I’ll let that fester.

Sterling’s reaction was triggered by someone telling him about a picture Stiviano posted of herself and Magic Johnson on Instagram (which has now been removed). The NBA’s reaction to the tape was swift.

Yesterday afternoon, NBA commissioner Adam Silver held a packed press conference where he banned Sterling “for life from any association with the Clippers’ organization or the NBA.” Silver then fined Sterling for $2.5 million, “the maximum allowed under the NBA constitution”, promised to donate the money to anti-discrimination and tolerance organizations, and is pushing Sterling to sell the team. He needs three-quarters of owners’ votes to boot out Sterling. Silver expects full support.

This is an important step that some media outlets did not think Silver would make. But it may not be a step against racism. Instead it seems like a need to preserve image and ensure players don’t boycott games. Otherwise, if this were solely about equality, Sterling would have been gone long ago. In 2009, for instance, Sterling paid more than Silver has fined him to settle trouble for discriminating against black and Hispanic people in his own L.A. apartment buildings. Deadspin has collected an entire list that dates back to 1983 of Sterling’s past disgusting and racist beliefs and actions.

The public response has varied.

Over the past few days, celebrities, NBA players, NBA coaches, and former players expressed their disappointment on social media. Some even urged fans not to come out to the games. Warriors coach Mark Jackson and comedian and actor Kevin Hart explained that Sterling has to be hit where his money grows.

On the flip side, musician Pharrell recently said there is a “new black” that should not blame non-people of colour for their ignorance . He told Oprah, “the New Black doesn’t blame other races for our issues…”

I wonder how Pharrell feels about Sterling. I wonder if he knows that the NBA was aware of his ignorance long before Saturday.

People like Pharrell who may be shocked that racism is alive and well need to be reminded that not all racism looks like Sterling’s. Racism comes in all forms: insensitive “innocent jokes,” remarks about stereotypes, an innocent opposition to dating a specific race. All of it—and more.

And unless we are open to admitting personal ignorance and even privilege, we could end up hurting fellow humans as much as Sterling has his team.

An XCC Match on the Walpole Island First Nations Reserve, August 2010. Photo by Jeremy Beal.

The champ climbs into the steel cage against the sounds of loud, thrashing theme music, polite applause, and the odd hiss. Caleb Grummet may be holding the championship belt, but the crowd isn’t here to see him retain the title. Chris “The Menace” Clements is waiting in the ring, and the 900 fans in attendance have already given their hometown boy a hero’s welcome.

Before the crowd even has a chance to roar, Clements opens with a rush of punches that lands one good right hook to Grummet’s ear and sends him scampering back. Grummet, knowing well he’s outgunned by Clements’ standup game, backs out and buys some breathing room. When the pair lunge again, Grummet performs a textbook takedown, twisting Clements onto his back and wrapping his neck in a headlock, cutting off blood to his brain and air to his lungs. Clements manages to wriggle his way out of the hold, only to be trapped yet again. The partisan crowd groans and the referee squints closely for any sign of submission or loss of consciousness. Clements moves calmly and conserves energy, working his weight against an imperfect hold all the while ticking down the seconds he has left.

Mixed martial arts will be sanctioned in Ontario for the first time starting in 2011. This type of combat sport, incorporating aspects of boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, and martial arts, is often referred to as Ultimate Fighting, from the name of its most prominent organization. Though six other provinces and at least 46 U.S. states allow professional MMA matches, Ontario has held out longer than just about any other major jurisdiction on the continent besides New York State.

Opposition to mixed martial arts has generally come in two flavours: concerns over medical health and concerns about the moral problem of condoning violence. At the annual general meeting of the Canadian Medical Association in August, the CMA’s then-president Dr. Anne Doig restated the association’s official call to maintain the ban: “We are concerned when people engage in activities, the sole purpose of which is to pummel, kick, punch, scratch—whatever methods they use—until either somebody is seriously hurt or injured, or somebody cries uncle and submits.”

The other major concern that this kind of fighting prompts is that, beyond being damaging to the body, it is also, in some way, corrosive to the soul—that the spectacle of two gladiators beating each other senseless satisfies an appetite too dark and primal to be sanctioned by a modern society. In August, Toronto writer Susan G. Cole called the new move to legalize “a sign of social depravity” and “repulsive,” in her column in NOW Magazine. “Does anyone really think we can do anything about reducing violence in our culture,” she asked, “when the government is making money by entertaining sadistic audiences with vicious bloodshed? The fact that it’s popular doesn’t make a difference to me. Blood lust has always been big, ever since the Romans sent the Christians to the lions.” The arguments against MMA are both scientific and emotional, but they’ve been outshouted by the cheering masses and the ring of the cash register all the same.

MMA might not have been legal in Ontario, but it has been going strong under the province’s nose longer than the current government has held office. Competitions have been running underground in southern Ontario for more than a decade, one of the province’s worst-kept secrets. As early as 1996, they’ve happened on First Nations reserves near Barrie, Brantford, London, and Windsor. The on-reserve location isn’t coincidental: in the wake of the Ipperwash crisis, the Ontario government has shied away from challenging the boundaries of First Nations’ sovereignty. The result was, and remains, jurisdictional ambiguity, allowing grey-market businesses— gambling, tobacco, extreme fighting—to thrive, a legal blind spot hidden in plain view.

But in less than a year, the Ontario government’s position on legalizing MMA shifted from visceral disgust to “not being on the radar” to fast-tracked official endorsement. The turnaround was in large part the result of concerted lobbying by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, the sport’s largest, richest, and most recognizable league.

UFC president Dana White has repeatedly called Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe the “mecca” for mixed martial arts, and expressed his intent to conquer. White told anyone who’d listen that “Ontario is the UFC’s biggest market,” that support for his sport was virtually unanimous, and that it was only a matter of time before legalization threw the doors open. In early 2010, White appeared satisfied with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s assessment that legalizing the sport wasn’t a top priority. “The world being the way it is, he’d be in real trouble if MMA was at the top of his list,” White quipped. After all, that was solid progress from the premier’s assertion that he “hated” the sport a few short months prior.

Privately, however, the UFC was lobbying hard. In May, White decided to flex his company’s considerable muscle: with almost no notice, he announced that the UFC would be making a “major announcement” at a Toronto press conference a few days later. That vague promise drew a scrum of reporters of every stripe, who turned out en masse. The move turned out to be some well-scripted posturing, and White announced to a disappointed crowd the opening of a satellite office in Toronto, helmed by former Canadian Football League commissioner Tom Wright. In addition to the well-known football heavyweight, the UFC had already retained former Ontario premier David Peterson’s bulldog lobbyist law firm Cassels Brock, who had already been applying pressure behind the scenes for some time.

The PR stunt was a pushy, calculated move, but the numbers did their share of talking as well. The nanny-state accusations, the lobbying pressure, and the promise of adding millions to the provincial coffers through sanctioned events proved enough to let MMA legislation skip the queue. On August 14, Sophia Aggelonitis, at the time Ontario’s minister of consumer services, announced that in the interest of keeping fighters safe, Ontario would be giving professional mixed martial arts the go-ahead starting in 2011.

Photo by Jeremy Beal.

On the Tuesday before the August 28th match, I’m hanging out at Adrenaline Training Center, a pristine MMA training centre sitting behind a hardware store parking lot in London, Ontario. Adrenaline opened in 2007, a stone’s throw from a rough neighbourhood notorious for OxyContin abuse and prostitution, but the gym’s interior strikes a hard contrast to its host neighbourhood. It’s almost fussily clean, with perfectly maintained equipment and clean-cut staff and patrons. A regulation boxing ring and an MMA-specific steel cage occupy opposite ends of the gym, while punching bags, free weights, and even a gift shop sit neatly between.

Alex “Pecker” Gasson greets me at the front desk and gives me the tour. He stands just under six feet tall and has won enough accolades in kickboxing, MMA, and Pankration (a fighting style descended from ancient Greek wrestling) to fill several trophy cases. Today he sports a pink crescent scar around his left eye, courtesy of a full three-round bout two months prior.

“Three stitches, a nice, clean cut,” he waves dismissively.

Upbeat and energetic, Gasson talks up the mix of groups that use the gym. It plays host to wrestling clubs, fitness fanatics, boxers, martial arts groups, and, of course, MMA classes, their bread and butter. (Though matches have never been sanctioned, official training in the sport is condoned and prolific throughout Ontario.) Their patrons come from varied backgrounds: students from nearby Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario flood in every fall; thirtysomething professionals arrive in their BMWs alongside teenagers on ratty 10-speed bikes.

The Ontario decision is only a few days old, but having spoken with Gasson a few weeks earlier, he thought the change was bound to happen. He thinks the organizations that have been operating illegally will flourish under a new regulatory regime. “The people going to the shows, they aren’t die-hard fans of the promoters,” he says. “They’re fans of the fighters. The organizations that know the fighters, that already have relationships with the big names—they’re the guys that will thrive.”

New sanctioning will bring with it a new provincial governing body and, most likely, strict guidelines that help justify the Ontario government’s change of heart on the issue. That means a board of governors and an oversight body. I ask Alex if there is anyone from the tightly knit community he thinks the province should bring onboard, in terms of expertise. “Sure. Me.”

When you make your living getting kicked in the face, a healthy dose of narcissism is more or less requisite. But Gasson and his cohorts from Adrenaline might just be the people best suited to take their sport into the light. They take it seriously, train top-shelf athletes and run a very tight, respectable ship. What’s clear in talking to Gasson and others is their ambition towards the mainstream credibility at home they enjoy everywhere else on the continent.

Chris Clements, a trainer and mainstay of the Adrenaline team, is often credited with holding the world record for fastest knockout in the sport, thanks to landing a quick haymaker to an opponent’s charging jaw in Montreal in 2006. Clements, 34, has been involved in MMA for about eight years. Trained originally in tae kwon do and then as a boxer, he was taking some time off when he read about MMA in the newspaper. Seeing a chance to fight in real matches for real money, he got involved and became one of the bigger Ontario names in the sport while it was still in its infancy.

Clements’ 80-kilogram frame sits slack and comfortable behind the gym’s desk, flanked everywhere by merch bearing his and his partners’ names. He speaks calmly and thoughtfully with the quick cadence of the southwestern Ontario accent, and falls naturally into a conversation about the state of the sport in the province.

“That’s one thing about these fights. Everywhere else you fight, there’s a commission guy watching you get your hands taped. There’s blood tests, steroid tests. On the reserves there’s no one. They could be taping metal bars to their hands. There’s hepatitis, HIV. Blood can get into your eyes, your mouth, you just don’t know.”

Consistency and fairness is another black-market problem. “Pecker and another guy had a draw at the last one. [The promoters] wanted them to go another round, and they said no, so they just went back and changed the scores.”

“With the amateurs it’s even worse. These promoters are making a lot of money. When I first started you had to be training for years. You’d have to have a known MMA coach, he’d put in a word for you, and you’d get a small fight. I’ve been at fights on native reserves, you go talk to the guy in the dressing room, ask him how long he’s been training. He says some guy in a bar offered him $500 to fight the night before. It disrespects guys like me who put in 10, 15 years of martial arts training. It makes us look bad. With some of these events, if they have 15 fights, I’d say out of 30, maybe six guys actually belong in the cage.”

Clements shares the opinion with the rest of the gym that the decision to sanction the sport is a good one. “I’m in the main event this Saturday on the reserve, and it’s my home town. I wouldn’t do it for any other reason. I’d rather see them get wiped out … I think they’ll go under.”

Crossing the bridge onto the Walpole Island First Nation on the Saturday evening, there isn’t much to tell you anything’s changed. The only visible difference is the lack of brand-name franchise stores in the strip mall. The hockey rink hosting the fight looks like anything you’d find in a thousand small towns across Canada.

But the reserve still carries a stigma among outsiders; I was surprised at the friends and family members who warned me of the dangers of setting foot on the reserve. Some expressed concern for my safety, others refused an invitation to come along. An astonishing number recited hearsay about the calamities that had happened to friends of friends who “went over there.” Of course, it was all disturbingly bigoted nonsense: whatever problems exist on this reserve, the urge to rough up white MMA fans with money to spend is not one of them.

The racial dynamics of the event are curious. You get the impression—from the demeanor of the Bkejwanong security guards and police on site and the notably small number of aboriginal fans in the crowd—that the event is regarded as an oddity at best. Native kids with skateboards stand and watch the crowd of almost exclusively white revelers lined up outside the arena with a wary curiosity. There are 900 people here to see the fight, but only a dozen or so are residents of the reserve.

Historically, these events have played the indigenous iconography to the hilt: the last organization to set up shop at Walpole was Fighting Spirit MMA, which bills itself as Ontario’s “Ab”original MMA organization. (The band council at Walpole recently cut ties with the group over some outstanding bills.)

Tonight, however, the promotional team is a company out of Michigan called Xtreme Cagefighting Championship, or XCC. The American league found an aboriginal silent partner to get around local ownership bylaws, which was contentious, but not contentious enough to stop the fight. The coming change could be a bellwether for the soon-to-be-legal business. With legitimacy looming, the larger, better-funded American leagues look poised to crowd out the smaller organizers—mainly aboriginal entrepreneurs—that have controlled the black-market sport for more than a decade. Tonight, titled “XCC 64: Battle at the Border 10,” marks XCC’s first foray into Canada.

MMA events may be illegal, but patronage, promotion, and sponsorship are alive and well: restaurants, energy drinks, gyms and gear outfitters are keen to slap their logos all over the event’s promotional material, and a select few are even shilling their wares in the arena the night of the fight. Local businesses, both directly related to the sport and others looking to advertise to the target demographic the events pull in, actively and aggressively sponsor rounds, intermissions and official after-parties. A small family-owned vitamin water company has been following the various tournaments so closely that their daughter is invited to sing the national anthem to start the night.

Before that can happen, though, an emergency of sorts breaks out. Woodrow James, the XCC lieutenant and promoter responsible for the evening, has been flitting in and out of the arena, dressing rooms, and small circles of agitated entourages, putting out fires. There have been some no-shows (more the rule than the exception at these events), and James is calming down a supremely agitated manager whose fighter is apparently without an opponent. The confrontation degrades almost instantly into a shouting match.

“Your guys should fucking be here; this is bullshit! You’re fucking amateurs! The whole setup is amateur!”

“Fuck you, then, leave—fucking leave!”

As it turns out, the two missing fighters had been pulled over en route from London by the police, who had clocked them at 180 km/hour in a 50 zone. Inexplicably, they were only delayed and all the fights advertised on the card went on, although in shuffled order.

Speaking with James, flush with excitement from having successfully quarterbacked his first Canadian event, he sounds more like the biggest fan in the building than the orchestrator. He is a thirtysomething former fighter who was plugged in to the London scene well before he got his job with XCC. He was roommates with Chris Clements and is on a first-name basis with most of the staff at Adrenaline. “Chris Clements is my best friend,” James says. “Business is business, but I’m scared as shit for him and I want him to win.”

James loves the location and considers it well above the median. “I love the arena atmosphere. The fighters get to have showers, a little breathing room, a place to sit.” Even south of the border where the events are legal, it seems frills like showers and proper dressing rooms are few and far between.

The fights start a full hour and 15 minutes later than advertised but the crowd barely seems to notice. The national anthems are belted out, the announcer spills out the opening ceremony and the fighting commences.

The first match of the evening neatly illustrates the Canadian Medical Association’s assertions about the risks of brain injuries in MMA: Jeff Silver, an Adrenaline-trained fighter, lands a right hook not 20 seconds into the match that leaves his opponent, D.J. Gamble, stupefied on the ground, announced colloquially as TKFO—“Technically Knocked-theFuck-Out.” The crowd doesn’t seem to mind trading substantial fights for highlight material, and excited chatter bubbles up while the next fighters are immediately introduced in the interest of making up the lost time.

The second fight is the sole women’s bout of the event, pitting Bernice Booth against Randa Markos. Their fight is a particularly technical one, filled with more punches and kicks than the average men’s bout. It ends with a full flip into an “arm bar submission,” whereby Booth’s elbow is hyper-extended against her opponent’s thigh, that forces Booth to tap out.

The evening is filled with strange juxtapositions: all-American looking dudes taking on tattooed punks; flabby bodies pitted against muscle-bound Atlases. Throughout the entire night there is a palpable current of energy flowing through the crowd, punctuated by the oohs and ahhs that accompany landed fists, knees, and all sorts of bloodletting. That it caters to baser instincts doesn’t make it any less irresistible or troubling. It’s dangerous and brutal, disciplined and technical, entertaining and grandiose, cheap and sickening.

Chris “The Menace” Clements looked to be on the verge of passing out from the arm twisted around his neck, complemented by an ongoing introduction to Caleb Grummet’s elbow. Somehow, Clements slips free and quickly rises to his feet, and the momentum of the match turns, with Clements landing a string of solid punches until the sound of the bell ends the round. The fighters retreat to their corners, Clements eerily composed, as if he’s standing in his own living room.

Thirty seconds into the second round, Clements’ fist opens up Grummet’s forehead, sending a torrent of blood spattering over both fighters. The cut is bad enough to put the fight on hold for some first aid, but Grummet is soon back on the mat, showing a brave face but not much else, and absorbing blow after blow until the referee halts the fight, calling the match in Clements’ favour and awarding him the belt. Adrenaline has another champion on its staff, and The Menace spends the next 20 minutes posing exhausted but victorious for the cameras, smiling and looking not even slightly dangerous.

These are the last days of underground MMA on the reserves, and whatever your opinion on the sport itself, having events sanctioned and governed by stricter and safer regulations should be a welcome change. Distaste for the sport does not justify indifference to the well-being of its participants. For all the gladiatorial hyperbole put on by the organizers who market the sport, the fighters consider themselves, and each other, legitimate athletes who are due the same protections and respect that their peers in boxing, hockey, and every other violent sport receive. This is a sport that prides itself on pushing limits and buttons, but the core of this phenomenon is still the men and women who choose to enter the ring, but have had to risk shoddy conditions to do so. Those conditions are set to improve, but there is a more important change coming next year. It’s all too clear that the appetite for this controlled violence exists: pay-per-view numbers and the draw to events like the ones on Walpole Island speak for themselves. These blackmarket venues provided a moral cover for Ontario’s collective self-image. MMA was condoned, but could essentially be dismissed as de facto criminals servicing a fringe group of ultraviolent thrill-seekers. Now that the sport has been embraced, it becomes a true piece of Ontario’s official identity. One wonders whether the province will be able to tell the difference.

I remember when you did what you’re doing right now for the Phillies for the Jays. It was just last year. How could I forget? You were the reason—perhaps the only one—local fans continued to return to the Rogers Centre. The few bums that were in the seats were there for you, not for the team. When somebody had an extra ticket, the first question that anybody asked was, “Who’s pitching?” The only answer that meant anything was Doc Halladay. In a sports-mad city, you were the only thing that kept baseball relevant.

This season you’re ripping it up in Philadelphia, your first year in the National League, dominating the competition the same way you used to in Toronto. You’ve been on the hill four times so far and your record is a perfect 4-0. You already have two complete games and have given up a miserly 26 hits in 33 innings-pitched. Your ERA is under one. You’ve struck out 28 hitters and walked only three. There’s no doubt you’re the best pitcher in baseball right now and you’re probably the best player in the game, too.

The thing about you, though, Roy, is that you mean so much more to a ball club—and to a city, maybe even a country—than just what you produce. Everybody loves you for your humility and your blue-collar attitude. You’re a workhorse and a gentlemen. Players respect you, fans adore you. You may not be warm and cuddly, but your focus in unrivaled. Toronto couldn’t give you a chance to get what you ultimately wanted—a chance to win—so you moved on. It was the kind of break-up that was best for everyone involved.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t miss you every fifth day. Sure, the Jays got off to a hot start. But, really, they always do. We know they’re just a tease.

More so than any other sport, baseball is a pasttime. An American one at its heart, but there were times when the sandlot game gripped the whole country. I can remember the halcyon days when the SkyDome was packed to the rafters every day. When the team was loaded with players who had your competitive fire, Roy, people who had your character. Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Devon White, Kelly Gruber, Pat Borders, Paul Molitor. The list goes on. I remember how not just the city of Toronto but the entire country got behind the team. I remember living in Vancouver and watching as the Jays brought the World Series to Canada for the first time.

The Blue Jays could be called a national pasttime then. They created conversations across the country the way hockey and curling do. People watched for the sport itself and for the emotion that came with it. Today, Torontoians watch baseball to drink beer in the sunshine. Today, there seem to be more empty seats than filled ones at the Rogers Centre. Today, I couldn’t imagine a 10-year old in Vancouver getting behind the Jays.

You were the only thing that reminded me of those days, Roy. You might not have played on those teams, but you symbolize their greatest virtues. You were a bridge that connected the good ol’ days of the past to the sad-sack days of the present. But you still made the game—or at least the games where you were pitching—worth watching. I wish you luck, Doc, because you deserve better.

Baseball in Canada just isn’t the same. And, honestly, I don’t think it will be for a while.

Toronto's Rogers Centre (formerly Skydome), built with public funds and later sold off to private business for a pittance. A major league sports team is often assumed to be more economically stimulating than actual results attest. Creative Commons photo by Mike Babcock.

The National Hockey League playoffs open this week and the abundance of emotion-laden storylines are sure to captivate a significant portion of the the Canadian sporting public’s hearts. But while three Canadian squads—the Vancouver Canucks, the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators—vie for Lord Stanley’s coveted Cup, there’s another, less exciting, story unfolding that probably should captivate our minds, even those of the non sports-adoring variety.

Tomorrow, the city council of Glendale, Arizona will vote to approve the arena-lease agreements for the two bids put forward to purchase the suburban community’s NHL hockey club, the Phoenix Coyotes. But, as the Globe and Mail reported this weekend, even if the leading bid, submitted by Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reisdorf, is approved the lease agreement may not survive. In an interesting twist of fate, a lawyer for the Goldwater Institute recently announced that the conservative watchdog group won’t hesitate to take the city of Glendale to court if it appears the agreements are in violation of Arizona laws against public subsidies for private corporations.

The concern for Goldwater is a piece of the Reisdorf “memorandum of understanding” that calls for local taxpayers and businesses to foot up to $165-million of the purchase price and annual operating losses. While this sort of stipulation isn’t unusual in the standard agreements between sports franchises and host cities, it is unusual that a powerful watchdog is calling both parties out.

For too long, the public has dogmatically accepted the connection politicians and team owners like to tout between sports franchises and local economic development. Massive public subsidies are regularly given to billion-dollar sports operations under the guise that they will bring an influx of new economic activity to the local community. This year alone, Winnipeg, Quebec City and Hamilton have all, at one point or another, flirted with the idea of bringing a professional hockey team home. And each has made claims about the economic benefit a pro franchise would bring. However, the problem is that justification is demonstrably false. There is, in fact, no economic rationale for publicly funded sports teams and stadiums.

According to Andrew Zimbalist, a prominent sports economist at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, all independent scholarly research on the economic impact of sports teams and stadiums has come to the same conclusion: there isn’t any. As he told Stephen J. Dubner on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, contrary to the rhetoric often aired by local politicians and sports teams owners, “one should not anticipate that a team or a facility by itself will either increase employment or raise per capita income in a metropolitan area.”

The economics behind this are complicated, but, generally, three principles hold. First, sports stadiums rarely create new capital: consumer spending on sport is almost always a redistribution of existing dollars in the local economy. People don’t spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise; they simply spend some their entertainment budget on local teams instead of something else. Second, much of the income generated by the team ends up leaking out of the local economy. Millionaire owners and players have their savings tied-up in world money markets and often live and spend their money outside of the host city. Third, and perhaps most importantly, host governments typically contributes close to two-thirds of the financing for the facility’s construction, usually takes on obligations for additional expenditures and routinely guarantee a significant amount of revenue. In other words, it’s the taxpayers that bear most of the risk—not the multimillion-dollar franchises that make a city home.

That’s not to say there aren’t perfectly good reasons for cities to host big-time sports teams or build world-class sports stadiums. It’s just that the supposed “positive economic impact” of a sports franchise shouldn’t factor into local governments’ decisions. Cities spend millions of dollars on cultural activities that they don’t anticipate to yield additional revenue. Sports teams can have a powerful cultural impact on a community and are integral part of most cities’ social fabric. If local residents value sport they are obviously welcome to allocate public dollars toward it. In fact, I, for one, hope they do. But sports teams and stadiums should be sold as a source of civic pride—not as a source of economic development.

Today in Verbatim, This contributing editor Andrew Wallace interviews Dave Zirin, sports editor of U.S. progressive weekly The Nation and host of Edgeofsports.com, a blog and radio show that examines the collision of politics and sports. He’s the author of several canonical books on that topic, most recently of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, and before that wrote What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States and Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports.

As always, this is a transcription of the biweekly This Magazine podcast, “Listen to This.” You can hear the whole audio interview here, but we’d also encourage you to easily subscribe to the podcast through iTunes so you never miss an episode.

Q&A

Andrew Wallace: You were in Vancouver prior to the Olympics and I read your piece in Sports Illustrated. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the sense of discontentment that you experienced there before the Games.

Dave Zirin: I was there just a couple weeks before the start of the Games and what I found, walking around the streets and just talking to people is that it seemed to finally settle in on people just how much the Games were going to cost, how much of an inconvenience it was going to be, and just how shut out of the party a lot of them were going to be.

I spoke to one person who was so excited, and had been saving for a long time to go to one of the hockey games, just to find out that he wasn’t even close to what it would actually cost to get a ticket to go. That sense, you could see it just weighing on people in a really serious way. Also, this is a media term, the optics were just terrible. When I was there it was announced that funding for physical education programs were being cut, letters were going out to 800 teachers because of budget overruns. To have that on the front page of the local newspaper while the top flap was all about Olympics, Olympics, Olympics, happy, happy, joy, joy, it definitely bred a feeling of discontent.

Andrew Wallace: But do you think now, we’ve had the Games for the last two weeks and the hype machine got in motion and with the spectacle and excitement of it do you think that all of that will be forgotten?

Dave Zirin: Well it’s interesting; I think a lot of it was forgotten during the Games because there’s a rush. You’ve got so many people there and it’s such a big party, but if history is any guide, now is when you’re really going to get the second shoe dropping because the bill is going to come due. The amount of money, all the accounting is going to be on the table.

When Vancouver first got the games, one local politician said publicly that according to his figures and his estimates it would be a $10 billion influx of funds into the city. PriceWaterhouseCooper, the independent accounting firm, said right before the games started it would probably be more like less than a billion. That’s a huge drop off, now what are the final figures going to be? Once the dust is cleared and all the accounting tricks and obfuscation has been cleared off the table. That’s usually when you see politicians losing their chops, so we’ll see what happens.

Andrew Wallace: Right, one guy, Christopher Shaw with No2010, he said that he thought it would be the equivalent of the Montreal, maybe not equivalent in scope, but of the Montreal Olympics which everyone calls “the Big O” because I think with all the interest, they were still paying back over $100 billion in debt to the city.

Dave Zirin: Yeah that’s right, in Montreal, the lead up to the Games was similar. I mean it’s so interesting, you go back and you look at previous games and it’s always the same promises and it’s almost always the same results too. Before the Montreal Olympics a local politician said that Olympics cause deficits about as often as men have babies and yet, the Montreal Games of course, it didn’t get paid off until 2006. It took 30 years to pay off the debt. Will Vancouver be that bad? It’s hard to say, but one of the things is that the Olympics, and the financing of the Olympics, is always held hostage to the larger economic forces in society and in the world and I think that’s one of the things that really hurt in Vancouver is that this was the first “post-global recession” games and we’ll see what kind of effect that has in the long run.

Andrew Wallace: What do you think the implications could be for future Olympic events then, because I think what’s really interesting is what happened in Chicago recently, that their was such a backlash to that bid, right? So are we seeing a change in the tide there of how people feel about the Olympics?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, I mean I also think one of the things you’re going to see is the Olympics rely heavily on the BRIC countries and their satellites. By BRIC countries you know: Brazil, China, India (and Russia), and I think that their going to rely on countries where dissent can be smashed with as little publicity as possible and where a lot of these projects can be pushed through with as much hypocrisy as possible. I think that’s going to be the unfortunate future of the Olympic games unless we really do have international solidarity movements for people who want to keep the Olympics out and I think that’s going to be the only thing that leads to what I think is the only sensible solution for the Olympics which is to have a permanent winter and summer site and to eliminate the bid process all together.

Andrew Wallace: That’s interesting, what problems would that solve?

Dave Zirin: Well it would end the bidding process and that’s where you have the root of the IOC’s power and the root of a lot of corruption and lies that surround the Olympics.

See, the best way to understand it is that the IOC is like McDonalds headquarters and what they demand of every city is that they be a franchisee. That means if you’re a city and you decide say, democratically, through your city council that you’re going to have strings attached to the Olympic bid, that you’re going to have civil society at the table, that’s a favourite phrase, but at the end of the day though, if the IOC says “well, actually no,” then that’s just the way it is.

I spoke to a lot of people in Vancouver, very well meaning progressives who were pro-Olympics when they first heard about it, precisely because they got a ton of promises from local politicians about this seat that the table. But it was a mythical seat at the table and they became fierce Olympics opponents precisely because they were shut out of how a lot of the infrastructure spending would happen. And I think that’s the reality of the Olympics and if you had a permanent site it would just eliminate this kabuki theatre all together. Being on the International Olympic Committee would be little more than a ceremonial post, which is what it should be instead of what it is now, which is a position of a frightening power almost like a free-floating state with absolutely no oversight.

Andrew Wallace: And with charitable status right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah exactly, a non-profit that makes billions, I don’t even know how that works.

Andrew Wallace: So what do you think that means for say something like Rio? I mean, how does the progressive movement get in there and start speaking to the issues that could happen in Rio, because you know the things that are exacerbated by the Olympics are things like police corruption, political corruption and those are endemic problems in Rio right?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, huge issues in Rio with police brutality, huge issues of gentrification particularly the clearing of the favelas. I mean there’s already been a very dramatic gun battle where a police helicopter raided one of the favelas and someone in one of the favelas got a lucky shot off and the helicopter hit the ground—huge fire, explosion, right outside of Rio itself. I think the Rio example is going to be really interesting because, on the one hand you have a Brazil of that is ground zero to the World Social Forum movements in Porto Alegre, you’ve got the worker’s party in Brazil, that’s sort of on the one hand. But on the other hand, you also have the World Cup coming to Brazil just two years before the Olympics. They’re going to be able to push through a lot of the infrastructure, spending and policing that they need to do for the World Cup and that’s going to be interesting because it’s one thing to oppose the Olympics in Brazil. It’s another thing to oppose the World Cup. That might be a much tougher political needle to thread.

Andrew Wallace: That all being said, if we look at the Olympics that just happened, do you want to point out what you think your three most significant stories within the Olympics that went beyond the X’s and O’s of the field were?

Dave Zirin: Yeah, one, first and foremost, is the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luge slider, which really resulted from the fact that he and the other luge sliders had no access to be able to practice at Whistler because of Canada’s Own the Podium campaign. And the fact that the people who were in charge of the International Luge Federation, the FIL, they created this track up there in Whistler that, for a year, people have been warning about, that it’s too fast and it’s too dangerous, it’s too much like trying to turn luge into the X-games, some wacky spectacle of lightening speed.

So people were talking about it for a year, and the predictable happened, somebody died. And the Olympics just go on as if it didn’t happen, including NBC news, issuing a dictate to NBC sports to stop showing footage of Nodar’s death. They didn’t want it ruining the party. But it symbolizes so much of what’s wrong with the Olympics. The Olympics speak about standing for these ideals of ethics and sportsmanship, but in reality it’s “go for the gold all the way and go for network profits all the way,” and it’s an absolute farce. So that’s a big one is Nodar Kumaritashivili.

But there are other stories that complemented the Olympics as well. Not all of them are bad stories by any stretch. The other ones I would say though are like the protest movement that occurred, the fact that for all the debates and discussions about the protest movement, organized largely through the Olympic Resistance Network, I mean it was something that was an Olympic protest movement that was open, and out and on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, so they got a remarkable about of publicity and I think really put a marker in the ground for future cities.

So those are stories that I’m going to remember that took place off the field of play. Beyond that too, I’ll just throw another one out there, It was really quite shocking the amount of homophobia by broadcasters against U.S. skater Johnny Weir and how accepted it was. I mean, like broadcasters saying over the air that he should be gender tested, all kinds of things like that. That he was ruining figure skating. It’s just unbelievable; he wasn’t macho enough for figure skating? Are you kidding me? It’s just ridiculous; to have that amount of homophobia in figure skating just really set my eyes back.

Andrew Wallace: Were you impressed with how Weir came back? I thought his comments in the interviews after the original homophobic comments were made were quite interesting and quite strong.

Dave Zirin: Weir’s never been shy, that’s for sure. He’s never been shy, but I still regret he didn’t make it to the top five. He came in sixth, because Lady Gaga was going to come and perform, and be there in person, so that would have been a lot of fun. So we were denied that.

But I think it’s still an important story because of these issues. Particularly the issue of gender testing in Olympic sports, its something I’ve written a lot about in the last year with South African runner Caster Semenya being a part of that story and it’s something that the International Olympic Committee–you can tell they’re trying to shift away from it in a number of ways, but as of this interview we’re doing right now, I mean they still have a Neanderthal view of gender testing. Although they’re moving it away from having it in their rules that the idea of being a “man” is this inherent advantage in sport, which is at least somewhat of a step forward. They still operate on a very strict gender binary and haven’t quite figured out what to do with people who don’t fit into their little compartments.

No doubt, March Madness is a sporting spectacle to behold (the CIS Final 8, not so much). The tournament is so widely watched that Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. has made it an annual habit to calculate the hit the American economy takes as men and women across the States stop working and start consuming nothing but sport. This year, the consultancy firm predicts a gargantuan US$1.8 billion will be lost in productivity. CBS, the broadcast rights holder for the event, even created a “Boss Button” to accompany its online stream of the Final Four. The gadget, which counted 2.77 million unique users last year, instantly mutes the sound and replaces the tournament feed with a very intricate, very elaborate, spreadsheet in a bid to fool any suspicious supervisors that might be lurking nearby.

But the real loss that accompanies March Madness isn’t economic. It’s actually educational. Sure, it’s fun to think about people sneaking around the office, using the Boss Button to minimize work and maximize play. But it’s not so fun to contemplate the tournament’s darker underbelly, one that is hidden beneath a veneer of charming Cinderella stories and heart-warming anecdotes about teamwork, dedication and overcoming obstacles.

