The Golden Generation, page 6
That confidence carried the Canadians forward, as they easily dismantled Angola and Spain in their next two games to start the tournament a perfect 3-0 in Group B. However, Canada took its foot off the gas in the penultimate group stage game against Russia, losing 77–59 after Russia’s massive frontcourt held the high-scoring Canadians to just 33 percent shooting and a dismal 3-of-15 from behind the three-point line.
The 18-point loss complicated Canada’s path to a medal, as they would now have to beat reigning world champions Yugoslavia in order to avoid ending up on America’s side of the bracket. Canada hadn’t beaten 47Yugoslavia since the 1983 World University Games, and as the heavy underdogs, the Canadians knew they had to junk up the game. Despite having Nash, Canada slowed the game down and zoned up on defense to force its opponent to beat them from the outside.
Still, Canada got off to a slow start, falling into an early 20–8 hole. But the bench of MacCulloch and Swords kept Canada in the game until the third quarter, when the starters came alive. Barrett, Meeks, Hamilton, and Guarasci all picked up the scoring until Nash took over late, making back-to-back three-pointers to tie the game at 65–65, when the Australian crowd began to root for the underdogs.
Then, Nash got a steal and passed it to Hamilton for a dunk that gave Canada their first lead since the early going. Yugoslavia responded with a run of its own and went back up 73–72 with 1:57 left. But Canada reeled off an 11–2 run to put the game away, with Nash scoring or assisting on 18 of Canada’s final 21 points as he looked to be having the time of his life picking apart the Yugoslavian defense.
With Canada up by one possession in the final minute of the game, Triano offered $100 to whoever got the next rebound during a timeout. And when Yugoslavia took its next shot, he could have sworn there were five Canadians all fighting for the ball. “I took it as a personal challenge,” MacCulloch says. “Coach needs a rebound, I will get us a rebound. And sure enough, Yugoslavia missed the shot. And I went in there with a little extra incentive and came down with the board.” After a slow start to the tournament, MacCulloch finished with 21 points and 4 rebounds.
In the end, Canada conquered, beating Yugoslavia 83–75 as Guarasci carried Nash on his shoulders at centre court with the team celebrating around them. “That was all grit,” Barrett said. “That wasn’t X’s and O’s at the end. That wasn’t Yugoslavia against Canada. That was heart against heart. And our heart won.”
As the Canadian Press wrote, “the historical win would compare to Canada’s national soccer team upsetting England at the World Cup.” It was the greatest win in the history of Canadian men’s basketball and should have been remembered as such.
Instead, the Canadian team was better remembered for what followed.
* * *
48Jay Triano was born in Tillsonburg, in southwestern Ontario, in 1958 and fell in love with hockey, but an early growth spurt meant he couldn’t keep up with the other kids on skates. Meanwhile, his father started coaching a local high school basketball team just as the Niagara region was becoming a basketball hotbed, with Niagara University and the NBA’s Buffalo Braves across the border.
Triano was a standout player at A.N. Myer Secondary School in Niagara Falls, living for Friday nights when the entire city would come out to watch their games. And his dreams quickly turned to making the national team once he watched a scrappy Team Canada rally to win an exhibition game against Russia in Niagara ahead of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where they finished fourth.
Triano attended Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, BC, because he knew three players from the Canadian national team went there: following them around, lifting when they lifted, shooting when they shot, and diligently working on his game in hopes of getting invited to a Team Canada tryout. He was further inspired by his friend Terry Fox, who managed the basketball team when Triano arrived at SFU until one day he showed up in a wheelchair after losing his leg to bone cancer. Triano developed a friendship with Fox and watched him train to run across Canada.
“If his whole story doesn’t inspire you from the way it started and the way it finished, I don’t know,” Triano says. “It was a big part of my life.”
When the invitation did come to attend a Team Canada tryout at 20 years old, Triano thought he was ready. But he couldn’t make a shot, turned the ball over constantly, and was getting bullied by grown men. “So that’s when I started diving on the floor and just over-hustling, overworking, being physical,” Triano says.
He thought he blew his chance when Coach Donohue taught him a lesson that Triano would carry with him on his 37-year coaching journey: good coaches don’t just select the best 12 players for a roster, but the 12 who best fit a role. Triano’s work ethic earned him a spot at the end of the bench, where he became the best cheerleader and teammate possible. And by going up against older players in practice three times a day, he got better. “And then a couple of injuries and a couple things happened and all of a sudden I’m starting,” he says. “And it’s a position that I never gave up.”
