Thanks for showing some class, Edmonton...

[Don Corleone]

Hey, nobody ever accused American sports fans of having an over-abundance of high-mindedness. Canadians certainly shouldn't take it personally.

There's a particularly intense baseball rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Now mind you, these are two cities that are about 200 miles away (very close in American terms). Most people outside the Northeast cannot distinguish between a Bostonian and New Yorker. But, because they play in the same division, there is something of a blood feud there.

While up for a conference in Boston, I took a couple of coworkers to a Red Sox game several years back. Now, this was on a Thursday night, and they were actually playing the Kansas City Royals (this becomes relevant later in the story). This was April of 2002, roughly 6 months after 9/11. As we were walking into the game, hawkers are selling "Yankees Suck" t-shirts all over the streets (the Yankees were arriving on Friday for a 3 game series). My coworkers were surprised that a team that wasn't playing that night was actually occupying the majority of attention from the fans, more than the Red Sox themselves at that point.

During the traditional '7th inning stretch', which happened shortly after 9, the announcer came on to ask for a minute of silence at 9:11 exactly, in honor of the fallen. Well, the crowd made it about 12 seconds, before from Left field, we heard the drunken wail "The Yankees suck", soon joined by a (granted small) chorus. People were horrified! We all broke into "My Country, T'is of Thee" to drown it out. It was very embarrassing, especially with 3 southerners who had no idea what was going on in tow.

The moral is, nothing against Canadians, we just don't always show a lot of class at sporting events.