Barbara K. Adamski, Writer, Editor, & Certified Proofreader, Greater Vancouver, Canada

An Upstream Battle (The Walrus, May 2007, 1880 words)

One of Canada’s oldest lacrosse clubs attempts to reclaim history

The sounds are distinctive, heard nowhere else in the country: the hollow thud of a hard rubber ball hitting the floor and ricocheting off the boards; the stomping of feet, rising and falling as players stampede from one end of the box to the other. I’m at a lacrosse game in New Westminster, British Columbia, watching the hometown team, the Salmonbellies, play their longtime rivals, the Coquitlam Adanacs, in their first game of the 2006 season.

Almost 3,000 fans fill “The Barn,” as the Salmonbellies call their home arena. It’s the biggest crowd in years, and Dan Richardson, the Bellies’ general manager and president, tells me excitedly that, for the first time, they’ve even pre-sold seats. It isn’t necessarily the team that draws these numbers (the Bellies have been in a demoralizing slump for over a decade). People have come to see the floor, a brand-new replacement of the original 1938 tongue-and-groove surface and the only wooden lacrosse floor in Canada. Unlike the old floor, whose worn-out fir planks were sold piece by piece to supporters across the country, the refit is made of hard maple, its grain visible through the sea-green stain like a sandy beach through tropical waters. The Salmonbellies’ logo, a bright red fish swimming through the legs of the letter W, graces either side of the centre faceoff circle.

This night is both a celebration of the community’s achievement and a tribute to the team’s illustrious history. Local Salmonbelly legend Wayne Goss, seen in recent weeks standing behind the glass watching his young grandson play for the junior Salmonbellies, performs the honorary faceoff with a retired player from the Adanacs. New West players sport new uniforms with bright, tricoloured shorts and an updated version of the team’s 1958 jersey.

The Bellies score within the first few minutes of play, sending a wave of excitement through the stands, boosting hopes that there’s a new team to go with the new floor. It’s hard not to get caught up in the moment. Anticipation of the May 25 official opening has been building for months. When my daughter’s bantam squad played their first game on the restored floor two weeks earlier, the team of twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls spontaneously lined up side by side and together knelt to kiss it.

In a promising start to the season, New Westminster overpowers Coquitlam, 13–7. The wood floor has worked its magic.

The New Westminster Lacrosse Club was officially formed in 1889, just thirty years after Queen Victoria named the Royal City BC’s first capital. The following year’s formation of a provincial lacrosse association, comprising teams from Vancouver, Victoria, and New Westminster, prompted the bitter inter-city rivalry that is responsible for the Salmonbellies’ name. According to local lore, riled-up Vancouver fans called out “Get their salmon bellies!” during a game between the two cities. The barb was in reference to New West’s once-prominent canning industry and the team’s red jerseys. Rather than taking it as an insult, the team revelled in their new name and subsequently added the image of a fish to their jersey.

The Bellies went on to great things. The name appears twenty-four times on the Mann Cup, an award established by Sir Donald Mann, a master builder of Canadian National Railways, and presented to the winners of the Canadian Senior Lacrosse Championship (played between the Western Lacrosse Association and Major Series Lacrosse champions). It’s a legacy that has motivated generations of local lacrosse players. Fifteen percent of New Westminster’s youth participate in Minor Bellies lacrosse, and the city boasts the largest girls’ program in the province.

At the Bellies’ annual fundraising dinner—a boisterous gathering of lacrosse legends, current players, volunteers, and supporters—athletic trainer Keith Johnson tells me that what sets the team apart are its grassroots and its history. For many years, of course, they dominated the Western Lacrosse Association (WLA). But it has been sixteen years since the Bellies last won the Mann Cup. “The drought was driving me nuts,” says Richardson, who played for the team during its 1981 championship win at the Barn. He promises a return to the glory days “the old-fashioned way: through trades, drafts, and hard work.”

Lacrosse, in its many forms, is experiencing a renaissance, enjoying increased popularity at home and abroad. Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton have professional teams that compete across North America in the National Lacrosse League. And the World Lacrosse Championship, which Canada won for the first time in twenty-eight years in 2006, brought together teams from countries as disparate as Wales, Bermuda, and Japan, as well as one representing the Iroquois Nation. But regardless of what is happening elsewhere in the world, and despite the fact that many senior Salmonbellies play in other leagues in the Bellies’ off-season, in New Westminster, the Mann Cup is still the ultimate in lacrosse competition. There’s no salary for a Salmonbelly player and no cash prize. The Bellies play to stake a claim in local and national history.

What we think we know about the history of lacrosse in Canada turns out to be a curious combination of fact and fiction. Members of various Algonquian language groups referred to an early version of the sport as baggattaway, a term often erroneously translated as “they bump hips.” In fact, it derives from the linguistically related words peki’twewin and packettywaun, meaning “to hit or beat,” and photos of early Ojibwa implements exhibit strong similarities between the lacrosse stick and the war club.

