A Sporting Chance. William Humber

own country’s more tolerant culture in race relations but, as this story of Black participation in sports demonstrates, the record is far more troubling. Canada’s record in matters of race has been a disturbing mixture of occasional good intentions and ugly practices. The story of Black athletic participation in Canada has nevertheless been a record of remarkable accomplishment in one of the few fields (the arts being the other) in which some integrated accomplishment was possible. The key word is “some” and this story is often full of heart-breaking acts of exclusion.

      Canada’s sporting culture is not the same as that in the United States; commercial sports in Canada have had a less successful heritage. Athletes have often had to balance their sporting accomplishment with employment in other fields. Black athletes in Canada never had the luxury of assuming that a sports career could be an occupation in itself. If they intended to make it one, they often had to move to the United States. By their accomplishments in other fields, however, African-Canadian athletes disproved the racist conclusion that they were somehow only suited to sports.

      Even in its own right, however, sport is not a field of physical excellence separated from mental challenge. It is above all else a field of culture. It is as important to self-definition and expression as any branch of artistic, industrial or business life.

      The Black athletic experience has been shaped by its history as a separate identity whether because of real segregation or, as in Canada, because the African-Canadian community was so small until the last 40 years. This chapter has now largely ended though there is continuing fascination with the limited number of Black hockey players in the National Hockey League. This is at best, however, a small item of curiosity.

      However, an examination of Black sports participation remains a current issue in at least two ways. One of these is the problematic field of racial genetic exploration, which reduces the dynamic of public life to a lifeless debate on predetermined genetic capabilities of racial groups. In sports, as in every field, one’s original talent, if that could be measured (a dubious proposition at best), only takes one so far. It is the sheer willpower, determination and dedication of the athlete that matters.

      Rather than looking at genetic profiles based on absolute categories of racial definition (recognizing that 90 per cent of all Black Americans have some white ancestry), more can be gained by looking at social context. The significant involvement and success in sports by American Black athletes owes much to its being a field largely open to advancement and employment based on demonstrated ability.

      The second and more pertinent area of current study is immigration. Public discussion on the meaning, necessity and challenges of integrating new residents into the life of the country remain with us today. Often the customs, religion, lifestyle and appearance of newcomers are different from those of the majority population.

      Trinidad-born Nick Benjamin was first overall pick in the Canadian Football League’s 1985 draft of Canadian players. Here, Benjamin (number 65) is shown in the pulling guard position as a member of Montreal’s Concordia University team where he won All-Canadian honours.

      For much of Canada’s first hundred years no group, with the possible exception of the Chinese and Japanese, was more subject to these discussions as its Black population. In some ways that conversation continues though sports provides a partially liberating resolution by bringing communities together.

      This examination will uncover forgotten stories of tribulation and triumph; examples of the marvellous legacy of human diversity; the profound and often neglected strengths and contributions of immigrants; and the experiences of a community of people defined by race.

      As a distinct and at times almost invisible minority in a country that most chose to come to, the experience of African Canadians is markedly different from that of African Americans. Canadian Blacks sought out and participated in most sports choosing hockey in some cases, despite its cost and nearly all-white makeup, because it was the essence of a Canadian identity they wished to celebrate.

      The Black sporting experience in Canada has five distinct characteristics. The first are those athletes with deep roots in the country. They share a common 19th century immigrant heritage with new European arrivals and Loyalists fleeing from the United States. They include Ferguson Jenkins, Herb Carnegie and Fred Thomas, the sons of American and West Indian descended parents. Jenkins as well as Sam Richardson descended from slaves who had escaped to southwestern Ontario through the Underground Railroad. Boxer George Dixon grew up in Africville, the most famous Canadian Black settlement and the home of Loyalist Blacks and Jamaican Maroons. Reuben Mayes’s family dated back to the immigration of Oklahoma land seekers around the turn of the century. Among baseball player Jimmy Claxton’s ancestors in British Columbia are freedom-seeking American Blacks, French Canadians, Aboriginals and Scottish immigrants.

      A second group are those immigrants who arrived throughout the 1970s and ’80s in the wake of changes in Canada’s immigration policies. Recent gold medallists including Donovan Bailey, Mark McKoy and Lennox Lewis have a West Indian background and in Lewis’s case a British one as well. Outstanding female athletes like Molly Killingbeck are also West Indian immigrants.

      Action shot of the Toronto Raptors in their second season. Courtesy of Seneca College.

      A third are those African Americans who have influenced Canadian sports for over a hundred years. They usually returned to the United States when their sports employment ended. In 1946, baseball provided Canadians, particularly the French-speaking population of Montreal, with an opportunity to accord a lone champion, Jackie Robinson, the kind of life-affirming support that helped change the world. The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993 led by Manager Cito Gaston and their homerun hero Joe Carter, both later inducted into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame despite their American citizenship. A Canadian invented basketball but its greatest practitioners have been Americans. Black American general managers, Stu Jackson and Isiah Thomas, were in charge of the Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors when they entered the National Basketball Association in 1995. The Grizzlies later left Vancouver but Toronto’s star player was the Black American, Vince Carter. Another American immigrant, Mike “Pinball” Clemons of the Toronto Argonauts, became the face of the team as first its premier player, later its coach and as a permanent Canadian resident.

      Perdita Felicien competing for the University of Illinois. She followed her 2003 world championship tide by winning the Women’s 60-metre Hurdles Final at the 2004 World Indoors Athletics Championships in Budapest. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Sports Information.

      A fourth category now encompasses the entire world. Ethiopian and Somali soccer teams have their own leagues in larger Canadian centres. Daniel Igali, an immigrant from Nigeria, went on to win gold in wrestling at the 2000 Olympics for Canada, while a National Hockey League star, Jarome Iginla of the Calgary Flames, is the son of a Nigerian father. In the process, the meaning of what it is to be Black is being transformed as people of colour include immigrants from Sri Lanka, the Indian subcontinent and Arabic countries. The Canadian national cricket team at the 2003 World Cup was a picture of the new Canada.

      Each of the above has been a stage in the evolution of Black participation in sports in Canada as skin colour and immigration background have diminishing significance. The selection of Perdita Felicien of Pickering, Ontario, as the country’s female athlete of the year in 2003 recognized her gold medal triumph in the 100 metre hurdles at that year’s world athletics championships in Paris. Hers was perhaps a final stage, as it was essentially a mainstream Canadian story without reference to racial identity. Included in this fifth and final stage are African-Canadian hockey players who no longer raise eyebrows of surprise when they step on the ice. At the same time, young Blacks can form their own teams like the BigUp volleyball team, not because they have to but because they are friends and that’s what friends do.

      It