Is it really an honour for a Black athlete to win an award named after Lou Marsh?

This is a column by Morgan Campbell, who writes opinion for CBC Sports. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

By Wednesday afternoon we'll have crowned Canada's best athlete for 2021, with the Lou Marsh Trophy going to the winner.

Leading contenders include Andre De Grasse, who set a national record to win 200-metre gold at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and who finished the Games with bronze medals in the 100 metres and 4x100 relay. 

Or the trophy could go to Damian Warner, who won his first Olympic decathlon gold medal in Tokyo. He opened that competition with a 10.12-second 100m, the fastest ever run in Olympic decathlon, and closed with a 4:31 in the 1,500m, a feat of endurance that should be impossible for somebody with Warner's raw speed. He's like a Chevrolet with a Corvette's speed and a Volt's fuel mileage.

If you're wondering how Marsh, longtime sports editor of the Toronto Star, would react to the trophy bearing his name landing in the hands of a Black person, it's a fair question. Along with his jobs as journalist and all-purpose referee — hockey, boxing and wrestling — Marsh had a history of littering his copy with racist comments. Some of it, at the time, was run-of-the-mill, early 20th-century bigotry that didn't sound offensive to contemporary ears, in a city less diverse than it is today.

WATCH | De Grasse wins historic gold in men's 200m at Tokyo 2020:

But Marsh's late-career antisemitism is tougher for modern audiences to rationalize. He referred to boxer Sammy Luftsping as an "aggressive Jew Boy," and refused to acknowledge the deadly menace Nazi Germany represented in the mid-1930s, when the rest of the world was choosing sides.

When Canadian sports writers first started voting on the award, its title an honour to Marsh, his track record on race didn't matter. But these days, it does. The last year has seen a growing chorus of voices calling to rename the trophy we hand to Canada's top athlete.

Add mine to it.

Not because I want to put a nail in what Aaron Rodgers might call Marsh's "cancel culture coffin," or think he deserves to be written out of history. Marsh was a towering presence on Toronto's sports scene. There's no changing that reality, and no need to. He'll always have a place in textbooks and archives, and on Boxrec, where you can examine his entire two-decade career as a boxing referee.

But the trophy needs a new name because of progress. Not passive, but hard won, by successive generations of civil rights leaders and everyday citizens who have worked to make Canada the multicultural country we currently inhabit. As a sports community, we can honour that ideal by naming the trophy after somebody whose legacy aligns more closely with the values we, as a nation, say we cherish.

I say that knowing how difficult it is to reach across eras to compare types and degrees of racism.

WATCH | Warner offers event-by-event breakdown of his decathlon gold:

Marsh once described legendary distance runner Tom Longboat as "smiling like a coon in a watermelon patch." This particular smear, one of many Marsh lobbed at Longboat over the runner's career, is equal parts offensive and efficient. In using a well-worn anti-Black trope to insult an Indigenous runner, Marsh hits his target and ensures collateral damage.