Good Eggs

Back in the 1960s, as I delivered the morning Boston Globe out of a canvas sack, I was taking lessons from professors of the sporting press. The faculty included Bud Collins, Harold Kaese, and Ray Fitzgerald, eminences most eminent. Kids like me were Sox fans foremost, also partisans of the Patriots in the go‑go American Football League. Young Bobby Orr and his Bruins were winter wonders, and Red, Russ, Cooz, and Hondo’s Celtics were grandmasters. As my friend Dan Shaughnessy, today a legend of the Globe himself — a guy who, unbeknownst to me, was growing up one town over, also learning at the knee of Collins, Kaese, and company — puts it: in spring, the birdies and Sox would fly north, the forsythia would bloom on Boston Common, and the Celtics would win another championship. The Sox always lost, even when the Impossible Dream season of 1967 somehow delivered us to game 7.

Personally, I was something of a wintertime exotic. Here was an eastern Massachusetts boy who didn’t skate but skied, who cared for the Celts over the Bruins. In fact, I revered those Celtics, with their flags hanging high above that patchwork parquet court in stinky old Boston Garden. Bob Cousy was a local lad who’d introduced a Globetrotter wizardry with his pioneering no‑look passes. Bill Russell’s selfless play, his Wilt-wilting D, his supreme work ethic, and his pointed politics in a political age were unique and inspiring to a legion of knee-pants libs being raised by Kennedy-voting parents.

Dad, Mom, and their three kids were properly provincial in a region where provincials were thick on the ground. After Dad’s trudge to the Bulge in the Second World War, he stepped beyond New England only twice when we were little: to take us to the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and then across the border to Expo 67. I still recall the geodesic dome and the rides at La Ronde. Both fairs promised a bright future for the world we would inherit — nothing but progress, prosperity, peace, and goodwill! My adolescent self was certain that we, in the nice United States of America, were lucky to have such a good friend nearby in even-nicer-than-us Canada, whom we would never forsake. . . .

After I’d served an apprenticeship at a little journal in New Hampshire, I joined a muscular sports magazine in Manhattan, which was spinning money and sending staffers all over the place for any reason whatsoever. Our expense accounts were the playground version of Graydon Carter’s fancy dance at Vanity Fair. I got to know Collins at a 1984 Davis Cup match in Bucharest and first met Shaughnessy at the December 1980 Major League Baseball Winter Meetings in Dallas. Dan and I were at the bar when Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football told us John Lennon had been shot.

I covered lots of stick-and-ball stories, sure, but I was still drawn to the exotic, which my pals in the magazine’s bullpen called “the weird stuff” or, sometimes, “Sully’s weird stuff.” Of several assignments I pulled in Canada, one was to cover an amateur boxing tournament in Montreal, the reason being to inform fellow Americans about Cuban fighters whom we might be seeing in the Olympics. A second feature was about a caribou carnage outside Kuujjuaq, Quebec, hard by Ungava Bay. A third involved dogsledding across a lake that I recently saw again on TV. On that assignment, I was riding shotgun on the sled of a Minnesota adventurer who was training for an expedition to the North Pole. And then there was the so‑called Winter Olympics of 1988, where, while taking notes with gloveless hands in Bahamian temperatures during a Calgary chinook, I reported on the goofy ways of the British ski jumper Eddie the Eagle, as well as on the gentleman bobsledder Prince Albert of Monaco and the hip-hopping Jamaicans, whose third run was nearly their last when they flipped going eighty-five miles an hour.

I say all this to establish my credentials as a sports type, an outsider, a fan of hoops, a friend of Canada, and a person drawn to anomalies. And what could be more anomalous than an NBA franchise largely stocked since its inception thirty years ago with American exports — basketball exiles spending their time chilling in a country known around the globe as Hockeyland?

The Raptors are the latest Canadian curiosity to fascinate me, thanks to a new book, We the Raptors. At first blush, the co-authors seem a curious pair. Eric Smith, the team’s radio voice for twenty years and on the beat for Sportsnet since the first tipoff in 1995, isn’t odd as a sports-book writer, per se. But his sidekick is Andrew Bricker, a professor of English literature at Ghent University, in Belgium. It turns out the two are brothers-in-law, and they have certainly written a fun and lively volume. Having sat with thirty former and current players — not necessarily the biggest names but some of the most beloved by fans — they present profiles in the order of those players’ signings. The collective experience of these men paints a picture of a club finding its footing, becoming a factor, developing a following, and winning it all in 2019.

The Raptors — like the Toronto Blue Jays, founded in 1976 — went through an extended period of featuring major-league backwater boys. Most of the early roster never dreamed of playing on the shores of Lake Ontario. Free agents from Texas or Florida felt free to shun calls from the first general manager, Isiah Thomas, or asked their agents to respond politely along the lines of “Canada? Are you kiddin’ me?!” That the Raptors and the Jays are today respected, veteran, downright venerable members of their confraternities is remarkable.