49Triano was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1981 but was dedicated to the national team, where he won gold in ’83 and went to two Olympics during the heyday of the team, when he was a captain. He played in 66 official games and scored 1,032 points — a national team record.
When he was done playing in 1988, Triano got the job as the head coach of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, SFU, where he tried recruiting a local talent named Steve Nash, whom he saw holding his own at national team scrimmages at U Vic. But instead of selling Nash on false hope in order to land him to SFU, Triano told the young point guard the truth. “You need to play at the NCAA level if your goal is to play in the NBA,” he said. Nash appreciated the honesty and told Triano that he would play for him one day regardless because he knew that it was Triano’s dream to coach Canada at the Olympics, while it was Nash’s dream to play for Canada there.
A few years later, after Triano became head coach, he and Nash walked into opening ceremonies in Sydney with their arms around each other. “We said we were gonna do this. This is really cool,” Triano remembers them saying.
* * *
The Olympic basketball quarter-final crossover is one of the toughest and highest stakes games in professional sports, because no matter how well you play in the group stages, one team goes on to the medal round while the loser goes home.
Canada got matched up with France, who had gone 2-3 in group play and looked to be weaker than Canada but made some major changes ahead of the matchup. Eight minutes into a tightly contested game, France subbed in Makan Dioumassi, a long, athletic guard who almost never played in the previous games. His entire job was to shadow Nash everywhere he went, pressuring him when he had the ball and face-guarding him when he didn’t — causing two Nash turnovers as soon as he got in the game.
“Most teams, they put a guy on Steve, he breaks the guy down two or three times and the guy quits,” Barrett said. “But Dioumassi didn’t quit.”
50France went on an 8–1 run as Nash struggled to find his rhythm, being constantly hacked by Dioumassi but not getting any whistles as the referees allowed more physicality than in previous games. Canada began to show frustration towards the end of the first half, when Meeks leveled Dioumassi with an illegal screen to get him off Nash. Meanwhile, Canada didn’t have enough supplemental scoring without Nash consistently breaking down the defense, as the bigs missed easy baskets, Hamilton looked tentative, and Barrett found the worst time to have a poor shooting night.
“If they don’t blow the whistle, he’s successful,” Triano said of Dioumassi. “If they blow it, Steve shoots 15 foul shots. That’s international basketball, you never know.”
France took a commanding 38–23 lead into halftime after Canada opened the game shooting 11–32 from the field and 0–5 from three. However, Canada started the second half with two quick threes to cut the lead to nine, keeping it in that range for most of the second half despite making uncharacteristic turnovers, missing easy baskets at the rim, and shooting just 2–13 from three. With France leading 63–52 with three minutes remaining, Nash found Barrett for a fast break layup before laying the ball off to MacCulloch for another layup — two of his game-high 23 points. Then, Nash drove into Dioumassi’s chest to get two free throws, but despite complaining that the ball was wet, the referee handed it to him anyways and he missed the first shot.
Canada kept fighting, with a chance to cut it to a one-possession game in the final minute when Nash drove into the lane and gathered the ball to lay it up before discovering that he dribbled it off his foot and out of bounds. He looked to the sky as if to say, “What’s going on?” “It felt like a weird day, like something was off,” Nash says. “It just felt like I was experiencing something . . . almost was like an out-of-body experience.”
After scoring 26 points and 8 assists versus Yugoslavia the previous game, Nash managed just 10 points, 8 assists, and 9 turnovers against the French, and Canada lost 68–63.
Shortly after they shook hands with the opposing team, Nash’s body began to shake and tears started streaming down his face. Hamilton and Triano carried him off the court, with the image of Nash crying being posted to newspapers across Canada the next morning. “I’ve never seen 51a guy as gutted as Nash as that day,” Doug Smith, who has covered basketball for over 30 years, says. “I’ve never seen a guy take a loss harder, because that was a really, really good team. And France wasn’t.”
The locker room was a mess, with grown men unable to control their emotions after losing to a team that they thought was inferior. Hamilton was selected for a random drug test, but he collapsed on his way to the bathroom, sobbing on his knees after his legs gave out. “That one broke me in that moment,” he says. “It definitely broke me.”
