True colours
A ‘New’ Canadian nationalism through sport
IT but it shouldn’t CAME AS A SURPRISE, have.
When Torontonians, of all Canadians, unexpectedly embraced the 2015 Pan Am Games not only for the street parties but for the sport and, more tellingly, the flag-waving, it confirmed what we had begun sensing about this country five years earlier.
True nationalism-through-sport has arrived in Canada. Might have taken 140-years plus, but it’s here and not likely to go away.
It’s not the same as our neighbour’s hyperaggressive sports nationalism. Most, but sadly not all, of us are hesitant to adopt the northern equivalent of the “U-S-A, U-S-A” shouts whilst destroying a much lesser opponent. We watch “The Simpsons,” we know what they’re mocking even if the mock-ees often don’t.
Instead, what has emerged in Canada is a hybrid sporting nationalism, best exemplified by our Olympic athletes of this decade, but also adopted and amplified by those who watch. The streets of Vancouver in February 2010 were one big Canada First assembly, without the bitter riots that accompanied the Stanley Cup loss there 16 months later.
As paddler Adam van Koeverden, who might just be the central architect of this attitude, once told us, “We’ll be polite … but we will kick your ass. Big time.”
Iconic cyclist Curt Harnett, who was Canada’s chef de mission for the Rio Games last summer, put it similarly in MetroNews: “We’re always humble, giving, caring, awesome. Our athletes are always out welcoming people, talking to people. We’re willing to hold the door for you, give you the smile, too. But that doesn’t mean we’re not willing to kick your ass.”
The latter part, the ‘kicking ass’ part, is the newest part. Humble, caring, welcoming etc., are adjectives the outside world had applied to us for decades and which we applied to ourselves in all sports except hockey, generally translating it as “not all that good at this.” Humility was synonymous with a sports inferiority complex.
WE MIGHT HAVE thought we had demonstrated a strong sports nationalism before the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, but outside of a few isolated instances — figure skater Barbara Ann Scott in 1948 and ’49; the Toronto Blue Jays in 1992 and ’93; Ben Johnson for about 72 hours — what Canada had was hockey nationalism.
Nationalism is a multifaceted, complex, and sometimes dangerous notion that links people of a nation through shared common experiences which those people identify with their nation, or its accepted symbols. Once linked, the people celebrate and, sometimes, boast through those symbols. Sport, other than when orchestrated by dictatorships, is generally a safe vehicle as a symbol.
For a number of reasons, Canada was slow to, first, come to any kind of nationalism, and then to exhibit and celebrate nationalism through sport. Even hockey.
Part of it was our relative youth as a nation. Our overall culture was still developing.
Part of it was that when we did show signs of a national sport culture, such as during Grey Cup Week, it was inward-looking rather than outwardly-directed. Us bragging about Canada … to ourselves. And much of the Canadian sporting unity, like our fragile national unity, was based on something negative: taking shots at Toronto.
Part of it was that we spent more than a century stuck on what we aren’t — Americans or Brits — rather than moving toward what we are, which we didn’t seem all that curious to discover.
Part of it was that we’ve been too practical as a people to embrace myth makers. We’ve never had our Walt Disney or our Sports Illustrated to accelerate the pace of national self-belief and destiny.
And a big part of it was that we invented and started proselytizing hockey even prior to becoming a formal nation. It was our flag long before we had one. We owned it, we excelled at it and the world never questioned our superiority. If we didn’t have world power we at least had global prestige in something.
And while it was our Big Thing, we didn’t look at hockey closely, analyze it critically or recognize how it encapsulated us until the Soviet Union nearly beat most of our best in the 1972 Summit Series.
That Series was, outside of two world wars, the most nationalistic period of our first 140-or-so years mostly because the young men entrusted with what was assumed to be an easy chore … nearly lost. Nationalism thrives most when a country feels threatened.
That post-Summit Series reaction provoked, if only slowly and limited to hockey, some national self-examination, and we began to understand that hockey was a big and parseable part of our identity and culture. We found that immigrants would gravitate toward it, initially as fans and second-generationally as players, because it was the quickest path to ‘Canadianism.’
But wasn’t it a little naïve, or arrogant, to de-
rive so much national strength from a sport that is played seriously in only about a dozen nations of the world, all in the Northern Hemisphere?
And it wasn’t reflective of what was evolving in other spheres of Canadian life, particularly immigration, or what was happening to hockey itself: increasingly, the best in the sport were coming from more affluent areas of the country, reducing the universality of that particular Canadian experience.
And big-league hockey, the hockey Canadians watch, is being managed in New York and has become fragmented by so many American teams. We cheer for Canadian-based teams loaded with Americans and Europeans and against American-based teams, many of whom have a clear majority of Canadians on their rosters. And no Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup in nearly a quarter-century. That’s not much landing space for a vibrant sports nationalism.
FOR SO LONG, hockey was virtually our sole way of expressing sports nationalism, because we rarely did well at other sports, except in periodic bursts or in sports such as figure skating which didn’t appeal to enough of the general populace.
And hockey usually offered us international victories. The Summit Series was followed by mostly-successful Canada and World Cups, highlighted by Gretzky-to-Lemieux at Copps Coliseum in 1987.
A developed nation can’t risk spending national pride on sports in which no international impact is being made. Our summer Olympians, for instance, were sent off for decades with a “do your best” and little expectation and few demands. That was also the unspoken feeling among many of the athletes.
But, all of that had changed by Vancouver and Rio. Even in London in 2012, the women’s soccer team ignited widespread and frantic nationalistic passion, especially since the Americans were seen as the villains in the piece.
Suddenly, it seems, we have expectations, and many of them are met, which increases our national pride and further increases expectations.
But like so many changes that only appear sudden, it was building long before the tip of the iceberg broke the surface.
Sports such as figure skating (beginning with Brian Orser and Kurt Browning), track (beginning with Donovan Bailey and the relay team in Atlanta), rowing (Barcelona), speed skating, sliding, and a multitude of new sports introduced in the X-Games generation, had created their own standards of expectations and delivery. They weren’t always met, but they weren’t lowered. They were Canadian archipelagos of higher hopes, ready to be fused with others.
Additionally, massive soccer registration and accelerating interest in youth basketball resulted in the double-medaling women’s soccer team and a spectacular number of Canadians in the NBA, which in turn affects the men’s national team and what we want from them.
And, while no Canadian NHL team has won the Stanley Cup and grabbed the nation’s total support, both the Raptors and Blue Jays have gone deep in the playoffs recently — dovetailing nicely with Canada’s Olympic and Pan Am successes — and clearly ‘Canada’s Team’ in their respective sports. Mackenzie Hughes and Adam Hadwin are winning PGA tournaments, and our boarders and freestyle skiers are piling up titles.
All of that provides affirmation of, and further nourishment for, Canadian sports nationalism.
We’ve come a long way from being a hockeyonly nation. By the time Vancouver 2010 — which, we tend to forget, began with negative expectations except on the ice — was drawing to a close, the only way that men’s hockey could have stood out was if the best player in the world scored in overtime of the gold medal game for the 13th, and record-setting, gold medal.
When, in fact, it did, this didn’t trigger an explosion of Canadian sports nationalism, it merely added to it.