Dysfunctional Sports: Carter's rise and fall in Toronto

The Toronto Raptors will begin their season this year with a very new look. The 2006/07 season has brought in a lot of European players to the basketball team, in hopes of making the playoffs this year. Names like Jorge Garbajosa, Uros Slokar, Rasho Nesterovic will be running up and down the court giving 100 per cent and trying to replace, in the minds of many fans, the one player that the city and country worshipped not to long ago - Vince Carter.

Carter has now turned into the number one disliked athlete that has ever played in Canada. It's time to take a look at the serious of events that lead to the fall of the former man that was once given the nickname Air Canada.

Game seven of the 2001 Play-offs. The Raptors had come with in one win of going into the Easter Conference final. In a game that was to be the biggest game in the history of the franchise, its star player, Carter, decided to attend his graduation from University of North Carolina the same morning as the big game against the Philadelphia 76'ers that night.

Despite the out-cry from fans and media who objected to Carter attending the ceremony, he went down to North Carolina for his graduation instead of resting for the most important game in his career.

After traveling all day and a new degree in hand, Carter missed the game winning shot that night. But who needs fame and glory when you have a degree that you know you “EARNED” while playing for a major U.S college sports program.

Over the next couple of years Carter would become injury prone. It was not uncommon to see him drive toward the basket, and with only the slightest touch from an oppsoing player, Carter would be on the ground for a lengthy period of time waiting for the medical team to come out and help him to his feet.

The 2004-2005 season will go down as the year that Vince Carter officially quit on the the Raptors. In the summer of 2004 Carter stated that he wanted the team to hire Julius Erving, who was inexperienced, as the GM. The Raptors management, for the first time in Carters career did not listen to the injury-prone player, and hired Rob Babcock, who would go on to show the Raptors fans how good of a GM he was by drafting Rafael Araujo with the eighth pick in the draft.

Naturally, Carter was upset that the Raptors had drafted someone who was more suited to be bouncer at a club then an NBA player and choose another GM then the one he wanted. He stopped trying altogether and the team was forced to trade him to the New Jersey Nets and acquired a couple of draft picks and the best 11th and 12th men in the NBA.

Carter's stats with Toronto before the trade were 15.9 PPG. After the trade to New Jersey he pulled an impressive 27.5 PPG, which makes Carter the biggest quitter in Raptors history.

The up-coming NBA season starts soon and Carter will be coming to Toronto a couple of times to play his former team. I suggest the Toronto fans continue to treat Carter with hostility every time he touches the ball.

I honestly think the fans should take some advice from Eminem's song “Quitter,” in which he rips on Everlast

“So this is what we ask of our fans/If you ever see Everlast, whoop his ass/Hit him with sticks, bricks, rocks, throw shit at him/Kick him, spit on him, treat him like a hoe, bitch-slap him”

Toronto Raptors fans would never go as far as what the song describes to do. But if Carter was a professional soccer player in Europe and quit- the fans just might treat him like that.