When Martlet Lacrosse captain Megan Halbrook went to the McGill Varsity Athletics website last May and found her team’s webpage missing, she had no idea what it signified.

“I called the web page administrator in Athletics because I assumed something had gone wrong in the computer code,” Halbrook says. “She informed me that because we weren’t a varsity team we weren’t allowed to have a page under varsity sports. And that’s how I found out we weren’t a varsity team anymore.”

This change in status for the Martlets was part of a major restructuring of McGill’s varsity teams system implemented at the start of this school year. Prior to these changes, McGill operated on a three-tier system. Level I teams consisted of football, hockey, basketball, soccer, swimming, and women’s volleyball, while Level II included cross country, track, rugby, badminton, rowing, and men’s volleyball. Level III teams, also known as intercollegiate clubs, included all other teams.

Under the new system, Level I teams operate under the status quo. While men’s volleyball was removed from Level II, a number of teams have been added in addition to the previously mentioned teams: baseball, women’s field hockey, men’s lacrosse, alpine ski, and synchronized swimming. Men’s volleyball was removed from Level II.

The biggest changes, however, were aimed at the Level III teams. These teams, now comprised of cheerleading, cricket, curling, cycling, fencing, figure skating, women’s lacrosse, nordic ski, squash, tennis, ultimate, and men’s volleyball, are no longer considered “teams” by the university. Instead, they are now called “competitive clubs,” and fall under the purview of campus recreation. Because members are no longer considered varsity athletes, they can no longer use the varsity gym. These teams no longer receive funding from Athletics and must instead pay the administration an annual fee of $100 per team. They are also not permitted to compete in CIS, OUA, or QSSF leagues or competitions.

According to Athletics Director Drew Love, this restructuring was partially the result of budget considerations. Facing shortfalls in some program expenditures, McGill Athletics cut approximately $120,000 from intercollegiate sports. Love emphasized, however, that these changes were also the result of a major review of all Athletics programs and sports which the department conducts every four to five years.

“When you look at how you deliver your programming you also have to look at what’s happening at other schools across the country, at our leagues, and what we have available to deliver,” he says. “Queen’s has made similar moves as we’ve done.”

For the 30 members of the McGill ultimate team, the team fee is not a major issue, according to its president Rumi Tejpar. However, the loss of varsity status has a significant impact.

“It’s a heavy commitment, and to not be able to say that you play on a varsity team, that you’re just a club, means you have very little credibility,” he says. “People won’t choose to come to McGill now if they can’t say they’re a varsity athlete.”

Halbrook says that while losing varsity status was disappointing, the main challenge the Martlets have faced has to do with medical services. Now, Halbrook says, simply obtaining a roll of medical tape is a five-step process.

“If someone needs their ankle taped, I do it,” she says. “The only experience I have is from watching YouTube videos.”

Tom Fabian, Students’ Society vice-president internal,  former Varsity Council president and men’s volleyball team member, says that while he understands the restructuring from a sports management perspective, he’s concerned with the lack of transparency behind the decision-making process.

“The main issue for a lot of athletes is that there was no real criteria for us to see,” he says. “I understand why they did it, but it wasn’t a fair process.”

Both Halbrook and Love acknowledged that the OUA’s prior restructuring to eliminate its women’s lacrosse, squash, tennis, and figure skating leagues impacted these teams’ position in McGill’s new system. With the OUA’s decision, these McGill teams lost leagues in which to compete. However, Halbrook says when she approached the Athletics administration with questions, they were unresponsive.

“The varsity people told me I wasn’t under their jurisdiction, and the recreation admin said they didn’t know what to do with us,” she says. “I wrote long, impassioned emails to Drew Love and Lisen Moore and they responded by sending me a PowerPoint presentation.”

Although there is no longer an OUA women’s lacrosse league, the team competed through the Fall in a private league organized by Halbrook and the coaches of the teams that previously played in the league. While the OUA is sponsoring a women’s lacrosse championship, the Martlets cannot attend due to a McGill regulation which stipulates that teams who are not part of officially sanctioned leagues cannot compete in championships.

“To not let us go to championships is like cutting us at our knees,” Halbrook says. “I just want to hold the trophy and now that’s not possible.”

The situation of the men’s volleyball team, however, is unique in that it is the only team to be dropped to competitive club level that could still possibly compete in a sanctioned league, in their case the CIS. According to Love, when compared to universities across the country, McGill had been drastically underfunding the men’s volleyball team. Athletics was thus faced with the option of either investing at least $100,000 in the program or cutting it completely.

