Players come and go, rivalries change, so just keep cheering … somebody
Away we go. Like many Canadians, I tuned in to the NHL playoffs in mid-April with one clear cheering interest. My team is in this season, so no reason to shop around. For many fans, that is taboo. When you’re a fan of one team, you deride all the others. –Boo! But I have never really endorsed that line.
Please don’t doubt my bona fides. I have all the proof of fandom: the Canadiens-themed pyjamas, slippers and woollen tuque. The CH-branded coffee cup and P.K. T-shirt. A framed Sports Illustrated cover of the 1986 Cup win. And, the pièce de résistance, my Frank Mahovlich 27 sweater in bleu blanc et rouge.
In truth, I grew up with the Maple Leafs in Southern Ontario. My Dad followed the Leafs via Foster Hewitt’s radio broadcasts. The old Maple Leafs had roots in small-town Ontario. Players were seen at summer softball tournaments, sometimes after farm work. Dad still has a team photo of the ill-equipped, underweight-looking 1931 Leafs on his wall, the first photo known to exist.
Reality of pro sports
But that kind of idyllic team loyalty has been tested in recent decades by the arrival of big TV money and players’ achievement of free agency. Pro sports have become rootless.
A century ago, an English football match between, say, Manchester and Liverpool would actually feature working men from Manchester vs working men from Liverpool.
That was largely the case on the Canadian NHL teams too, through to the 1950s. The Canadiens of that era were famously made up of French-Canadian heroes along with local Anglo (Doug Harvey, Dickie Moore, Charlie Hodge) standouts. The Leafs until the 1960s mostly featured sturdy, dependable rural and northern Ontario boys, from Ron Ellis and Bob Pulford to, yes, Tim Horton.
Today, most player links to their club cities and regions have disappeared. Tellingly, these places have been relabelled as just “markets”.
In English football, well-funded Chelsea FC first fielded a squad in 2003 with no English-born starters at all. In hockey, Toronto and Montreal are loaded with players from all over the world, from Phoenix to Helsinki and Magnitogorsk. The “Canadiens” have had multiple American captains, while the most dynamic player on the Maple Leafs today, Auston Matthews, has Mexican-American family roots in Arizona.
Hero gets traded
Which brings us back to our conundrum –who can we cheer this spring?
As a Toronto kid, I attended my first NHL game early in the 1967-68 season at Maple Leaf Gardens, while still in junior high. We sat way up in the “grays”, watching Dave Keon, Johnny Bower and my man, Frank Mahovlich, play far below. I liked the fast-skating Mahovlich, with his big strides and hard shot.
Then the shocker: Big M was traded away in March 1968. In my cosmology of Canadian hockey, Frank was dumped by the Cup champion Leafs – and they haven’t won anything since. Do the math.
Moving on to Montreal, he helped Dryden and Béliveau deliver a “miracle” Cup in 1971.
Fast-forward to the 2020s: the Canadiens launched a clear rebuild and are starting to rise with their young talent. An exciting postseason may be on the horizon, or their dreams may be quickly extinguished.
This playoff season could be like 1994. We lived in Manhattan then, surrounded by the noise of Madison Square Garden sports media: the cable network was called MSG and it amped up the local teams. With the ’94 Habs out, I cheered those New York Rangers to break their 53-year Cup drought. Led by captain Mark Messier, they did. The city went berserk, and I joined the parade up Broadway. Then my Rangers fandom ended – none since that blowout.
Three decades later, Leafs may be peaking, too. This could be serendipity time for their cast of scoring stars. –Why not cheer them?
The bigger picture: never walk alone
But why do we cheer any pro sports teams? Is it just a pointless fantasy?
The comic Jerry Seinfeld set out the skeptics’ view: “The players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. …You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city”.
But sports have thrived, partly by giving people an identity in a mass society.
You join a crowd, but one with a purpose. Many teams’ mottos have variations on “We are all one”, or “We’re in this together”. The Toronto Argonauts’ motto is “Pull together”. Liverpool FC fans adopted the theme song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.
As an announcer says on the YouTube clip, with 54,000 singing it at Anfield stadium: “When you are part of Liverpool Football Club, you will never walk alone”. The sentiment may sound cheesy, but the effect of the crowd singing is spine-tingling. The solidarity with a team is all emotion.
Commercials featuring sports-fan solidarity are a bonus for business.
I recall the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, with Boston facing the Vancouver Canucks. The CBC had a phone-in show where the host anxiously asked listeners, in her inimitable CBC way, why they weren’t supporting Vancouver, the Canadian team.
Many callers replied: “Whaaa? I’m never going to switch from cheering [the Oilers/Senators/Jets] just because some Cup finalist is from Canada”. That kind of national cheerleading is saved for the Olympics.
Losing can also be an identity.
In a scathing pre-playoffs column in 2023, Toronto writer Cathal Kelly argued that T.O. would have “no identity” without the Leafs constantly losing. As with the century-long drought of the Boston Red Sox, a negative identity can build loyalty, too: We lived through this together. We’ll never walk alone.
So they may fall on their faces again, but hey, we have to cheer for somebody. If they’ve lost their series by the time you read this, well, it was just clothes anyway. Go Habs. And, well, go Leafs go.
