Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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Canadians must embrace their sports to be truly genuine, and they do, but, of course, with a caveat that it is what is expected of them. The outsider will quickly know they are in Canada once they turn on a television and investigate the country’s sports stations. Two will be showing hockey games, a third will have aging veterans of the game talking about hockey games and prattling on about how necessary fighting is to the game’s definition, while a fourth station will be showing a curling match.

Those from other countries are of course baffled by this strange cultural abnormality. A caller to a Geneva, Switzerland, sports talk show in the year 2000, having spent some time in Canada watching television, inquired of the bemused host whether Canadian parents, as a rite of passage for children, removed all their child’s front teeth before putting them into the game as the loss was inevitable in any case. The host was unable to contradict this apparent European urban myth.

The most promising basketball tandem in Toronto in the early twenty-first century, featuring the mercurial Vince Carter and his cousin Tracy McGrady, was broken up by McGrady’s protest that he needed to get out of Canada because not only was the American sports station ESPN not available but its alternative, TSN, only covered curling — hour after hour of Vic Rauter proclaiming the mystery of draws, and rocks, and buttons, which McGrady found culturally baffling. The promise of a National Basketball Association dynasty in Toronto was thus shattered by the country’s bizarre winter sports fixation.