On those 2019 Raptors, breaking dams of doubt and going in on underdogs: a SportsLit Segue
Two years ago today the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship, and it brought out all the feels for a Xennial fan who got in at the ground level with them Back In The Nineties.
Two years ago today, the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship. This piece is adapted from a monologue that was part of SportsLit S4E07 when Doug Smith, the dean of Toronto basketball writers, joined Neil Acharya and me to talk about his book We The North: 25 Years of Raptors Basketball (Viking Press, 2020).
A transcendent team gives you something that fits with the story you tell about yourself. The Toronto Raptors are riveting to their thousands of Canadian fans since this team built by and with people who have all overcome something.
Those stories have been told by our guest today and other basketball writers, and often by the players themselves. My 2019 Raptor was Serge Ibaka, the Congolese-Spanish forward who often seemed to pull down 50/50 rebounds or swish timely three-pointers. What I can share, as a fan, is that I have Gimme Five Bees For A Quarter Energy when it comes to the Raptors and my bond with basketball.
A grown-ass man should not tether his self-worth or his emotions to the fortunes of his favourite teams. You are responsible for your own happiness.
But the spirit of the thing means segueing into where I was in the 1995-96 season when the Raptors were an NBA expansion team playing in the SkyDome, and how that got locked in for far too long.
When the Raptors came into being, Neil Acharya and I were teenagers in Kingston who could see how the sportscape was shifting in Canada. It calls to mind a trick that Greg Daniels and the creative team on The Office used for a “talking head,” where someone speaks to the camera. Characters who did not have a future outside of Dunder Mifflin were placed in front of interior windows.
They put the characters who had a future outside Dunder Mifflin in front of exterior windows.
For our purposes, in 1995, hockey, that was the interior window into Canadian sport’s past. The arrival of the Raptors was the exterior-facing window into the coming 21st century. There was a multicultural main city primed to rally around Raptors basketball — if they started to win.
When the Raptors played in the SkyDome there was uncertainty with ownership, the arena and Canada’s poor exchange rate. There was a precarity about it, and our Xennial generation who are now in their 40s was introduced to that term way before Gen-Z.
Now, basketball seems unique among team sports because a loner/outsider can find acceptance, like music. You can play full-court, half-court, or you can just get some shots up on your ownsome.
Steve Rushin wrote about this in his two memoirs, Sting-Ray Afternoons and Nights In White Castle.
Rushin grew up in Minnesota, the State of Hockey, in a sports-loving Catholic family. The oldest brother played college hockey under — callback to our Brian Burke episode — Lou Lamoriello at Providence College. Rushin’s youngest brother played hockey for the University of Notre Dame.
Rushin, an introvert, felt more himself, felt more comfortable with that round ball in his hands instead of a curved Sher-Wood. Plus gyms are warmer than a hockey rink. So he became a gym rat, and his music tastes shifted to R&B.
I relate to that. Back in the ’90s, among my friends at my rural southeastern Ontario high school, we shifted from playing baseball or pond hockey to shooting hoops. The music coming out of headphones was less hair metal and more grunge or hiphop. We are that “The Last Dance” generation.
That basketball worlds and the music worlds were coming together. That wasn’t new; Corporate North America were playing catch-up.
Here one thinks of the New York Rens almost a century ago. The Rens were a Black-owned team, and in the ’20s and ’30s, they played games on courts set up in a ballroom … and then after the game, there would be a dance with live music. A basketball game and a dance on the same ticket. The Rens won the first professional basketball championship in 1939, but they weren’t accepted into the early NBA. But the team is inducted en masse into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
So in Bath, we’d get a winter thaw. My buddy Jay (Wegs) McKegney, the sixth man for the Ernestown Eagles, would call some people, they’d call some people. Wegs would grab snow shovels and a push broom so we could clear the court behind St. Linus School of snow, slush and gravel and get our hoop on.
That court is long gone, replaced with, what else, a subdivision.
That passion for basketball was there across Canada. Of course, Vince Carter changed the scope. He is the most globally popular athlete who ever played on a Canadian team. But movers and shakers in Toronto — and Vancouver — saw that their kids loved the NBA and wanted to to sell them on supporting their own NBA team. That is a prequel to the “Carter Effect” narrative. Please save space for the idea that something was trickling up from Generation X.
