The Only Way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. It’s the analogy Howard Kelsey uses to describe the task he and his co-founder of the National Basketball Teams Alumni Association found themselves with about eight months ago. Their goal was to connect Canadian basketball’s bright future with its underappreciated past, and to reconnect figures from that history with each other.
There was a lot of hardwood to cover.
Canada’s basketball story starts when the game was invented over a century ago, and national teams have represented the flag since 1936, when the men won Olympic silver in Munich while playing outdoors and in the rain. Should Andrew Wiggins and Kia Nurse help Canada find its way into the world’s elite in the decade to come, they won’t be breaking new ground but returning Canada to pre–Steve Nash glories, when for long stretches in the 1970s and 1980s, both the men’s and women’s teams were among the top five in the world.
Do people remember? Did they ever know? Does Wiggins know that a Canadian team beat a U.S. team on which his dad—NBAer Mitch Wiggins—was the starting shooting guard at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tenn., in the summer of 1982? Does Nurse realize that her assistant coach this summer, Bev Smith, was a tournament all-star when Canada finished third at the World Championships in Seoul, Korea, in 1979?
In hockey, there’s an unbroken history that stretches from Gordie Howe learning to skate on the frozen Saskatchewan prairie to Connor McDavid arriving in Alberta this month, with nods to Orr, Gretzky, Lemieux and Crosby along the way.
In basketball, there’s Naismith, Nash and now Wiggins and Nurse. Beyond that, things get a bit fuzzy.
Kelsey and his team set out to create a web-based archive (at NBTAA.com) that included every team, player, coach, referee, trainer and manager who ever represented Canadian basketball internationally. It was like creating a family tree, starting from scratch.
“None of us are archivists, but we quickly became [adept],” says Kelsey, an 11-year national-team veteran who co-founded the association along with fellow national-team alum Dave Turcotte. Former women’s star Misty Thomas has taken on the task on the women’s side, with help from former national-team player and coach Kathy Shields.
“We now have every single player from every team since 1936,” says Kelsey. “The heavy lifting for the first eight months was almost overwhelming.”
It’s worth it. Canadian basketball is having its moment, and it might last a while. There has never been more enthusiasm about our national teams, more discussion or more coverage. And it’s all being broadcast or live-streamed, captured forever in the Internet. But with all the excitement about the future, it’s the perfect time to revisit a proud past.
The archive, the website and the establishment of an alumni association are all part of an effort to bring together the Canadian basketball family.
No one is trying to make the current generation feel bad if they don’t know the history they’re now a part of—only to help them and the fans they’ve brought to the national team realize that they’re part of a tradition, not the start of one.
“As alumni, we’re all proud of our teams,” says Thomas, the captain of the Canadian women’s team that finished fourth at the 1984 Olympics and won bronze at the 1986 World Championships. “But we hope more and more Canadians will take an interest in how it happened and how we’ve evolved. We didn’t just show up at this point. Canada has always been one of the best countries in the world.”
And perhaps just as importantly, a forum for some of the greatest sports stories never told.
As with our hockey teams, some of our basketball teams’ best moments took place behind the Iron Curtain. The difference is that an entire nation watched Paul Henderson’s theatrics in 1972—when Canadian basketball teams made their trips to Bulgaria, Russia or Romania, no one knew what happened until they came back.
“There was no communication back then,” recalls Thomas, whose appreciation for basketball’s history was fostered by her father, Paul Thomas, who coached the Canadian team at the 1952 Olympics and has also helped with the alumni project. “You’d get on a plane, land behind the Iron Curtain, and three weeks later, you’d come back out, and that was that. You’d send a telegram to tell people the score.”
Canada almost never played at home; instead, they embarked on what, in the retelling, sound like bizarre camping trips where you foraged for food, light and medals, with medals being the easiest thing to find. Bags full of Kraft Dinner would be lugged around the world and cookouts held in spartan dorms.
Shields remembers arriving at the Pan Am Games in Venezuela in 1983 to an unfinished athletes’ village. “There were no doors, no showerheads, no light bulbs and no beds, just mattresses,” she says. “The conditions were horrible. So you went around and found some light bulbs and pulled together some mattresses and that was it. And you taught your players: So what? You have a game to play, and you learned how to do that under tough conditions.”
It meant finding solutions to problems the current players don’t have. While living arrangements at the FIBA Americas Championship in Mexico might not compare to six-star NBA luxury, they’re comfortable. There’s reliable Wi-Fi in Mexico City. The traffic may be terrible, but the food is good.
Not bad, all in all, especially when the new alumni association can tell you how many medals were won for Canada on queasy stomachs. “Everyone who played for Canada back then learned that peanut butter was the first thing you packed,” says Shields. “No matter where you went, they couldn’t screw up bread, so you brought peanut butter and lived on that.”
And went on to make history, bite by bite.
This article appears in the September 21 issue of Sportsnet magazine
