OUR FATHERS’ GAME
This weekend, the Canadian Lacrosse Association celebrates the 150th anniversary of the game. But the roots of Canada’s official summer sport — and a route to spiritual peace — can be traced long before that
In this country, we loosely refer to hockey as a ‘religion’ but it is Canada’s other national sport which was actually founded upon deep spirituality.
LACROSSE,
RECOGNIZED by 1995’s National Sports of Canada Act as our official summer sport (hockey does have winter honours), is arguably the only team sport in the world rooted in religion, mysticism, devout respect for those who played before, and a sacred link between the earth and the heavens.
Despite their passionate proselytizers, hockey and soccer aren’t “religions” so much as secular fanaticisms. They do not spring from spiritual roots, and the sense of the divine is not inherent to the game itself, as it is in lacrosse.
“It’s a whole different sport than hockey, or basketball, or golf, because of that,” says Derek Graham of Ancaster, a former high-level lacrosse player who is the Canadian Lacrosse Association’s athlete director.
Developed by indigenous peoples, mostly around the Great Lakes and mostly by the Iroquois Confederacy and Algonquins, it was named ‘la crosse’ by French Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf when he saw Iroquois play it in New York 380 years ago. The game has been played since at least the early 17th century and probably long before that.
IT
IS WIDELY KNOWN among indigenous and many veteran nonnative players, as The Creator’s Game. That covers the original field game and indoor (or box) lacrosse, which was invented during the 1920s to fill off-season hockey arenas.
Known variously as “a little brother to war,” a route to spiritual peace, a medicine game, a way to develop strength, a link between the land and the heavens through the wooden stick, and a continuous connection to ancestors, lacrosse has a sacred aspect that has always kept it alive and relevant among indigenous peoples.
But in the century-and-a-half since they began playing the sport in earnest, non-native Canadians have also developed their own somewhat mystical bond with the game and their forebears who played it.
There are, then, two parallel streams of keepers of the flame: indigenous people, for whom lacrosse is inseparable from culture and history, and the non-natives who’ve played and organized the game for decades, often as a family tradition.
During the numerous valleys and troughs between lacrosse’s infrequent peaks, usually generated by short-lived professional leagues, it survived in only a few small-town pockets of strength, particularly in Ontario, where it is linked to tradition, forefathers, neighbourhood culture identity and an inherited memory of the essence of the game.
“Lacrosse is one of those games that once you discover it, it’s hard to let go,” says professional field and box lacrosse star Shawn Evans of Peterborough, one of those “pockets” along with the likes of Oshawa/ Whitby, Toronto’s Lakeshore, Brampton, and St. Catharines. “I keep my stick by my bed.” Says Hamilton lawyer Stu Aird, who played senior and pro lacrosse: “Box lacrosse was more of a blue-collar game, it wasn’t expensive. So it was big in those towns. If John’s older brother played, John’s playing and John’s friend plays. Their dads probably played. And those people didn’t leave town. So the game stayed big there.”
That has been both the strength and weakness of lacrosse, as it seeks to expand beyond the 76,000 players registered with the Canadian Lacrosse Association. “There are a lot of second- and third-generation lacrosse players,” says Hamilton’s Ed Comeau, coach of Canada’s national men’s box lacrosse team and of the National Lacrosse League champion Georgia Swarm. “How do we get new Canadians, or athletes in other sports, to try the game we love?”
The sport thrives in the lower B.C. mainland and in Ontario where, after a serious decline into the mid-1980s, there had been 20 straight years of growth in registrations — from 4,500 to about 40,000 — until “a bit of a downturn nationally and provincially the last two years,” according to Stan Cockerton, the Ontario Lacrosse Association’s longtime executive director.
Cockerton points to the explosion in junior teams in the province. Junior A has 11 teams, Junior B has expanded from 10 teams in 1990 to 25 today, and the nascent Junior C league has 16 entries.
