From left, Sara Blunk, Rosemary Baptista, Julia Blunk and Ticat star Dylan Wynn pose with the Grey Cup during this week’s media day at the Convention Centre.
From left, Sara Blunk, Rosemary Baptista, Julia Blunk and Ticat star Dylan Wynn pose with the Grey Cup during this week’s media day at the Convention Centre.
They’re the perfect trio for a Grey Cup week run by an organization that owns a football team and a soccer team.
Rosemary Baptista, as well as colleagues Julia Blunk and Sara Blunk (Julia’s mother), are fully accredited members of the media covering the Grey Cup and its accompanying festival for Brazilian Wave, which publishes its content online and every second month in a hard-copy magazine that is translated into three languages.
“We’re here to cover the Grey Cup, to do a comparison between the CFL and soccer, and also to introduce the CFL into the southern hemisphere and promote North American football in that light,” says Baptista, who is a reporter, editor and translator for the Toronto-based magazine.
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“The purpose of Brazilian Wave is to educate Canadians about Brazil in a positive way, to integrate Brazilians into Canadian culture and promote Canadian culture worldwide.”
Sara Blunk is a freelance photographer and her daughter Julia is a freelance writer with the publication and say, “we all team together for the Grey Cup.”
The Blunks arrived here from Brazil only six months ago and live on the west side of town. Julia works as a model in Toronto and is taking courses online, and her mother is doing her PhD in mechanical engineering at McMaster. Baptista says her friend is too modest to mention that she has just won two major awards in Brazil for inventing an orthopedic implant for pets.
Baptista’s family came from Brazil to Hamilton 52 years ago. She went to the old Cathedral Girls High School and was Miss Brazil-Canada in 1984. She speaks four languages and translates Brazilian Wave into three of them: Portuguese, English and French. She is also a radio host and producer at CFMU and is producing an upcoming documentary series on late Hamilton mayor Bob Morrow.
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She attends numerous Ticat games and loves the Oskee Wee Wee chant because it captures the deep passion of the city for its team.
Baptista emphasizes how proud she was of the many Brazilian team fans at the 2015 Pan Am Games soccer tournament who donned Brazilian jerseys for every game except the ones versus Canada, when they wore Team Canada shirts “out of respect and loyalty to this country.”
She says that while soccer, the fervour of Brazil, is played with the feet and football, which North Americans embrace with passion, is played with the hands, she finds some of the strategies to be similar.
“Soccer is internationally played but I just learned by being at the Grey Cup that the CFL does international player recruitment,” Baptista says, “So that will be part of our story as well.
“Football is an important part of North American and Canadian culture and that’s what the Wave lives up to: promoting Canada in a positive light and creating a healthy integration.”
has spent 33 years of his 42-year sports-writing career at the Hamilton Spectator, most of that as an award-winning columnist. He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and the Skate Canada Hall of Fame and is also the author or co/author of 25 books.
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