Shifting as gaze

Identity, nationalism, March Madness basketball

I’ve spent a good part of the last two weeks interviewing people for a museum exhibition I can’t talk about yet. What I can say is everyone I’ve spoken with represents an integral part of Canadian, and specifically Torontonian, basketball history.

Some told me about the waves of immigration to the city their families were part of — Caribbean, Southern and Eastern European, West African — and how each culture carved out niches in the city and picked up basketball. Others told me about the influx of young Americans fleeing conscription during the Vietnam War, how their style of play influenced the Toronto game’s flow.

Some talked about being the de facto founders of the basketball prep school system (borrowed from the States) in Ontario and Toronto, or the growth of the women’s game going back to the Edmonton Grads, or could remember Steve Nash as a scrawny kid who hung around the gym after everyone left Canada Basketball tryouts. Some were former NBA and WNBA players, Olympians; some were career educators who wound up founding the most influential high school basketball programs in the city.

Most everyone choked up walking me through a moment or memory, whether mundane or triumphant. All were there because they’re primary sources.

This was a long-winded way of saying I’ve been thinking about identity. How lightly or tightly we fix the tethers of place when we construct concepts of identity, and what can alter those ties.

It’s been refreshing, working on this project. For the fulsome sense of history we’ve quite literally been recording, ensuring to some degree that these stories are captured and organized, and to be focused on something so Toronto-centric in a time of renewed Canadian nationality against the existential threat of the current American administration. To research, ask, sit and listen to stories that explode out neighbourhood by neighbourhood a city I was born in, know well, am discovering anew, has been like burrowing down and away from an amorphous anxiety. Having it all backgrounded by basketball helps even more.

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March Madness has always felt to me an intrinsically American custom. A compact prism of culture and identity.

I didn’t recognize until a few years ago that my American friends and peers in sports media didn’t have intrinsic, encyclopedic knowledge of every team that makes the tournament. That, like me, they only learn about some of them when their names get slotted into brackets.

There is no such thing in Canada as the tribalism that exists for American alma maters. There’s no such thing as the moneyed, competitive, colossal landscape of American collegiate sports, either, and I wonder if that’s the key differential.