RAPTORS’ TITLE A SPECIAL FEAT IN DIFFERENT TIME
A lot has changed in the world since that championship, making it hard to celebrate
It doesn’t feel like a year has gone by.
It either feels like more time or less time has passed since the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship and this country went wild.
During the past 12 months, our perspective has been altered in this challenging year of demonstrations, COVID-19 and untimely deaths.
The days seem longer and less identifiable. The weekends, especially now with summer upcoming, don’t feel much like summer weekends.
Three months at home, with the occasional trip to the drugstore or grocery store, has probably brought families closer together and in many ways, has changed how we view the world and our own community.
One year ago in Oakland, it was electric as the Raptors gave the country a championship run of moments and miracles.
For some, those moments never leave you.
Some people have been holding on to the Joe Carter home run forever.
In Calgary, it’s the 1989 Stanley Cup.
In modern Montreal, it was that last Cup 27 years ago from a team that used to win them every other year.
In Edmonton, it was the blur of the 1980s, the Oilers and Eskimos dominating like no one before or since.
In Winnipeg, it was last November’s Grey Cup.
Each market is different. Each moment meaningful. And it was different when the Raptors won a championship — all of Canada seemed to celebrate as one.
That life-altering feeling may never go away, even now as we struggle through some of the largest challenges of our lives.
The one-year anniversary of the Raptors is a lovely memory that will grow larger with time. Right now, it’s just hard to celebrate much of anything.
The Toronto Blue Jays were ecstatic that Austin Martin was available with the fifth pick in the MLB draft. They even pulled out the old “I can’t believe he was still there” line that just about every team uses when making a selection.
But in this case, considering the rankings and pre-draft talk, the Jays may have come away with a steal in Martin. The key words being “may have.”
Of all the drafts in professional sports, the baseball draft is the least reliable. Teams pay all kinds of money for prospects and only a small percentage of them ever turn out to be significant. The Jays haven’t picked as high as
No. 5 in years so there was a natural kind of excitement in selecting Martin, who many have called the best hitter in the draft.
But then look backwards for a moment. In a 10-year period, from 2009-18, not one of the players picked in the No. 5 slot ended up being a big league star. Only one, Drew Pomeranz, became a decent major league player. The rest either tapped out or are still in the prospect phase.
Maybe Martin will be different. Maybe he will be the real thing. Maybe he will join the Jays on the rise like Bo Bichette, Vlad Guerrero Jr., Cavan Biggio and Lourdes Gurriel Jr. Maybe.
Canada won 22 medals at the last Summer Olympics, and 16 of those were won by women. By that number, you might surmise what a great country this happens to be for female athletes.
Then consider this: some of the most famous athletes in the country are women — Brooke Henderson, Bianca Andreescu, Christine Sinclair, and before that, Hayley Wickenheiser.
All that makes the release this week of something called The Rally Report all the more discouraging. For those who care about women’s sport, the results were somewhat heartbreaking.
The number of girls participating in sport in Canada is rather low and the dropout rate is particularly high. One out of every three girls in sports drops out in their adolescent years, according to the study. On the same scale, just one out of every 10 boys drop out.
The notion of gender equity in sports has always been a noble one but it’s also unrealistic when 62 per cent of all girls don’t participate in any kind of sport. How does this get changed? How do you change socialization? Maybe you can’t. But you have to try.
It starts with parents. It starts with local programs and school programs. It starts by removing stigmas, real or imagined, that playing sports can bring.
Sports can be life-changing for kids, for adults, for families. We need to do more in this country to make sports accessible and available and cool enough for young women to participate.
The flaws in the NBA’S return to play plan are growing. The COVID-19 situation in Florida is rather drastic. Some NBA players don’t want to play for health reasons. Some don’t want to play for social reasons and all that is currently going on in with the racial discourse in America. This is getting more complicated than NBA commissioner Adam Silver could have anticipated . ... It’s hard to be a commissioner in any sport. There’s no road map as to how to deal with a global pandemic. It get more confusing when the laws of states and countries and provinces and borders all differ. Nothing prepared CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie for this and he’s struggling to find a way to deal with all the issues. It’s the weakest Ambrosie has appeared since taking the impossible job.
... Gary Bettman has to be happy about what he sees around him. The NBA is struggling to figure things out. Baseball is fighting with itself. Football season is far away. For once, the NHL looks like the smart guys in a world of confusion . ... It’s an August night. And on television you have a choice — playoff basketball, playoff hockey or if they come back, regular season baseball. For me it’s easy: 1. Stanley Cup playoffs; 2. NBA playoffs. 3. Baseball.