmer High School football
team.
Those years were a popular time for Denis. He was
good-looking, and liked to wear his hair fashionably
long. "He took good care of himself," Al says. "He was
well-dressed, well-groomed, and he tried to have as many
girlfriends as he could." Denis also loved music and
collected about 12 milk cartons full of albums. In Grade
11, he became fascinated with electronics and
audio-visual equipment.
Denis graduated from Grade 12 and went to Canadore
College in North Bay for two years to study radio and
television production. Before he was out of school, he
landed a job as a cameraman at a local TV station. His
energy and his ability to get good action footage took
him to jobs with CTV, Global and CBC, both on staff and
as a freelancer, travelling to the U.S.S.R. in 1987, and
various Pan Am and Olympic games. Rob Faulds, a
Toronto-based Rogers Sportsnet broadcaster, met Denis at
CFCF-TV in Montreal 20 years ago, where he was already
one of the most requested cameramen in a pool of eight
or 10. "He liked sports," Rob says, "and it became
obvious right from the start that he was a very good
shooter. He would get you a different angle, he would
get you enough footage that the story had everything. He
was like that with news too."
Denis always aimed high, Al says, for something more
dynamic, and he was both tireless and fearless. Rob
remembers the time Denis caught a puck in the head
during a warm-up at the Olympics in Salt Lake City, but
wouldn't relinquish his camera. "Cameramen are
different," Rob says. "Denis wanted the shot everybody
remembers."
In his time off, Denis drove fast cars -- he once owned
a Mazda RX-7 -- partied with a crowd of friends, and
went back to his athletic roots. He learned to play
golf, passionately, Al says. He played three-on-three
hockey. He skied, he hiked, he mountain-biked. Says his
friend and former colleague, cameraman Graham Dunnell of
Ottawa, "He loved nature. He always liked to be out in
nature." Another friend, Global TV cameraman Mike
O'Drowsky, said that Denis, as much as he thrived on the
excitement of a sports event, also loved to sit alone
and contemplate the sky. "He would go and pick a real
good spot and suck all the energy out of the spot," he
said.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Denis discovered Canmore,
Alta., on a road trip out to the West Coast in his Jeep
TJ, and decided to move there. When Rob heard about the
plan, he says, "I went, 'Wait a minute, you just took
all this time to get established in Ontario and get on
all the right call sheets.' Denis said, 'If I don't do
it now, I'll regret it forever.' " It was a risk, but
"if there was a scale of risk-taking," Al says, "he
would be in the top half." But, Al says, Denis was not
foolhardy.
In Canmore, Denis lived in a beautiful home with a view.
"He would send us emails and say, 'I was out for a hike
this morning, or I got up and sat on my back deck and
watched the sun come over the mountains while I was
having my coffee, and then I went to Sunshine and skied
for the morning, and I came back and went for a mountain
bike ride, and I went to Calgary to shoot a game,' " Rob
says. "He would do more by 9 a.m. than most people did
all day." Denis's friend Theresa van Hoof was there last
summer for a visit and he was already praying for snow.
"I was like, are you crazy? It's August." Theresa and
her husband were supposed to visit again in late March,
but they had to cancel. Denis decided to go to Whistler,
B.C., instead.
He packed his skis in his Jeep. He took a still camera
with him. He told Al he was also going to hike the Wild
Pacific Trail on the west side of Vancouver Island. On
the morning of April 2, Claire Curran of Parksville was
out walking on the trail with her mother. She saw a man
sitting way out on the black volcanic rock near the
ocean as the surf was crashing in. No one knows if that
man was Denis, but Rob, for one, can understand him
being there. "It could have been the cameraman in him,"
Rob says. "He could have been trying to get that perfect
shot in his mind."
At 11:45 a.m., the Ucluelet RCMP and the Canadian Coast
Guard found Denis's body floating in the ocean near
Amphritrite Point. He was 45.
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