The Globe and Mail, Thursday, Nov. 1, 2001

I Truly Love This Game

I’m a newly converted basketball fan.  Vince Carter made me a believer.

By Jennifer Lanthier

I believe in basketball.

I believe in basketball in a way that I always wished I could believe in something – the Catholic Church, universal bilingualism, or the NDP.  I believe it is the most perfect sport, the most beautiful game ever invented.  I believe it can raise spirits and save lives.  I believe Canada needs basketball.  I am doing my best to raise my children in my faith; Vince Carter’s new deal should help.

There is no zeal like that of the recently converted.  I’m 37 years old.  I’m a mother of three.  I can’t jump, I can’t dribble.  I will never have a skyhook or a fadeaway jumper.  I will never score on an alley-oop.  I never played basketball when I was a kid, and until two years ago I had never even watched a game – pickup, NCAA or NBA.

But when I was about eight months through my final pregnancy, someone handed my husband a pair of Raptors tickets.

Now I subscribe to Slam Magazine and scramble to line up babysitting for every home game.  Now there’s a hoop on the side of our barn and another inside, night-lit for after the kids are in bed.

Now I have a phone bill saved from last spring, with a total I wouldn’t confess to my best friend.  It shows the final 15 minutes of the last playoff game in Philadelphia, broadcast over the phone from Canada to my hotel room, at 2:30 in the morning, Barcelona time.  My father put the receiver down beside the television and let the last, longest seconds play out over the line.  He couldn’t feel what I felt, but he understood.  He grew up in Montreal when the Canadiens were as powerful as priests.

I grew up in a frozen Northern Ontario town at a time when boys played hockey and girls – well, girls tried to be good sports about it.

My daughter wants to delay bedtime.  “Is hockey better than basketball?” she asks.  It’s not an innocent question.  At seven, when it comes to manipulating her mother, this girl is what “b-ball” players call a “playa”.

“Hockey?” I choke, unable to stop myself.  “A long, long time ago hockey was beautiful, and fitting for a land of ice and snow.  Then came global warming and TSN.  Hockey is dead.”

“Who killed it?” my daughter asks.

“It died by its own hand,” I respond.  “Hockey became consumed by violence.  The crowds grew restless, vicious, and stupid, and the players followed.”

I tell her to slowly count to five and imagine Carter hanging in the air that long - long enough to catch his own rebound and dunk over the head of a giant.  I tell her about Alvin Williams’ grit guarding Allan Iverson, Lenny Wilkens’ unfailing calm, and referees who’ll give technical fouls to Charles Oakley just for staring at a guy.

I tell her about the WNBA, and the female referees in the NBA.  I remind her that at an airport I asked one of them, Violet Palmer, to shake my hand, and her graciousness lit up the room.

It’s hard to be a team fan, I tell my daughter.  (I still own jerseys with the names of now-departed Mark Jackson and Charles Oakley.)  But if you love the game, you can watch your guys get kicked all over the Staples Center in Los Angeles and still have a great talk about Kobe Bryant’s performance with the desk clerk at your hotel that night.

I believe basketball demands the most an athlete can offer.  You have to be strong, you have to be quick, you have to be clever, and you have to be fearless in the face of anterior cruciate ligament tears.

“Did you really go to a Raptors game in your ball gown?” my daughter asks.  She knows I did.  What choice did I have?  The ball was at the Royal York Hotel, the game just metres away.  We bolted for the Air Canada Centre after cocktails and were back in time for the silent auction, although I forgot to remove my jersey until someone in sequins made a remark.

“But basketball is not elitist,” I tell my daughter.  “Anyone can play.  You don’t need expensive equipment or a posh club.  You don’t even need height.”

With its cool fusion of rural dreams and urban drive, its rhythms pounded out on tarmacs from prestigious universities to prison yards, basketball was made for Canada.  (The people of Almonte, Ont. will even tell you it was made in Canada.)  Over the years our country has exported to the United States everyone from our doctors, nurses, astronauts, writers, and yes, basketball players, to Pamela Anderson.  We give, and we give and we give.  Frankly the Americans owe us, and missile defense systems are not what we need.  We need more fun.  We need more basketball.  We need the children of towns like St. Catharines to get busy setting screens and outsmarting zone defences.

On Aug. 1, we were given the sign we sought.  We were granted Vince Carter.  And this week he hit the court in his quest to take the team “to the next level”.

He’s young, he’s beautiful, insanely talented, yet polite and unassuming.  And he’s making big coin in his adopted country.  As my daughter would say: “How Canadian is that?”