“It couldn’t continue the way it was. Its competitiveness was not there. The continuity of the program without a full-time coach was not there. We didn’t offer financial assistance to our athletes so we were unable to recruit the best student athletes,” Love says. “They were taking a significant amount of funding for what they were doing, and we felt that it was best for those funds to be redistributed.”

Ryan Brant, assistant coach and former men’s volleyball player, however, disagreed with Love regarding the team’s competitiveness.

“If everything stayed the same, our team would have fought for second or third place in our league this year. We had very strong returning players,” he says. “We just weren’t given an opportunity to continue to play.”

He was also confident that the team would find a way to finance many of their expenses, even with no support from McGill.

“We could have fundraised. I would have coached for free,” Brant says. “When we met with Lisen Moore, the intercollegiate manager, we asked what we could do to save our program, and she said we needed to raise $2 million. We thought we could raise $30,000, but they were concerned about a lack of funding year to year.”

Like Halbrook, Martlet lacrosse Head Coach Heather Roffey and members of the men’s volleyball team were disappointed with how and when news of the restructuring was conveyed to them.

“I hold no animosity towards the department if changes needed to be made to create stronger athletic programs,” Roffey says. “Being a part of the decision process, or having some advanced warning of decisions already made, would have lessened the emotional impact.”

While Halbrook learned of the change through the McGill website, Fabian says his team’s coach was informed over the phone in late April.

“It was pretty awful that they didn’t tell us, when we asked them so many times,” Fabian says. “It wasn’t until the day after the Athletics Gala that they even told the coaches.”

Love, however, said that restructuring announcements are always made once all teams have completed their seasons.

“The reality is there’s no good time to make an announcement,” he says. “If you make announcements prior to the end of the season that a team is no longer going to compete after the season, now you have an emotional environment where you have people participating on a team that isn’t going to exist any longer.”

When they learned of the change, two freshman volleyball players decided to transfer to Ontario schools that still offered volleyball teams. In addition, Brant had to inform their numerous recruits that the team would no longer exist. While some decided to attend McGill regardless, others opted to go elsewhere—in Dominic Kucharski’s case, the University of Montreal.

“I applied [to McGill] because it’s such a great school academically, and combined with volleyball, it would have been the perfect school for me,” he says. “As much as I wanted to go to McGill, I wanted to play volleyball as well, so I had to look at other options.”

Kucharski said that while he is happy to be playing volleyball, he is still disappointed.

“I was devastated when I found out. I felt like all my future plans were gone out the window,” he says. “I knew what rez I would be in, I knew some of the guys on the team. I was really looking forward to playing for McGill.”

For former Level III teams, however, McGill’s new sports model has provided increased support and recognition. Love cited the men’s baseball team, who recently won the National Championship, as an example of the possible success of such a system. Synchronized swimming Head Coach Cassandra Bilogan said the increase in pool time her team received this year is just as significant as any financial support.

“It’s frustrating having minimal pool time and having one of the only teams at McGill that consistently wins nationals and places well at all their competitions,” she says. “I’ve been fighting for this for years, and this is the first year we actually got more time and it’s been really helpful.”

In addition to increased support for new Level II teams, Love explained that the department has hired a part-time clubs coordinator whose main task is to offer support and guidance to the competitive clubs. Roffey said the support structure in place has been particularly beneficial for her team.

“I think it is important to note that the newly formed sport club office has been extremely understanding, helpful, and patient with our team as we navigate through this season,” she says. “They are working with the teams to create competitive programs with the fewer resources we now have.”

According to Norman O’Reilly, associate professor of sport business at the University of Ottawa, a lack of resources has become an issue for university athletic departments across Canada. O’Reilly agreed with Fabian and Love that such a system of prioritizing certain teams is becoming a common response to financial issues among Canadian schools.

“The bottom line is athletics departments without exception are cost cutters for universities,” he says.  “They’re not revenue generators.”

According to O’Reilly, different Canadian universities have implemented various models in response to the funding cuts that began about a decade ago. Some schools have chosen to prioritize and promote one specific team—for example, Laval’s football program or Carleton’s powerhouse men’s basketball team. O’Reilly explained that these teams are now revenue generators for their respective schools, with money being invested into other teams and facilities. Other schools, including Nippissing and Lakehead, have moved to mixed funding for some teams. Under this model, the men’s hockey teams are underwritten by a group of alumni.