In We The North, Doug Smith writes of how there was skepticism about the NBA succeeding in Canada. Seems shortsighted until you build in the state of pro sports in Canada in the ’90s. Canada had two NHL teams pull up stakes to move to U.S. cities.
The Montreal Expos had been a zombie franchise since long before the 1994-95 baseball strike.1 The Toronto Blue Jays were under absentee foreign ownership. The Canadian Football League had to punt on a U.S. expansion experiment. And, of course, the Grizzlies eventually moved from Vancouver to Memphis in 2001.
But there was that energy.
I connect that to some brilliant people I knew at the time through being an, uh, bench warmer for Ernestown. That energy was Looking For A Place To Happen, to borrow the title of a song by The Tragically Hip.
If it seems like a stretch to connect the Raptors with the late great Gord Downie ... one of Gord’s last public appearances was at a Raptors playoff game in 2017. Every sports media personality in Canada wrote about The Hip’s relationship to hockey.
I have this memory burn of Gord Downie sitting courtside at a Raptors game. In his jeans, jean jacket and signature hat — as my fellow “Bath boy” Joey Horrocks once put it, no one rocks a Canadian tuxedo like Gord did. I imagine Gord absorbing the game the way an artist appreciates other artists who work in another medium or form. And you know if you’re privileged enough to sit courtside at an NBA or WNBA game, you know those leagues produce the world’s premier athletic show. Up close, so I am told, you really get a sense of their skill and quickness that is backed up by 99th-percentile height and strength.
Smarty
So Nineteen Ninety-Five was when Rob Smart transferred to Ernestown. Rob would go on to be an all-Canadian guard with the Carleton Ravens playing for his uncle, the legendary Dave Smart. Rob went on to become a professor in the business school at Carleton and a long-time assistant coach, first with Dave and now alongside Taffe Charles.
People know of Carleton’s basketball dominance: 15 men’s titles over 18 years; the women’s team has also won a U Sports title. Rob is the first, and so far only Raven who has won a title as a player, assistant coach and head coach.
I must build in the lay of the land in Kingston high school sports around that time. Normally a big-time transfer goes to a jock school with a big enrollment, but Ernestown was not like that.
The better fits for that description were the three west-end schools: Frontenac, Bayridge, and Holy Cross.
A quick snapshot from 2009: a Frontenac grad, Stu Turnbull, was the most valuable player at the Canadian university Final 8 after helping Carleton win the championship.
The Memorial Cup MVP was future NHL star Taylor Hall, who attended Frontenac while he was playing youth hockey in Kingston before joining the Windsor Spitfires.
On the final weekend of the oh-nine Canadian football season, our alma mater, Queen’s, won the Vanier Cup. Bayridge grad Scott Valberg caught two touchdown passes and Holy Cross grad Devan Sheahan caught one. The next day, Rob Bagg, Frontenac and Queen’s grad, played wide receiver for Saskatchewan in the Grey Cup.
That ’09 Carleton team also had a second Frontenac Falcon, Rob Saunders. Its star forward was Aaron Doornekamp, the last in the line of Dave Smart’s seven nephews and nieces who went from Ernestown to Canadian university basketball or D1.
By the way, Aaron, showing how all Canadians know each other, wrote a testimonial to Carl English’s book Chasing A Dream, which Neil mentioned in our Jeff Pearlman episode.
So, in 1995-96 at Ernestown, the Smarts showed me that basketball was a first-choice sport for a Canadian outside of the big city.
At that point in ’95, Dave was in his 20s, a year removed from being an all-conference guard at Queen’s. As people know, Dave coached for a few years before he went to university.
We had Robbie, his brother and fellow future Ravens mainstay Michael Smart was in Grade 9, on the junior team.
Most of the core players on Ernestown’s girls varsity, including Dave’s niece, future Dr. Amy Doornekamp, played in his Guardsmen club program. So that year Dave Smart was coaching hoops at little ol’ Ernestown. He did not impose himself. We had a good coach for the senior teams: Tom Turnbull, Stu’s dad.
