Plenty of worthy candidates for athlete of the year
Curse of the Lou Marsh Trophy? Hopefully not.
The fact that Bianca Andreescu hasn’t played a single match on the WTA Tour since she won the prestigious award as Canada’s athlete of the year for 2019, well, we’ll just put it down to bad luck for the seventh-ranked player in the world and yet another one of the oddities of the 2020 sports year.
That said, for a while there were serious questions as to whether Andreescu, without hitting a single ball, might not surrender the trophy for another year.
Put yourself back in time to July. Wimbledon had been cancelled. The Masters had been postponed. The Summer Olympics in Tokyo had been postponed. The NHL and NBA seasons had been interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.
We always hoped to be able to give out the Lou Marsh for the 82nd time. We just weren’t certain we were going to have many candidates. For a few months it seemed like COVID-19 was going to force us to shelve the honour for 2020.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. By midsummer, sports were starting to reappear. Golf first, then the NHL and NBA with their bubble seasons. Baseball argued and argued, but finally agreed on a 60game season. Tennis got going in late summer, and the NFL resumed in the fall.
Only the CFL was totally blasted out of existence. No Grey Cup. Ski races and other cold weather competitions resumed in Europe, and soccer did, as well, in Europe and North America.
By October, we were confident again that we could have a worthy Lou Marsh debate. That will take place Tuesday morning by virtual conference call with the largest and most diverse voting committee to undertake the exercise. We have veterans and we have newbies. We have newspaper people and broadcasters, authors and podcasters. One year we had Alex Anthopoulos, but he says he’s too busy these days.
So away we go one more time, and instead of this being a down year for sporting accomplishments by Canadians, it’s turned out to be an extraordinary season. Andreescu was a unanimous winner last year, but it seems unlikely that will happen again.
There are just too many Canadians who have done too many noteworthy things.
Often, the nature of some sports, with the season starting in one year and ending in another, makes it tricky. This year, the stop-and-start nature of so many athletic calendars really messes things up. By the time Brayden Point, for instance, was finishing his splendid playoff campaign for the Stanley Cup winning Tampa Bay Lightning, a season that had started the previous October was ending almost 12 months later.
Now hockey hasn’t started up again. So does that make it fair for Point, Nathan MacKinnon, Connor McDavid or any other hockey player you might consider?
Canadian soccer players have done spectacular things in 2020. Christine Sinclair set a new scoring record for international female soccer players. Kadeisha Buchanan won her fourth consecutive Champions League title with Olympique Lyonnais. Alphonso Davies became one of the biggest stars in the soccer world playing for Bayern Munich, and became the first Canadian male to play on a Champions League-winning squad.
How do you grade those various accomplishments?
B.C.-born Chase Claypool left Notre Dame and immediately became a star wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers., undefeated until Monday. Meanwhile, offensive lineman Laurent Duvernay-Tardif won the Super Bowl with the Kansas City Chiefs in February, then chose to opt out of the current NFL season to help out on the front lines of the COVID pandemic. Duvernay-Tardif has a medical degree, but has been working as an orderly at a seniors residence.
So are we recognizing football players for playing? Or for bravely choosing not to play?
Moguls skier Mikaël Kingsbury was brilliant again this year before being injured. Golfer Brooke Henderson is now No. 6 in the world and is likely to contend at the U.S. Open this weekend. Denis Shapovalov broke into the top 10 of the ATP Tour for the first time.
Then there’s Jamal Murray. Always an outstanding young talent for the Denver Nuggets, Murray exploded into a new stratosphere in the NBA playoffs, twice scoring 50 points or more in a single game.
The list goes on and on: Graeme Fish in speedskating; Malindi Elmore, the recordsetting marathoner; another speedskater, Ivanie Blondin; and wheelchair racer Brent Lakatos.
In the end, a year that at one point appeared so mangled by the impact of the coronavirus has yielded many Lou Marsh candidates. What gives the Lou Marsh its singular distinction, of course, is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Terry Fox and Rick Hansen were both winners. So was Marilyn Bell. Sidney Crosby has won it twice, but he didn’t win the year he scored the golden goal for Canada at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
Part of me wondered if Joey Moss wouldn’t have been a deserving winner this year because of his beautiful presence on the Edmonton sports scene for so long. His passing was mourned across the country.
What should we recognize in 2020? Excellence? Survival? Resilience? Personal sacrifice? Global popularity? Being a country that opens its arms to refugees and gives them the chance to change the world?
Or should we just be grateful we’ll get to vote. In 2020, perhaps that is where we should start.