With regard to McGill, however, O’Reilly explained that while teams representing less prominent sports can often support themselves financially, they often need official recognition from the university in order to survive.

“If you accept your reality then you can figure out a way to make your resources work,” he says. “But in order to be able to do that, you have to be able to maintain your varsity status. With a tiered system where teams actually lose their varsity status, you’re basically killing them. They’ll be a club for a while, then it will eventually peter off.”

Tejpar echoed a similar sentiment.

“I understand that McGill doesn’t have that much money. But varsity status doesn’t cost them any money,” he says. “It’s a glorified intramural, and that’s not what we are. We are a varsity team.”

Love says he is confident the restructuring has been beneficial since it has clarified the roles of varsity and club teams, and added that similar reviews will continue in the future.

“This has set us up for the next four years or so in a way that lines consistent with what other universities are doing and what the sport system is doing in Canada with respect to university sport,” he says.

Roffey is hopeful that the Martlets will regain varsity status, but also emphasized that her team is still moving forward regardless.

“Fancy practice uniforms and unlimited access to trainers are a benefit, but they do not change the heart of a player,” she says. “My players have heart. That is why we still have a team.”

Brant, however, was not as optimistic.

“All the effort we put in to build this team up now means nothing. I felt like we were leaving a dynasty,” he says. “I gave 30 or 40 hours a week for four years, for nothing. My dream was to coach this team someday. And now it’s gone.”

Few hipsters, biking furiously down St. Urbain Street in Mile End, notice number 5257, an unassuming second-floor apartment in a small, pinkish-beige brick building on the east side of the street. It’s uglier and noticeably younger than other buildings on the block, with no sign to commemorate its place in Canadian literary history as the boyhood home of Mordecai Richler.

Up and down this street, the young Richler walked and the old Richler—to his great delight—drove. A few blocks down is Baron Byng High School, where he gave 10-minute speeches about current events to his peers each day and was president of his class; a block over is the famous Wilensky’s Light Lunch, which young Richler guiltily frequented and where old Richler triumphantly returned to make films based on his novels; close, too, is Fletcher’s Field, now Jeanne-Mance Park, where Richler brought girls to “neck” in the bushes – whatever that means. The streets of the Mile End are infused with the lingering spirit of Richler and the Montreal Jewish community he immortalized in his books.

“Richler’s Montreal is still here,” says Charles Foran, author of a monumental Richler biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times, published by Knopf Canada last month.

The book begins with an expansive portrait of the Montreal Jewish community at the time of Richler’s birth in 1931. Foran, who, upon moving to Montreal as a young man, chose to live on Esplanade Street because it was “Richler country,” says he asked veterans of the community to show him around the neighbourhood, to say “this was the pool hall, this was where we bought our hot dogs, this was the shul, this was the this, that was the that.”

“It hasn’t been leveled,” he says. “There haven’t been any wars or urban renewal or anything. It’s still there.”

In recent months there’s been a notable surge in Richler-related activity. There’s the book by Foran, which, though the author concedes that no biography can be truly authoritative, will surely rank as the definitive work on Richler for many years to come. In October, the Walrus, a Canadian literary magazine, put Richler on its cover (cigarette in hand, as always) with an accompanying story by his son, Noah, who’s also a writer. This December a film adaptation of Barney’s Version, the last novel Richler penned before he died will be released starring Dustin Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, presumably drawing renewed—and maybe, finally, American—interest in his works. And in the past few weeks a debate has erupted in the local media as to how Montreal should commemorate its most famous writer.

Richler’s widow, Florence, has suggested renaming St. Urbain Street after her husband. Others have proposed Fairmount Avenue, home to Wilensky’s, and only a few metres from the old Richler home.

“I think it’s borderline criminal that there isn’t a street named after him already,” says Robert Lantos, the producer of Barney’s Version and a previous Richler film, 1985’s Joshua Then and Now. “It should be Sherbrooke Street, nothing less. Mordecai Richler Avenue.”

Foran, however, isn’t sure Richler would want St. Urbain or any other street name changed. He proposes changing the Mile End Public Library into the Mordecai Richler Library, following the model set by the city of Lachine, which christened the Saul Bellow Library after another world famous Jewish novelist born in Montreal.

This type of commemoration, Foran contends, more than the renaming of a street Richler played on as a child and immortalized as an adult in his fiction, would connect Richler forever to Montreal.

“He was a writer who needed to know the soil,” Foran says. “He needed to know the soil beneath his feet.”

