CANUSA connection is a tie that binds
It was essentially Homecoming Weekend when four New Orleans Saints arrived at St. Thomas More for the Hamilton Mighty Football Factory flag football clinic last Saturday. Most of that revolved around current Saint and former Tiger-Cat Delvin Breaux, who’s never been shy about thanking Hamilton for reviving his career after a broken neck suffered in high school kept him out of college football. But few of us realized Mark Ingram Jr. had great memories here, too. The former Heisman Trophy winner, and two-time Pro Bowl running back, offered up that three times he’d played in the CANUSA Games — the annual sporting exchange between Hamilton and Flint, Michigan, which will be held for the 60th straight year this August in Flint. Ingram said that CANUSA was an annual highlight of a Flint athlete’s teenage years, and he’s not alone in that. A few times while in Anaheim with the Blue Jays in the 1990s, I talked about CANUSA with the Angels’ Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher who played 11 years in the big leagues and had pitched for Flint against Hamilton. He had vivid memories of playing Hamilton teams. Glen Rice, considered the best athlete in Flint history and an NBA champion with the Los Angeles Lakers, also played in CANUSA, like Abbott, in the mid-1980s as did football player Andre Rison who won a Grey Cup with the Toronto Argos and a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers. When Ingram began talking so enthusiastically about his times in Hamilton, it took me back to the Toronto Raptors’ sixth Opening Night, and second at the Air Canada Centre, when “Vinsanity” was at its peak. All through training camp that fall, Vince Carter had taken a promising Raptor rookie under his wing, and Morris Peterson would make his NBA debut that night. Mo Pete had played in about a half-dozen CANUSA Games. And on the Detroit Pistons, the opposition that night, another rookie from Flint was making his pro debut. Mateen Cleaves, a guard, had been part of “The Flintstones,” four players from Flint, including Peterson, who started at Michigan State: Cleaves, Peterson, Charlie Bell and Antonio Smith. After Smith graduated, the other three led the Spartans to the 2000 NCAA title. Although they went to different Flint high schools, Peterson and Cleaves have known each other since they were seven years old and they were roommates for four years at Michigan State. The night before the 2000 opener, Cleaves visited Peterson at his Toronto condo for dinner, and eight people from Flint bunked in for the night. They watched another CANUSA grad, 11-year NFLer Robaire Smith, make a key sack on Monday Night Football. The next night, the 2000 first-round draft choices for their respective teams got their first taste of NBA play. Peterson came in the 10th minute, Cleaves in the 11th. Peterson sunk his first four shots, two of them from beyond the arc. Cleaves hit his first pro bucket three minutes after his lifelong friend dropped his. “We first started talking about this when we were seven or eight,” Peterson told me before the game. “We talked about it when we played CANUSA. You have dreams when you’re a kid, but back then, that’s all they were … dreams.” As college roommates, they’d idly wondered what it would be like to play against each other in The Association. “We knew it would happen, but not in the first game,” Peterson said. “When we had dinner we were just like little kids. We couldn’t believe it. It felt like I was dreaming.” Peterson said he and Cleaves had played in CANUSA from about the age of 11 until 1994, when they were 17. Cleaves added, “You’d just pray you’d be one of the ones who got chosen.” Peterson, who went on to become one of the most popular Raptors in franchise history, called coming to another country, even one just across the river, to play “a coming-of-age experience.” He recalled the 1991 Games in Hamilton when his team beat the home side by 50 points one day, then lost the next night at the buzzer. This August, young Hamilton and Flint athletes will be building their own memories and, who knows, one of them might be the next Mark Ingram or Mo Pete.
Veteran Spectator columnist Steve Milton has pretty much seen it all in his 40 years covering sports around the world, and, in Being There, he will relive special moments from those stories, from the inside out, every Friday. If there’s a memorable sporting event you would like Steve to write about, let him know at smilton@thespec.com. Chances are, he was there. smilton@thespec.com 905-526-3268 | @miltonatthespec