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Peter Dyakowski, Tiger-Cats’ guard…and contestant on Canada’s Smartest Person?

andrew bucholtz

If asked to describe a football player, "intelligent" probably isn't the first word that comes to mind for many. Hamilton Tiger-Cats' offensive guard Peter Dyakowski has spent much of his career trying to prove the old "dumb jock" stereotypes wrong, though, and as The Hamilton Spectator's Steve Milton writes, he's been selected as one of the four finalists on the CBC show Canada's Smartest Person:

Actually, he's smart enough to be one of the four finalists on CBC-TV's Canada's Smartest Person, which airs next Sunday night. The show is a competition — in which the viewing audience plays along via an app or Facebook — involving "challenges" that test aspects of "new" intelligence areas: math and logic; linguistic; interpersonal; visual and spatial; and musical.

"It isn't necessarily how smart you are that matters, but how you are smart," explains a CBC release.

The self-effacing Dyakowski likes to make fun of his participation in the show — "It's Canada's smartest person, so I don't know how I got in there" — but he's well-known in Ticat circles for his curiosity and wit.

The CBC release says Dyakowski has a Mensa level IQ, although this show strives to demonstrate there are many areas of intelligence that cannot be defined by IQ scores.

Game shows aren't particularly suited to defining and evaluating intelligence either in my mind, but Dyakowski's participation in this still could be a good thing for both him and the CFL. It's nice to see a football player breaking some of the conventions associated with that profession, and although many of us who deal with football players regularly know many of them tend to be far smarter than stereotypes would have you believe, this is a good chance for Dyakowski to show the public that you can be an intelligent, deep-thinking guy and a successful football player at the same time. That's not a bad message to send at all.

Of course, one of the unfortunate potential side effects of this is that Dyakowski might get some ribbing from teammates for his intellectual pursuits. As he told Milton, he thoroughly expects to hear about it:

"As soon as I make my first screw-up on the field and we're watching it in the film room," laughs the 6-foot-5, sixth-year guard for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, "I'll be hearing from everybody just exactly how smart I am."

Dyakowski's making light of things there, and hopefully there won't be anything more than just some mild ribbing, but there has been some evidence of anti-intellectualism in sports over the years. That can be quite devastating for those targeted by it, too, as baseball players like Jim Bouton and Dirk Hayhurst have found. It's becoming more and more clear these days that athletes come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have plenty of different interests, though, and that many of the old stereotypes are just wrong; hopefully that will translate inside locker rooms as well as outside. If a football player can be "Canada's Smartest Person", that could be another step towards breaking down some of the common misconceptions about athletes.