Triano told the team how proud he was of them, and they rallied to beat Russia in the consolation bracket and finish seventh in the tournament. With the entire country watching, Canada proved that it could compete with anyone in the world, as its 5-2 record matched that of France, who won silver, while only gold-medalists Team USA had a better record. “I hope there are some kids back home — they’re six, maybe seven years old — and they’ve never played hockey, and they see this, and they want to play basketball,” Barrett said.
“I think that, combined with Vince [Carter]’s impact in Toronto, helped galvanize a group of young kids to play basketball,” Smith said. “Because they saw what they could do for the country.”
In a few short years, Nash went from an unknown Victorian kid to the face of Canadian basketball, gaining the nickname “Captain Canada” during his incredible run at the 2000 Olympics. He nearly doubled his statistical averages the next NBA season before becoming an All-Star in 2003 and winning back-to-back NBA MVP awards in 2005 and 2006, fundamentally revolutionizing the game with the seven-seconds-or-less Phoenix Suns.
“I went to the Olympics in 2000 and it springboarded my career,” Nash said. “It was the best experience of my career.”
The Sydney Games were supposed to be start of a golden generation of Canadian men’s basketball, with everyone expecting the national team to begin a period of sustained success. Instead, Nash would never play for Team Canada again in an international competition, the core group would break up, and Triano would be unceremoniously fired three years later. Team Canada would fail to qualify for the next five Olympics as controversies, funding issues, and a lack of commitment came to define the program.
Chapter 5 Reverend Ro Russell
Coach Ro Russell (third from the right, holding up a black shirt) and his Grassroots Elite basketball team celebrate winning the Adidas Super 64 AAU tournament in 2008.
Ro Russell
53“That was my initial ministry. I was determined to help those kids not fall by the wayside. . . . Using basketball as a tool for them to stay in school and become something of themselves.”
— Ro Russell
In 1971, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the multiculturalism policy in the House of Commons, reshaping the country’s population. The policy eliminated Canada’s previous ban on non-European immigrants, thereby opening up the borders to people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, West Indian countries including Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago had recently gained independence, and their nationals began immigrating in large numbers to Canadian hubs like Toronto: a predominantly white city of just 2.6 million in the 1970s when about 80,000 Caribbean people lived there; by the 1990s, Toronto reached 4.2 million people with a Caribbean population of 240,000. By 2014, the metropolis’s population reached over six million — almost 20 percent of Canada’s population, nearly half of them visible minorities.
Immigrants were chosen on a point-based system that took things like age, education, language proficiency, and work experience into account, allowing only the hardest-working newcomers into Canada. While many of the athletes outlined in previous chapters took to basketball in high school, with some getting scholarships to play in university, most first-generation Canadians were more concerned with getting good grades, staying out of trouble, and working to support their families than they were dreaming of playing pro ball.
But when their children chose hoops over hockey sticks due to it being cheaper, more accessible, and more inclusive, parents were not going to let them get away with half-assing basketball or anything else they chose to do in their new country. Instead, it was straight As and zero excuses.
54“My grandmother and my mother . . . showed me what work ethic looked like and what responsibility to your family looked like,” Rowan Barrett, who’s family came from Jamaica, said. “And no matter where you start, they always had an expectation of where we would end.”
Canada now welcomes almost as many immigrants and refugees as any country in the world. Not coincidentally, basketball is among the fastest-growing sports in Canada and the most popular sport among “fast-growing visible minority groups,” according to a 2006 study. Another study found that basketball has the second-highest participation for team sports among children, behind soccer and ahead of hockey.
For second-generation Canadians who grew up watching Nash at the Olympics and NBA teams in Toronto and Vancouver since 1995 — Canadian immigrant offspring like Jamaal Magloire (Trinidad), Cory and Devoe Joseph (Trinidad and Tobago), Tristan Thompson (Jamaica), Anthony Bennett (Jamaica), Tyler and Dylan Ennis (Jamaica), Dwight Powell (Jamaica), Andrew Wiggins (Barbados), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Antigua and Barbuda), and RJ Barrett (Jamaica) — a career in basketball was a semi-attainable dream. It helped that they finally had someone who looked like them to look up to.
