CANADIANS HAVE ALWAYS PROVEN TO BE GOOD SPORTS
Taking a moment to reflect on the moments and shared sporting knowledge that bind us
You know you’re Canadian when ...
You know exactly where you were and how you celebrated when Paul Henderson scored for Canada or, depending on your age, when Sidney Crosby scored the Golden Goal.
Mike Weir won the Masters and it felt somehow like a family member or one of your closest friends had won.
You remember Daniel Nestor more for his Davis Cup win over Stefan Edberg in Vancouver than you do for his Olympic doubles championship in the Sydney Olympics of 2000.
You hear a Guess Who or Tragically Hip or Barenaked Ladies song blaring in an arena and you want to sing along, partly because you love the song, and partly because it’s our music.
Those two Saturday nights in Atlanta will be with you forever. Donovan Bailey winning gold on the first one. Bailey and friends kicking American butt in the 100-metre relay one week later. You can have your pick of Olympians in your life: that’s No. 1 on my list.
You wouldn’t go to Dr. James Naismith for a physical but you might want to shoot some hoops with him.
You remember being astounded by that big, tall, unconventional goalie named Ken Dryden, who didn’t come from nowhere but came from Cornell, almost single-handedly beating Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and the Big Bad Bruins in one of the great hockey upsets of all time back in the spring of 1971.
You can debate our greatest athlete. Wayne Gretzky. Steve Nash. Mario Lemieux. Gordie Howe. Bailey. Orr. Terry Fox.
You cried when Jean Beliveau and Gordie Howe died.
You didn’t always know what to make of Lennox Lewis. He was. He wasn’t. He was a gold medal winner, then a Brit, then a Jamaican, then a Canadian again. He was ours and he was theirs. And while George Chuvalo never won a world title or dominated the way Lewis did, we always knew what he was. He was one of us.
You know Ferguson Jenkins is from Chatham Ont. and Orr is from Parry Sound, Ont. and Nash is from Victoria, B.C. and Gretzky is from Brantford, Ont. and Lemieux is from Montreal and Crosby is from Cole Harbour, N.S. — and none of them live in Canada anymore.
You check the small print in the newspaper every Monday to see where David Hearn or Adam Hadwin or Graham DeLaet or Brooke Henderson finished up on the golf tour. For me as a kid, it was Al Balding and George Knudson and Sandra Post. What did they shoot? Where did they finish? How much did they earn?
You can instantly identify the following voices: Bob Cole, Brian Williams, Tom Cheek, Foster Hewitt, Danny Gallivan, Don Cherry, Dan Shulman. And each of them makes you smile.
You turn on the Grammy Awards, don’t know the songs, don’t care for the music, but take a certain personal pride that Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes and Celine Dion are all part of the entertainment. And this is years after The Band, Burton Cummings, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the late Leonard Cohen and Rush made their marks.
You tell your American friends that John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Eugene Levy, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Rick Moranis, Martin Short, Michael J. Fox, Russell Peters, Howie Mandel and Lorne Michaels were all funny in Canada before the rest of the world discovered their talents.
You’re one of about a million people who will tell you they were at the first Toronto Blue Jays game against the Chicago
You know you’re Canadian when ... You well up every time you see replays of Terry Fox on television, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
White Sox in the snow of 1977. I was there, honest. I have the tickets. Honest.
You know what “Touch ’em all, Joe” means. And you probably know where you were that late night. I was in the football press box at Toronto’s SkyDome where Mike Zeisberger and Jay Greenberg, sitting beside me, were discussing how Joe Carter never gets a big hit just as the ball was going past our eyes and over the left field fence for the World Series win by the Blue Jays in 1993.
You can explain what a rouge is — the term makes you smile — and you can further explain why a football team lines up with a punter in the end zone late in a close game.
You have heard of the Mud Bowl and the Fog Bowl, even if you don’t really know what they are.
You well up every time you see replays of Terry Fox on television, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
You can explain that a loonie is a dollar and a toonie is two bucks and a Penny is a gold medal-winning swimmer.
You know the names Lionel Conacher and Percy Williams and Rocket Richard and Russ Jackson and Barbara Ann Scott and Nancy Greene, but you don’t necessarily know why.
You really can’t decide between push brooms and corn brooms.
You think it’s too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and when you travel the world, you can’t wait to come home.
Happy 150th birthday Canada. I still love you.