Unsung heroes bask in praise from afar

It's hockey all right, and this country's new "Great One" is a guy named Wayne who fired the top-shelf, overtime winner on Wednesday to give Canada a Pan-Am Games gold medal and a coveted berth in the Beijing Olympics next year.
But the iceless version of Canada's favourite pastime is surely the Rodney Dangerfield of the national sports scene. That's one reason why, on perhaps the greatest day for field hockey in Canada's history, the game's top Canadian official couldn't watch the dramatic victory on television (or even the Internet), and contented herself with a flood of congratulatory e-mail messages -- from the Netherlands.
"They understand this is a big thing," said Field Hockey Canada executive director Suzzanne Nicholson from her office at the sport's national headquarters in Ottawa.
She acknowledges that her passion is "the other hockey" in a land of snow and skates and Stanley.
But Nicholson is hoping the national men's triumph in Brazil -- thanks largely to a two-goal performance in the final against Argentina by Wayne Fernandes, the country's top scorer at the Pan-Ams -- will "leverage a bit more sponsorship and attention" for a sport stuck in the summertime shadows of the Canadian consciousness.
"Something like this is huge for us -- really important. We really needed this," Nicholson told CanWest News Service in the afterglow of the "big, big day" for Canadian field hockey -- a stunning upset win over top-seeded Argentina at Rio de Janeiro, and a surprise bye for the world's 15th ranked team into the 12-country Olympic tournament at the 2008 Games in China.
"We've had seven terrible years," Canadian captain Rob Short of Victoria said after the gold medal game.
"This is the most important win of my career."
But Canadian field hockey's "miracle on grass" down in Rio has been overshadowed in the sports pages here at home by news that Eric and Jordan Staal -- a couple of Canada's favourite (ice) hockey stars -- got drunk and disorderly at a bachelor party.
A headline writer at one of the few papers that did give good billing to Canada's field hockey triumph deftly captured the sport's quirky, puck-free status in the national mindset: "Look, ma, no ice!"
The sport, in fact, is played on a soccer-sized field with 11 players and has more in common with the "beautiful game" than with the brutal game on ice that most Canadians love -- save the curved stick, known in old French as a "hoquet," that gives both sports their name.
Nicholson -- no relation, by the way, to Hockey Canada president Bob -- is a former player with the national women's field hockey team and an award-winning coach in a sport with much deeper roots in history and much broader global appeal than its ice-bound cousin.