{"id":80966,"date":"2022-10-07T15:27:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-07T19:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=80966"},"modified":"2024-09-01T09:54:38","modified_gmt":"2024-09-01T13:54:38","slug":"mckee-the-toronto-star-is-making-the-right-move-by-renaming-the-lou-marsh-trophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2022\/10\/mckee-the-toronto-star-is-making-the-right-move-by-renaming-the-lou-marsh-trophy\/","title":{"rendered":"MCKEE: The Toronto Star is making the right move by renaming the Lou Marsh trophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article written by Taylor McKee, Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Brock University, was originally published in\u00a0The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The\u00a0Toronto Star<\/em> recently announced<\/a>\u00a0it will be changing the name of the Lou Marsh Award, effective this year.<\/p>\n

Since 1936, the award \u2014\u00a0named after athlete and sports journalist Lou Marsh<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 has been\u00a0given annually to Canada\u2019s \u201ctop athlete of the year\u201d<\/a>\u00a0based on a vote by journalists across the country.<\/p>\n

During a summer spent working at Canada\u2019s Sports Hall of Fame, I frequently passed by the Lou Marsh Trophy, one of the most prestigious awards in Canadian sport.<\/p>\n

The trophy itself, a 73-centimetre solid marble trophy, is a fitting representation of the award\u2019s place in Canadian society. Unlike the small cup that is given to each recipient of the Lou Marsh Award, the actual trophy is a massive structure that cannot be physically lifted by any one person.<\/p>\n

While working at the Hall, I heard stories about the monument repeatedly cracking the foundation on which it rested. As it turned out, no foundation could adequately support such a heavy load.<\/p>\n

A piece of Canadian history<\/h2>\n

The Lou Marsh Award occupies a special place in Canadian sport and sport history. It creates a deeply personal connection between our sporting figures and the nation they represent on a global stage.<\/p>\n

However, as scholars and athletes have recently contended with\u00a0the fraught legacy of the trophy\u2019s namesake<\/a>, the Lou Marsh Award has itself become a ponderous weight for those who receive it.<\/p>\n

Although the athlete-centered award is intended to be one of the highest honours that can be given, cutting across gender or sporting distinctions, these recipients have accepted it under the shadow of Marsh\u2019s legacy.<\/p>\n

In February 2021, Janice Forsyth, professor of Indigenous Land-Based Physical Culture and Wellness at the University of British Columbia,\u00a0wrote a piece about the implications of the award being named in Marsh\u2019s honour and<\/a>\u00a0\u201cwhat it is like to win a sport award named after a notorious racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Forsyth and other Canadian sport historians like\u00a0Bruce Kidd<\/a>\u00a0have explained, Marsh\u2019s work for the\u00a0Toronto Star<\/em>\u00a0was often plagued by both overt and implicit racism.<\/p>\n

Lou Marsh\u2019s legacy<\/h2>\n

As a sports journalist, Marsh was charged with being the eyes and ears of Canadian sports fans, documenting key events and recreating the performance of emerging athletes. For this reason, his writing about specific athletes\u00a0altered the ways those athletes have been memorialized today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Marsh\u2019s power to shape narratives both informed his contemporary readers and distorted our views of\u00a0Canada\u2019s sporting past<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Marsh employed racial epithets or derogatory stereotypes in his reporting, he did so as a tastemaker in a position of power. Marsh\u2019s blind spot regarding athletes of colour, exemplified through his\u00a0relentless derision of his supposed \u201cfriend\u201d Tom Longboat<\/a>, reveals him to be a figure of questionable journalistic integrity.<\/p>\n

Moreover, his specific derogation of athletes themselves is even more troubling for his long-time association with Canada\u2019s \u201cAthlete of the Year.\u201d We understand more now, but it is not merely a matter of looking at Lou Marsh with 21st century eyes: it involves reviewing his work from the perspective of the athletes he knowingly harmed through his writing.<\/p>\n

Awards are inherently political<\/h2>\n

The Star<\/em>\u00a0is\u00a0taking submissions from the public on a new name<\/a>\u00a0for the trophy. A committee will choose a replacement before this year\u2019s award is handed out in December. No doubt there will be resistance by some individuals to the name change, likely more from a place of preservation than a feeling of genuine loss regarding Marsh himself.<\/p>\n

But the award is not a page in a history book; it is an evergreen celebration of Marsh himself, perhaps more than the individual who receives it.<\/p>\n

Even in cases where awards are created in good faith, the physical and cultural space they occupy\u00a0makes these awards an inherently political issue<\/a>. That allocation comes at a high cost, which involves near-constant scrutiny and critical interrogation.<\/p>\n

As such, these memorial awards are intended to reflect the needs and interests of the present population, rather than simply one individual from the past.<\/p>\n

American historian\u00a0Edward Linenthal argues that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cour choices about who gets remembered, what gets remembered, where acts of remembrance take place, and how we express the significance of remembrance is as much \u2014 or more \u2014 about the future than the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if Marsh represents an important component of the\u00a0Toronto Star\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0past, he cannot and should not dictate their future depiction of athletes. Anything that in any way detracts, or even distracts, from the honoured athlete and their achievement should be eliminated.<\/p>\n

More than a name change<\/h2>\n

There is no question that changing the name of the award is an important acknowledgement of the untold damage that has been done through Marsh\u2019s pernicious treatment of many Canadian athletes.<\/p>\n

But if the work ends there, then changing the award\u2019s name risks being dismissed as a knee-jerk response to public outcry, rather than an indication of genuine reflection on past inequities and a commitment to a new approach.<\/p>\n

In a tweet thread responding to the announcement of the name change<\/a>, Forsyth wrote:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Star can do more than change the name. It can address its legacy of teaching Canadians that it\u2019s okay to treat athletes like chattel, that athletes should shut up and do their job, that they need to put up with the abuse they experience. That\u2019s the legacy we\u2019re dealing with.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the name change is a necessary first step, until we properly understand the damage done through Marsh\u2019s journalistic outputs on sporting history and their persisting influence on contemporary Canadian culture, we will still feel the immense weight of this dark legacy.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taylor McKee, Assistant Professor of Sport Management, wrote a piece that recently ran in The Conversation about why changing the name of the Lou Marsh Award was a necessary step.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76539,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,7,6,1],"tags":[57,10657,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80967,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80966\/revisions\/80967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}