One man’s Toronto

Inspired by the My Toronto contest, Spacing contributor and Eye Weekly city editor Edward Keenan wrote up a treatment for what his commercial would include, in the end claiming “his Toronto doesn’t fit into a thirty-second commercial.” That’s likely a good sign for a city, and a daunting challenge to a marketer.

You can cut to a shot of me in a cook’s apron as a 25-year-old, leaning back on the boulder in Yorkville Park with my eyes closed, trying to suppress the urge to go back into my restaurant and strangle a customer or a server or anyone else who expects me to continue cooking. And then maybe fade to a shot of me leaning over my year-old son in the surf at Hanlan’s Point as he tries to catch the rolling waves, our friends and all the naked people in the background.

We have sports in my Toronto, though most of them are hockey. You can jump rapidly from me scoring my first goal on the ice at Ted Reeve to the bunch of us in Grade 3 playing “foot hockey” with a tennis ball in the schoolyard to me and my brother playing table hockey in a wood-panelled basement in Scarborough to a shot of Doug Gilmour on TV, his faced bruised and cut, as the Leafs have just lost to the Los Angeles Kings in the 1993 playoffs. Pan out from there to find a room full of grown men in tears. Then cut to the same group of men playing road hockey in the middle of Danforth Avenue in 2004.

I suppose there’s some baseball in my Toronto, too, so you can show me dancing in the middle of Yonge Street in 1992 after the Blue Jays have won the World Series for the first time, a stranger approaching me in the crowded streets and handing me a giant Canadian flag that he’s apparently ripped off the side of a building. Then you can cut to me with my hair dyed platinum inside the Phoenix Concert Theatre in 1993, sitting with the rest of the crowd and watching on the big screen as Joe Carter hits a home run to win a second title.

What’s interesting about some of the above selections is they’re also part of My Toronto, but they happened 7-9 years before I moved here. I remember being on Ouelette Avenue in Windsor after both the 1992 and 1993 World Series Jays wins where a smaller version of what I imagine was happening on Yonge Street occured (perhaps, in the back of all our minds, for the viewing pleasure of our American neighbours visiting from across the river). As well, on that spring night in 1993 when the Leafs came as close as they might ever to the Cup, three of us were driving aimlessly around country roads south of Windsor in Essex County, trying to find the game on the radio but couldn’t. We stopped at the Kingsville Tim Hortons (the old pre-gentrified kind, with the counter and stools and weird shaped apple fritters) and asked two O.P.P. officers if “we won” and they gravely shook their heads and looked back down at their coffees.

Sports extends the idea of the city out to people who may never even visit it. I wonder if it has some quantifiable affect on how they view and/or regard this city in general. Or perhaps it’s like people who hate New York — though they’ve never been there — simple because the Yankees exist.