In Grade 9, my friend James and I felt like we had the Canucks pretty much to ourselves. We were the only ones in school who talked Canucks. That’s partly because we went to University Hill, where hackysack was the No. 1 sport and the phrase “smoking the Leafs” meant something else entirely. Mostly, though, it’s because the Canucks were bad. They had no star players. They had ugly uniforms. Their 1982 Cup run was a thing of the past and clearly a fluke. And they had no chance — none — of ever getting past the Edmonton Oilers.
So for James and me, Canucks fandom was our “thing.” Tickets were easy to come by, so we’d go to the odd game at Pacific Coliseum, sit wherever we wanted and hope for a Garth Butcher fight, because that was the only highlight we were going to get. And if we told anyone at school about it the next day, they’d shrug and consider us quirky.
Now, even though I’ve been here the whole time and watched it happen, it blows me away when I think about how wide the Canucks passion has spread.
By now everyone’s heard the story of Boston Pizza changing its name to “Vancouver Pizza” for the Stanley Cup final. You may also have heard that the interior town of Boston Bar quickly did likewise. But did you know that an Abbotsford father contacted our newsroom yesterday to inform us he had officially changed his son’s name for the rest of the playoffs? Boston Unger, six weeks old, is now Vancouver Unger.
If you were to time-travel from 1980s west-side Vancouver to Scott Road in Surrey on a game night in 2011, you would have difficulty comprehending the scene: hundreds of people jammed into an intersection like popcorn in a glass cube at a movie theatre, all of them popping up and down to a bhangra beat banged out on dhol drums. Almost every face is brown, but almost every jersey is blue. Just typical Canuck fans.
And it’s all over the world. I saw a photo the other day of schoolchildren in Korea holding up cards that spelled “Go Canucks.” “Stanley Cup” was a trending topic on Twitter in Australia, thanks in part to accounts like @VanCanucksOz and @hnim (Hockey Night in Melbourne). A photo of Steve Nash made rounds on the internet after Game 1. He was in Miami — presumably to watch his buddy Dirk Nowitzki in the NBA Finals — standing alone with a beer in an empty corner of a South Beach bar, watching the Canucks play on a small screen. The Canucks have become one of those teams with a legion of fans spread around the world — and they’ve never won a thing.
I suppose if the Canucks were an indie band and I were a hipster, I wouldn’t like all this attention they’re getting. I would have been thrilled to discover them. I would have shared them with James and a few others. I would have been pleased to see them catch on within my small circle, thus affirming my good taste. But I would have turned my back long before they launched that “We Are All Canucks” marketing campaign.
However, the Canucks aren’t a band, I’m not hip, and I don’t mind this one bit. I like that the Canucks are massively popular, and I like that they’re very good. It’s about time.
Vancouver is one of the youngest cities in the world. When I grew up, it had a major-league sports history that stretched back all of a decade. Other cities had traditions, won championships, and produced MVPs; to beat their teams even once in a regular-season game seemed like an achievement, because Vancouver was really just there to round out the field. Having grown up with that sort of sporting inferiority complex makes it sweet indeed when people start to regard your team like the ones you used to envy:
“The Canucks are just too deep.”
“They can beat you any way you want to play it.”
“Best team in the league from wire to wire.”
“Good enough to contend again next year and the year after that.”
Win or lose, I’m soaking this up, because nobody ever talked like that about the Vancouver Canucks when I was a kid.
