Squeak

Are you enjoying the squeakity-squeak? It's Final Four time! It's that glorious time of year where Canadians from coast to coast put together something called "brackets," throw themselves into a sport they deliberately ignore the other blessed 11 months of the year, and jump and down when St. Mary's beats Villanova. Final Four BABY!!!

I'm not a fan of American college sports, but I see the appeal. My favorite tournament of any year is the World Junior Hockey tournament which, if the IIHF knew their ass from a hat, will be held in Canada four times a month. The appeal of the World Juniors is pretty similar to college sports, or the Olympics for that matter. Sports fans have the ability to know whatever they have time to expose themselves to. The Great Canadian Myth is dead; there are no more hockey players leaving frozen ponds to be discovered on Opening Night, no Gordie Howes signing with the Red Wings for a jacket or Bobby Orr signing for a new stucco job on his parents' house. Canadians know The Next Big Thing before they're even drafted into the OHL (Crosby, Tavares), Lebron James' high school basketball games were on Pay Per View, Stephen Strasburg was tabbed for the MLB Hall of Fame while still in high school. There aren't a lot of surprises left, and considering Wayne Gretzky had an agent when he was 13, this isn't a new development.

It's a matter of semantics I suppose, the whole idea of "discovering" an athlete. When Gretzky said that Crosby might be someone who could break some of his records, well, I guess that's when many people "discovered" Crosby. Or maybe it was seeing his first big YouTube moment, the goal where he picked up the puck from behind the net, lifted it up, and wrapped it around into the top corner. Knowing that Lebron James would probably be the NBA's next Michael Jordan years before he was draft-eligible was great marketing; it certainly built up anticipation for that draft, revitalized the Cleveland Cavaliers' national and international merchandise sales, TV ratings were up and perhaps, though this being the NBA it isn't really documented anywhere, the play of the team itself. In Canada, we can be a little fragile so it's exciting to know that Canada can still deliver our own heroes even while our game was being dragged through the American swamps, deserts and airplane hubs. Even if we're losing World Championships (we were), World Juniors (we weren't), Stanley Cups to teams with SWEDISH captains (we did, but his English is better than Don Cher... hmm, bad example), Canadians could sleep comfortably knowing that while the future might not see the NHL permanently filled will good Canadian boys, we could still churn out the occasional super-prodigy. The same future would also guarantee that they wouldn't catch us off guard either.

So we love "discovering" new athletes, that's obvious, but what's the difference between discovering Sidney Crosby at 14 and skeleton racer Jon Montgomery in Vancouver? It's all about timing, isn't it? Each day I'd wake up during the Olympics, see who was competing in what, realize I didn't know any of those names and ask friends and co-workers "Are we any good at this?" "I don't know" they'd say, and you'd watch the event and find out. It's the same way with the World Juniors or college sports; we discover these athletes right as they're in the heat of battle. We don't have years to get to know them, form opinions, argue over their value, find flaws, and de-mythologize them. They truly do come out of nowhere, like hockey superstars used to, but then often disappear just as quickly. Think of all the Olympic athletes who's name you recognize but receded into the obscurity in which their sport spends most of its time. Remember Clark McArthur, Anthony Stewart, or Matt Halischuk? Great times. What about Mateen Cleaves? I don't know much about NCAA basketball, but I can't hear the word "floor general" without thinking about him because that's ALL they called him during his Michigan days. The sudden fame of these kinds of athletes, which is just as suddenly gone, give fans the idyllic myths that we instill on our sporting experiences. There's no scandals, no unrepaid hype, no contract disputes and no steroid accusations. In other words, they're gone before they spoil.

I'm not saying that we don't get steroid scandals and other controversies in these kinds of events, that would be silly, I'm just saying that because each World Juniors or NCAA event usually starts on a fresh note, isn't ongoing over several years and features a lot of unknown athletes there's a sense of new beginning. Professional sports don't really end, the offseason can be just as interesting as the regular season and certainly as influential. There's free agents, trades, drafts, rumours, and sometimes international tournaments to track. It's a lot of work being a sports fan, we have to know players, stats, teams, trade and free agent history, draft successes and failures and now we need to be experts on collective bargaining. These kinds of tournaments don't require us to know anything, we just show up, let the analysts spin human interest stories about sick siblings, supportive parents and 5 am wakeup calls. We don't know any better to be cynical, we can't counter the talking heads with mounds of internet data and common sense, so we're resigned to sitting on the couch and enjoying ourselves.