* * *
Vince Carter grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, before becoming a high-flying basketball star at the University of North Carolina. He was drafted fifth overall by the Raptors in 1998 and spent the first six seasons of his career in Toronto, helping put a relatively unknown city and franchise on the map with his awe-inspiring dunks and exciting style of play.
“Vince, he was Canada when he played for the Raptors,” Wiggins said. “He made every young person, old person, it don’t matter who you were, you just loved basketball.”
Carter was must-watch TV, with a skill set built on a one-of-a-kind athleticism. From acrobatic layups to big blocks to posterizing dunks, Carter did something special every time he touched the court. But no performance was more influential than the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, where Carter wore the classic purple and black Raptors dinosaur jersey and put on an array of dunks that just kept getting better, throwing down 55a 360 degree, between the legs dunk before capping off the performance by sticking his elbow in the rim after dunking, hanging there for the world to see. “I’d be at home after school watching highlights of this guy named Vince Carter dunking, and the crowd was going crazy,” Thompson said. “That is kind of where I fell in love with the game.”
“The Vince Carter Effect” was a key turning point in the history of Canadian basketball, inspiring countless Canadians to dream of playing professional basketball — especially visible minorities who saw themselves in the African-American star. But by the turn of the century, there was already an uprising bubbling beneath the surface. “I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people that will say that everything changed after Vince,” former Ontario Basketball Association (OBA) president Rob Wright says. “I think everything was changing. Ontario was building a machine.”
Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, OBA saw a 10 percent annual growth rate each year, with kids joining local clubs that played each other throughout the year and met in the annual OBA championships. The school system was growing, too, with 18 different school boards competing at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) championships each year.
The OBA and school system were great for instilling passion and fundamentals into kids who wanted to play recreational basketball within the province, promoting a Canadian experience. In fact, the OBA was a feeder system for the provincial and junior national teams and for Canadian universities.
But Ontario’s system was not set up to develop elite athletes or to expose players to NCAA Division I schools like Duke or Kentucky, where they could potentially earn a full scholarship and prepare for a career in professional basketball. “A PSO [provincial sport organization] should be promoting the sport and the love of the sport and the development of the sport for the masses, not for the five kids that are going to get a scholarship,” Wright says. “To balance the two would have been impossible.”
The problem was that playing in the OBA or for Team Ontario could cost over $1,000 a year, which was prohibitive for many inner-city kids. As a result, a lot of them slipped through the cracks.
The 18-point loss complicated Canada’s path to a medal, as they would now have to beat reigning world champions Yugoslavia in order to avoid ending up on America’s side of the bracket. Canada hadn’t beaten 47Yugoslavia since the 1983 World University Games, and as the heavy underdogs, the Canadians knew they had to junk up the game. Despite having Nash, Canada slowed the game down and zoned up on defense to force its opponent to beat them from the outside.
Still, Canada got off to a slow start, falling into an early 20–8 hole. But the bench of MacCulloch and Swords kept Canada in the game until the third quarter, when the starters came alive. Barrett, Meeks, Hamilton, and Guarasci all picked up the scoring until Nash took over late, making back-to-back three-pointers to tie the game at 65–65, when the Australian crowd began to root for the underdogs.
Then, Nash got a steal and passed it to Hamilton for a dunk that gave Canada their first lead since the early going. Yugoslavia responded with a run of its own and went back up 73–72 with 1:57 left. But Canada reeled off an 11–2 run to put the game away, with Nash scoring or assisting on 18 of Canada’s final 21 points as he looked to be having the time of his life picking apart the Yugoslavian defense.
With Canada up by one possession in the final minute of the game, Triano offered $100 to whoever got the next rebound during a timeout. And when Yugoslavia took its next shot, he could have sworn there were five Canadians all fighting for the ball. “I took it as a personal challenge,” MacCulloch says. “Coach needs a rebound, I will get us a rebound. And sure enough, Yugoslavia missed the shot. And I went in there with a little extra incentive and came down with the board.” After a slow start to the tournament, MacCulloch finished with 21 points and 4 rebounds.
In the end, Canada conquered, beating Yugoslavia 83–75 as Guarasci carried Nash on his shoulders at centre court with the team celebrating around them. “That was all grit,” Barrett said. “That wasn’t X’s and O’s at the end. That wasn’t Yugoslavia against Canada. That was heart against heart. And our heart won.”