Tom’s daughter Taryn Turnbull, who went on to play D-1 in the States and professionally overseas, was in the same grade as Neil at Frontenac.
Basketball now is all a pace-and-space, three-pointers and layups emphasizing- environment. Dave’s Carleton teams were playing like that 15 years before it came into vogue in the pros and NCAA D-1. The first time I heard about what’s now called positionless basketball, where all five players can lead the offense, was from the girls at my high school whom Dave coached with the Guardsmen.
It was just a matter of when Dave would take his talents to a Canadian university. He has a Maximum Canada view (hat tip: Doug Saunders). Canadian universities’ sport model is more Minimum Canada. It often tends to be the marketplace of few ideas.
Based on what Neil and me remember of Queen’s, Dave would not have fit there as a coach. Our old school was… old school.
Carleton wanted a rallying point. It is in Ottawa, our nation’s capital. Politicos have that phrase, “changing the channel.” Late-nineties Carleton University needed to change the channel on all the “Carleton, where the K stands for kwality jokes.”
They were beefing up men’s basketball while cutting football, which was an unpopular decision.
That environment was tailor-made for a disrupter such as Dave who had a vision to create a uniquely Canadian basketball juggernaut.
Two decades later, we now have a handful of mid-major D-1 quality men’s and women’s teams. It is done in player development-driven setting, rather than one dictated by TV deals and coaches’ contracts. Players get five seasons to play instead of the NCAA’s four, and there are no Byzantine restrictions on practice time. They can be together 11 months a year if they want.
I got a window into that with a minor harmonic convergence at Ernestown. We had Rob and our core guys, and we kind of got into teams’ heads by playing up being a ragtag team.
Bayridge and other teams had fancy nice warmup suits with last names on their shooting shirts. tearaway pants with the jersey number on the leg.
Our warmups were grey cotton T-shirts that said, “Ernestown Basketball: We Can Play!” We assumed people sized us up and figured we couldn’t. Instead of last names, we had nicknames on the back: BRICK LAYER … RAINBOW … WEGS … MADMAN … ROOSTER.
Rob Smart’s shirt just said, SMART. Rob is a Fun Guy, but he couldn’t be pulled down to our level.
Scoff at us? Take us lightly? We’ll beat you, or at least get your respect.
My Ernestown-ness, Kingston-ness and Raptor-ness is both inferiority and superiority complex all at once.
Neil and his homies and Frontenac, and the kids at other schools, probably didn’t look down at us. We put the chips on our shoulders. We had to get respect in basketball since Ernestown didn’t have football.
The one chirp we often heard was “you have a horse instead of a football team.” That was part of local lore that Ernestown spent money meant for starting a football team on this modern-art-masterpiece statue of a horse that was erected in front of the school.
In my parents’ youth, the horse was a prime TP target for Halloween vandals. My father was part of the Ernestown Horse Statue Guard one year.
That is how I came to really pull for the underdog story, and to love getting in on something at the ground level.
The Raptors fit with that. They dared to be different. They put the dinosaur on the jerseys. They didn’t care if someone laughed at it, because that meant they weren’t in on the bit. But maybe they would be once they saw that kids liked it.
And, Doug points this out, the NBA owners put the screws to Vancouver and Toronto by saying they couldn’t draft No. 1 overall for three years and could not spend to the cap. It was an overreaction to the Orlando Magic winning the Shaquille O’Neal lottery in 1992 and winning the lottery again the following season.
So as a budding Raptors fan that stoked an Against-The-World mentality. ‘The Man’ will let Toronto into the club, but won’t let them in VIP room of teams that can win the NBA championship.
AV
Now, that other cannot-miss kid who wore Eagle green, son.
Adnan Virk was in my grade and he was a basketball teammate at Ernestown. For my money, today Virk is the best Canadian sports host. Adnan is on DAZN, MLB Network, NHL Network and Yahoo! Sports Canada. He hosts an NFL podcast, the GM Shuffle, and he has his Cinephile podcast.
