VIEW TO A THRILL
Canadian university sports might attract more of a following if networks gave the Mac-Laval treatment to more events.
It was one of those days as a sports consumer that left you wondering.
Do we choose what we believe is worthy of our attention? Or is it chosen for us? If you understand how the food industry carefully designs products to appeal to your brain as “tasty,” and how the fashion industry dictates what is available to you as a consumer while leaving you feeling as though you’re making the choice, it does make you consider whether the world of sports, particularly as consumed via television, leads us to our preferred “choices” and then leaves us to believe we’re the ones doing the choosing.
The power of promotion and hype allows some sports to dominate and seem somehow “worthy” of our attention, even devotion. Those sports without the ability to drive that promotion and hype are left to seem less worthy. This is the lament of many sports that strive for more attention.
This reality hit home for me on Sunday, a day when we had a wide variety of sporting events to choose from here in the GTA as television consumers. We had the Raptors playing in Miami, the Arnold Palmer Invitational from Florida with a strong leaderboard, tennis from Palm Springs with both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in action, elite curling from Manitoba and NHL games, including the Hometown Hockey matchup between Winnipeg and Washington, the defending Stanley Cup champion.
Alongside all of those marquee events, meanwhile, was the U Sports women’s basketball final between McMaster and Laval at the Mattamy Athletic Centre. The Mac-Laval tussle, in a departure from its usual place in the sporting landscape, got the full national-TV treatment from Sportsnet: A full broadcast team, including an in-studio panel. The best camera crews. An attractive venue with quality lightning. Lots of promotion.
The quality and depth of the coverage unveiled intriguing plot lines. Theresa Burns, the Mac coach, had been at the school toiling in relative anonymity for more than a quartercentury without winning a national title. Laval had lost only one game all season, and had the top player in the country (Sarah-Jane Marois), the top defensive player (Khaléann Caron-Goudreau) and the top coach (Guillaume Giroux).
The game itself started sloppily, but gradually picked up steam. Laval pulled ahead in the first half, but a crucial decision by Burns to go small in the second half allowed Mac to take over the game, ultimately winning 70-58 with fifth-year player Linnaea Harper winning MVP honours. It was an entertaining game with well-defined characters and a compelling story. There were 1,684 fans on hand, in a facility that holds about 3,000, to see it live.
“It’s kind of like that glow the day after the Olympics and Davis Cup,” said Sportsnet’s Arash Madani, who did the play-by-play of the game, when he reflected on the broadcast.
Madani usually reports on much “bigger” events like the Super Bowl, World Series, NHL playoffs, that sort of thing. But he found himself still buzzed by the women’s final the day after.
“It feels really good and fulfilling,” he said. “That meant so much to those kids. Really special. That’s why I love it so much. It’s their everything.”
In terms of the overall sports viewership on the day, the Mac-Laval game was a blip on the radar screen. Probably less than a blip. By Monday, we were all back to worrying about how the Leafs will match up with Boston, whether Kawhi Leonard will ever play two games in a row again and whether Vladimir Guerrero Jr. should drop a few pounds.
But for one day, Canadian university women’s basketball could say it got treated like a really big deal by television, elevated to the same level as most professional sports, and met the challenge. The newspapers chimed in, with both the Star and the Globe and Mail providing stories and pictures of a sport that’s seldom covered.
So why was it worthy of all those bells and whistles on one day, but only one day? The easy answer you’ll get is that there’s no interest in Canadian university sports, that no one watches. But is that the case because there is no interest, or is there no interest because media, specifically television, only occasionally shines a light on those events?
You’re left with the nagging feeling that it’s less about the “worthiness” of those sports as events deserving of our eyeballs, and more about what we as consumers are told is worthy. But are we led in certain directions, then left to feel like we actually made the choices?
The world junior hockey championship was once not a very big deal at all. Other than the Piestany brawl, it was an event played in small rinks before small audiences and rarely made major news. But in the early 1990s, TSN decided it would make the world juniors into must-see television. It assigned its best people and spent all kinds of money putting major resources into the tournament.
It was the same tournament, same top young players, same countries. But because TSN convinced viewers and other media that this was worth more of their attention, more Canadians started watching, and instead of being played in Anchorage and Red Deer, it was held in NHL arenas in Vancouver and Toronto.
The tournament, and its importance, hadn’t changed. TSN, however, had brilliantly altered our perception of it, and now it is must viewing every holiday season.
Women’s sports have rarely received this type of treatment. In general, men’s sports — particularly men’s professional sports — have been assigned a much greater sense of importance to the sports consumer. They had decades of a head start before women’s sports began getting any attention at all, and today men’s pro sports attract hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and pay their athletes millions of dollars.
All that money makes it seem even more important, more worthy. The best.
The question we should all ask ourselves is: Did we go there ourselves because it was what we wanted? Or have we been led there without really having chosen at all?
Damien Cox’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday.