Disclaimer: if I watch sports where there is a home team or athlete to support, I turn into a chest-thumping cavewoman.
I’m a Canadian of (mostly) Italian descent, born and raised in Montreal.
Friday July 2nd was, for me, the equivalent of a big, knock-down blowout summer blockbuster in sporting terms.
The Montreal Canadiens were on Game 3 of the NHL Stanley Cup Final, the first time they’d made it so far since winning the cup back in 1993, over the Los Angeles Kings.
Italy was playing Belgium for a spot in the semi-finals of the UEFA European Football Championship.
Week 1 of The Championships, Wimbledon was well underway, and the order of play announced a match between Canadian and number 10 seed Denis Shapovalov, and Scottish legend Andy Murray (known otherwise as Sir Andrew Barron Murray OBE), who clawed his way into the third round of tennis’s most revered Grand Slam after coming back from multiple hip injuries and ensuing surgeries.
I don’t bite my nails, but considered starting last Friday just for form.
For your information, Italy beat Belgium 2 goals to 1, having deserved their victory, according to the commentators, despite a lot of rolling around on the grass in paroxysms of pain accessorized with stylized gesturing worthy of the Noh theatre. I don’t condone the antics of the Squadra Azzurra, but will shout Forza Italia! into the ear of anybody I come into close contact with, without batting an eyelash.
Shapovalov blasted past Murray in 3 sets, much to the dismay of the crowd, who were nevertheless relieved to hear that their beloved British stalwart has no plans to retire. Shapovalov, being an emphatically pleasant young chap bloke lad-like fellow, managed to speak with enough reverence for his opponent and humility regarding his own victory to legitimately expect a satisfactory amount of spectator support for the next round.
The Tampa Bay Lightning won the third game of the Stanley Cup Final 6-3, giving them a 3 game lead over the Montreal Canadiens. This went some ways towards increasing the IBU (bitterness index) of the beer I was drinking between fistfuls of chips and fried chicken. The match started with a rendition of Oh Canada sung mainly on-key and The Star-Spangled Banner, sung decidedly off. Playing on the heels of a controversial Canada Day, where celebration was muted by the unspeakably horrifying discovery of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children near former residential schools, athletes watched grimly as images meant to raise awareness and commemorate lives lost flashed on screen during the anthem.1
I imagine some may have found this homage insufficient, and hockey itself a frivolous or even tasteless distraction, with its propensity to degenerate into “fisticuffs,” as it’s referred to in Rule 56 of the NHL official rulebook. As I watched the game unfold, the broadcast peppered with advertisements manufactured to celebrate Canada’s multiculturalism and racial diversity in what I suppose is an effort to make amends for hundreds of years of oppression, I wondered whether I wasn’t as shallow as a wading pool. Where was my cynicism?
As it turns out, I haven’t got any and here’s why:
In stark contrast to the Italian footballers, I watched Tunisian tennis player Ons Jabeur throw up on Wimbledon’s Centre Court between the line judge and the ball girl, and then swiftly stand up and serve out the match, becoming the first Arab woman in the history of the sport to reach the fourth round. I’m getting misty writing this, and while I’m known to cry at the drop of a baseball cap, what gets me this time around is Jabeur’s sheer resolve, the stiffness of her upper lip, her phenomenal ability to overcome embarrassment, nerves and nausea with formidable pragmatism, sealing victory over a former champion in the process. If your voice has ever noticeably warbled during a public speech, or your stomach audibly bleated during a moment of great silence, hold your head high, briskly accept your body’s dissent, and get the eff on with whatever you’re doing.
Rolex runs this series of ridiculously moving ads during the tennis Grand Slams whose inspirational messages amount to something like, the beauty, elegance and legacy of sport and its iconic athletes cannot be reduced to statistics or scoreboards, but is rather reflected in their resolve, and in the drive to excel, perpetually, against oneself. If I had three to eight thousand dollars to spare, and fractionally more money than brains, I would carry a Rolex Oyster Perpetual in my tennis bag, and slap it onto my wrist in defeat as in victory.
Marginal mocking aside, pushing one’s limits, whether intellectually or physically, to the point of coming up against an army of oneself (clin d’oeil Björk circa 1995) floods the body with an onslaught of endorphins and adrenaline, which ward off depression and anxiety, and help those creeping their way down the pathological spiral to swing volley their way back up. Hence my writing about sports here as an amuse-bouche before pummelling a tennis ball down a hard court this evening.
Descending into one’s limbs relieves the confusion in one’s mind, debunks the disbelief, helps one ascend beyond the limits of representation and turns the gaze inward-out. Because people called me a bolle (Québécois slang for a smart person) in school, I was never considered an athlete, even though I danced for many years and practiced a variety of sports. I find this kind of narrow, binary categorization irritating, and refuse to subscribe to the view that professional athletes are all simpleminded knuckle-draggers or intellectuals, affected, ungainly sports haters.2
I don’t fully understand why, but sport has the ability to rally, to elevate, to unite, to create cohesion even in opposition. It satiates our need for community and belonging. Sports teams or athletes are symbols or even metonymies for a collective national identity, an extension of ourselves, and their excellence lends us superhuman sparkle for years after a trophy has been lifted or a record has been broken. It seems almost absurd, the logic defective, but the appeal of sports is lodged in the gut, rather than anchored in reason. The French expression esprit de clocher evokes the sort of attachment to the place from whence one comes which drives fans to thump their chests and scream into the lenses of camera operators. A synonym for this expression is, apparently, chauvinism.3 As irrational as nationalistic fervour may seem, its potentially dangerous angles are mostly eroded in a stadium or arena by the principle of sportsmanship, and its essential values, which include fairness and respect. One can root root root for the home team, but it is imperative to be gracious in both victory and defeat.
Since writing this article, both Denis Shapovalov and Montrealer Félix Auger-Aliassime have moved into the Wimbledon quarter-finals.
Italy is set to play Spain in the UEFA Euro 2020 semi-final today (yes, 2020, the pandemic having caused a 12-month delay just as the 60th anniversary of the competition was meant to be celebrated).
The Montreal Canadiens (or Habs (habitants) for short) have just won game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final, keeping them alive until at least tomorrow evening.
I will be riveted to my television set, frantically navigating my erratic wifi, and the TSN and CBS Sports apps, in my Squadra Azzurra jersey, a maple leaf painted on my face, shouting “C’mon” and “Go Habs, go” to no one in particular while spilling (local) beer down my front.
My nails are still perfectly intact and ready for an offhand gnaw.
If you know someone whose spirits might be lifted by a fistfight, a high stick, an ace or an offside, please send them my way.
Frontispiece photo taken by me at The Championships, Wimbledon, 2019.
As important as this topic is, I don’t have the stomach to research it further. Anything this grim involving children is more than I can handle physically and psychologically. If you want to read about the topic, I recommend “If this isn’t genocide, what is?” by Christopher Curtis.
For a few guffaws generated by poor writing and general absurdity, I suggest checking out sportssuck.org. My favorite is this picture:
I was just going to text about a montrealer making it to Wimbledon. I figured you must be over the moon :)
Nothin' like a good donnybrook, eh?