Still, while the game has spread into 58 countries around the world, it is making only marginal progress domestically, despite the two-decade presence of the NLL, the first pro league with long term success, as a career target for younger players.
DESPITE
ITS national-sport status, lacrosse has not been part of the Canada Games since 1981. Only eight of the 629 members Canada’s Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, including 2017 inductee, the late Gaylord Powless of Six Nations, are recognized strictly for lacrosse.
The demographics of new Canadians, more familiar with sports like soccer and cricket, have impacted recruitment, as has the lack of air conditioning in arenas where lacrosse is
CMYplayed in the spring and summer.
“I’m not involved at the youth level but I’m not convinced we have the recipe to get new kids in at the rate it needs to be,” says Johnny Mouradian, Team Canada’s box lacrosse director.
“Lacrosse families are going to grow the game, but we have to attract new kids instead of just kids who come from lacrosse families.
“We’re proud to have been around 150 years, but there are fewer than 80,000 kids playing in Canada.”
This week in Montreal, the CLA, the oldest governing body in Canadian sport, celebrates its sesquicentennial. The centrepiece of the three-day commemoration is Saturday’s field lacrosse match between the McGill varsity team and players from the Kahnawake Survival School, scripted to resemble a “national championship” game between the Kahnawake Lacrosse Club and the Montreal Lacrosse Team played on July 1, 1867, using the first set of codified rules.
Those rules, organized by Montreal dentist George Beers, cut down the massive team sizes and eliminated much of the spontaneity of the indigenous game. Eventually, the sport that the general public saw had become a white man’s game.
By 1880, “Indian teams” had been banned from national championship competition, ostensibly because they were deemed professionals. More likely it was related to those teams’ superior skill and to institutionalized marginalization and exclusion. One lacrosse bylaw read, “No Indian may play on a white club unless previously agreed upon.” That agreement rarely came.
Indigenous players had their own leagues but were welcomed when box lacrosse became the preeminent form of the game in the 1930s. Six Nations’ Bill Isaacs, who led Hamilton Tigers to a Mann Cup (national senior title) in 1948, was the first superstar of “boxla.”
Over the past 25 years, indigenous teams and players have had renewed and remarkable success. Six Nations teams have won several provincial and national junior and senior championships. A few other Ontario senior teams are First Nation owned, and about 10 per cent of the NLL is indigenous, including a number of marquee players.
Six Nations also has the largest minor lacrosse association (4,000 members) in Canada, and its Iroquois Lacrosse Arena has been open yearround for lacrosse since 2004.
When the Arrows won the 1992 Minto Cup to become the first team from a reservation to win the junior championship of Canada, team captain Miles General emphasized: “We won this for all native people across Canada and especially for those here in Six Nations.”
In 2014, teams representing Six Nations stunningly won all four of Ontario’s top championships: Junior A and B, and Senior A and B. Three of those teams also captured their respective national titles.
“That was a great, great feeling,” says Bo Henhawk, who played Jr. B.
Henhawk, a 22-year-old Cayuga Wolf who makes and sells wooden sticks, has a special hickory stick he uses for medicine games (traditional field lacrosse games played for health and spiritual benefits), “and after I pass and I go to the SkyWorld, it’s going to be waiting for me.”
Today, most players use alloy metal sticks with plastic heads. Those sticks, easier for beginners to master, started making inroads in the 1970s.
Many non-native lacrosse players, especially younger ones, aren’t connected to or even interested in the game’s genetic spirituality, but there are also many who are, even if they didn’t start out that way. “When I was young, that side wasn’t part of it; it was just a game I enjoyed,” says Aird. “As I got older, I learned to appreciate it more. No other sport has that, because it’s about culture.”
And, concludes, the OLA’s Stan Cockerton: “The vast majority of our members know the First Nations roots, the almost religious nature of it. Whether you’re First Nations or white, we all fell in love with the stick. I believe that’s as true now as it was 150 years ago.”