The NBA certainly didn’t make it any easier for Thomas and his team to compete. The league had drawn up a hamstringing provision under which the Raptors, as well as the Vancouver Grizzlies, also launching in 1995, paid a stiff tax for the privilege of getting whomped day after day by their betters. “The Raptors could only spend two-thirds of the league [salary] cap during the team’s first few seasons, an artificial ceiling that prevented the franchise from bidding competitively,” Smith and Bricker write. “The agreement also barred the Raptors from winning the NBA Draft lottery during the team’s first four seasons, which meant Toronto had to give up the first pick of the 1996 draft, which went to the 76ers, who selected Allen Iverson.” Of course, Iverson turned out to be a Hall of Fame legend.

Those handcuffs doomed the Grizzlies in Vancouver, and they relocated after five seasons to Memphis, which probably hadn’t seen an actual grizzly since the days of Hernando de Soto. While that team went south, the Raptors, made of sterner stuff, stayed north, bought mittens, survived.

The early dynamic created opportunities for resolute athletes. Tracy Murray, a Raptor in the inaugural 1995–96 season and again in 2001–02, was “hardly ever playing at all my first two years in the NBA,” he recalls. “I was rotting at the end of Portland’s bench.” Murray was good if not great in Toronto, but here’s the thing, and it’s a thing that is a constant charm in this book, as well as a key to what the Raptors were able to become: he came to love the city and, more largely, Canada. “When I first got here, hockey was all over the place,” he tells Smith and Bricker. “The Blue Jays had just won back-to-back World Series in 1992 and 1993. We were hardly even being talked about. We were fighting for visibility. We were fighting for eyes. We were fighting for an audience. We were fighting for fans.”

The fight was not limited to the SkyDome, home of the Blue Jays, where the Raptors squatted for several seasons. “We must have hit every city in Eastern Canada,” Murray recalls. “Literally, from Nova Scotia to Barrie down to Niagara Falls. Whether it’s preseason games, appearances, after practice, going with the Raptors’ Dance Pak members and driving two hours somewhere for an autograph signing. We hit everything.” While it might have been a “grind,” Murray never “felt like it was a job” for himself and his teammates. Experiences that might be an annoying part of any old day to the average Ontarian — driving into a snowbank while trying to get to work on time — were adventures to the newcomers. Anthony Parker, once known as the “Michael Jordan of the EuroLeague,” had played all over the world (he’s still an idol in Tel Aviv), but he says of his time in Toronto, “In your career, you play in a place or two that feels like home.”

Each of the thirty short bios does double duty to advance We the North’s history plus the authors’ enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of signings and such, but few of the sketches develop into true character studies. Missing, too, are sit-downs with three especially pivotal players: Vince Carter; his cousin and teammate Tracy McGrady; and Carter’s successor as star of the team, Chris Bosh. The trio’s impact is acknowledged (the “Vinsanity” period, the “Bosh Era”), but the players themselves are shadow figures, as are DeMar DeRozan and Kawhi Leonard. (Kyle Lowry, for his part, provides a foreword.) Is this just as well? By design, this is a celebratory book for partisan sports fans, not an encyclopedia, as the authors have repeatedly pointed out in interviews. It’s not a hoops edition of Ball Four or Friday Night Lights or, in the basketball realm, John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are. It is as rah‑rah as its title implies, and I say this with the authority of a guy who unabashedly wrote a book called Our Red Sox.

Something happened while I was reading We the Raptors. Part of it was the 2025 World Series, which you may remember. That was such a Moby Dick of a contest — one that spewed all kinds of cosmic messages. I’m not sure — in fact, I don’t think — that Smith and Bricker intended a deep sociological subtext to their book, some big think about North American comity, the creep of globalization in the twenty-first century, or how every town’s gymnasium, from Timmins to Timbuktu, has become a laboratory of U.S. major-league sports. But I sensed such a subtext lurking as the chapters turned over and the innings piled up in Toronto and Los Angeles.

I was reading about basketball teams of the twentieth century, with players surnamed Thomas and Williams and Davis, yielding to more recent rosters featuring men named Biyombo and Valančiūnas. I was watching every nervous pitch thrown in a showdown presumptuously labelled the world championship but between teams from only the United States and Canada, featuring stars named Suzuki and Yamamoto (of Japan), Giménez (of Venezuela), Rodríguez (of Cuba), and others who had deep personal ties to both countries, including Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who was slugging for the North, where he in fact was from, and Freddie Freeman, homering for the South — to beat the team of his parents. Call it Shakespeare’s Own Series.

