It’s the year 2003 and my girlfriend and I have just moved into a little apartment in Edmonton.
We’re young and dumb and cute and poor. We’re both sports lovers, but for financial reasons we hesitate to get the full cable TV sports package, on account of the poorness. Then Team Canada gets on a roll at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, scoring wins over Japan and Argentina to advance to the playoff round for the first time in team history. They have plenty of firepower on the squad, but the most exciting of the bunch are a couple of youngsters in 16-year-old phenom Kara Lang and 20-year-old Christine Sinclair, barely out of her teens herself but already established as a team leader and one of the best goal scorers in the world. A header from Sinclair stands up as the winning goal in Canada’s crucial win over Japan to book a spot in the quarterfinals.
My then-girlfriend (now my wife) and I find ourselves so enthralled with the action that we end up seeking out local sports bars so that we can watch every minute of the playoff games – a win over China to make the semifinals followed by losses to Sweden and United States to finish in fourth place, still the best showing ever for Canada at FIFA men’s or women’s World Cup.
By the time the bronze medal game rolls around my wife and I finally do the math and realize that the money we are spending on beers and wings and nachos to keep a table at the pub for all these games would be enough to buy us the sports package for months, maybe even years. Hook us up!
This was the power of that one soccer team – exciting enough to get money from an empty pocket. This was not something Canada had seen from a women’s team before except for maybe the women’s Olympic hockey team that took home gold in Salt Lake City the year before.
Fast forward 10 years and we now have a kid of our own, a two-year-old who loves sports – shocking, I know – and adorably mispronounces athletes’ names. He’s got a little soccer setup in the living room, and when he fires in goals he screams out “just like Sixteen Sinclair!”
That’s pretty cool – a little boy screaming out the name of the best Canadian soccer player there is, who happens to be a women from just across the bridge in Burnaby. And by 2013 Sinclair is, no doubt, the best Canadian soccer player ever. She still is – young Alphonso Davies probably has a decade or two of work left to do to catch her.
Fast forward eight more years, and the women’s national team, driven by Sinclair more than 20 years after she made her national debut, claims one of the biggest victories in Canadian sports history in winning an Olympic gold medal in Tokyo.
Few sporting moments in the country’s history could be more satisfying than seeing Sinclair with a gold medal around her neck. It’s a win that will live forever in Canadian sports history.
And then, last week, Sinclair announced that she was retiring from national team play at the end of 2023. She’ll leave, truly remarkably, as the leading goal scorer for any man or woman in international soccer history, having scored 190 goals in 327 international games.
She’s the most Canadian of legends: modest and humble and full of quiet power.
Not everything on her way to becoming the greatest international goal scorer of all time was easy though. In announcing her pending retirement, Sinclair wrote a letter to her 16-year-old self. It offers lovely and touching insights into the mind of normally very private superstar. It’s also kind of heartbreaking in parts, rage-inducing in others.
“Pretty soon you’ll discover things aren’t so rosy behind the scenes,” she writes to her teenaged self, describing the battles she waged off the field over two decades to try to bring equality to the sport in Canada.
“While people will know you for your accomplishments on the pitch, they will remember you for how you transcended the painted white lines. Creating equity is what you will be most proud of.”
It’s such an indictment of the system that the most prolific goal scorer in history is most proud of the battles she waged against her own federation off the field, not the victories garnered on it.
But the legacy that will hopefully live the longest is all those youngsters, boys and girls, who saw her play and realized that someone from around here could go on to become one of the best in the world.
Forget the cost of the TV sports package – that legacy is priceless.
Andy Prest is the editor of the North Shore News. His lifestyle/humour column runs biweekly.