Every year, Dr. Richard Lapchick at the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports releases an eye-opening study on the graduation rates of Final Four teams that coincides with the start of the tournament. The findings are alarming, but perhaps unsurprising. Although NCAA Division 1 universities and colleges are graduating players at an increasing rate, the overall results are abysmal. Only six sides in this year’s tournament graduated their entire squad over the study’s six-year period, and a whopping 12 teams had a graduation rate of less than 40 per cent, including number-one seeded Kentucky (which graduated 31 per cent of its players). If U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had his way, those 12 teams would have been banned from play this year. A former college player himself, Duncan recently told the media: “I grew up with too many players who played on a successful team, who no one cared about their educational well-being. And when their playing careers were done, they struggled.”

What’s even more unsettling, however, is that the situation is markedly worse when it comes to African American players. While 79 per cent of tournament teams graduate 70 per cent of their white players, only 31 per cent graduate 70 per cent of their black players. In Kentucky’s case, each and every one of of the Wildcats Caucasian athletes graduated—but the same can be said for only 18 per cent of their black teammates. And the racial disparity reflected in this year’s study is by no means an anomaly. Earlier in the decade, UCLA, a perennial college basketball powerhouse, failed to graduate a single black player for five straight years and just two years ago an overwhelming majority of top-ranked teams graduated less than 25 percent of their African-American stars.

The NCAA often propagates the myth that college hoops are the last stop on the fast track to riches and glory in professional sports. But, as Lapchick points out, it’s statistically more likely for an African-American ballplayer to become a doctor or a lawyer than it is to make it to the NBA. What’s so problematic is that college ball players legally can’t be paid to play, while the universities they play for rake in billions. The players’ compensation is supposed to be a high-quality post-secondary education—something that, clearly, a shocking number of them aren’t getting.

The CIS Final 8 tournament may be considered a bore (though, I must admit, I follow it with a near-religious fervour—sadly, my Thunderbirds lost to Saskatchewan in Sunday’s championship), but Canadian institutions at least attempt to provide their athletes with a proper education. Of course, there are athletes at our schools that are just along for the ride. There always will be when it comes to college sports. But, in general, scholastic standards are higher and big-name institutions certainly aren’t reaping massive financial rewards off the backs of their students.

A handful of CIS varsity programs have recently made a concerted push for NCAA status, including the University of British Columbia. The profile that would come with a Canadian institution playing in the upper echelon of U.S. college athletics would  undeniably be huge. But for all the hoopla, hype and hysterics that March Madness brings, there remains a particularly nagging question that still needs to be asked: At what cost?

Brian McKeever qualified for the Paralympics and the Olympics, too bad his team started someone else.

Most people think that the ‘para’ in Paralympics means paraplegic, but it actually means parallel. Ironic, since for much of its history, its treatment has been anything but. In fact, the Paralympics has always been that thing that you’re vaguely aware is supposed to come after the regular Olympics, but is never seen, nor heard from unless you really are grinding it out to look.

Most audiences really get into disabled sports when they see them live, or they’re marketed with the right approach, (Remember, Murderball?) but when you combine a lack of coverage with an international community that has largely just begun to realize they should probably let their disabled citizens out of the attic, you basically get an event that looks like it was put together just to save the IOC from a potential human rights quagmire.

Yes, most able-bodied people see the paralympics as an athletic aside. The part that literally no one has energy for after the immense production of the Olympic Games, but I hope now that for the first time — things will be different.

The tickets to Paralympic events are still appallingly cheap, costing between $15 to $175 for the closing ceremonies in Whistler, as opposed to the $800 my family paid for the Olympic closing ceremonies.  A monetary value judgement that says nobody cares. With this information, what can possess me to think that this games will turn a corner?

Two things.

First, the coverage. This year’s Paralympics features 57 hours of Canadian coverage. (30 in french and 27 in English)  Sure, it seems utterly disparaging when compared against the 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage, but those 57 hours, of mostly replays, tape delays and highlight packages, are the most ever for a Paralympic games. Don’t forget the 150 hours of online coverage.  Plus, packaging Friday’s opening ceremonies with Saturday’s Canada vs, Norway sledge hockey game will give the games almost a day of exposure.

“Is it good or bad? Well, it is better than what they’ve had in the past. There wasn’t anything for the last two [Paralympics], I think, in this country,” Terry Wright, Vanoc’s executive vice-president of Games operations told The Vancouver Sun.

“We’ve certainly had an improvement. I think in general broadcasters see the importance of showing something.”

Exposure is most important because from that comes demand and from demand comes the raising of the overall international profile of the games, which allows the IPC to raise the price of broadcast rights and feed the resulting cash back to further Paralympic development.

There will be live coverage too. All sledge hockey games involving Canada will be live and all the medal rounds will be live.

Just to get two dozen broadcasters to come out for the games is a victory, since none will make any money from their efforts.

But broadcasting isn’t the only step forward, the other one began during the able-bodied games. That’s when Rick Hansen became the most prominently featured disabled athlete at an Olympic Games as one of the final torch bearers.  Sure, Mohammed Ali had Parkinson’s when he lit the torch in 1996, but he was never originally known as a disabled athlete like Hansen is.  The Man in Motion’s involvement indicated to the world that there would be no prioritizing of able-bodied athletes over disabled ones. The two games would co-exist together as two parts of the same event. In this way, Vancouver took a step towards equality that so many other host cities omitted.

Hansen was also front and centre as a member of CTV’s broadcast team in his regular ‘Difference Maker’ segment. The best of these was a profile of Alexandre Bilodeau’s brother Frederic and his impact on Canada’s first home-soil gold medal winner. It was distinctive for most because it showed how Frederic courage in dealing with his cerebral palsy motivated his brother to shoot for a higher level in Ski Aerials, but with Hansen at the helm there was also a change in presentation that’s rarely seen in mainstream media. When Hansen rolls in, we see him from top to bottom and not from the chest up to hide his chair.  Bilodeau’s CP gives him a speech impediment that would’ve been subtitled if the able-bodied media had final say, but here he can speak for himself.

Perhaps few people caught Chris Cuthbert issuing a challenge to Canada’s sledge hockey team following Canada’s gold medal win in Men’s Hockey: “Jean Labonte, get your team together.  Sledge hockey athletes, it’s your turn now.”

That mention was heard by over 94% of Canadians and though small, does wonders to instill the idea of an equal relationship between both events and their athletes.This has continued through the marketing campaign. The most popular Paralympic sports (mainly, Sledge Hockey and disabled skiing) have their athletes featured in spots narrated by Donald Sutherland just like the athletes of the regular games.

Let’s also remember that Vancouver 2010 marked the first time an athlete qualified for both the Paralympics and the Olympics. Don’t forget it wasn’t the IOC who ultimately prevented legally-blind cross-country skier Brian McKeever from doing his run, it was his own team who thought they could increase their medal chances with different athletes.

Sure the Paralympics may not have the audience numbers or the big broadcasting support, but as long as the attitude of the organizing committee, the volunteers and the media is that these are meant as a compliment to the main event and not a hastily stitched together addendum — the rest will surely come with time. After all, the entire disability rights movement has moved with baby steps, so why should this be any different?

By the way, those ridiculously cheap tickets are almost all sold-out. For all the concerns surrounding the traditional games, supporting the Paralympics means giving the world’s most undervalued minority a truly equal playing field.

