Baseball may not be Canada's best-known sport – but one player, Kiyoshi Suga, deserves a spot in the hall of fame alongside other barrier-breaking greats like America's Jackie Robinson.
Baseball may not be Canada’s best-known sport –but one player, Kiyoshi Suga, deserves a spot in the hall of fame alongside other barrier-breaking greats like America’s Jackie Robinson. Sure, Suga could hit a ball as well as anyone –but the legacy this great sportsman leaves has as much to do with his life history as his way with a bat.
Suga, a Japanese-Canadian resident of Vancouver, was a star player on Vancouver’s Asahi baseball team during the 1930s. The team was at the top of their game in 1941 when everything changed: After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese-Canadians in Vancouver were forced to relocate to internment camps in the province’s interior, and would live there for two years. Their possessions –baseball bats and balls included –were seized from them and sold off by the government.
After the war had ended, Suga told the Montreal Gazette, “instead of being allowed to go back home, we were given a cruel choice - move out to eastern Canada or be deported to Japan.” Suga chose to move to Montreal, and has spent many years of his life there. The legendary Asahi baseball team would never again have the chance to show their stuff on the baseball diamond.
But on June 28th, 2003, Suga and his surviving teammates were given a final shot at the spotlight, with an induction into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. The symbolic gesture brought Suga and his teammates to tears, and served as the “ultimate validation for everything that has happened,” he said.
Despite everything he had been through, the great baseball player still loved his country. “We still have the utmost faith in our country,” he said in his speech. “Canada is the greatest country in the world in which to live!”