Canadian sports

Canadian sports attract numbers of participants and large audiences.

Lacrosse

See also Lacrosse

In 1931, hockey owners and promoters in Canada attempted to introduce a modified version of lacrosse to attract fans in the summer. Played in a smaller space, competitions could be held indoors or in baseball stadiums. Few cities could support teams, however, and the dire circumstances of the Great Depression reduced the number of fans. Entrepreneurs like Joe Cattarinich and Peter Campbell, while failing at the commercial level, changed the landscape of Canadian amateur lacrosse, isolating it from the more widely contested field lacrosse played in the United States, Britain, and Australia.

Hockey

see also Hockey

Despite being excluded from Winnipeg's senior hockey league for the 1919-20 season, the Winnipeg Falcons, made up of the children of Icelandic immigrants, became Canadian national champions and won the 1920 Olympic gold medal in Antwerp. Combined with their willingness to serve Canada in World War I, their success made this team a symbol of Canadian manhood, unaffected by the ethnic stereotyping and discrimination that affected some other sports teams during the 1920s.

In September 1972, Canada's best hockey players from the National Hockey League (NHL) played the elite amateurs from the Soviet Union in a friendly series. When Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau met his Soviet counterpart, Aleksei Kosygin, in 1971, their discussions included increasing the hockey competitions between the two countries. Soon after, hockey hierarchies of both nations decided on a series of eight games, four to be played across Canada and four in Moscow. For Canadians, the Summit Series was intended to be a celebration of their global supremacy in ice hockey. The architects of Soviet hockey, on the other hand, had designs on surprising Canada and the world with their skill and claiming the Canadian game as their own. Over the course of the month, the games captured the imagination of both nations. Far beyond any hockey match, the series pitted East against West - communism against capitalism - and many of the players were swept away with the extrasporting significance that the games engendered. What was to be a friendly contest became instead a politically charged event with extensive cultural repercussions - quite literally, a Cold War.

Culture of sports

French Canadanians by 1700 were influenced by native culture to the degree that they began to measure themselves and their masculinity against their native counterparts by competing against them in such activities as canoeing, snowshoeing, and tobogganing and in the team sport of lacrosse. The author explores how this sport identity contrasted the Victorian gentility of sports for bourgeois gentlemen during 1850-80 and how this French/native subculture called les Canadiens expressed not only sport masculinity and identity but Canadian nationalism.

Hudon (2005) examines the history of sports education from 1870 to 1940 in Quebec's classic schools for boys from ages 11 to 18. Much of Canadian historiography on the emergence of sports education focuses on the relationship between sports education and the construction of a national identity. Hudon explores the relationship between religious pedagogy and sports education and the religious philosophy behind such education that promoted a spirituality with masculine undertones.

In Anglophone areas the ideas and ideals of English author and reformer Thomas Hughes expressed in Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) and elsewhere, that sport provided moral education and training for citizenship, have long resonated throughout the Canadian sport community. Despite a period when Canada focused on high-performance athletes rather than widespread participation, the principles of Christian socialism continue to inform the development of sports programs, particularly for Canadian youth. Outside of sports the social and moral agendas behind muscular Christianity influenced numerous reform movements, thus linking it to the political left in Canada, contrary to its right-wing reputation in other parts of the world.

Organizations

Created in 1961 to coordinate and regulate college athletics into five regional associations, the Canadian Intercollegiate Athletic Union (CIAU) struggled with differing views on sport of the various regional groups, the autonomy of powerful Ontario universities, and differing goals concerning national championships. Funding was continually problematic, despite assistance from the federal government. Questions related to student-athlete eligibility, appropriate institutional representation, and recruiting regulations also haunted the organization in its early years. In 1971, the CIAU officially agreed that it would represent both male and female athletes. By 1975, the CIAU established uniform rules and regulations and expanded its scope to include fund-raising.

