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New Canadians embracing football

New Canadians embracing football

David Naylor

Globe and Mail Update Published on Friday, Nov. 27

His Tunisian-born parents wanted their little boy to be kicking a soccer ball, not chasing quarterbacks.

“My Mom told me ‘that's not a good sport for you,'” said Mehdi Abdesmad. “And my father … his dream was to see me play soccer. He wanted me to play it like all the immigrants because this is our national sport.”

Today, college scouts are swooning over the 18-year-old defensive lineman at Cégep du Vieux Montreal, whose bedroom in Laval is adorned with football trophies and recruiting letters from major U.S. colleges.

Stories like Abdesmad's are becoming more common as football programs across the country absorb first- and second-generation citizens from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. While the statistics are hard to get a handle on, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence. When scouts talk about some of Canada's top prospects, names of the players sound like a roll call at the United Nations. They are being inspired in part by role models in the pros. In the CFL, Hamilton's Marwan Hage (Lebanon), B.C.'s Sherko Haji-Rasouli (Iran), Edmonton's Patrick Kabongo (Zaire) and Calgary's Alain Kashama (The Congo) are just a few of the players who picked up the game after arriving in Canada as children.

Others, such as Montreal centre Brian Chiu, were born here and won the tug-of-war with their parents over being allowed to play the game. Of the dozen Canadians in the NFL, Chicago's Israel Idonije (Nigeria) and San Diego's Vaughn Martin (Jamaica) were born outside of Canada and a third, St. Louis's O.J. Atogwe, was born to parents who immigrated from The Congo.

Abdesmad was enrolled in soccer school as a young boy when he saw football being played by kids at a local park. It took some convincing but eventually he won over his parents, who themselves became big fans of the game.

“Now I am very pleased about football, I am very crazy about football,” said his mother, Sihame Abdesmad, whose husband Montacer died last spring from cancer. Sihame was the loudest fan at Vieux Montreal games this season.

“After 10 years, I think I know a lot about football. When I see a sack and tackle and a fumble and a touchdown, I think I know a lot.”

The children of new Canadians tell remarkably similar stories of seeing the game for the first time and being struck by its speed and physicality in a love-at-first-site kind of way.

“I'd never even heard of it,” said Farhad Gadjev, a middle linebacker at Toronto's Northern Secondary school who moved from Azerbaijan as a 7-year-old. “Football meant soccer to us. And soccer was the life back then. But then I watched [the movie] Any Given Sunday and it changed my mind.”

Gadjev couldn't speak English when he and his brother went to the theatre that day, but he came out obsessed and begged his parents to let him play.

“Me and my brothers checked the phone book and started looking for flyers, and we saw a blue flyer on a wall that said North York Grizzlies,” he said. “That was the luckiest day ever and we signed up. It took over my life right away. I got hooked on football. Football is not soccer any more. Football is football.”

Ron Dias has spent 22 years scouting high school football players for U.S. and Canadian universities. As he watched immigrants populate certain metropolitan areas, he wondered whether the football programs would be shut down due to lack of interest.

“And then I start looking around and going ‘geez, what's going on here?'” Dias said. “All of a sudden you're looking and going ‘wow, I think the immigrant situation has really enhanced the growth of football in Canada.'”

Coaches on the ground are noticing the same trend.

“You get kids from so many different backgrounds and so many different cultures,” said Tom Gretes, a former York University football head coach, now defensive co-ordinator at Northern Secondary School. “Everybody has a different way of expressing themselves – how they talk, how they act and so on. And I try to bring all of that together.”

So why are the off-spring of so many recent immigrants gravitating to football, a sport that is completely foreign to them and which their parents rarely encourage?

There appear to be several factors at play, including the fact that, unlike hockey, football is a game that kids can pick up as late as their mid teens.

And since at most places equipment is provided, the sport doesn't cost anywhere near what it does to play hockey.

“With football you can enter it at the high school level, and that's what's happening,” said Rick Sowieta, director, high performance of Football Canada, whose organization will begin tracking the diversity of football players in Canada starting in 2010. “You don't need to start it at six or seven years old, you can pick it up at any level.”

On Grey Cup weekend, a national celebration of football, many realize the importance of immigrants for the future of the sport in Canada.

“Canada is a multi-ethnic country,” Gadjev said. “We're a bunch of great athletes. We just want to play football.”