I reread much of We the Raptors and got ready to write, but there was a big unwieldy thought swirling in my head like a cyclone. Because this basketball team was born outside the United States; because of the sport involved; because perforce the team had to be constituted of mercenaries from a foreign land; because Canada already had a national sport encased in ice, a game considered by many proud citizens to be synonymous with identity; because many of the mercenaries opened their eyes and hearts and minds to a new people and a new place; because the Overlords of Hoops were viewing their project in Toronto and Vancouver as a petri-dish experiment in their not exactly evil or secret effort to expand and perhaps one day conquer the world through basketball; because notable sporting milestones elsewhere were being evidenced by LeBron sweatshirts for sale in Beijing and Khaman Maluach’s exodus as a refugee from South Sudan to Uganda to Duke and now to the Phoenix Suns, because one day near Bwebajja, a guy on a boda boda stopped alongside the road to tell him that he should try some American game (albeit one invented by a Canadian); because such things as these were occurring in Communist China and Central Africa; because such things as these were making the Overlords satisfied with what they saw; because what they saw was a success that was, in fact, beyond any hope or reckoning, with inroads being made all over, cultures everywhere being influenced, including in North American cities like Toronto and Vancouver as well as Saskatoon and Halifax and Montreal and Moncton; because, you see, hoops was Fun, and it was Good, and it was not only Good but getting Better; because even as the game was changing the world, the world was changing the game back in America, at its highest level, making it ever more citus, more altus, more fortis; because with all these impressive, bigger players from Canada and Lithuania and Japan and the Democratic Republic of Congo . . . And then — because I was also cheering on the sensational Blue Jays, who were better this year than even the hated/vaunted Yankees and my beloved young Red Sox, as they tried their very best to bring home (home to Toronto!) the trophy representative of America’s National Pastime™ — I couldn’t help but think of Suzuki and Yamamoto and Guerrero and Freeman going at it, alongside a catcher from Louisville named Will Smith, who might as well be named Beaver Cleaver or Opie Taylor or Huck Finn.

Then one night — the Freddie Freeman night — I had a little extra time to think about this stuff because we were in the middle of a six-hour, thirty-nine-minute epic (everyone used that word) game 3. I was chewing over my unwieldy notion every which way, while on the tube there were these players from everywhere dominating the diamond.

After watching those wonderful/terrible eighteen innings, I trudged upstairs and summarized in my befogged brain: the team from the U.S. beat the team from Canada after the American team’s famous superstar, the Japanese man who is widely regarded as the best baseball player in American baseball history, homered twice more, and the Americans’ second baseman, who holds dual citizenship because his dad is from Windsor and his mom was from Peterborough, homered, finally, deep into the theretofore endless night, and sports fans went, “Holy cow! Whatta game!!!” The concept of global harmony may be a non-starter these days in the corridors of power, but globalization seems to be flying high on the fields of play. Perhaps, I wondered, we should leave this woebegone, godforsaken world to the children of the sandlot.

Youth sports beyond hockey are on the rise in Canada, and basketball is leading the pack (soccer is close behind). In the decade from 2000 to 2019, there was a 25 percent jump in organized basketball participation by adolescents aged twelve to seventeen, according to the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute. The rise was particularly pronounced in urban areas. And that growth among kids is being reflected at the highest levels. Seventy-two Canadians have set foot in the NBA since 1946, but the influx has gone from an intermittent drizzle to, in this century, a steady rain of talent.

When the Raptors broke camp in 1995, there were no Canadians on the team. (There was one Croat; the rest were Yanks.) In fact, there were no Canadians anywhere in the league that year. Zero. The big goose egg. Two new Canadian teams, but no Canadian players on them.

The list of thirty men profiled in We the Raptors confirms that the team remained largely a “Born in the U.S.A.” enterprise throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Toronto’s players were the ones who needed paycheques and couldn’t say no when Isiah Thomas called. Once the Raptors had proved themselves a steadfast operation, Europeans and Canadians trickled in. We the Raptors is right up to date, and in fact three of the thirty subjects are natives of Toronto who represented or are representing their home team.

Elsewhere in the league, there’s more of the same when it comes to Canadian basketballers. This season, it is estimated that 150 Canadian men are playing NCAA Division I hoops, and there are twenty-plus in the NBA — more than from any country except the U.S. Two of those Canadians are Raptors. Toronto also has an Austrian and a Georgian on its squad, and its head coach is a Serbian who learned his trade in Belgrade and became a naturalized American.

