Goodbye Kyle Lowry, you’re not just the greatest Toronto Raptor of all time — you were the city’s enduring heart and face
Raptor #Raptor
And that’s how he goes. Not with an endless ovation. Not in a sea of teary adulation. Not even with a fitting proclamation.
A handful of tweets signalled the end of an era for Toronto sports. For Toronto life. On social media such announcements are labelled “bombs.” But on the Monday evening of a long weekend in a city tentatively feeling its way out into the new light and lull of a pandemic that shut it down and shut him out, it didn’t feel like a detonation. The fuse had been burning for a while now. And yet the slow discovery of the crater left behind, of the space that was once filled but now isn’t, sure will take time to get used to.
Everything before the tweets was a then. Everything after, a now. Because for so many of us, Kyle Lowry was the sporting face of our entire Toronto lifetime. While we’re at it, he was its sporting heart too.
Lowry, the beating heart of the Raptors for the better part of a decade played 601 games for Toronto. There won’t be a 602. After so much fevered analysis about his destination and how he was the central domino that would decide how the rest of the league would fall, the opening hours of the NBA’s free agency duly took the 35-year-old point guard away, reportedly in a sign-and-trade deal with the Miami Heat. Gone on an August holiday evening.
I immigrated to Toronto in the late summer of 2015. Sure, Jose Bautista hit a bomb and flipped a bat in my first few months here and it was a truly monumental moment, worthy of the murals and the memes and the tattoos and the oral histories. But still, Lowry was the enduring, always-there (even and especially through the damn dark winters) face and heart of these past six years.
And in this city, where every year so many arrive to build new lifetimes, there are thousands for whom the same is surely true. That’s why Monday night mattered, why that empty space won’t be easily filled.
Truth be told, it felt like it would be empty sooner. The night before the NBA’s trade deadline back on March 25 was arguably the most peculiar of Lowry’s lifetime of Raptor nights. In what felt like a curtain call game, he helped devour the Denver Nuggets, walked right down a home tunnel in Tampa, Fla., that felt nothing like home and gave a lingering look into the camera that said this was it. The end.
But by the end of the next day he was still with us, the contenders who needed him most — Philadelphia and both Los Angeles teams — unwilling to meet the asking price and then paying the price in the playoffs. “Should have traded for Lowry” became such a recurring response to the failure of those teams that it hit meme status. Team USA loses to Nigeria? Should have traded for Lowry. But it’s a meme with a ring of truth. Every team needs a Lowry. Toronto was blessed to have the Lowry all this time.
Still unsure how the next day would go, Lowry himself had called that night against Denver “weird” in his post-game press conference. Sure was. He was asked if this was the end and said: “I don’t know, truthfully. I don’t know what I want. I just know that I’ve given a lot.” Sure did.
Lowry gave this place all of him. All of his very best. And to have an athlete like him, all heart and hustle and work, work, work as the city’s sporting heart meant something. Tough as old boots, bringing all of his North Philly f— you and putting his body on the line night after night. But he was a Rolls-Royce of a playmaker, too. Perseverance and pushing through, sure. But so much polished poise, too. It meant a hell of a lot.
There are moments and memories and, with them, physical places that will be part of his lasting legacy here. Back around the trade deadline, Raptors HQ ran a superb March Madness-style bracket of Lowry’s best moments. It was fun to bring them all rushing back. But what it reinforced was that, after nine years here, his legacy both on and off the court simply cannot be defined by individual moments. After all, in Kyle Lowry’s Toronto, the collective always trumped the individual.
Through the growing and the growing pains of the early years and the playoff agonies that seemed determined to define (and pretty much did) the Raptors of Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, to the championship glory of 2019 alongside Kawhi Leonard and these past two unorthodox, uprooted campaigns that took him away from us before he was truly taken away from us, the collective has been Lowry’s most consistent focus.
When the time came for the most individualistic Hollywood moment of all, it didn’t drop. With fractions of seconds left in Game 5 of the 2019 NBA Finals, Lowry, the face of the city had the shot to win it all in front of the city. He always said the ball felt good coming out of his hands but Draymond Green got a piece. And even if hindsight and the comfort now of knowing what was to come next tints our view, it nonetheless feels right that his career here wasn’t defined by a Hollywood moment. How could a guy who puts his body and face on the line planting his legs and his sturdy arse and drawing a zillion charges go the Hollywood route anyway?
Instead, the history and the glory and the gold was clinched in a truer Lowry fashion — sucking up that disappointment and unleashing all of the focused frustration on the Warriors in Game 6. Don’t poke the bear remember? Lowry came out and was bloody relentless. Within two minutes, he arrowed 11 points right down their guts and then marshalled it home. When the buzzer sounded, the cameras immediately focused on Leonard but the ball was in Lowry’s hands. Where it belonged.
Even in those early seconds of deliverance, all of the off-court qualities that also made Lowry matter here came to the fore. When Raptors president Masai Ujiri was being racially profiled and manhandled by a courtside cop, having his own moment taken away from him, it was Lowry, with ball still in hand, who sensed all was not right and rushed over to take Ujiri out and on to the court, to have as much of his moment as he now could.
For a fan base with a conscience, in a city where those who run or police it haven’t done so with a similar conscience, having a sporting face and heart who was so attuned to the social and political failings mattered, too. It must have mattered hugely to so many. Lowry’s leadership on social justice conversations and efforts in the NBA bubble in the fraught days of last summer was as impressive and impactful as anything he did on the court.
There was so much more. His Thanksgiving assist initiatives, bringing light and laughs to underserved parts of the place. Giving back, speaking up, looking out. All of it. On that trade deadline night when his future, his life was being debated by all and sundry, what many billed as his final media scrum as a Raptor was marked not by him talking about himself but saluting the all-female TSN broadcasting team that had just made history covering the game.
Was it all sweetness and light? No. Would you really want it to be, though? At times he was a pain in the arse but almost exclusively to the higher-ups. And in an era when all around us the suits in the suites become less accountable, there was plenty to like in Lowry’s antagonizing of the hierarchy. Even in those fractious times, this work was always valued, cherished even, by his equals. That told so much.
And now he’s gone. The greatest Raptor of all time but a Raptor no more. Monday brought confirmation but in lots of ways this has been a long goodbye, drawn out since that trade deadline night in March. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier though. Not much could.
Toronto is no longer Kyle Lowry’s Toronto. And yet in so many ways it will always be. For so many, he was the first sporting face of this place we now call home. For that and so much more he leaves a legacy. A legacy of a thousand lifetimes.
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