'Famous for a Time' profiles Canadian history makers & record smashers nobody seems to remember anymore

Famous for a Time  Forgotten Giants of Canadian Sport

by Jason Wilson and Richard M. Reid

Canada has more unsung sports heroes than you'd expect. Even with our many territorial, provincial, and national halls of fame, there are world beaters, history makers, record smashers, who just about nobody has even heard of nowadays.

Famous For a Time: Forgotten Giants of Canadian Sport cracks open an aging vault of curiously unknown champions. Jason Wilson and Richard M. Reid are both history professors at the University of Guelph, and while they are celebrating past athletic greatness, they are not sugarcoating any awkward details. This is warts-and-all hagiography, if there is such a thing.

A century and a half ago, lacrosse became Canada's national sport. Before then, the Anishinaabe played Baggataway; Wendat played Kahwendae; Kahnawake played Tewaarathon and Haudenosaunee enjoyed Dehoñtjihgwa'és, the Creator's game. Colonizers co-opted these sports, tweaked the rules, called it lacrosse and then systematically excluded Indigenous players from the game. Lacrosse was neither English, French, nor American, which made it an ideal building block for a new settler-centric Canadian identity.

In 1867 there were 2,000 settlers playing lacrosse in Canada. That number exploded to 20,000 by the 1880s. William George Beers did more than any single person to make it Canada's national sport. He loved lacrosse, and he accomplished great things on the playing field, but he made sure to ban Indigenous players. As with many stories told here, heroes and heels are often one and the same individual.

In 2010, The Indigenous Nationals tried to use Haudenosaunee passports rather than Canadian or American documents to enter England for the World