As the Canadian Press wrote, “the historical win would compare to Canada’s national soccer team upsetting England at the World Cup.” It was the greatest win in the history of Canadian men’s basketball and should have been remembered as such.
Instead, the Canadian team was better remembered for what followed.
* * *
48Jay Triano was born in Tillsonburg, in southwestern Ontario, in 1958 and fell in love with hockey, but an early growth spurt meant he couldn’t keep up with the other kids on skates. Meanwhile, his father started coaching a local high school basketball team just as the Niagara region was becoming a basketball hotbed, with Niagara University and the NBA’s Buffalo Braves across the border.
Triano was a standout player at A.N. Myer Secondary School in Niagara Falls, living for Friday nights when the entire city would come out to watch their games. And his dreams quickly turned to making the national team once he watched a scrappy Team Canada rally to win an exhibition game against Russia in Niagara ahead of the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where they finished fourth.
Triano attended Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, BC, because he knew three players from the Canadian national team went there: following them around, lifting when they lifted, shooting when they shot, and diligently working on his game in hopes of getting invited to a Team Canada tryout. He was further inspired by his friend Terry Fox, who managed the basketball team when Triano arrived at SFU until one day he showed up in a wheelchair after losing his leg to bone cancer. Triano developed a friendship with Fox and watched him train to run across Canada.
“If his whole story doesn’t inspire you from the way it started and the way it finished, I don’t know,” Triano says. “It was a big part of my life.”
When the invitation did come to attend a Team Canada tryout at 20 years old, Triano thought he was ready. But he couldn’t make a shot, turned the ball over constantly, and was getting bullied by grown men. “So that’s when I started diving on the floor and just over-hustling, overworking, being physical,” Triano says.
He thought he blew his chance when Coach Donohue taught him a lesson that Triano would carry with him on his 37-year coaching journey: good coaches don’t just select the best 12 players for a roster, but the 12 who best fit a role. Triano’s work ethic earned him a spot at the end of the bench, where he became the best cheerleader and teammate possible. And by going up against older players in practice three times a day, he got better. “And then a couple of injuries and a couple things happened and all of a sudden I’m starting,” he says. “And it’s a position that I never gave up.”
49Triano was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1981 but was dedicated to the national team, where he won gold in ’83 and went to two Olympics during the heyday of the team, when he was a captain. He played in 66 official games and scored 1,032 points — a national team record.
When he was done playing in 1988, Triano got the job as the head coach of the men’s basketball team at his alma mater, SFU, where he tried recruiting a local talent named Steve Nash, whom he saw holding his own at national team scrimmages at U Vic. But instead of selling Nash on false hope in order to land him to SFU, Triano told the young point guard the truth. “You need to play at the NCAA level if your goal is to play in the NBA,” he said. Nash appreciated the honesty and told Triano that he would play for him one day regardless because he knew that it was Triano’s dream to coach Canada at the Olympics, while it was Nash’s dream to play for Canada there.
A few years later, after Triano became head coach, he and Nash walked into opening ceremonies in Sydney with their arms around each other. “We said we were gonna do this. This is really cool,” Triano remembers them saying.
* * *
The Olympic basketball quarter-final crossover is one of the toughest and highest stakes games in professional sports, because no matter how well you play in the group stages, one team goes on to the medal round while the loser goes home.
Canada got matched up with France, who had gone 2-3 in group play and looked to be weaker than Canada but made some major changes ahead of the matchup. Eight minutes into a tightly contested game, France subbed in Makan Dioumassi, a long, athletic guard who almost never played in the previous games. His entire job was to shadow Nash everywhere he went, pressuring him when he had the ball and face-guarding him when he didn’t — causing two Nash turnovers as soon as he got in the game.
“Most teams, they put a guy on Steve, he breaks the guy down two or three times and the guy quits,” Barrett said. “But Dioumassi didn’t quit.”
50France went on an 8–1 run as Nash struggled to find his rhythm, being constantly hacked by Dioumassi but not getting any whistles as the referees allowed more physicality than in previous games. Canada began to show frustration towards the end of the first half, when Meeks leveled Dioumassi with an illegal screen to get him off Nash. Meanwhile, Canada didn’t have enough supplemental scoring without Nash consistently breaking down the defense, as the bigs missed easy baskets, Hamilton looked tentative, and Barrett found the worst time to have a poor shooting night.
