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Create AccountThe Canadian Canoe Museum, located in Peterborough, Ont, is a national heritage centre that explores the importance of CANOEING to Canadians. Its collection comprises 580 canoes and kayaks and 1000 canoe-related artifacts, including whaling dugouts, bark canoes, skin kayaks, and more.
Canadian baseball has a proud and vibrant history. From the first recorded game, in Upper Canada in 1838, to the Toronto Blue Jays' winning season in 2015, this collection of articles recognizes the game as played in Canada, and the people around it.
Baseball is a game played with a bat and ball between 2 teams (of 9 players each), which alternate between being at bat and in the field. The object is to score runs by advancing players counter-clockwise around 4 bases, each 90 feet (27.5 m) apart.
The Winnipeg Falcons was a hockey team of the early 20th century that was made up almost solely of players of Icelandic heritage.
During the 1920s Oppenheimer Park, also known as the Powell Street Grounds, was home to the best baseball team in the city. The Asahi drew its members from the surrounding Japanese-Canadian community. It all ended with the outbreak of World War Two.
Through the formation of the Oxford University Ice Hockey Club (OUIHC), Canadian students at the University of Oxford helped bring Canadian hockey rules to prominence in Europe, thus influencing the development of British and European ice hockey.
Toronto FC (also known as TFC or “The Reds”) is a men’s professional soccer team that plays in Major League Soccer (MLS). Founded in 2006 by Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, the club has won the Voyageurs Cup seven times (2009–2012 and 2016–18). They have made it to the MLS playoffs three times (2015, 2016 and 2017), becoming the first Canadian club to reach the MLS Cup final in 2016 and the first to win the MLS Cup in 2017. TFC has competed in the CONCACAF Champions League five times, making it as far as the finals in 2018. The club is one of three MLS franchises in Canada, including Montreal Impact and Vancouver Whitecaps FC.
The Soccer Hall of Fame and Museum is an organization that aims to “collect, record, interpret and commemorate the soccer heritage of Canada.”
On 9 August 2012, millions of people in Canada and around the world watched the Canadian women’s soccer team take on France for the Olympic bronze medal.
In 1970, Bob Dawson, Darrell Maxwell and Percy Paris made history at Nova Scotia’s Saint Mary’s University by becoming what is believed to be the first and only all-black forward line in the history of Canadian university hockey.
The Grey Cup was donated by Albert Henry George Grey, yet another of those governors general who have left their monikers on our sporting life.
When the National Hockey League formed in late 1917, few could imagine the importance it would have in the fabric of Canadian life.
With our national game now a multi-billion-dollar professional sport, it is perhaps comforting to look back to simpler times when hockey was closer to community, and was played for love and glory by amateurs. In the early days of Stanley Cup competition, any Canadian team with some success at the senior level could challenge the current champs. In 1905 one of the strangest challenges came from Dawson City, Yukon.
That hockey is “our game” is incontestable. We invented it. We dominated it for so long and to such a degree that we could cobble together teams of amateurs, servicemen and semi-pros and beat the best the rest of the world had to offer.
Humans wrestled first for survival and eventually for sport; in fact, drawings on cave walls portray a form of freestyle wrestling. Wall paintings in Egyptian tombs from about 2000 BC depict matches that show moves very similar to those practised today.
The victory of the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1967 Stanley Cup was a singular event. It was unexpected then, and who would have predicted that it would not happen again? (As of 2016, it has been 49 years and counting.)
This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on March 11, 2002. Partner content is not updated.
This article was originally published in Maclean’s magazine on March 16, 1998. Partner content is not updated.
Sean O'Hare is a little nervous as he stares through the windows of the Fort Simpson Curling Club at the action on the ice below. It is clear that he is trying to figure out just what exactly the people are doing with the rocks and brooms.