The point: Sports is an enormous global melting pot right now, one of our tormented civilization’s more effective, relatively peaceful efforts at getting along. Tennis, soccer, baseball — each of them is spiced by mondialization. And standing tall among all sports, reflective of its vertical nature, is basketball. Recently in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas considered the looming generational shift in the men’s game. The superstars who have dominated since the Russell-Chamberlain, Kareem, Bird-Magic, Michael, Shaq-Kobe eras — including the greybeards LeBron, Kevin, and Steph — will be hanging up their sneakers in the next few years. They’ve already loosened their grip on the MVP trophy. Beginning seven seasons ago, Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks won it, then handed to Nikola Jokić of the Denver Nuggets, who passed to Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers, who dished it back to Jokić, who last year yielded to the Oklahoma City Thunder’s twentysomething point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Thomas’s article was concerned with aging, but consider for a moment nationality. The eleven Golden Era legends of the game who are listed above, from Russ in the early 1960s right through to Steph Curry, are Americans (though Curry does spend a lot of time in Markham, Ontario). Their successors since 2018 hail from, in order, Greece, Serbia, Cameroon, and Canada.

Gilgeous-Alexander’s emergence is one reason, certainly, why basketball in Canada is on a roll. A few historical events have led to this. Indeed, these things served to inspire Shai’s own rise as a young player in Hamilton. They include the NBA’s arrival in Toronto and Vancouver in ’95, which overnight gave the nation a second major-league winter sport. Related was the NBA’s successful global assault, which led to such athletes as Michael and Kobe becoming Ali‑like idols in Halifax and Shanghai as well as New York and Chicago. Third was the Raptors’ ongoing story of better play, as basketball itself grew. There was, particularly, the championship in 2019, which really did energize not just Toronto’s South Core but the whole nation, much as — if not quite as much as — the Jays recently did.

There’s one more thing, and it got under way in 1996, one year after the Raptors were born, one year after the number of Canadian players suiting up in the NBA had been capital‑N Nil.

Every movement needs a figurehead — a Joan of Arc or George Washington or John A. Macdonald. Every sporting crusade needs a Babe Ruth or Knute Rockne, a James Creighton or David Bauer. An indispensable individual. Canadian basketball found such a figure in Steve Nash, who was born in South Africa, yes, but moved to Saskatchewan when he was eighteen months old in 1975. His family then settled in Victoria. As a boy, Nash played soccer and hockey, taking up basketball only in his early teens. From day one, he could shoot. He played college hoops in California, then eighteen seasons in the NBA, being named the league’s MVP in 2005 and ’06, then runner‑up in ’07. He was smart and engaged, named by Time one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2006, appointed to the Order of Canada in 2007, awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria in 2008. He was a great teammate, always a leader in assists as well as points. I consider him a Canadian Bill Russell.

At least, that’s what I realized after I polled a few old friends — all four natives of Canada and three still living there. I’ve known them since our college days in New Hampshire, in the early 1970s: Peter, Stuey, Swoop, and Swoop II (he asks that I call his brother “Swoop the Elder”) had been stars of our school’s Division 1 hockey team.

They all agreed that basketball is today a bigger deal everywhere — in the playground, at the gym, after hours in the bar — than when they were growing up. Baseball too. Swoop II tells a fun story about being in Banff one evening with his wife when the Raptors were making their title run. “At dinner upstairs at the Maple Leaf on Banff Avenue, we were considering what was causing all the commotion down in the bar — the outburst of cheers, the collective groans,” he told me. “After dinner, we went down and joined the crowd watching the Raptors and the Warriors in game 5. I’m not saying the fervour was as intense as during the Summit Series, but it was strong and unexpected in Alberta, where cheering anything from Ontario is as rare as hen’s teeth.” Swoop the Elder was more succinct: “That championship elevated the sport everywhere.”

Stuey mentioned the constitutional resentment of Canada’s biggest city, hardly exclusive to Albertans. “Toronto’s always promoting itself as the centre of the universe,” he explained. “They’re always promoting the Blue Jays, the Raptors, and even the Leafs as ‘Canada’s team.’ ” But like all good citizens, even Stuey squeezed onto the Raptors bandwagon in 2019, as he did for the Jays’ campaigns of ’92, ’93, and, of course, this past year. All four of my friends continue to join Toronto in mourning.

Later, Peter got back in touch. “Sully,” he said. “I just remembered some stories about Steve Nash. He went to the high school my daughters went to years later. Steve’s best friend lived five doors down from us. He brought a lot of attention to basketball here in Victoria. Both my daughters played, in high school and in the night league.” It was that night league that organized a trip in late 2005 to see Nash and the Phoenix Suns play the Seattle SuperSonics. “Many of us took time off work and school to be part of it. Several years later, as a publicity stunt, Shaq bet Steve that he could beat him in any sport contest. Steve chose hockey and won the bet.”

Too bad Steve was never a Raptor. His story would have fit neatly into this book, which is full of sweet, warm, affectionate memories, all of them telling how a game — a game! — can bring a country together.