A fable

Written by Mark Farrell

Imagine a world, much like our own, one in which there was a hugely popular hockey league in Canada, separate from a larger more popular hockey league in the USA (far-fetched but just go with it for a second), and there was an awards show for this Canadian hockey league that celebrated its participants. This award show was actually broadcast on television.

Now imagine that there was also a Canadian lacrosse league, not as popular in Canada as the hockey league but there was a belief in the highest offices of the land that lacrosse was much more important to our national identity than hockey. Hockey is fine, but lacrosse is CULTURAL. Canada couldn’t be a country if we weren’t accomplished at lacrosse. No matter how good, or popular our hockey players and games were.

But even though many people — often good, well-intentioned people — tried, lacrosse never caught on in a mainstream way. Oh there were great lacrosse players, but we couldn’t compete with the American lacrosse players for a bunch of reasons, not in the purview of this silly self-indulgent exercise.

So there was a hockey awards show and also a lacrosse awards show, separate, both broadcast in Canada. The hockey one, while sometimes cheesy and sometimes not very good, was always watched, mostly because people cared about Canadian hockey. Just for the sake of keeping the numbers simple let’s say it always got at least one million viewers. It also attracted all the big name Canadian hockey players.

Sadly, the lacrosse awards, no one watched ever, despite how important Canadians were told lacrosse was.

So then the elite of the elite, those lacrosse owners and some hockey owners who dared to dream about being lacrosse owners, decided to move the hockey awards from its normal time in March when it was being watched, to an asinine time in September. People stopped watching the hockey awards. Let’s say for the sake of the simplicity that it had 300,000 viewers.

So the Illuminati said let’s move the hockey awards back to its original time in March. But wait: let’s combine it with the lacrosse awards. Oh and let’s add soccer, because soccer is the future. And let’s call it the Canadian Score Awards because you are trying to score in each of the games.

Some simple-minded people asked: but won’t that water down the hockey awards? The elite folks smiled at the benign naivete of the question. No, they answered, in fact it will be great because people are getting awards show fatigue. And even if it did water down the hockey awards, lacrosse is much more important to the fabric of the country. We’ll mix popular hockey players with unknown lacrosse players and tell everyone it’s just like the Golden Globes, except you can find out the winners an hour before in 95% of the country if you have something called the internet.

Well some people still thought this wouldn’t work; that hockey would be dragged down. These people were quickly dismissed as unpatriotic lacrosse haters.

So the awards were moved back to March and some great people produced and worked on the show. The show was good, hiring hosts known for their work in hockey and writers who had also worked in hockey. But half the show was given to lacrosse and its celebration.

The first Canadian Score Awards got 700,000 viewers, and was trumpeted across the land as a huge success even though that was less than the hockey awards used to get. In fact the only knock from the lacrosse people was that the award for Best Lacrosse Game is the most important and should have been last. The next year the awards show got 500,000. But the award for Best Lacrosse Award, the award really that no one in the actual audience on television gives a shit about, was last.

So that’s how the Canadian Score Awards, or the CSAs, came to be.