Sports fandom is irrational. Adults, cheering like children, for millionaires in colourful outfits, playing a game.
We accept the irrationality of sports fandom because it’s fun, and helps shape culture, creating unique contours around a city, as we share experiences, passion, and pride.
After a weekend of revisionist history and Potemkin emotions, something needs to be said about the vandalism against history committed against Toronto sports fans with the Vince Carter jersey retirement ceremony. The story of Carter in Toronto isn’t a story of victory or jubilation. It’s a story of disappointment, failure, and, ultimately, betrayal.
I grew up in Toronto, a child of parents from Vancouver. I occasionally describe myself as a sports bigamist, given my childhood was shaped cheering for Bure, Linden, and the Canucks at home, while I retained a soft spot for the Maple Leafs and tried to fit in with my friends at school. As I grew older I became more coy, declaring I would only ever choose between the two if they faced off in the Stanley Cup Final; odds are I will never be forced to put my cards on the table.
The one team where I have never blurred lines is the Toronto Raptors. A more affordable sports entertainment choice in hockey-crazed Toronto, my family became day-one season ticket holders for the expansion Raptors in 1995. Our tickets were in the 500-level of the Skydome, where most fans showed up to games with binoculars to catch a clear glimpse of Damon Stoudemire or Doug Christie.
They were heady days. Buoyed by youthful exuberance and low expectations, I remember cheering wildly as the expansion Raptors delivered a loss to the juggernaut 72-win Chicago Bulls team in 1996, as Jurassic Park clips played on the makeshift jumbotron.
As years passed and the initial thrill wore off, the losing and irrelevance became less fun. We fans, even the teenage ones, longed for relevance—so you can only imagine the thrill we felt when the most exciting player in a generation exploded into our lives.
Carter was an incredible talent, and the most electrifying player in a league searching for the next Jordan. The two went to the same college, shared a similar size and silhouette, and, most importantly, they exploded with superhuman dunks that lit the rafters of our arenas on fire. Toronto loved Carter. Canada loved Carter. The entire NBA was enamoured by him, and we loved him all the more for the relevance he bestowed on us.
I don’t have the time or inclination to outline his whole career in Toronto—the greatest dunk contest performance since Jordan, the wins and the playoffs, the graduation and disappointment—but there’s no question he put us on the map.
But Carter took our love and stabbed us in the heart and spit at our feet as fled our city and the smoldering crater of a team he left behind.
It’s easy to be swayed by the propaganda, especially when it’s good propaganda. The endless clips and highlight reels saturating our sports stations the last several days are convincing. But they obscure what really happened.
The Raptors were badly managed in the early 2000s, and Carter was tired of it. He wanted to leave town and wasn’t shy about saying so. He openly admitted that he stopped trying for the Raptors. He quit on the team in an effort to be traded, and when that didn’t work, he actively sabotaged games by tipping off plays to opposing teams. This shockingly destructive behaviour ultimately succeeded in not only forcing the trade he so desperately wanted but in tanking his trade value along the way.
Parting with beloved sports figures is never easy, but the acrimony we felt in the way Carter gave us a massive middle finger on his way out the door is hard to overstate. We loved him, and in return, he gave us the ultimate disrespect and ensured the team would have its cupboard bare after he fled town.
Hell hath no fury like a lover scorned.
It took years for the team to recover, but recover we did. The Raptors rebuilt, and became a winning franchise, with a winning culture, where players wanted to play. The cacophony of sound and energy at our home games became the stuff of legend on the march to the 2019 championship.
Those of us who remember like to believe that the energy unleashed in 2019 began to be harnessed when Carter returned to Toronto after he forced his way out. Every time he came with an opposing team, we booed him and booed him relentlessly. Every time he touched the ball, every game, he felt our pain and our betrayal.
Time heals old wounds, but some betrayals are too deep to be repaired by time alone. Vince never delivered a mea culpa or told us he was sorry, yet this past weekend we were told to memory-hole all the pain he inflicted on our city. To remember only the good times, with no salve but time to heal the bad.
Even more offensive, we were told to celebrate the Raptors’ choosing to provide an unprecedented honour not to Kyle Lowry who helped hang a championship banner in the rafters, but to the guy uniquely responsible for pulling our team into the valley of despair. To many in the city, that’s emblematic of an organization that is shaking off the winning culture built in defiance of Carter, and replacing it with a hollow, loser, quisling mindset.
Like Andy Dufresne, Toronto crawled through a river of excrement to find salvation on the other side. We suffered through that indignity because of Carter and succeeded in spite of him. Now his banner hangs in the rafters of Scotiabank Arena, first and alone, as a reminder of his failures and betrayal.
The peak of the 2019 championship is now long in the rearview mirror, replaced by yet another indignity inflicted on our city by a man who was once our greatest hope, and who became instead our greatest villain.
Most of the city may have moved on, but for this Raptors fan, my lasting memory of Carter will always be those boos—our way of expressing the completeness of his betrayal. Banner or not, the next time he shows up for an alumni event, amidst the cheers of revisionist history, this fan will remember, and at least in some corner of our building, the meager but rightful justice of boos will continue to rain down.