He was the first Muslim anchor on ESPN and has worked to foster diversity and inclusion. Give Adnan Virk all the agency in his well-earned success. People who knew him at the age imagined that for him ’cause he hustled on top of his giftedness. Even at 15, 16 and 17 years old. Working on his dream of being a television sports anchor. He bet big on himself, moved to Toronto at 18 to start getting reps.
Trust me, with young Adnan, it was like how you see a YouTube video of 13-year-old Seth Rogen doing stand-up comedy and he does not look like a kid quoting routines or trying to be someone else. He already is The Seth Rogen. So it goes with the greats. They have that confidence I have never had.
Like Dave and Rob, Adnan was a man with a plan. On the basketball team, his character, expressed by practising and playing hard when he subbed into games, helped our chemistry.
It contributed to us achieving our goal of a championship season in ’96. Party at the moon tower!
So those are the “humble origins stories” that tie in with my Raptors fandom. People who happened to be in the same corner of the world, who were Looking For A Place To Happen … and getting defensive stops along the way.
The Raptors are outsiders, too, as the NBA’s lone Canadian team. Always feeling they’re ignored by American experts. Seeing sports fans in Canada trade in dog-whistle comparison memes of basketball and hockey players’ “toughness.”
It is tough to stump for basketball when your favourite team is mediocre. The Raptors were down more than up from 1995 to about 2013, outside of the Vince Carter Era.
That time honestly always felt like chimera, to someone who saw what made the 1990s Bulls tic. It was overhype. Kobe Bryant had 12 NBA all-defensive team selections. Michael Jordan had nine. LeBron James has had six. Kawhi Leonard has had six. Carter had zero.
The Raptors became a solid playoff team toward the mid-2010s, but there was always a Ya-But. DeMar DeRozan had limitations. Kyle Lowry had limitations. They would have solid regular seasons, but you would always hear the non-believers tell you they would get trashed in the playoffs. Like you did not need to hear that, since — who is more brutally honest than a true fan? But, still, we hoped against hope.
And then came the Lebronto memes.
May 12, 2019.
Kawhi Leonard joins a team full of players who all overcame something. If your favourite team is good and lucky enough to approach the sport’s summit, you just know. You get into a zone.
It is rare for me. “Nate Sager” sounds like naysayer for a reason, fam.
When you have depression, like I do, despair and bargaining are kind of default settings. Thankfully I have many friends who help me up every time I take a charge and get called for a blocking foul.
Analogies!!
I watched Game 7 of the 76ers-Raptors series on my laptop. Doug Smith writes on Page 211, “Nobody played particularly well.” That spiked the tension for an observer. You can handle the logic of a loss in a big game if your beloveds emptied the tank, et cetera.
And, the Raptors got the last shot to make a series-winning basket. When Kawhi Leonard’s buzzer-beater bounced off the rim the first time, I turned from the laptop screen thinking, well, he missed, so “we” are going to overtime.
It was a full two seconds from the first bounce off of the rim to the fateful fourth bounce; I heard the crowd roar and thought, did the refs call a foul on the 76ers? Then the on-court celebration started and, on my end, I remember I started laughing and then sobbing. Because the Raptors did the hardest thing the hardest way.
“Team of Destiny” is a cliché. But I relate this little bit to say it was Catharsis — a word I first heard from Gord Downie on a song called “Every Irrelevance.”
The dam of doubt burst, and well, you know the rest of the story.
When the Raptors won the NBA title one month later, I watched it on a newsroom TV, gathered with a group of colleagues. Remember gathering with people? In a workplace?
I was actually the first person to go back to their desk. I had to since I did not want everyone to see that the happy tears were flowing like Champagne.
I took the Raptors flag I had in my workspace home with me, and walked around downtown Hamilton holding it up in front of passing cars so they could lean on their horns.
So this is the emotional equity I have built in the Raptors, although a pin was put in it for their pandemic-displaced Tampa Bay season. Obviously, the Raptors are a corporate product. I view them objectively. But they also truly tapped something organic.
Wherever I wind up, we had the spring of 2019 that brought me back to my inner hopeful 18-year-old. We will always have it.
The end of the Expos was in the early 1990s when Charles Bronfman walked away from the franchise. Fight me, see what happens.