Slam dunk

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This article was published 06/03/2025 (303 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As Joe Poplawski high-stepped it into the end zone to give the Blue Bombers the lead in the 1984 Grey Cup game, a six-year-old Ray Strachan bolted across his living room nearly as fast — a sideline reporter eager to give his dad an ecstatic scoring update.

“I remember it because he was in the washroom, and I was yelling through the door that Joe Pop scored,” says the local actor-director, for whom that game — a 47-17 win over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — served as an unbeatable introduction to the world of professional sports fandom in Winnipeg.

When the Bombers kicked off the 1990s with their third championship in seven seasons, perhaps Strachan was convinced that being a local sports devotee would always be a boomtime of downtown parades overflowing with champagne fountains and Gatorade showers.

Then the Jets flew south for Arizona winters and the Bombers suffered the repetitive indignity of a 29-year title drought — so close, but so far, for so long.

Only 29 years? That’s nothing to a Cleveland sports fan.

In the lakeside Ohio city (pop. 360,000), the longstanding reputation for athletic futility is eerie: for 52 years starting in 1964, no major Cleveland team — not football’s Browns, not hockey’s Barons, not baseball’s Guardians (formerly the Indians) and not basketball’s Cavaliers — could rightfully call itself a champion.

But in 2003, a glimmer of hope arrived at the downtown Gund Arena when a phenom named LeBron James was made Cleveland’s first overall pick in the National Basketball Association’s draft, his 18-year-old shoulders carrying the pseudo-messianic burden of the post-Michael Jordan basketball world.

Before he could legally taste a Cleveland-brewed Carling, James was expected to bring a long-awaited revival to a city that hadn’t celebrated since the Browns won the 1964 NFL Championship, the final title match televised for American audiences in crackling black and white.

That lingering civic saga of underdoggery plays out on a personal level for Cavs season-ticket holders Matt and Shawn (Justin Fry and Eric Miracle, respectively) playing one-on-one in Pulitzer Prize-winning Cleveland playwright Rajiv Joseph’s basketball comedy King James, premièring tonight at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Tom Hendry Warehouse.

For Strachan, a longtime featured player on the RMTC stage, the two-hander will mark his directorial debut for the company. It’s a role, and a play, that the actor — who hosts a weekly sports podcast (Ray and Benny Talk Sports) with a best friend he’s kept close since their days at West Kildonan Collegiate — connected to on an almost spiritual level.

Like Matt and Shawn, the podcast co-hosts’ conversation initially revolved around sports, but Strachan says that their discussions about CFL free agency or Connor Hellebuyck often veer into the more cerebral territory of historical scope, professional legacy and collective responsibility.

In King James, Strachan says that goes even further in a show he compares favourably to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

As director, Strachan is leaning into coach mode. On a rehearsal hall whiteboard, the Cal Murphy acolyte has scrawled quotations from world-famous bench bosses, often relating Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin’s simplistic maxim that “the standard is the standard.”

In the NBA, James, now a member of the Los Angeles Lakers, is the standard-bearer for sustained personal excellence: the league’s all-time leading scorer is averaging 25 points, eight rebounds and eight assists per game at age 40.

In the theatre, Strachan has also learned to understand what peak performance looks like. He witnessed it as an audience member at the Crow’s Theatre production of Rajiv Joseph’s renowned Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, but can remember when, as a theatre-goer, he had his first Joe Pop moment.

“The play that always comes to mind is Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, which played at the Warehouse when I was in university. I grew up with sports, but seeing that show, its brutal honesty, and the creative way it was staged was mind-blowing,” says Strachan.

“I’m always chasing that feeling whatever show I’m doing — musical, comedy, whatever — the truthfulness onstage was amazing. That’s the standard right there.”

For some players, nothing less than a championship will do.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com