Bibliography

• Ballem, Charles, 'Missing From The Canadian Sport Scene: Native Athletes', Canadian Journal Of History Of Sport, 1983, 14(2): 33-39.
• Booth, Bernard F. & Moss, I. Social and Moral Antecedents of Canadian Sport. (1989).
• Bouchier, Nancy, 'Canadian Sport History', Acadiensis, 1998, 28(1): 98-102.
• Bouchier, N. For the love of the game: Amateur sport in small-town Ontario, 1838-1895. (2003)
• Bray, Catherine, 'Sport and The Canadian State: Gender and Class Issues', Resources For Feminist Research, 1988, 17(3): 75-77.
• Brown, D., 'The Northern Character Theme and Sport in Nineteenth Century Canada', Canadian Journal Of History Of Sport, 1989, 20(1), 47-56.
• Burstyn, V. (1999). The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and The Culture of Sport. Toronto: U of Toronto Press.
• Coakley, Jay and Peter Donnelly, Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies, (2004)
• Dauphinais, Paul R., 'A Class Act: French-Canadians In Organized Sport, 1840-1910', International Journal of The History Of Sport, 1992 7(3): 432-442.
• Dallaire, Christine, 'Sport's Impact On The Francophoneness of the Alberta Francophone Games', Ethnologies, 2003, 25(2): 33-58.
• Donnelly, Peter and Jean Harvey, 'Class and Gender: Intersections in Sport and Physical Activity' in Philip White and Kevin Young (eds), Sport and Gender in Canada, (1999), pp. 40-64.
• Fisher, D.B. Lacrosse: A History of the Game. (2002).
• Gillespie, Greg, 'Sport and "Masculinities" In Early-Nineteenth-Century Ontario: The British Travellers' Image." Ontario History, 2002, 92(2), 113-26.
• Gruneau, R. and D. Whitson. Hockey night in Canada: Sport, identities and cultural politics, ( 1993)
• Hall, M. Ann, 'Rarely Have We Asked Why: Reflections on Canadian Women's Experience in Sport', Atlantis, 1980, 6(1): 51-60.
• Hall, M. Ann. The Girl and the Game: A History of Women's Sport in Canada. (2002).
• Harvey, Jean and H. Cantelon, 1988. Not just a game, U of Ottawa Press.
• Hollan, Andrew C., 'Playing in the Neutral Zone: Meanings and uses of ice hockey in the Canada-U.S. Borderlands, 1895-1915', American Review Of Canadian Studies, 2004, 34(1).
• Howell, C.D. Northern Sandlots: A Social History of Maritime Baseball. (1995).
• Howell, Colin D. Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada. (2001).
• Kidd, Bruce. The Struggle For Canadian Sport. (1996).
• Lathrop, Anna H, 'Contested Terrain: Gender And "Movement" In Ontario Elementary Physical Education, 1940-70', Ontario History, 2002, 94(2): 165-182.
• Lenskyj, Helen, 'Whose Sport? Whose Traditions? Canadian Women and Sport in the Twentieth Century', International Journal Of The History Of Sport, 1992, 9(1): 141-150.
• Lenskyj, Helen, 'Common Sense and Physiology: North American Medical Views On Women and Sport, 1890-1930', Canadian Journal of History Of Sport, 1990,21(1): 49-64.
• Macintosh, D. & Whitson, D. The Game Planners: Transforming Canada's Sport System. (1990).
• Macintosh, D., Bedecki, T., & Franks, C.E.S. Sport and Politics in Canada. (1987).
• Metcalfe, Alan. Canada Learns To Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807-1914. (1987).
• Metcalfe, Alan. 'Sports In Nineteenth-Century French Canada: The Case of Montreal, 1800-1914', Loisir et Societe/Society and Leisure, 1983: 105-120.
• Metcalfe, Alan, 'The Meaning of Amateurism: A Case Study of Canadian Sport,1884-1970', Journal Of History Of Sport, 1995, 26(2): 33-48.
• Morrow, Don, and Kevin Wamsley. Sport in Canada: A History. (2005). 318 pp. ISBN 978-0-19- 541996-2. online review
• Morrow, Don, 'The Myth of the Hero in Canadian Sport History', Canadian Journal of History of Sport, 1992, (2): 72-83.
• Mott, Morris, 'Perspectives on Sports and Urban Studies: Canadian Sports History: Some Comments To Urban Historians', Urban History Review, 1983, 12(2): 25-29.
• Mott, M., ed. Sports in Canada: Historical Readings, (1989).
• Robidoux, Michael A. "Imagining a Canadian Identity through Sport: A Historical Interpretation of Lacrosse and Hockey" The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 456, Special Issue: Folklore in Canada (Spring, 2002), pp.209-225 in JSTOR
• Schrodt, Barbara, 'Problems of Periodization in Canadian Sport History', Canadian Journal of History of Sport, 1990, 21(1): 65-76.
• Smith, Michael, 'Sport and Society: Towards a Synthetic History', Acadiensis, 1989, 18(2): 150-158.