One of Pivot Legal Society's Red Tents on the streets of Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Photo by The Blackbird.

The five-ring circus has rolled out of Vancouver, but the tents are still up. Hundreds of red tents, which became as much a symbol of our 2010 Games as those maple leaf mittens, won’t be coming down until we get our housing legacy. That’s the pledge of Pivot Legal Society, the non-profit legal advocacy organization that launched the campaign as some 350,000 visitors descended on Vancouver in February to soak up the so-called first socially sustainable Olympics.

The Red Tent campaign was pitched in response to the predicted shortage of shelter beds in the city during the Games and the failure of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee (VANOC) and its government partners to deliver on promises related to housing and civil liberties. The distinctive tents bear the statement, “Housing is a Right. This tent is protected by Section 7 of the Charter”—the right to life, liberty and security of person. They will be popping up in urban centres across the country as Pivot expands its action, which was inspired by a landmark constitutional case: last December, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the right of homeless people to set up temporary shelters on public property when they have nowhere else to go. The campaign will continue until, Pivot says, the ultimate Olympic legacy is realized: A funded national housing strategy. Canada is the only G8 country without one. In April 2009, NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) stepped up to the podium with a private member’s bill to push for adequate, accessible and affordable housing for all Canadians, but the Conservatives didn’t support the initiative. There were Olympic dreams that Vancouver would set a golden example of how to tackle homelessness, but when the road to the Games got bumpy, promises were torched. Let’s look at what happened.

During the bid stage in 2002, a coalition of environmental and social activists and academics formed the Games-neutral Impact on Community Coalition with “the purpose of maximizing the opportunities presented by the Games and mitigating the potentially negative impacts on Vancouver’s inner-city neighbourhoods.” The IOCC successfully pushed for a referendum on the Games, and together with the bid committee and its government partners, developed the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement (PDF), a set of promises that was incorporated into Vancouver’s bid book and was considered binding.

The statement addresses 14 areas—including civil liberties and public safety, housing, and input into decision-making—and makes 37 specific promises. It’s been touted as an unprecedented pledge by a mega-event host city to work with low-income communities and promote social sustainability, but it materialized into little more than public relations puffery.

While the city boasted about hiring binners to collect bottles and cans left around town (meeting a commitment under employment and training) and VANOC proudly made 100,000 event tickets available for $25 each (ticking off the box next to affordable Games events), housing and civil liberties promises were glossed over.

After a quarter of Vancouverites cited homelessness as their greatest concern in a 2006 poll, ignoring the housing crisis was a Quatchi-sized gaffe. Worst of all, it broke the promise that no one would be made homeless as a result of the Olympics.

According to the Metro Vancouver Homeless Count, the number of homeless people in Vancouver increased by 135 percent from 670 in 2002 to 1,576 in 2008. The tally is believed to greatly underestimate the reality, given the difficultly in tracking down and interviewing the homeless, and housing advocates estimated there were between 4,000 and 6,000 homeless during the Olympics. (There were an estimated 5,500 athletes and officials.)

There was a promise that no one would be involuntarily displaced, evicted or face unreasonable increases in rent due to the Games. But according to the IOCC, approximately 1,300 low-income single room occupancies (SROs)—many contained in old hotels on East Hastings and considered the last option before homelessness—have been lost since the bid was won and the city is not following its own policy to replace rooms at a one-to-one rate. The city defends its record, making another promise that from 2003 to the end of 2012 it will have nearly 2,000 additional non-market units built, compared to a loss of over 1,400 units. However, these numbers don’t take into consideration rent increases that have made SROs unaffordable for low-income residents, nor does it account for rooms held vacant by landlords. Further, the city counts provincially owned rooms as new social housing, when they are newly social, but not new accommodations.

Before the Games, condos were outpacing social housing in the Downtown Eastside at a rate of three to one, and SRO residents were being booted out of their homes as landlords renovated so they could raise rents and make room for Olympic visitors. The IOCC went so far as to file a human rights complaint with the United Nations in July 2009 (PDF), saying hundreds of renters could be evicted prior to the Olympics because of loopholes in tenancy legislations, which allows for these “renovictions.”

An early version of the Inner-City Inclusive Commitment to provide affordable housing proposed by the city of Vancouver included a three-tier housing model at the Olympic Village: market price, moderate income and core-need. However, when a new city council was elected in 2005, one of its first moves was to play Monopoly with the model and commit only 25 percent of the units to “affordable housing,” and of those 252 units, between 30 and 50 percent for core-need individuals. In February 2009, the city reported that the cost of affordable housing at the village had risen from $65 million in 2006 to $110 million. And as of print time, housing advocates feared the plan would be axed completely (the city said a final decision was yet to be made).

Since they failed on the housing front, in a desperate attempt to clean up the streets before the Games, the B.C. Liberals pushed through the controversial Assistance to Shelter Act in November. Dubbed the “Olympic Kidnapping Act,” the law gives police the power to haul homeless people off the streets, pile them into paddy wagons and deposit them at shelters when there’s an extreme weather alert, which can occur in Vancouver when the temperature hovers around zero and there’s heavy rainfall (read: winter in the city). After activists rallied against the act—housing experts came forward to denounce it and Pivot said it was prepared to challenge its constitutionality in court—the chief of the Vancouver police said his officers will only use “minimal, non-forceful touching” to persuade people to accept a lift to a shelter, and will back off if they are met with resistance.

Another Inner-City Inclusive commitment was to commit to a “timely public consultation that is accessible to inner-city neighbourhoods before any security legislation or regulations are finalized,” but the community only became aware of the draconian act when a document leaked, and hasn’t been involved in any meaningful consultations.

In a last desperate attempt to quell negative media attention, BC Housing and the city teamed up to intercept international journalists at the edge of the Downtown Eastside, before they could get to the gritty stretch. They set up an information centre, Downtown Eastside Connect, at the shiny new Woodward’s site, where they shared their “successes” in tackling homelessness, including the building of social housing on 14 city-owned sites. There’s no mention of the fact that construction of these sites was delayed and not one was ready in time for the Games. The cost of the propaganda kiosk: $150,000.

Inevitably, foreign journalists found their way to the Downtown Eastside and wondered how the world’s first “socially sustainable” Games could look like this: Human wreckage, open drug use, prostitution, crumbling buildings. And a legacy of red tents instead of homes.

How could all of these promises be broken? There was no budget to implement the recommendations, including no funding for an independent watchdog; there was no enforcement mechanism and a lack of accountability; many of the goals were not measurable and the statements were wishywashy and open for interpretation. But perhaps that was the point: Get Vancouverites behind the bid with promises of social sustainability, and then hope we forget about it when the circus comes to town.

Canada's women's Olympic hockey team pose with their gold medals after the winning game.

Guest blogger Canice Leung recently wrote in this space that Canada’s “national sport,” our beloved ice hockey, has became too elitist, too expensive and too inaccessible to maintain its position near to the top of the Canadian cultural hierarchy. Sparked by a fiery debate on Twitter the day before, her words were thought-provoking and insightful and her column provided an valuable perspective—one that those of us closely connected with the game often forget. And though I agree with the spirit of Leung’s argument, I have have to take issue with her conclusion, that hockey does not and should not represent this country.

