There is nothing quite like your first time.<\/p>\n
The first sounds. The first looks. The first tastes. The first night of the Toronto Tempo in the WNBA.<\/p>\n
A memory that will never leave you.<\/p>\n
It was Game 1 of the rest of your life. A Friday night out at the rather archaic Coca-Cola Coliseum on the grounds of the semi-archaic Canadian National Exhibition.<\/p>\n
With everybody looking at everybody. Taking in the game and the scenes. Taking photos of each other. Wearing Tempo gear. Taking shots of one smile after another. This is what sport can provide when it matters this much.<\/p>\n
I have had a most privileged life around Toronto sports. I was at Exhibition Stadium for the first Blue Jays game in 1977. I still have the ticket and the memories.<\/p>\n
I was at the last Maple Leafs game at Maple Leaf Gardens and the team\u2019s first game a few nights later at what was then known as Air Canada Centre.<\/p>\n
I was at the last ball game the Blue Jays played at Exhibition Stadium, and the first they played at SkyDome in 1989.<\/p>\n
And I was there when Alvin Robertson, who had been in legal trouble earlier in the day, hit the first three-point shot in Raptors history \u2014 the first bucket actually \u2014 also at SkyDome, weird as that may seem now.<\/p>\n
All that is part of a personal scrapbook of the mind \u2014 both as a working journalist and as a younger fan \u2014 the places sports can take you.<\/p>\n
This was Marina Mabrey\u2019s first regular-season game for the Tempo, first regular-season game in Toronto. She felt the jitters all day long, knowing what was to come at night.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited for everyone,\u201d said the Tempo wing. This is new for her, for her teammates, still trying to figure out who they are, where they are, what to know about their city, what to know about the past.<\/p>\n
Mabrey admitted she didn\u2019t know the words to O Canada just yet. \u201cGive me time,\u201d she said. \u201cI know a few. Give me till June.\u201d<\/p>\n
She didn\u2019t know the name of the mayor, which may be to her credit, and didn\u2019t know the name of the prime minister either.<\/p>\n
She was aware that RJ Barrett was Canadian and played for the Raptors, was completely aware that teammate Kia Nurse is Canadian, and when she was told Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was from around here, she smiled and said: \u201cI voted him for MVP.\u201d<\/p>\n
She did promise to learn more about Canada, about Canadian basketball, about playing for a country instead of a city, as time moves on.<\/p>\n
This was a night for the sporting celebrities to put in an appearance. Big names. Medium names. Smaller names. No one got the applause Christine Sinclair received. Andre DeGrasse got a nice hand. Masai Ujiri got a nice hand. Larry Tanenbaum got a nice hand. The rest, mostly pleasant kind of claps.<\/p>\n
This was a big night for so many, and certainly for Maria Conde, the Spanish import who just arrived on the Tempo scene the other day. She has been considered the best player not playing in the WNBA for some time now. There was a certain excitement to being here, this night, to feeling this, to realizing that this is a new beginning for an old league in a place it never really has been before.<\/p>\n
Women\u2019s sports is in a place it never has been before. It is growing in ways and places no one ever thought possible. The WNBA likes to say this isn\u2019t a moment in time, it\u2019s a movement.<\/p>\n
Toronto has a pro women\u2019s basketball team. It has a pro women\u2019s hockey team. It has a pro women\u2019s soccer team. And not very long ago it didn\u2019t have any of those.<\/p>\n
The salaries being paid in the WNBA, after the recent collective bargaining agreement was signed, after the recent television deals south of the border were signed, is now paying women\u2019s basketball players more money than ever before.<\/p>\n
This was the first appearance for Conde, away from her family in Spain, who stayed up until 1:30 in the morning to watch her play.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an awesome feeling,\u201d said. \u201cThis is an amazing thing to be part of.\u201d<\/p>\n
And really, this is just the start. We didn\u2019t know much about the Blue Jays when they played their first game in 1977. We didn\u2019t know much about the Raptors when they played their first game in 1995. Expansion teams are like this. It takes a while to grow with any team, to learn their names, their tendencies, to decide who you like and who you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Friday night at Coca-Cola Coliseum was a touch like a blind date. You know you\u2019re out, you know you\u2019re at something: You\u2019re just not certain how you feel about it.<\/p>\n
Except there was a certain excitement to it all. That something you can tell your kids and your friends or your family years from now.<\/p>\n
I was there on the night when the Tempo began.<\/p>\n
Sandy Brondello is the instantly likeable coach of the Toronto team. She has been around the WNBA for about three decades, give or take a decade. She already was feeling what this night was all about, not about winning or losing necessarily, just being part of history.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is Canada\u2019s team,\u201d she said, not completely knowing what that means. We saw what that meant with the Blue Jays last October. We saw what that meant with the Raptors in 2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m excited about this challenge. We\u2019re excited to be in Canada. We\u2019re excited about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
She, too, looks forward to knowing all the words to O Canada. \u201cI love it,\u201d she said of the anthem. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty cool. It has a lot of beat to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dick Clark would have liked that on opening night for the Tempo.<\/p>\n
ssimmons@postmedia.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is nothing quite like your first time. The first sounds. The first looks. The first tastes. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16396,1018,17,12777,16397,16398,16399,2032,2693,1394,2145,8240,3639,48,2318,3961,2317],"class_list":["post-38093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-air-canada-centre","tag-blue-jays","tag-canada","tag-canadian-national-exhibition","tag-exhibition-stadium","tag-georgia-amoore","tag-kia-nurse","tag-maple-leafs","tag-marina-mabrey","tag-raptors","tag-rj-barrett","tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","tag-the-blue-jays","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-tempo","tag-washington-mystics","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}