Vancouver Courier
for September 9, 1998

There are so many things to think about these days. The Supreme Court of Canada. Air crashes. The president of a country is jailed for life for genocide. The president of the United States' open zipper policy, now admitted. Russia ... Japan ... on it goes. Which is perhaps why I have chosen an apparently trivial issue today, though perhaps when all's said and done it's not so trivial.

I was born, raised and educated in Vancouver and have lived here most of my life. The only person who loves this place more than I is the newcomer who, upon getting off the plane from Toronto into a rainstorm which lasts two weeks, becomes in the way of all converts, more zealous than the natives.

It would take a dozen columns to describe how our city has changed since that New Year's Eve in 1931 when I first sniffed the then unpolluted salt air. But Lordy how it has changed!

But we're at the end of an era. Vancouver is a big kid now. Back in the 70s, Allan Fotheringham accused Vancouverites of "municipal masturbation" - and he was right. We were like the "front room boys" in my law class who constantly had their hands in the air to show off their erudition and enthusiasm to the professor.

There's still plenty of breast beating left but where there was once a bite to our boasting it's now mostly self serving platitudes uttered because we think it's expected of us when talking to "easterners".

This coming of age can be seen in two current sports stories - the Lions and the Canadians.

Baseball goes back a very long way in this town - and in my life. I remember my long lost pal Mike King and I going down to Athletic Park to watch the old Vancouver Capilanos, the "Caps", in the Western International League. We knew that the Tran brothers, Frank Mullins, and Bill Brenner belonged in the majors - hell, Yankee star Gil McDougald once played for Victoria didn't he? For a brief flurry we had the Mounties who had a Hall of Famer, Brooks Robinson. Now the Vancouver Canadians will be lost to Sacramento after next year.

How come? Doesn't everyone talk about the wonderful sunny afternoons with a "dog" and a beer, in the "greatest little ball park in the world"?

Alas, Mark Twain had the answer when he said "'Classic', a book which people praise but don't read." The Canadians are minor league, they don't play against anyone we hate, and too few talkers make it to the park.

Thus it is with football. I was around at the beginning and usually part of the 35-40,000 people who crammed into Empire Stadium. About 20% went for the football game - to the rest of us the game was occasionally exciting confusion. We went because we hated not the other team but the city it represented. Especially if it was Regina or Winnipeg which had tried to keep us out of the league. Or the whatever eastern city was in the Grey Cup. The tension was always in the air. The politicians told us every November at the "big" game that this utter hatred and contempt for other Canadian cities was healthy and bound the country together. I always wondered about that.

Vancouver no longer cares that Toronto might beat us - at least we don't care very much. The contempt for Winnipeg and Regina is gone because we've nothing to prove. The raison d'etre for the B.C. Lions has vanished - bush league from the start, the Canadian Football League has lost it's central theme - regional hatred.

Hockey may survive in Vancouver, though I doubt it. There will soon be only three Canadian teams and the chance of an all Canadian final will be all but mathematically impossible. It will be left to hockey fans willing to spend the equivalent of a mortgage payment to go the GM Place to save the franchise. I mean who the hell can hate the Phoenix Coyotes enough to pay those prices?

But this isn't a sports story, it's the cultural story of the greatest city in the world. We don't have to tell Torontonians or Haligonians that this is the best place on earth to live - any travel agent in London, England will tell you that. We've nothing left to prove.

Our hatred, so essential to sports, has become pity.

We've moved from the boastfulness of an inferiority complex to the calm arrogance which accompanies the air of certain superiority.

Jimmy Estrada fouling off 15 or 20 pitches to get a walk, Brooks Robinson making unbelievable plays at third, Willie Fleming and Bill Munsey kicking the hell out of the hated Hamiltons - it was wonderful. And so were street cars, "dining in the sky" on the 8th floor of the Sylvia Hotel, Shelley's 4X bread and the North and West Van ferries.

But that was then .. and now is now.