Twenty years ago, baseball was the most played sport in Canada. Today, nine people arrayed on a diamond has a faintly quaint aura, evoking the sepia tones of another era. That's just one example of how the sports Torontonians play are as sensitive to demographic change as the restaurants we frequent.
As the Greater Toronto Area absorbs hundreds of thousands of immigrants from South Asia and China, Toronto's sports scene has a lot of other balls in the air.
Cricket is hugely popular today among the growing population of Canadians of South Asian background. Table tennis, China's national game, is exploding in Toronto's suburbs. And then there is kabaddi, an Indian village game that through the power of nostalgia and the financial muscle of Indian immigrants is now more vibrant in Canada than it is in India.
For the moment, they are niche sports – and kabaddi is more significant as a spectator event than participation sport – but demographics are on their side. Their impact won't be immediate or earth-shattering : table tennis won't regularly fill the Rogers Centre any time soon, and playing fields won't be re-painted with kabaddi boundaries. According to the Statistics Canada General Social Survey, immigrants are less likely to play sports than the Canadian-born.
That may be a result of their efforts to establish themselves financially in a new country, as income has a profound effect on participation. People with family incomes above $80,000 a year are twice as likely to participate in sport as those with incomes under $30,000.
But a change-up is in order. Baseball has now slipped behind basketball and soccer, globally popular games that rival the supremacy of hockey and golf in Canada. And soccer, which in 1992 was the 13th most played sport among those 15 and older, jumped to fourth by 2005, encouraged by huge waves of immigrants from soccer-mad countries.
CRICKET
The players arrange themselves for a group photo with the boredom typical of athletes anxious to start play. The power brokers of Toronto cricket and a candidate for mayor, eager to insert themselves in this multicultural tableau, step to the fore, relegating the players to backdrop.
Joe Pantalone, candidate for mayor, addresses a camera operated by his campaign staff, promising that, once elected, he will make construction of an international-level cricket facility one of his top priorities. It's the surest sign that Toronto's changing demographics are having an impact on the city's sporting scene.
As the historian C.L.R. James put it, describing the infinite ways in which cricket and politics intertwine, "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"
Cricket is spreading like wildfire, according to Mohamed Shaikh, president of the Toronto and District Cricket Association. His league has mushroomed to 172 member teams this year, up from 100 teams five years ago. The Brampton-Etobicoke league has 110 teams and the Commonwealth Cricket Association, 40 teams, which adds up to more than 300 competitive teams of at least a dozen players in the GTA, and participation is growing beyond capacity.
"I would still say immigration is driving the growth, people coming in from South Asian countries," Mr. Shaikh said. "We still need more mainstream local participation, but it's mostly new immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka."
The gentlemen of Upper Canada College and The Toronto Cricket Club who were its protectors saw it decline through much of the 20th century. Immigration from the Commonwealth, particularly the West Indies, sparked a mini-revival, but the number of West Indian cricketers in Canada is declining as immigration from that region slows. The Canadian-born children of West Indian immigrants are not taking up the game in great numbers, organizers say.
Leslie Soobrian, who came to Canada from Guyana, has poured much of his free time into running the Commonwealth Cricket Association for the last 30 years. To his mild bemusement, his own Canadian-born children never played the game.
"They played the traditional sports, basketball, baseball," he said. But cricket just didn't appeal.
"For the South Asians it's a kind of religion," Mr. Soobrian said. "That's where all the growth is."
Corporate sponsors have certainly noticed. The Royal Bank and Scotiabank both have sponsored cricket in recent years.
"What we're doing with RBC is we're using cricket as a cultural market, and a bit of a hedge on hockey," said Bob Stellick, who runs a Toronto sports marketing company. "Hockey is a bigger-budget mainstream sport for RBC. With cricket we pick certain niches like Brampton, Surrey B.C., places in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg where there are South Asian communities. From a corporate perspective we really want to engage our customers where they're comfortable."
Tonight's match features Brampton Masters' top team versus Apollo. Playing for Brampton is Mahendra Nagamootoo, a former top international spin bowler who played 30 times for the West Indies, a cricketing powerhouse.
"It's good cricket here. The elite division is really high level," Mr. Nagamootoo said. He is one of several semi-professional players who are brought in on special immigration visas every year, lending prestige to the events.
Tonight he's regularly walloping shots over the boundary for six runs. It's a style of play observers say is evolving in Canada as a reaction to municipal groundskeepers who are deaf to the needs of a cricket pitch. The grass is as long and shaggy as a hipster haircut, which means batted balls lurch to a halt if played along the ground.
Mr. Soobrian sighs a resigned sigh and gestures to a beautifully maintained, purpose-built soccer pitch across the way. He can remember when that area belonged to cricket. The soccer pitch was built thanks to a highly mobilized and politically connected Italian-Canadian community group, he says.
Cricket may get there yet.