“If they don’t blow the whistle, he’s successful,” Triano said of Dioumassi. “If they blow it, Steve shoots 15 foul shots. That’s international basketball, you never know.”
France took a commanding 38–23 lead into halftime after Canada opened the game shooting 11–32 from the field and 0–5 from three. However, Canada started the second half with two quick threes to cut the lead to nine, keeping it in that range for most of the second half despite making uncharacteristic turnovers, missing easy baskets at the rim, and shooting just 2–13 from three. With France leading 63–52 with three minutes remaining, Nash found Barrett for a fast break layup before laying the ball off to MacCulloch for another layup — two of his game-high 23 points. Then, Nash drove into Dioumassi’s chest to get two free throws, but despite complaining that the ball was wet, the referee handed it to him anyways and he missed the first shot.
Canada kept fighting, with a chance to cut it to a one-possession game in the final minute when Nash drove into the lane and gathered the ball to lay it up before discovering that he dribbled it off his foot and out of bounds. He looked to the sky as if to say, “What’s going on?” “It felt like a weird day, like something was off,” Nash says. “It just felt like I was experiencing something . . . almost was like an out-of-body experience.”
After scoring 26 points and 8 assists versus Yugoslavia the previous game, Nash managed just 10 points, 8 assists, and 9 turnovers against the French, and Canada lost 68–63.
Shortly after they shook hands with the opposing team, Nash’s body began to shake and tears started streaming down his face. Hamilton and Triano carried him off the court, with the image of Nash crying being posted to newspapers across Canada the next morning. “I’ve never seen 51a guy as gutted as Nash as that day,” Doug Smith, who has covered basketball for over 30 years, says. “I’ve never seen a guy take a loss harder, because that was a really, really good team. And France wasn’t.”
The locker room was a mess, with grown men unable to control their emotions after losing to a team that they thought was inferior. Hamilton was selected for a random drug test, but he collapsed on his way to the bathroom, sobbing on his knees after his legs gave out. “That one broke me in that moment,” he says. “It definitely broke me.”
Triano told the team how proud he was of them, and they rallied to beat Russia in the consolation bracket and finish seventh in the tournament. With the entire country watching, Canada proved that it could compete with anyone in the world, as its 5-2 record matched that of France, who won silver, while only gold-medalists Team USA had a better record. “I hope there are some kids back home — they’re six, maybe seven years old — and they’ve never played hockey, and they see this, and they want to play basketball,” Barrett said.
“I think that, combined with Vince [Carter]’s impact in Toronto, helped galvanize a group of young kids to play basketball,” Smith said. “Because they saw what they could do for the country.”
In a few short years, Nash went from an unknown Victorian kid to the face of Canadian basketball, gaining the nickname “Captain Canada” during his incredible run at the 2000 Olympics. He nearly doubled his statistical averages the next NBA season before becoming an All-Star in 2003 and winning back-to-back NBA MVP awards in 2005 and 2006, fundamentally revolutionizing the game with the seven-seconds-or-less Phoenix Suns.
“I went to the Olympics in 2000 and it springboarded my career,” Nash said. “It was the best experience of my career.”
The Sydney Games were supposed to be start of a golden generation of Canadian men’s basketball, with everyone expecting the national team to begin a period of sustained success. Instead, Nash would never play for Team Canada again in an international competition, the core group would break up, and Triano would be unceremoniously fired three years later. Team Canada would fail to qualify for the next five Olympics as controversies, funding issues, and a lack of commitment came to define the program.
Chapter 5 Reverend Ro Russell
Coach Ro Russell (third from the right, holding up a black shirt) and his Grassroots Elite basketball team celebrate winning the Adidas Super 64 AAU tournament in 2008.
Ro Russell
53“That was my initial ministry. I was determined to help those kids not fall by the wayside. . . . Using basketball as a tool for them to stay in school and become something of themselves.”
— Ro Russell
In 1971, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau introduced the multiculturalism policy in the House of Commons, reshaping the country’s population. The policy eliminated Canada’s previous ban on non-European immigrants, thereby opening up the borders to people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, West Indian countries including Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago had recently gained independence, and their nationals began immigrating in large numbers to Canadian hubs like Toronto: a predominantly white city of just 2.6 million in the 1970s when about 80,000 Caribbean people lived there; by the 1990s, Toronto reached 4.2 million people with a Caribbean population of 240,000. By 2014, the metropolis’s population reached over six million — almost 20 percent of Canada’s population, nearly half of them visible minorities.
