The whole coin incident that happened in the NHL playoffs has reminded me about another quirk that happens at some sporting events in the US when a team from a Canadian city plays a team in an American city. This only seems to happen for Canada’s national sports (hockey and lacrosse) but that may be because the lone Canadian team in both the NBA and MLB haven’t been involved in any post season play recently. This quirk is the chanting of U-S-A near the end of the game when the American team is in the lead.
The first complaint about this is that these games are not between teams representing the two countries. Just because a team is based in a city of one country does not mean it represents the entire country. The team can only be seen to represent the City it’s based from. There is likely several hockey “fans” in Toronto right now cheering for Carolina to win the Stanley Cup. And can you blame them since Bettman, the commissioner, is even cheering for Carolina, but that’s another story. The hatred Torontonians have for the rest of the country is no going to be put aside because of a game.
The second complaint about the U-S-A chant is that the American based teams, at least in hockey and lacrosse, are still comprised primarily of Canadians. In fact, if you look at the actual numbers, American born players are still the minority on most teams. For example, the NLL Champions (Colorado Mammoth) had 8 Americans and 17 Canadians while the losing side of the championship game (Buffalo Bandits) shows 1 American and 25 Canadians (using the rosters on NLL.com). As for the NHL, only 7 of the 25 Carolina Hurricanes are American while 11 are Canadians (including team captain and one assistant captain) and there are 5 Americans and 20 Canadians on the 32 man roster of the Oilers (according to the respective team websites). There is likely a similar mix to most other teams for the most part, some may even have more “foreign-born” players but the Americans will still be the minority.
As proven here, the players on hockey and lacrosse teams based in American cities mostly consist of none-Americans. Given this fact it is improbable that the players represent anything more than the City where they are employed. The fact that a team plays their home games on American soil does not mean anything more then that and the fans of those teams shouldn’t try to make more out of it then that. If one wants to start a chant that splits the ears of all others in the arena and hopefully give the home team some advantage or more incentive to win, then please use the team’s name. The City’s name would do just fine too but whatever you do, do not chant for your country as no one playing a professional sport in North American is playing for their country.
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1 comment:
Yah man. Can-a-da! Can-a-da!
I remember going to Pittsburgh to watch a hockey game between them and the Flames. Calgary won and as we left the building a few morons were yelling such nonsense as "Canada sucks!", "We don't need you guys here!". However, they failed to remember that their 2 star players... really the only 2 people keeping their boat afloat are from Canada and proud of it.
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