She is right to point out that sport in Canada is a multimillion-dollar industry and that in certain respects it has become increasingly elitist and inaccessible. As Leung notes, higher-end ice skates alone can cost upwards of $600 and that’s just one piece of the bounty of expensive gear required to the play the sport at any level. Also, rinks are expensive to maintain, so ice-time is scarce and registration fees for youth hockey leagues are exorbitant. Just last week, the Greater Toronto Hockey League, the minor hockey association for the city that is supposed to the most diverse on earth, announced it would be doubling its fees next year. All the GTHL’s 512 teams will now pay $2000 to register a 16-player squad in order to cover the $500,000 hit the league expects to take with the introduction of the Harmonized Sales Tax in Ontario in July.

As Leung argued, circumstances like these make any sport—or any endeavour, for that matter—self-stratifying. Sure, there are bursaries, hand-me-downs and other equalizing measures out there. But with decreased accessibility comes increased elitism. More immigrants and second-generation Canadians may be filling roster spots in the game’s professional ranks. Yet there are also fewer opportunities for the less affluent to have a shot at playing the game at its highest level. For Leung, that means that when hockey is “put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents.”

But, for me, it’s still the national game.

The reason hockey needs to be more a more accessible and more equitable sport is precisely because it’s so deeply interwoven in our collective identity. Opening the sport to a wider, more diverse sample of Canadians will not only increase its already massive audience—10.3 million Canadians tuned in to the Olympic quarter-final against Russia; 21.5 million, nearly two-thirds of the country, for the gold medal match-up with the United States—and support other values we hold close, but also deepen the talent pool and make us that much better at, that much more connected, to our cherished national pastime.

When Leung writes that “in modern-day Canada, the idea that the sport represents us all seems anachronistic,” I think she may be missing the point. In today’s world, there is nothing that is going to perfectly represent us all. Hockey is for some, not for others. But the shared experience of sport can unite us and hockey is that shared experience for Canadians. The beauty of sport is that you don’t have to play it to take part in it—the Olympics final the perfect example of just that. It’s the overwhelming emotion and excitement coupled with hockey’s rich folklore that brings people together in one collective act. The fact that so many of us tune it on a nightly basis is what makes it ours.

Granted, it’s a shame the women’s game doesn’t get the attention it deserves—but that is true of all female sports and Canadian women’s hockey is probably in a better state than most. Plus, that culture is rapidly changing, particularly at the amateur level where more young and talented female athletes are playing competitive sports than ever before. They, too, share in the collective hockey experience and are increasingly becoming an active part in shaping it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t apply a critical lens to our national game, giving it a free pass simply because we love it. More access and more representation will only make our game bigger, better and more of a positive force in shaping Canada’s culture. Leung’s point is an important one and very well taken. But there’s still something distinctly Canadian about that good ol’ hockey game.

Hockey players at McGill University, Montreal, 1901.

I grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, home to the most diverse region in all of Canada, perhaps the world, in a Hong Kong immigrant household (caveat: my Man U-loving dad raised me on soccer). I’m intensely proud of that fact. So it ruffles my feathers that, hockey so often precludes all other events — a men’s hockey semi-final quarter-final win over Russia (at that big sporting event that shall not be named) garnered more media and spectator attention on a day in which four medals were won in non-hockey events.

Hockey, Wikipedia tells me, is the national winter sport of Canada and has a well-known history that predates European arrival. But in modern-day Canada, the idea that the sport represents us all seems anachronistic.

I tweeted as much yesterday, saying “Heres the thing about hockey: its a rich cdn’s sport. It irks me to no end one of the least accessible games somehow represents my nat’l ID. … That, and up until recently, it was (and arguably still is) a boy’s game. It just doesn’t represent us all.” The debate that ensued seemed to strike a nerve, which you can read in its entirety here and here.

The Canada-Russia game averaged 10.3 million viewers—a third of Canada’s population. I don’t doubt the popularity of hockey, but it’s the modern incarnation of the sport that irks me.

As I tweeted earlier, it doesn’t take much to figure out that hockey runs hundreds, maybe even thousands, beyond what more “democratic” sports cost: high-performing soccer cleats run about $200, plus another $100 for jersey, shorts, socks, shin guards. Basketball: $40 ball, $150 shoes. Hockey: high-end skates can run $600 — never mind the cost of pads, sticks, helmets, pants, jerseys, neck guards and everything else.

My boyfriend, a lifelong hockey fanatic and a player in his adolescence, took umbrage with my assessment. He says in his small town in New Brunswick, almost every kid, boy or girl, played the game. If they couldn’t afford it, coaches supplied hand-me-downs, freebies or communal team gear.

True, you can still enjoy a game of outdoor shinny on hand-me-down skates and sticks. And the game itself is still a rush to watch. But we don’t live in a Tim Hortons commercial — even a rec league requires all that equipment, and from it, the hockey industry — from the $300 Leafs tickets to Bauer and Nike — generates billions of dollars from it.

For a disadvantaged Toronto kid, charity, waived fees and mentoring seems to be the only way into the game these days, the Toronto Star found, quoting NHL goaltender Kevin Weekes: “The pricing is such that our sport is becoming an elitist sport.”

Playing at a rep level and up requires several thousand in registration fees, cost for travel, and that’s not even counting the gear. All totalled? $10,000 a kid. As the Star pointed out, this leads to kids—talented ones—dropping out because of the financial burden.

Any sport that requires such a money sink is self-stratifying. It’s a terrible social phenomenon happening not just in amateur sports, but also in skyrocketing university tuition, extra fees required even in public school, laptops and other technological gadgets that are now virtually mandatory in academic and professional spheres. It also means at the highest level, the NHL, as in many other places in life, those that succeed are the ones that can afford it. It’s disheartening that all these opportunities are moving further and further out of reach of low-earning Canadians families.

In recent years, more leagues, presumably aware of this problem, have started offering bursaries to players—but I’m sure the effects are analogous to university bursaries vs. tuition freezes and reductions.

@bmo, a gentleman I was talking with on Twitter, mentioned how sports such as football institutionalize the outfitting of players—high schools supply all the equipment. An online search turned up nothing on socioeconomic statistics of incoming players in any major leagues, but I’d be interested to see if there’s any correlation between how sports are funded and who ends up succeeding. For a country whose diversity will only increase, not to mention an NHL looking for a wider audience, this isn’t a passing concern.

The costs associated with modern youth activity isn’t just hockey, obviously. It’s just as wrong that serious coin must be spent for extracurriculars such as soccer, basketball, dance, gymnastics, horseriding, ballet, skiing or swimming.

The difference is, no one’s calling these the national sports of Canada. When it’s put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents. I think most Canadians believe we are a fair, free and equal country. Hockey, if it ever did represent that, doesn’t anymore.

The spirit of a nation comes from its people, emblematic of their shared experience, ethnicity, history or culture. Our spirit is that we lack all these, and instead take polite pride in them all. We are not one dish, one national dress, one language, one music (I would defect if Anne Murray or Celine Dion were our national chanteuses). How, then, can Canada reduce its sport to just one?