Canada needs a Wimbledon or an Open to call its own

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Very early one morning about a week into Wimbledon, I was walking along the border of London’s great hidden gem, Battersea Park. It was the only place in the city that wasn’t suffocating.

A car stopped in the middle of the road. A slight man in a high-visibility vest got out. He was holding a punnet of strawberries.

“Hello, I wanted to give you this,” he said, skipping over to the sidewalk and handing me the little basket.

He said he was coming home from working an overnight at the local market. He had this extra and was looking for someone to gift it to. We were the first people he’d seen.

This kind gentleman talked and talked, while I smiled and tried to figure out how, exactly, this fruit had been poisoned.

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The whole thing struck me as exceedingly British. The man’s ornate manners. The fact that nobody beeped as they encountered his idling car in the middle of the road. The thing itself. Who is trusting enough to believe strangers will accept food from them?

The lesson – you go to Wimbledon and Wimbledon-type things happen.

The same atmosphere held in Northern Ireland at The Open. Everywhere you go here, people involve you in conversations based entirely on the fact that you happen to be standing next to them in a lineup or a crowd or outside a bar. They’ll turn to you out of nowhere and go, “So where ye comin’ from then?”

The really wild thing? They actually want to know. They’re interested, so you’re interested, and everyone can be interested together, which is not a Canadian virtue. We’re nice enough. But we’re not interested.

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About 500,000 people attend Wimbledon every year. About half that come to The Open. Most of them are local, but that is still a lot of outreach. If you have attended either event, it is a lifetime highlight.

You’ll never forget that place. You’ll tell stories about it to friends and family, and then they’ll want to go. It’s marketing you can buy, and Britain is buying it.

Since we’re doing a lot of thinking about how Canada can separate itself from our antagonist next door, shouldn’t we have something like this?

We have a ton of sports, but none of them are both quintessentially Canadian and globally recognized. The closest thing might be the Calgary Stampede, but while that includes sport, it isn’t a sports event.

The Brier hits the quintessential bar, but global? No. Same deal with the Grey Cup or the World Juniors.

The Canadian Grand Prix used to be a big deal, but no one would call it that now. It’s a second tier of the top tier event.

The Canadian Open and the National Bank Open are fine, but they’re not majors.

Everything else is either American, shared with America or mostly staffed by Americans.

The Stanley Cup is no longer Canadian in any way other than its origins. Even were two Canadian teams to compete for it, they would be doing so under the auspices of a New York-based operation.

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The most important tournament in our most important sport – Olympic hockey – is almost never played within our borders, and isn’t regular enough. No one cares about the world hockey championships, even Canadians when Canada wins it.

We have a lot of sport, but little of it is big, and the stuff that is isn’t ours.

Other countries had more foresight than us. The Tour de France, the Super Bowl, the Grand National, the Australian Open, the Clasico, the Ashes, the Kentucky Derby, etc. etc.

Hearing those names summons up a rich sense of place, even if you’ve never been there.

A million campaigns and targeted ads cannot replicate what those sporting institutions have done for their respective nations. They are culturally definitive and, in most cases, privately funded.

I get why creating one of these from scratch, or building out something we already have, has not been a priority recently. Until six months ago, we were living in the interconnected global future.

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Back then, piggybacking on America’s sporting obsession seemed like a good way to save ourselves a lot of bother. Let them make the events, so we can feel full of ourselves when we occasionally win one.

The reason we care so much about our baseball and basketball “world” championships is because those are American things. We stole them.

Most of us are still living that small-world dream, though it’s now the past. Time to find a new place to live.

Building pipelines is great for business and trade wars bring people together, but those things end. Only cultural institutions go on and on, and the only cultural institutions everyone’s interested in these days are sporting.

Canada doesn’t need one of these events. Plenty of very nice countries don’t have one. But why not aspire?

It should be hockey, obviously. It’s the only thing we know we do better than anyone anywhere. It should be a world championship. It should feature a men’s and women’s version, and all of the best in the world. It should never be played outside Canada. Preferably, it should only be played in one city.

It wouldn’t be easy to do, not with the IIHF, the NHL, the IOC, the PWHL and the NHLPA trying to wrestle it off you. But what great event doesn’t have a great origin story?

Stealing hockey back for Canada so that it can tell Canadian stories to the world – that’s a nice place to start.