Everyone has his or her own idea of what it means to be Canadian. However, there are some similarities to how Canadians view themselves that can be seem in the sports heroes we gravitate towards.
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- We typically like players that play with a little edge (Being polite all day leads to a lot of pent up aggression)
- We want our players to play by unspoken codes of good sportsmanship (no divers or whiners allowed)
- BUT we’re OK if our players lose it and lash out physically at opponents (blame Don Cherry)
- Given the choice between lunch bucket hard workers that bleed for the cause and highly skilled players that lack some ill-defined sense of passion we pick the plumber every single time (often irrationally).
Basically we want all of our athletes to be third line left-wingers for the Calgary Flames. Even our gymnasts (Kyle Shewfelt won a gold medal in Athens, but he gained Canadians respect for competing in Beijing 11-months after breaking his leg) and rowers (See Laumann, Silken: Rowing bronze medals) must meet that criteria to be truly loved. We're an odd bunch. Must be the cold.
In Canadian soccer there has never been a better example of a player that exemplified all of those attributes than the captain of our 1986 World Cup side, Bruce Wilson.
So, we have re-named the What if Soccer was Played on Ice Award the Bruce Wilson Award.
After watching the Canadian men’s national team lose 8-1 in Honduras we’ve never needed another Wilson more. Luckily we have one on the female side of the equation in Melissa Tancredi
Tanc bleeds (figuratively and, sometimes, literally) for the Maple Leaf. She was the glue to the bronze medal team and she
Like last year the runner-up was Terry Dunfield (and one year Dunfield will win this thing), but in 2012 it was no-brainer.
Whereas Christine Sinclair is a national treasure, with skills that we can only dream of ever having, Tancredi is one of us – someone you’d have a beer with while watching the game.
And, for that, we raise our glass of Labatts 50 up and toast her: Don’t change Tanc (and Carli Lloyd probably deserved it – not that we’re admitting anything)