It was in a motel room on a Saturday. I had my can of beer, my chips, ready to give Canadian football another chance. A semi-final between the Alouettes and the Tiger-Cats. It took place at the Percival-Molson stadium, in the shadow of Mount Royal: enough to awaken my old “Montreal” fiber…
But hey, there is this rule book with its particularities which owe more to folklore than to spectator sport. In the Canadian Football League (CFL), when your first play results in a two-yard run, your quarterback is already in trouble. The next essay becomes as predictable as a Justin Trudeau speech. And in football, the punt serves as an anticlimax. Let’s just say that there are a lot of anticlimaxes in Canadian football.
While the count was 1 to 0 — a single point scored, yes, thanks to a punt… —, I started to skip around and came across the game between the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Alabama Tigers. the University of Louisiana. It was 28 to 28. The situation was as clear as in tennis, where you have to break your opponent’s serve to have a chance of winning. Here, the first team to succeed in stopping the opposing attack would escape with victory.
At 42-28 for the Crimson, I switched positions just in time to see the end of Texas A&M against Ole Miss on another major American network. It was 35 to 35. I don’t know what must be more depressing for a fan of a CFL team: knowing that the best university teams from the neighboring country would beat the underpaid professionals of their favorite club to the death. seams or think about the 55 other college football games played that same Saturday afternoon across America, in front of the kind of delirious crowds that Regina and Ottawa can only dream of?
One good thing that can be said in favor of three-down football: not even bothering to balance its two divisions by adding a tenth franchise somewhere in the East, the CFL, while the NFL dreams of global expansion, accurately reflects the socio-economic importance of Canada on a continental scale. It’s like the Quebec Capitals in baseball: you can’t afford the (real) major leagues? You can settle for a lot less and be happy, my friend.
The Alouettes played in the Eastern semi-final against a club that had finished the regular season with a negative record (8-10). But wait, that’s nothing: the Calgary Stampeders played in the West after having amassed twice as many defeats as victories (6-12)! Another incongruity: the geographical distortions created by the precariousness of this pin-to-ball league. This is how in 2016 a team from Alberta found itself in the semi-final and final… of the East.
How then can we explain this Canadian football, I mean: from a logical point of view? This is because, as Emmanuel Lapierre eloquently demonstrates in his fascinating Cultural duel of nations (Boreal), Canada, under the cover of an apparent denationalization which is as much wishful thinking as fantasy, actually practices (like England, like the United States…) an ethnic nationalism which, to present itself as civic and unifying, is nonetheless as “tribal” — cultural and linguistic — as those he claims to fight. The Gray Cup and the face of Charles on our future piastres: so many visible signs of a nationalism vaguely ashamed of its imperial past.
Lapierre’s essay represents essential reading for anyone wishing to better understand the meaning of our history. I also refer you to theCanadian Encyclopedia who, regarding the popularity, at the dawn of the 1960s, of a piece of tableware named after a colonial viceroy, Lord Grey, said it in full: “Parliament considers [ce] match as an instrument of national unity.
In Quebec, football is therefore Canadian if not American. People will respond to me that the gigantic machine of the NFL constitutes, just like the GAFA, a formidable steamroller of identity. So what ? If Quebec must continue to become anglicized, I at least want to be able to choose the weapon of suicide.
That said, when a Montreal team defeats the Torontonians, as the Alouettes did last Saturday, I am not shy about my pleasure. There is the cup in the story and there is the story of the cup. I am old enough to remember Trudeau senior kicking the ceremonial punt in a top hat and dandy cape in November 1970. That day, the Alouettes avenged the pass fumbled by Pierre Laporte in front of his house in Saint -Hubert six weeks earlier.
Forty years later, with a three-week-old child at home, I managed to escape long enough to down a BLT in a Sherbrooke joint where, staring at the tiny television installed in the corner, I I saw the big Anthony Calvillo lead our Zoiseau to the ultimate victory for the second year in a row against the representatives of the windy country which bears the beautiful name of Saskatchewan.
Sunday, I will follow it from here to there, and my heart will be with the Alouettes. I’m going to wish a good day to their anemic offensive brigade and hope that the defense stands up again, that marauder Marc-Antoine Dequoy stands out, that other Alouettes rise up and that, why not, Péladeau makes his investment profitable.
I would even like the score to be tied with a few seconds left and for the two teams to exchange punts endlessly! And I will nonetheless continue to think that it was a funny idea, to give a local sports team this bird name reminiscent of a traditional French-Canadian song whose chorus says: I will pluck you.
Novelist, independent writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.