After graduating from Baron Byng, Richler attended and then dropped out of Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University, and moved to Europe to become a writer. Montreal was the city he couldn’t wait to leave but couldn’t forget once he was gone. Despite his nearly 20-year residence in London, England, all of Richler’s major works—The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Joshua Then and Now, and Barney’s Version—are set in and around Montreal.

“He was a quintessential Montrealer,” Foran says. “Like him or not, agree with him or not, he defended his Montreal, his conception of Montreal—what it was, what it should be, what it shouldn’t be.”

Indeed, Richler wrestled with the city of his birth in both his fiction and his life. Explaining his return to Montreal in 1972, Richler said he worried “about being so long away from the roots of my discontent.”

He criticized the city and his Jewish community endlessly, but never denied his origins or pretended to be anything other than a St. Urbain street boy.

“In no small part, he was such a loyal son to the city because of his childhood in that neighbourhood,” Foran says. “It kind of held him; it nurtured this very distinctive, outsized personality. Jewish Montrealers, who were sort of the first people he exercised his muscles on, they got this kid—this bratty, angry, smart, iconoclastic kid. Judaism has this tradition of provocation and people asking hard questions, and Richler took on that role.”

In this sense, the Richler story is very much the Montreal story. Both represent a heritage of internal contradiction, ceaseless dialectic, and rabid self-criticism.

Foran presents this idea as a substantial theme of his book. “I think Montreal is a naturally combative city,” he says. “There are different narratives, and different histories, and it’s all on the same ground.”

Cities are monuments to irresolution. The changing skyline, the perpetual construction, social and cultural transformations, daily turmoil—the city is the quintessential embodiment of a “work in progress.” Humans, like most creatures, inhabit the spaces our ancestors constructed; and we, too, continue to build.

Montreal has always taken this principle of irresolution to the extreme. It represents hundreds of years of argument, negotiation, and constant battle. It has always promised to be different things to different people, and its famed dynamism is the result of this ceaseless negotiation.

Richler’s refusal to compromise himself and his principles—especially what Foran called “his conception of Montreal”—eventually got him in a lot of trouble. After the publication of Oh Canada Oh Quebec! in 1992, outlining his ideas about Quebec separatism and odious language laws, Richler became a persona non grata for many Francophones in the province. He was and is still regularly called a racist, a bigot, and a fraud. His list of enemies is long, and many of them are not ready to let Montreal commemorate a man they consider to be an enemy to their city and to La Belle Province.

Robert Lantos, the producer of Barney’s Version, has his own ideas about Richler’s legacy.

“I suspect that there isn’t anyone who has done as much for Montreal in terms of world literature than Mordecai has,” he says.

But of course not everyone agrees. Richler’s Montreal is not the only Montreal. Foran believes that Francophones living in Brossard or Laval “just don’t know what we’re talking about.”

Indeed, Macha Grenon, a famous Quebec actress who plays a supporting role in Barney’s Version, admits that Richler represents only a part of the Montreal experience.

“Of course I’d heard of Mordecai Richler, but to be honest I only came to know that whole universe through Barney’s Version,” she says. “It was fascinating to me, because so much of it was about the neighbourhood I grew up in, and it’s amazing to read and to realize how unaware you can be of somewhere you’ve been living your whole life.”

Even so, Grenon is excited by the major role the city itself plays in the new film. Whereas many filmm
akers use Montreal for films set elsewhere—as with the upcoming production of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which is being filmed here but is set in late 1940s Denver—Barney’s Version is securely placed in Montreal. The characters stroll in Square St. Louis, drink in a bar on St. Catherine streets, try to kick a drug habit while staying on the Lower Main, and make off-hand references to St. Viateur bagels and even our own eminent university.

“Someone not from Montreal or Canada will really enjoy the film,” Grenon says. “But I think for Montrealers and Canadians you’re on the inside of it, you really get to recognize things, and Montreal finally gets the stardom it deserves.”

Perhaps in this way Richler will posthumously be recognized as a quintessentially Montreal artist, who, while alternating between celebrating and criticizing his home city, created in his fiction a singular monument to its complexity and unique sense of itself.

“Richler really took a stab at everyone,” says Anna Hopkins, also a native Montrealer, who plays the title character’s daughter in Barney’s Version. “I think that’s really characteristic of Montreal in general. Self-criticism – big time.”

“Richler was never at ease in the world,” Foran says. And, arguably, neither is Montreal, the city he never really left and which, to the end, never left him.