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It has always been a sensitive subject here.
Actors and comedians and musicians can move away and ply their trade, and yet are forever embraced as Canadians. But athletes who compete under another flag, even if the rationale makes perfect sense, are rarely given the benefit of the doubt.
that was one reason - the biggest one - why Lennox Lewis, named as a member of Canada's Sports Hall of Fame today, was never fully appreciated in his home and native land. Turning professional at a time when the domestic boxing scene was all but dead, he had little choice but to pack up and move. Had he wound up in the United States, nationality wouldn't have been an issue. Lewis could have happily called himself a Canadian and no one would have much cared, just as long as he continued to knock people out.
But because he was presented with an offer he couldn't refuse from an English hustler named Roger Levitt, the dynamic changed.
Levitt was persuaded to invest in Lewis because the fighter had been born London, and lived there as a boy. The last English heavyweight champion to that point was a freckled Cornishman named Bob Fitzsimmons, in the dying days of the 19th Century. Lewis would be sold as the next one, someone who could achieve what even the beloved Henry Cooper had failed to do.
For the first couple of fights, they introduced Lewis as being from both places, but that soon went by the wayside. Lewis was wrapped in the Union Jack, developed a mid-Atlantic accent that sure didn't sound much like Kitchener, and became someone else's undisputed heavyweight champion.
Under those circumstances, it was understandably difficult to also think of him as the first Canadian heavyweight champ since Tommy Burns. But the truth is, we didn't seem all that interested long before he chose to fly a flag of convenience. When he was fighting for Canada in Seoul, winning the country's first Olympic gold medal in boxing since 1932 (and knocking out the American Riddick Bowe in the process), Lewis's accomplishment was largely lost in the national hand-wringing following Ben Johnson's positive test.
The English stuff later became an easy excuse to disqualify him from all of those Canadian athlete-of-the-year votes, at least one of which he should have captured. When he was at the top, we still didn't have the good sense to reclaim him.
So consider this honour the first step in repatriating one of our very best of the second half of the 20th Century.
A couple of asterisks might be attached. There were fights that, through circumstance, never took place and could have - a professional rematch with Bowe, a chance to take on Mike Tyson before he was completely washed up, a rematch with Vitali Klitschko. But the bottom line is that Lewis stood up to everyone they put in front of him, avenged his only two professional losses, and was the dominant heavyweight of his era - arguably the finest pure athlete ever to hold that storied title.
He will have been out of the game for five years next month, and still no one has really taken his place.
But was he really a Canadian? Well, ask his mom, who still lives here, who never left. Ask the friends from Kitchener who are still his friends. When he was alive, you could have asked his old trainer, Arnie Boehm, who was a special guest at all of the big fights.
Go back and take a look at the gold medal performance that so many missed. That was our song they were playing.