Relations des Jésuites, a 1636 collection of missionaries’ journals that includes Jean de Brébeuf's, contains one of the first recorded references to the sport being played in Canada: “There’s a poor sick one, with a fever and near death, and a wretched Sorcerer has but one remedy to reduce the fever, and orders for him a game of lacrosse.” It has been suggested that Brébeuf gave the sport its name, and that he did so because the stick resembled a bishop’s crozier, but if so, the martyr never wrote about this similarity. His depiction of the activity is not even detailed enough to confirm that it is a game of lacrosse as we know it. In any case, the term appears much earlier, in the sixteenth-century text Gargantua, by French satirist François Rabelais. Here, “la crosse” could refer to any number of stick games played at the time. Lacrosse also shares many characteristics with the medieval Irish ball-and-stick game known as hurling, or iomáin in Gaelic.

Skip ahead to the mid-nineteenth century, when English-speakers in Montreal began to develop an interest in the native pastime. William George Beers, a Montreal dentist, first watched aboriginals from Caughnawaga and St. Regis play the game on a reserve just outside of Montreal. He was so taken with the sport that he designed a set of rules for the game and replaced the deerskin ball with one of hard rubber. A fervid nationalist, Beers also launched a campaign to have lacrosse recognized as Canada’s national sport.

In 1867, the year of Confederation, the National Lacrosse Association of Canada was formed, adopting as its motto “Our Country—Our Game.” Beers added fuel to the fire by producing a book entitled Lacrosse: The National Game of Canada, in which he wrote, “On the day which created the greater part of British America a Dominion, the game of Lacrosse was adopted as the national game, and it was appropriate and auspicious that this should be so.” Newspapers reinforced both the “national sport” myth and lacrosse’s popularity. “Lacrosse has become to Canada what cricket is to England and base-ball to the United States” read a Montreal Gazette excerpt published in an August 1875 issue of the Canadian News, an England-based paper for potential immigrants to the Dominion.

Box lacrosse, the variety played by the present-day Salmonbellies, truly is a sport made in Canada. It was developed in the 1930s as a way to take advantage of hockey arenas during the summer months, and, unlike field lacrosse, in which an out-of-bounds ball is out of play, “boxla” allows for rebounds, not to mention harder checks off the boards. A shot clock that requires a team to try to score in thirty seconds or relinquish the ball to its opponent increases the speed of play.

Despite its initial popular appeal, interest in the sport was waning by the 1950s. In a 1957 cbc Radio broadcast, Bill Good Sr. accused lacrosse of failing to keep up with the times. “According to the official books on sport,” he went on, “lacrosse is still listed as the national sport of Canada. That’s official. But to many thousands of Canadians, it’s just so much malarkey because they have never seen the game played. So how can it possibly be considered a national sport?”

Good was wrong (but by no means alone) in thinking lacrosse was the official national game. In fact, it wasn’t until 1994, when Kamloops MP Nelson Riis introduced Bill C-212, a private member’s bill declaring hockey the national sport, that there was any serious consideration of the issue in Parliament. Debate ensued, and in May of that year, with typical Canadian diplomacy, the National Sport Act established hockey as the nation’s official winter sport and lacrosse its official summer sport.

To many fans, however, lacrosse has always been, and always will be, the only national sport. As for Bill Good Sr.’s scathing indictment, some might argue that failing to keep up with the times has been lacrosse’s saving grace, insofar as it has kept the players human and the game accessible. If multi-million-dollar player contracts and high-priced corporate seats are symbolic of “keeping up with the times,” then perhaps lacrosse, with its down-home style of entertainment and culture of community involvement, is better off for not falling into the big-money trap that has turned hockey into a circus act.

In New Westminster, lacrosse is about history: preserving it and repeating it. “We play a violent game with lots of injuries for no pay, just the chance to hold one of North America’s oldest trophies, and the chance of a [commemorative] ring,” says Richardson. Of playing for the team that has won the Canadian Senior Lacrosse Championship more times than any other, Salmonbellies’ alternate goalie and New Westminster native Joe Bell Jr. says, “There’s no better way to win a Mann Cup than with a fish on the ring.” The 2006 WLA season came to a close on August 29, when the Salmonbellies lost in the finals to the reigning Mann Cup champions, the Victoria Shamrocks. (The Shamrocks went on to Ontario, where they were defeated by the Peterborough Lakers, four games to one, in the Mann Cup challenge.) It was the first time in eleven years that the wla finals were played in the Royal City, a sign perhaps that the Bellies are indeed on the verge of a comeback. With the team’s first game of the 2007 season set for May 16, the chase is on for a twenty-fifth Mann Cup championship. This year, the Cup playoffs return west, many hope to the Barn, where the Salmonbellies and their fans might truly relive the glory days.