SHOULD IT BE CALLED SASQUATCHEWAN?
Even after he earned the ire of the Wheat Province for saying so on-air, NBA announcer Jeff Wade is standing by his claim that Saskatchewan got its name due to its high population of sasquatches.
“I don’t want to upset anybody, but I find it a little odd that I know more about the history of your great province down here in Texas than perhaps some of your own citizens,” Wade, an announcer for the Dallas Mavericks, told the National Post by phone from Dallas.
“Maybe you guys might want to storm the libraries and see what’s really going on in your backyard,” he added. It’s a joke, of course. But there was no shortage of Prairie folk taking it at face value when Wade, during a Feb. 9 game between the Mavericks and the Utah Jazz, mentioned that Saskatchewan is “known for being home to a lot of sasquatches … that’s what it’s named after.”
“This from a country that cannot figure out the metric system,” reads one of the myriad online posts from Saskatchewanians mocking Wade’s perceived cryptozoology slip-up.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall took to Twitter to inform Wade that “Saskatchewan’s a hotbed for sasquatches just as Utah’s a hotbed for jazz.”
TSN ran the clip with the warning that Wade should get a “geography lesson.”
CTV Saskatchewan broadcast Wade’s clip, tsk-ed our “southern neighbours for being out of touch” and even canvassed the province’s political leaders.
“We don’t need to have someone else validate who we are, but it is sort of funny that they think Saskatchewan’s named after a sasquatch,” a stoic Regina Mayor Michael Fougere told the broadcaster.
Canada’s most rectangular province was first mentioned during the NBA broadcast Tuesday as a result of a free-throw shot by Utah Jazz forward Trey Lyles, who was born in Saskatoon.
“He is the first-ever NBA player from Saskatchewan,” said announcer Mark Followill.
Wade said he deadpanned the made-up factoid about sasquatches as a jab against Followill’s encyclopedic sports knowledge.
“I figured that it was such an absurd thing to say that it wasn’t possible that anybody could take it seriously,” said Wade. “The words don’t even sound similar, really.”
The name Saskatchewan derives from white settlers mangling the Cree word “Kisiskatchewanisipi,” which means swift-flowing river.
Sasquatches, sometimes referred to as Bigfoot or yetis, are more commonly associated with the dense tree cover of the Pacific Coast. Nevertheless, sasquatch researchers have documented at least a few sightings of mysterious ape creatures in forested regions of Saskatchewan.