CANADIANS RULE LIKE NEVER BEFORE
Nation's athletes dominating the world of sports at highest levels of competition
As Jamal Murray's dream of a playoff season begins to wind down, I find myself oddly thinking about Mike Smrek.
And about then and now. You probably don't know the name. In 1988, the year now famous for Ben Johnson, I was sent to Los Angeles to do a feature story on Smrek.
He was one of the few Canadians in the NBA back then, living in this underwhelming hotel just across the street from the Fabulous Forum. Smrek was seven feet tall, white, friendly, and slightly awkward. He was the backup for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who really didn't need a backup on those phenomenal Lakers championship teams. Smrek has two NBA rings to prove he was there.
When I went to interview Jabbar about Smrek, he actually thought it was a prank of some kind. You're asking about who? Why? You're serious?
That was Canadians in the NBA then. In 21 playoff games over eight seasons, Smrek, from Welland, Ont., scored 11 points.
Inside the bubble, Jamal Murray from Kitchener, an hour away from Welland, does that about every 11 minutes. He has put on a show through these NBA playoffs like we've rarely seen before. In Game 7 against Kawhi Leonard and the Clippers, he scored 40 points in a stunning one-sided Denver win. Against Utah the round before, he scored 50, 42 and 50 in three consecutive games. Breathtaking numbers for any player.
But for a Canadian, it's more than that. It's Steve Nash-like, and Nash won two most valuable player awards.
The other day, a German won the Hart Trophy as the NHL's MVP; a Swiss won the Norris Trophy as best defenceman; an American won the Vezina Trophy, and if the Conn Smythe Trophy was voted on today, the competition would be between a Russian, a Kazakh, a Swede and a Finn.
Our game isn't just for us anymore. Just as we've entered games that were never ours. The contrast of Murray now to Smrek then isn't just about basketball. It's about this country. It's about the amazing depth of athletes we have, a national roster like never before.
At the first significant tennis tournament I covered, Bjorn Borg beat John McEnroe in the finals of the 1979 Canadian Open. A few weeks after that, McEnroe went on to win his first major, the U.S. Open.
There were no Canadians in the main draw of the U.S. Open that year, but there were 63 Americans. In the past few days, Denis Shapovalov has moved to 10th in the world of men's tennis, not that far ahead of Felix Auger-Aliassime and Milos Raonic. And we continue to wait for the return of U.S. Open champion Bianca Andreescu, who remains ranked seventh in the world.
The top Canadian tennis player in 1979, when Borg won at York University, was Rejean Genois. Outside of Quebec, he's about as famous today as Smrek.
You can go sport to sport now and see the accomplishments of Canadians and the strength and depth seems to be growing by the day. And in places where we normally don't exist.
On Sunday, Chase Claypool, a 22-year-old from Abbotsford playing in his second game in the NFL for the Pittsburgh Steelers, hauled in an 84-yard touchdown pass from Ben Roethlisberger. No Canadian has ever done that before.
Claypool's debut comes in the same year in which Alfonso Davies, the youngster from Edmonton, and Kadeisha Buchanan have won championships at the highest level of club soccer, and as important players on their teams. Both should already be in the Lou Marsh discussion for Canadian athlete of the year, along with Murray, Shapovalov, NHLer Nathan MacKinnon, Super Bowl champion Dr. Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, and golf star Brooke Henderson.
And all this happening around this special week of Schitt's Creek; we are far more than a country that just makes people laugh. We can hit a lot of threes in a whole lot of sports — and that makes my heart beat just a little bit louder.