Immigrants were chosen on a point-based system that took things like age, education, language proficiency, and work experience into account, allowing only the hardest-working newcomers into Canada. While many of the athletes outlined in previous chapters took to basketball in high school, with some getting scholarships to play in university, most first-generation Canadians were more concerned with getting good grades, staying out of trouble, and working to support their families than they were dreaming of playing pro ball.
But when their children chose hoops over hockey sticks due to it being cheaper, more accessible, and more inclusive, parents were not going to let them get away with half-assing basketball or anything else they chose to do in their new country. Instead, it was straight As and zero excuses.
54“My grandmother and my mother . . . showed me what work ethic looked like and what responsibility to your family looked like,” Rowan Barrett, who’s family came from Jamaica, said. “And no matter where you start, they always had an expectation of where we would end.”
Canada now welcomes almost as many immigrants and refugees as any country in the world. Not coincidentally, basketball is among the fastest-growing sports in Canada and the most popular sport among “fast-growing visible minority groups,” according to a 2006 study. Another study found that basketball has the second-highest participation for team sports among children, behind soccer and ahead of hockey.
For second-generation Canadians who grew up watching Nash at the Olympics and NBA teams in Toronto and Vancouver since 1995 — Canadian immigrant offspring like Jamaal Magloire (Trinidad), Cory and Devoe Joseph (Trinidad and Tobago), Tristan Thompson (Jamaica), Anthony Bennett (Jamaica), Tyler and Dylan Ennis (Jamaica), Dwight Powell (Jamaica), Andrew Wiggins (Barbados), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Antigua and Barbuda), and RJ Barrett (Jamaica) — a career in basketball was a semi-attainable dream. It helped that they finally had someone who looked like them to look up to.
* * *
Vince Carter grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, before becoming a high-flying basketball star at the University of North Carolina. He was drafted fifth overall by the Raptors in 1998 and spent the first six seasons of his career in Toronto, helping put a relatively unknown city and franchise on the map with his awe-inspiring dunks and exciting style of play.
“Vince, he was Canada when he played for the Raptors,” Wiggins said. “He made every young person, old person, it don’t matter who you were, you just loved basketball.”
Carter was must-watch TV, with a skill set built on a one-of-a-kind athleticism. From acrobatic layups to big blocks to posterizing dunks, Carter did something special every time he touched the court. But no performance was more influential than the 2000 NBA Slam Dunk Contest, where Carter wore the classic purple and black Raptors dinosaur jersey and put on an array of dunks that just kept getting better, throwing down 55a 360 degree, between the legs dunk before capping off the performance by sticking his elbow in the rim after dunking, hanging there for the world to see. “I’d be at home after school watching highlights of this guy named Vince Carter dunking, and the crowd was going crazy,” Thompson said. “That is kind of where I fell in love with the game.”
“The Vince Carter Effect” was a key turning point in the history of Canadian basketball, inspiring countless Canadians to dream of playing professional basketball — especially visible minorities who saw themselves in the African-American star. But by the turn of the century, there was already an uprising bubbling beneath the surface. “I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people that will say that everything changed after Vince,” former Ontario Basketball Association (OBA) president Rob Wright says. “I think everything was changing. Ontario was building a machine.”
Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, OBA saw a 10 percent annual growth rate each year, with kids joining local clubs that played each other throughout the year and met in the annual OBA championships. The school system was growing, too, with 18 different school boards competing at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) championships each year.
The OBA and school system were great for instilling passion and fundamentals into kids who wanted to play recreational basketball within the province, promoting a Canadian experience. In fact, the OBA was a feeder system for the provincial and junior national teams and for Canadian universities.
But Ontario’s system was not set up to develop elite athletes or to expose players to NCAA Division I schools like Duke or Kentucky, where they could potentially earn a full scholarship and prepare for a career in professional basketball. “A PSO [provincial sport organization] should be promoting the sport and the love of the sport and the development of the sport for the masses, not for the five kids that are going to get a scholarship,” Wright says. “To balance the two would have been impossible.”
The problem was that playing in the OBA or for Team Ontario could cost over $1,000 a year, which was prohibitive for many inner-city kids. As a result, a lot of them slipped through the cracks.
