The Steve Bartman Fallout

Exactly 10 years ago today, an innocent fan was watching a baseball game. Just like everyone else at that stadium, he was cheering on his childhood team. They were winning and were about to make it to the World Series for the first time in almost 60 years.

That man was Steve Bartman. That team was the Chicago Cubs, playing the Florida Marlins in Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS.

The rest is history. In the top of the 8th, with 1 out and the Cubs up 3-0, a foul ball was hit along the left field line, right in the area where Bartman was sitting. The fan reached out to catch the ball, interfering with Moises Alou, who was trying to make the second out of the inning. Alou wasn’t able to, and immediately reacted angrily to Bartman’s interference.

Bartman never got to see the rest of the game because security feared trouble. They got him out of the stadium while fans yelled and cursed at him. He wouldn’t have liked what he saw anyway, because the Marlins went on to score 8 runs that inning. The Cubs lost the game 8-3, lost again in Game 7, and were eliminated from the playoffs. The curse of the Billy Goat persisted.

If you’ve gotten the chance to see ESPN’s documentary on this whole incident (and if you haven’t, you should), then you’ll know that Steve Bartman’s life has never been the same since that night. He released one statement to the media following the game to apologize for his actions, but has never done any interviews since. He’s received countless death threats from Cubs fans who, just like him, were hoping to see the “lovable losers” move on to the World Series on that faithful night.

When you sit down to think about it, you realize the insanity of all this. Sports can capture some of the best emotions that we as humans are capable of experiencing. That’s the beauty of sports – the ability to link strangers into one common ideal. When people talk about sports as a religion, you can’t help but seeing the link, because religion, at its foundation, is based on the oncept of connectinon. (Religion comes from the latin word “religare” which means “to bind”). This is not meant to be an essay on sports and religion, but it’s difficult to ignore some of the resemblances.

But just like they can connect us, sports (and religion) can tear us apart. On October 14th, 2003, thousands of fans turned on one human being whose innocent attempt to grab a foul ball became the representation of a century-long suffering. If you’ve ever been at a baseball game, you’ve surely tried to catch one too. But because he unfortunately picked the wrong time and the wrong situation, Steve Bartman became the scapegoat for a whole organization’s failure.

Just put yourself in his position for a few moments and try not feel bad for him. Bartman wasn’t the right scapegoat, as explained in this ESPN article, but he was the convenient scapegoat.

Don’t blame the Cubs for not being able to get refocused (as real professionals athletes should) and forget the incident, blame Steve Bartman. Don’t blame the Cubs for allowing 8 runs for the rest of inning, blame Steve Bartman. Don’t blame the Cubs for not being able to put a championship team on the field since 1908, blame Steve Bartman.

Seriously?

There’s a fine line between passion and pure stupidity, and this incident definitely reflected the latter. Professional sports don’t work without fans. There’s no doubt about it. But that doesn’t mean that fans are absolved from acting like human beings. Let’s not be animals.

I say this because we still see examples of this barbarism almost every day. Just yesterday, as Texans quarterback Matt Schaub was lying injured on the ground, Houston fans were cheering. Sure, Schaub hasn’t played well this season, but cheering for your home-team quarterback because he’s injured is terrible. In a way, it’s unfair to link the Schaub incident with the Bartman incident because those are two different fan-bases, and, consequently, not the same people. But the fact that we continue to see it means that we’re not really getting any better.

True fans support their teams not only when things go well, but also when things go bad. That doesn’t mean blindly accepting failure; it sometimes means being critical of your team with success as the endgame. But placing an entire century of failure on one man’s shoulders is a sad indictment of everything that can be bad with sports. Don’t be that fan. Don’t be an animal. Be the true fan that supports its team the right way. Cubs fans will say that the hate towards Bartman was just a product of the disappointment and frustration of years of losing, but that doesn’t excuse it.

Maybe change is too much to ask for. Just look at the Cubs themselves, who finished last in the NL Central this year and are coming off their 4th straight losing season. Some things never change. Even more sad is the fact that they haven’t won a playoff game since 2003.

Must be Steve Bartman’s fault.

Canada 2.0

The semifinal between Vasek Popsisil and Milos Raonic during the 2013 Rogers Cup could very well be a snapshot of the evolution of Canadian sports.

A great thing happened to me about a week and a half ago while I was watching the all-Canadian semifinal of the Rogers Cup. For the first time since I can ever remember, I was torn; I didn’t know if I was supposed to cheer for Milos Raonic, the best male Canadian tennis player (ever), or Vasek Pospisil, the up-and-comer who had just clinched a top 50 ranking for the first time in his career the day before.

I’ve always cheered for Raonic since he first made a name for himself at the 2011 Australian Open, but as far as Canadian pride goes, I had no justifiable reason to root for him over Pospisil (but I still did, if only because Raonic’s win allowed him to become the first Canadian male tennis player in history to reach the top 10 in ATP rankings, a mark he has since slipped from after losing to John Isner last week). They both seem like nice, down-to-earth young men who were both able to bring the country along for a memorable ride during the tournament.

