NORTH AMERICA : Canada Scrambles to Block U.S. Pass at Its Football Cup

Canada went into a prevent defense this week as the Americans threatened to appropriate another national icon.

A team from Baltimore may take home the Grey Cup, championship trophy of the Canadian Football League. Baltimore plays the British Columbia Lions on Sunday in Vancouver for the Cup, which has been awarded exclusively to Canadian teams since 1909, when Alfred, the fourth Earl Grey, the crown’s representative in Canada, donated it.

“Is nothing sacred?” the Toronto Star demanded in a front-page column.

Actually, they ought to be used to this. Canadians have been integrating into U.S. popular culture for years. Wayne Gretzky skates on Inglewood ice. Peter Jennings brings the news into U.S. living rooms nightly. William Shatner captained the USS Enterprise.

But Baltimore’s arrival in the Grey Cup finals collides with two sacred Canadian self-certainties: First, that CFL football is a unique national institution, superior in many ways to the NFL, and second, that you always have to be on guard against creeping Americanization.

This day was inevitable once they started letting U.S. cities into the CFL a few years ago, but no one here figured it would come this soon. Baltimore is a first-year expansion team. They don’t even have a team nickname, or at least a court-approved one. The owners wanted to call the squad the Colts, but the NFL and the Indianapolis Colts, who used to play in Baltimore, won a court order barring it. So, while they still have a horse decal on their helmets, they’re just known as Baltimore.

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A lot of people think Baltimore got to the finals so fast because U.S. teams don’t have to employ at least 20 Canadians on their 37-member rosters, as do Canada-based clubs. Undermining this theory is the fact that the league doormat is the Las Vegas Posse. Nonetheless, CFL Commissioner Larry Smith said the rule will be relaxed next year for Canadian teams, who may have to carry only 10 home-grown players.

Canadian football is played on a longer, wider field, with 12 men per side and only three downs to make a first. The result is a wide-open, high-scoring, fleet-footed aerial game. Adherents claim that it is far more entertaining than an NFL game. And the 37-36 victory in Calgary last weekend that got the B.C. Lions into the finals was about as good as football gets. The winning touchdown pass was caught amid snow flurries as time on the game clock expired.

But poor attendance and questionable ownership have damaged the league in recent years. In an effort at revival--and an American television contract--the CFL looked south, to mid-size U.S. cities. It’s pro football for a “niche market,” as Frank Cosentino, a former CFL quarterback and physical education professor at Ontario’s York University, puts it. The U.S. experiment has had mixed results. Franchises in Las Vegas and Sacramento are duds. The Shreveport, La., Pirates are hanging in despite losses. But attendance in Baltimore averaged more than 35,000 per game.

Commissioner Smith says the ultimate goal is to create Canada and U.S. divisions. Then there will be an annual U.S.-Canadian finals.

Cosentino notes that this represents a crucial juncture for the CFL. Some fear that there will be irresistible pressure to change the rules and maybe the league’s name to make Americans more comfortable with the game.

“In a way, the identity crisis of Baltimore, the team without a name, reflects the identity crisis of the league,” Cosentino said.

Sunday’s binational faceoff already has paid off in ticket sales. All 59,000 seats are expected to be filled at the BC Place domed stadium.

“This is big,” Neil Macrae, sports reporter for radio station CKNW in Vancouver, said in a telephone interview. “By CFL standards it’s as big an event as it’s had in several years.”

In the end, the Canadians may have it both ways. They can tsk-tsk all this week about the U.S. threat to the Cup and then crow all next week if Baltimore loses, as oddsmakers expect.

And this also has given them a chance to remind everyone that the last two World Series were won by the Toronto Blue Jays.

Of course, there’s no Canadian player quota in major league baseball.