Patrick Lance Borders (born May 14, 1963) is an American former catcher in Major League Baseball who is best remembered for being the Most Valuable Player in the 1992 World Series. Borders also won an Olympic Games gold medal with the United States' baseball team at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. He bats and throws right-handed.

Borders was born in Columbus, Ohio. He attended Lake Wales High School in Lake Wales, Florida and was a standout in both football and baseball. He batted .440 as a junior, and as a senior he batted .510 with a school single season record 10 home runs and 36 RBI. Although he was offered a football/baseball scholarship to Mississippi State University, he turned it down to sign with the Blue Jays, who had drafted him in the sixth round of the 1982 Major League Baseball Draft.

Borders was brought up in the Toronto Blue Jays system and made his major league debut in 1988, playing in 56 games. Over the next few seasons, he earned the full-time position behind the plate, and he was a cornerpiece of the 1992 and 1993 World Series champion teams. In the 1992 Series, he hit .450 with one home run en route to winning the World Series MVP award.

Robert Gordon Pearson (born March 8, 1971 in Oshawa, Ontario) is a retired professional ice hockey right winger who played in the NHL.

Pearson was drafted 12th overall by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1989 NHL Entry Draft. He played in 269 career NHL games, scoring 56 goals and 54 assists for 110 points.

As of 21 April 2006, Pearson signed on as Assistant Coach for the University of Ontario Institute of Technology Ridgebacks in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.

Clarence Edwin "Cito" Gaston ( /ˈsiːtoʊ ˈɡæstən/; born March 17, 1944) is a former Major League Baseball outfielder and manager. His major league career as a player lasted from 1967–1978, most notably for the San Diego Padres and the Atlanta Braves. His managerial career was with the Toronto Blue Jays where he became the first African-American manager in Major League history to win a World Series title.

Cito Gaston managed the Toronto Blue Jays from 1989 to 1997, and again from 2008 to 2010. During this time, he managed the Blue Jays to four Division Titles (1989, 1991, 1992 and 1993), two American League Pennants (1992 and 1993) and two World Series (1992 and 1993).

Gaston grew up in San Antonio and Corpus Christi, Texas, where his father was a truck driver. His career ambitions were either to be a truck driver like his father, or make into the Major Leagues. He adopted his nickname 'Cito' in preference to his given name 'Clarence'. Gaston later told Toronto Blue Jays broadcasters that the name was taken from a Mexican-American wrestler he watched as a young man in Texas. Other reports state that Gaston was given this nickname from a friend named Carlos Thompson who thought that Gaston resembled a Mexican wrestler named "Cito".

Pat Cooper (born July 31, 1929) is an American actor and comedian. Cooper is primarily known for his stand-up routines, where he often makes reference to his Italian heritage from Mola di Bari, Italy. He was also a frequent guest on many radio shows, most notably The Howard Stern Show in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, in January 2011, and more recently, Imus in the Morning and Opie and Anthony.

Pat Cooper was born Pasquale Caputo in Brooklyn, New York. He was a twice-over high school dropout (Manual Training High School, Brooklyn). He was a sixth-generation bricklayer and also had an extremely short career as a furrier in Manhattan's Garment District. But his weekdays were spent at neighborhood block parties or local clubs' charity events. Soon though, he was paying his dues playing strip clubs.

Pat's big break came in 1953 via TV's Jackie Gleason Show. From there on it was the big time, playing the top nightclubs such as the 500 Club, Latin Casino, Palumbo's, and various Atlantic City and Las Vegas casino/hotels. It meant appearing on the same show as Frank Sinatra, Martin and Lewis, Tony Bennett, Sergio Franchi, Sammy Davis Jr., Connie Francis, Bobby Darin, Tony Martin and many others.

James Kelman (born 9 June 1946, in Glasgow) is an influential writer of novels, short stories, plays and political essays. His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late and aroused something of a controversy in doing so: one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, denounced the book as "a disgrace" when Kelman was announced as the winner. Kelman has since said that his Booker prize win, specifically the negative publicity and attacks made as a result, made publishers more reluctant to handle his work. [1] In 1998 Kelman was awarded the Scotland on Sunday/Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. In 2008 he won Scotland's most prestigious literary award the Saltire Society's Book of the Year award for Kieron Smith, Boy (2008).

Kelman says :

My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city. Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc. etc. (...) For one reason or another, by the age of 21/22 I decided to write stories. The stories I wanted to write would derive from my own background, my own socio-cultural experience. I wanted to write as one of my own people, I wanted to write and remain a member of my own community.