So what was so great about this? It wasn’t specifically the fact that I didn’t know who to cheer for; that was kind of inconvenient actually. No, it was the fact that we had not one, but two Canadians battling in the semifinal of a sport that hasn’t been so nice to Canadians in the past (besides doubles master Daniel Nestor). Sure, I could focus on the developing rivalry between Raonic and Pospisil that should keep Canadian sports media happy for a while, but that’s not the point. Above all, this was another snapshot signaling the evolution of sports in Canada.

When I was younger I didn’t like the Summer Olympics very much, because there was never much to cheer for as a Canadian. That’s not to say that there weren’t great moments: I can’t speak about the Donovan Bailey moment because I was a bit too young for Atlanta , but Simon Whitfield’s triathlon victory at the 2000 Sydney Olympics still brings me goosebumps to this day. That being said, it’s clearly not our forte. Slowly, though we’re picking up ground. And it’s fun to be a part of it.

Now, I don’t pretend to know everything about everything, so I won’t sit here and say with confidence that such-and-such year is the turning point in Canada’s success in sports that aren’t played in the winter, but what I do know is that we’ve clearly seen a shift towards a more diverse athletic makeup. Canadian parents are putting their kids in hockey less and less, mainly because it’s too expensive and dangerous. Instead, kids are playing soccer, basketball, tennis, golf, etc.

If you’re worried about Canada suddenly becoming the Mark Sanchez of international hockey, you can rest easy. Hockey is still Canada’s sport and it’ll stay that way until global warming manages to turn our cold, harsh winters into Florida sunshine (and even then, I think we’ll figure a way around it). We still have more than half of the NHL players (including the best player in the world), the most recent Olympic gold medal (clinched by that same best player in the world), and most of the biggest prospects projected to become the next best players in the world (like Nathan Mackinnon and Connor McDavid).

But by trading off just a little bit of dominance in the coolest game on earth, we’ve managed to become increasingly more competitive across the board. Again, it’s difficult to point out when exactly this trade-off occurred, but it’s not important. The important thing is noting the current and future promising crop of Canadian athletes across a multitude of sports. (The only sad part about this whole situation is that this effervescence of Canadian athletes won’t be highlighted by Jay and Dan’s famous CANADIAN! every time one of ours makes his way onto Sportscentre, now that the two have traveled over to the dark side of the 49th parallel).

Like I’ve stated above, we now have two Canadian males, Raonic and Pospisil, in the top 50 of the ATP rankings for the first time in history. They’re both young, 22 and 23 respectively, and both have their best years ahead of them.

In basketball, we’ve seen Canadians be drafted in the first round in the past three years, including the 4th overall pick in 2011, Tristan Thompson, and the first overall pick this year, Anthony Bennett, who (evidently) became the first Canadian to go #1. As the Yahoo-based blog “Eh Game” notes, Canadian basketball is making huge strides; 4 Canadians have been drafted in the past three NBA drafts after only 3 were drafted from 2000 to 2009. And let’s not forget college freshman Andrew Wiggins, one of the most-hyped prospect in years, who could make it back-to-back Canadian-born 1st overall picks.

We can look to baseball, where more than 25 Canadians currently play in the MLB, including former MVPs Joey Votto (who is still among the game’s best) and Justin Morneau. Or to golf, where Canada doesn’t just have Mike Weir anymore, but other notables like Graham DeLaet and David Hearn who are 32nd and 53rd respectively in this year’s FedEx Cup race. If DeLaet and Hearn are able to keep up their strong play, it’ll be the first time that two Canadians have finished in the top 55 since the PGA implemented the FedEx Cup in 2007. There’s also Georges St. Pierre, who’s been the MMA Welterweight Champion longer than Barack Obama has been President of the United States.

And we wouldn’t want to limit ourselves to the men’s side. Let’s remember our women’s national soccer team, who became the first Canadian team to win a medal at the Olympics in London 2012 with a bronze medal (that could’ve been even silver or gold were it not for some shady refereeing) and boasts one of the best female soccer players of our generation, if not ever, in Christine Sinclair.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This is a new era in Canadian sports, and we may as well embrace it. Sure, we may have to suffer through a few more hockey-related hardships, like our blatant no-show against the US in the semifinals of the past World Juniors tournament, but I’ll swallow that pill in order to have more St.-Pierres, Vottos, Sinclairs, Raonics and Wigginses (plurals are fun!).

In my ideal world, Canada is still the best at hockey, but manages to produce solid athletes in all sports, a sort of new and improved Canada, or Canada 2.0 if you will; luckily for me, that might be just where we’re headed.

Maybe it’s just the luck of the draw, and maybe this is just flash-in-a-pan type of stuff that’ll get our hopes up for nothing.

But maybe we’ll get lucky and this is only the beginning. Maybe we’ve started to scratch the surface on a new crop of Canadian athletes that will be able to captivate us with a host of new emotions akin to the one I felt a few Saturday afternoons ago.

Let’s just hope so.