Former Toronto Raptors' Vince Carter dunks during a game against the Cleveland Cavaliers in Toronto, on Jan. 7, 2004. Carter will become the first player by the Raptors to have his jersey retired.AARON HARRIS/The Associated Press
Despite the remarkable length of time Vince Carter played in the NBA, it’s taking him even longer to leave.
Carter started talking about retiring around the time he turned 40. Years later, he was still waffling. It took a COVID season on a minimum contract for just about the worst team in the league to force him out.
Then Carter began his second career, trying to convince this country that he’s never forgotten about her. Canada – a self-deluding lover always prepared to swoon at a news-release quote – has proved receptive.
For two years, Carter and the Toronto Raptors have been planning his grand farewell, which also operates as a combination welcome back and all is forgiven. It reaches a crescendo on Saturday night, when Carter becomes the first Raptor to have his number retired.
On Friday, Hangar 6 at Toronto’s Pearson Airport staged the latest prelim of this endless goodbye. Air Canada has put Carter’s likeness on a plane. It was headed to Montreal later in the day. Because the show ran over, it was almost certainly late. All of this is a bit too perfect.
There was a lot of talk about The Dunk, not so much about going on work-to-rule a couple of years later in the hopes that someone, anyone, could smuggle him out of the country.
Back then, Carter explained it thusly: “This is about doing what’s best for me.”
Fair enough. At the time, the Raptors were abysmal. A team without a past, present or future. Carter was the only reason to watch. You could argue that no player was more valuable to a North American sports franchise than he was then.
So Carter left, submarining the Raptors’ hopes for another decade. Again, fair enough. If Carter had forgotten how to do basketball, the team would have cut him. Why shouldn’t he cut them for doing functionally the same thing?
Like a lot of can’t-miss moves you don’t hear so much about later, it missed. Carter had failed to understand that standing so tall in a backwater was his secret sauce. Anyone can be great in L.A. But in a whole different country? That was new.
Carter was still a good-to-great player when he moved on to New Jersey, Orlando, Phoenix and Dallas, but no one cared any more. He wasn’t blazing trails. He was just earning his pay cheque on a series of diminishing squads. In the end, leaving Toronto was as devastating for Carter as it was for the Raptors.
That must be why Carter is now stuck in a mode of permanent reminisce. He recalls small details of the big events of his life. He tells these ancient stories like he’s expecting rapt attention. Canada must be the only place where he gets it.
On Friday, they set him up in front of his plane for what organizers called “a fireside chat.” It was more of a marketing pitch. The product – Vince Carter, well-known company man and unquestioning loyalist.
“I played the game for the front of the jersey,” Carter said – for the team, rather than for himself.
Within seconds of that statement, he told a story about how he’d broken the set play at the start of the inaugural game held in the Air Canada Centre, so that he would be the one to score the historic first basket.
Every one of us is two people – the one we are, and the one we think we are. Closing the gap between the two is the work of a lifetime. At 47, there is still a Grand Canyon between the two Vince Carters.
At the end of his remarks, he was asked what he would say to Toronto fans, some of whom are capable of remembering things that happened longer than a year ago. What should they expect on Saturday night?
Carter paused meaningfully and got a look of extreme seriousness – “It’s their night also. Man, it’s simple.”
Is it? I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
But it sounds vaguely smart and the guy saying it is famous so the Hangar 6 audience began to applaud. One expects the same bovine reaction on a larger scale on Saturday.
The allure of the Carter story isn’t that he left, or the way he left, or what happened after he left. All of those things are mundane events in pro sports. It’s that everyone is now pretending that what happened didn’t happen. Or, at least, didn’t happen as badly as some people say it did.
Nobody expects their plumber to put them first regardless of how much money someone else is offering them. Athletes are plumbers in shorts.
The disconnect between loving your team and understanding that the individuals who comprise it do not feel the same way is made bearable by never talking about it. It’s why athletes know the only correct answer to a question about their next contract is to say, ‘Honestly, I haven’t even thought about it’, although that’s all they think about.
Carter was one of the few who could not help himself but also talk about it. His self-regard defeated his better judgment.
It’s still doing that, but now it works. People aren’t stupid. They know Carter didn’t love Toronto until he ran out of other options. It’s not as though Dallas was going to retire his number for not winning a championship there.
They know forgiving Carter goes against Fan Code. They know it would never happen in other, better sports cities.
But as Carter well understands, Canadian basketball teams don’t have the luxury of a rich history to tell back-in-my-day stories about. Toronto fans have those goofy purple uniforms and Vince Carter at the Slam Dunk Contest. That’s it.
Given a choice between pretending it was fated to end this way or facing reality alone, Toronto would rather hear more about how much Vince Carter loved them all along.