BOOK REVIEW: Playing the Long Game by Christine Sinclair

I was never a sports guy. Sure, I followed the Blue Jays when they were winning in the early 1990s, and I traded hockey cards when I was a kid, but I never really played or followed sports after I was about 12 years old. I went to a couple of Jays games when I lived in Toronto (in the 2000s, when they were playing like shit), and a couple of minor-league hockey games with family, but that was it. I never imagined in a million years that at 45 years old, I would suddenly become a sports fan, checking daily scores, following the players and even going to regular games in person (4 so far this season!).

And, never, ever, would I have imagined that the sport I would be following would be women's soccer.

The background here is that my daughter, 10-years old, starting playing competitive, development soccer this year. She's played soccer since she was like 5, but in the pee-wee league, which is chaos, like throwing a ball into a school of hungry piranhas. It's like rugby without hands, except they do use their hands. At the end of last year she decided she really wanted to learn how to play properly, and asked to go to the competitive league. Now, my daughter takes after me. She's not athletic by any means, but she loves to run and kick things. And, being the supportive parents we are, we plunked down the money, and have been sitting on the field four days a week all spring and summer watching practices and games.

I don't know if she'll play like Megan Rapinoe, but she's already got the look down.

Me, being me, if I'm involved in something, I want to know as much about it as possible. So I started paying more attention to the rules. I started to look up the history of soccer, especially in Canada. I started researching female soccer players, for my daughter to look up to. We started going to professional games. Canada just started their own women's league this year, the Northern Super League (NSL), and we have a local team, Ottawa Rapid FC, so we started going to games. It's great for my daughter to see women playing at a high level, to see how talented and hard working they are. And honestly, it's a lot of fun. We have the top goal scorer in the league right here in Ottawa (Go, Pridham!). I don't know what people usually feel when they're following sports, but I'm not there because I desperately want my home team to win, or because I wish it was me on the field, or even because I grew up watching it. I'm watching because I'm genuinely proud of these young women. I want so badly for them all to succeed. Women in sports have been treated as second class citizens (or worse) forever, and I get emotional watching them compete at what they love on such a big stage. I admit, my opinion and outlook on the game is coloured by having a daughter competing in sports herself, but I'm also not afraid to admit I really do enjoy watching them play.

There's actually a number of pictures floating around online of me at Rapid FC games, but I'll just share this one instead. 

Anyway, this all brings me to Christine Sinclair's book, "Playing the Long Game." Sinclair is one of the most successful athletes in Canadian history, one of the top female soccer players of all time. She has three Olympic medals. She has more goals in international play - 190 - than any other player, male or female. (The top male player, Cristiano Ronaldo, has 138). She should be spoken of in the same breath as Wayne Gretzky, Steve Nash, Donovan Bailey, and Sidney Crosby. But just four years after her gold medal win in Tokyo, a lot of Canadian fans seem to have already forgotten who she is.

Sinclair is a notoriously private person. She hates interviews and talking about herself. Even in her own memoir, she spends more time talking about her coaches and teammates than her own life. She's also so humble, always talking about how her team and her coaches win the game, and then casually throwing in, "oh, and I scored five goals." The fact that someone convinced her to even write a memoir is impressive, but even then she got away with talking about herself the bare minimum possible.

There are only two topics that really seem to motivate Sinclair to open up: One is talking about her parents, and the other is talking about the improvement and development of women's sports, especially soccer.

Sinclair's family is very important to her (she has no kids of her own, but talks about her nieces constantly), and her mother's long fight with MS and her father's surprising cancer diagnosis both cast a heavy shadow over her story. Their deaths hit her hard, and it's something she carried with her even in her most triumphant moments.

The book actually reads more like a history of the rise of Canadian's women's soccer, chronicling all the big moments for the national team from 1999 to 2022, because Sinclair was there for all of them. All the disappointments (and there were a lot of them), through the bronze medals, her breaking the world record for most goals ("Thank god that was over" - her words), and finally their big Gold medal win in Tokyo. Fortunately she wasn't there for the terrible outcome of the Paris Olympics in 2024, but we won't talk about that. 

Throughout the book Sinclair makes passing digs and comments about the Canada Soccer Association, and how the women's national team had to fight for better pay, better support, better facilities, better everything. Even though Canada was becoming one of the top countries in the world for women's soccer, they were still fighting every step of the way. The final chapter is an impassioned plea for Canada to keep moving forward, now that many other countries are starting to catch up and surpass Canada. One of her biggest dreams is for a professional Canadian women's soccer league, in order to develop and showcase the best talent the country has to offer.

...which brings us back to the NSL, and guess what? Christine Sinclair put her money where her mouth is, and since publishing her memoir has become co-owner of one of the NSL's founding teams, the Vancouver Rise FC. 

I really hope she adds a revised chapter to her memoir, to describe that story.