PHOTO ESSAY

Most Valuable Players

Hockey card summaries of this year’s GG Performing Arts Awards winners

By Alec Scott

November 4, 2005

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Photo Sgt. Eric Jolin, Rideau Hall.

While growing up, we’d sometimes get hockey cards in our cereal boxes, each one featuring some hulking hero of the rink. There was a homogeneity to these men: they were young and big and gap-toothed; they were all — it seemed — from some small town, not the urban and suburban centres that the majority of Canadians inhabited; they voiced the usual athletic clichés (the always popular giving of 110 per cent) and their career highlights could be conveyed through mind-numbing statistics. “Brett is married; his wife’s name is Ann,” is about all a typical card would reveal of a player’s life off-ice.

Now what if, in some parallel universe, you were to open your corn flakes and find a card trumpeting the achievements of, say, an artist like painter Michael Snow, ballerina Karen Kain or actor Kate Nelligan? To honour this year’s recipients of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards (handed out at Ottawa’s Rideau Hall on Nov. 4), we’ve produced player cards for this year’s GG winners, as well as the sole recipient (k.d. lang) of the prestigious National Arts Centre Award. These “players” are actually quotable; they come, largely, from urban centres, or from abroad; their career highlights can't be conveyed through mere numbers.