Marauders and those who watch

Fraser Caldwell

Sports Editor

I spent my first two years at McMaster in blissful ignorance of a group of individuals – indeed an entire thriving campus sub-culture – that would come to redefine me forever.

I was the most stereotypically insular of academics as I entered school in the fall of 2009. The path for the future was laid out years in advance in my mind, clear as if it were merely waiting to be travelled. Graduate school was a given, and a life buried in an archive of dusty, forgotten tomes was to be my lot in life.

I enjoyed professional sports as much as the next professed ‘bro’ did. I diligently did my nightly highlight homework in order to arm myself for conversations in dimly lit bars and flagging tutorials. But the campus sports scene was an unknown to me.

That changed forever in October of my third year, and I’ve never been more grateful for such an alteration to my life. I took a rare chance on the slightest of whims, answering a desperate call from a Silhouette editor for the nearest sucker willing to attend a volleyball match and scribble about it.

I had never seen the Maroon and Grey on court, and hadn’t played the sport in any real capacity since my voice was a few crucial octaves higher. But I remembered those early days fondly, and I was desperately looking for a distraction from the grim reality of corporate learning.

So there I was, parked uncertainly at an entirely meaningless exhibition between the Marauder men’s team and the Montreal Carabins. The match wasn’t particularly close, and neither team seemed overly concerned when a ball hit the floor. But I was hooked.

There’s a certain romance about the university game that’s incredibly difficult to describe, but undeniably powerful in its appeal.

Maybe it’s the amateur earnestness of it all, the knowledge that donning the Maroon and Grey will mark the highest point of many of these athletes’ careers. Or maybe it’s the campus-level closeness that comes from the basic reality that you could be seated beside any of these athletes at a lab or tutorial the next day.

Being the newest varsity scribe on the block, some part of the appeal probably arose from the self-serving notion that I had a stake in all of this. I felt like Tyler Durdan at the projector. I could run the film the way nature intended it, or I could throw some spice in there for the sake of amusement alone.

Whatever the reason, that first taste of Marauder sport created an appetite that has only continued to grow as time has passed. Even now as I write this final editorial, I find myself pining for a game to watch or a bus to jump to a decrepit country gym. The summer will be my Marauder methadone clinic.

What followed that first, epoch-making experience is history now. You can read it in the bland, matter-of-fact lines of my resume. You can see it in the articles of years past. But most vividly it lives in my memory as a collection of Marauder moments, snapshots brief but overpowering in their emotional intensity.

It can be found in Tyler Santoni’s merciless swing and Matt Poulin’s decimated, streaming nose.

You can spot it amid the chaos that greeted Paterson Farrell’s coolly slotted finish and Anthony Costa’s discarded jersey.

That history resides in so many such moments that have earmarked the many Marauder programs and come to most readily encompass my own McMaster experience. Because at some point, telling the stories of the Maroon and Grey became a more important part of my academic journey than the readings and the essays.

That message is not one that University administrators would be eager to read or disseminate amongst the student population of our fair school. And I won’t go as far as to advocate sport at the expense of learning. We are after all invested – at least financially – in an academic venture.

But I will advise those five of you reading at this stage that if you should choose to allow it to do so, the Marauder spirit will consume you in the best possible way. You need not be athletically gifted in your own right, or given to scribbling as I am.

You need only to open your eyes and most importantly, your mind, to the spectacle that the Marauders offer you for so little material cost. Athletic feats themselves are only part of the appeal, only the surface layer.

Beneath it you find the desperately emotional struggle of your fellow travelers on the academic journey that is McMaster. You find individuals who dedicate themselves to a sport for no material gain and in direct opposition to their scholarly commitments. You find survivors and competitors, the charitable and the fiercely driven.

And somewhere along the way, you might even find yourself.