Limey Louts and their genocide

Grey Squirrels and Limey Genocide
This Green Food thing is getting out of hand
By Seamus O’Blaymus
They are killing defenseless Grey Squirrels in Great Britain.
They are killing them for food.
They are calling Grey Squirrels the next ethical meal.
Retired British colonels, dressed in pukkah regimental garb from India circa 1961, have taken to the streets with vintage carbines, locked and loaded for squirrel.
They take the dead Grey Squirrels to local butchers and specialty shops, which then sell the inexpensive meat, touting ethical determinants.
Because the Grey Squirrel is not indigenous but imported from North America, and because they are usurping territory formerly held by the native British Red Squirrel, many rodent racists are even saying that it’s good for the country.
The thinning of the Grey Squirrel herd seen through a funky prism could be viewed without prejudice as genocide.
But trust the Limeys to forego such blandishment. They argue that the meat is cheap and free range.
Business is booming – forgive the pun.
So, harsh economic times, the Green food movement and neo-racist tendencies are ipso facto contributing to our poor Grey Squirrel’s rapid demise.
I am paraphrasing here good readers. I’m Irish. I’m allowed.
A Charter called the Divine Right of Louts, Boors and Staggering Poets, giving free reign for me and my Blarney Tribe to spout, sputter and stutter sweeping suppositions, was penned in Dublin back in 1645 and was upheld by Papal Decree in 1647.
It’s shocking. A headline from the London Observer shouts: “The Ultimate ethical meal: A Grey Squirrel. It tastes sweet, like a cross between lamb and duck. And it's selling as fast as butchers can get it.”
Not since Churchill ordered hard rain on Dresden, as reproach for an equally debauched Nazi boondoggle on Coventry, have I heard such an outrageous assault on good sense and common decency emanating from the British Isles.
Well, there was that Falklands thing and that lamentable string of mass executions in India, but that’s just me spitballing. (See Divine Right of Louts, Boors and Staggering Poets.)
It’s as if the Brits, still pining hard over the recent legislated loss of their precious and pernicious fox and hounds hunt privileges have morphed into zombie mode. Bloodlust apparently runs free on the streets of London, Liverpool and Leeds.
Sad, sad, sad. Mad Brits devouring poor Grey Squirrels for fun and profit. It’s a fad gone viral.
“The Grey Squirrel, the American cousin of Britain's endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand,” reports the Guardian.
“We put it on the shelf and it sells. It can be a dozen squirrels a day - and they all go,” said David Simpson, the director of Kingsley Village shopping center in Fraddon, Cornwall, whose game counter sells ever expanding amounts of Grey Squirrel meat.
“It's low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - Grey Squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate,” says the Guardian.
I blame the Greens and I blame the skinheads. The Grey Squirrel was brought to Great Britain from North America and we all know how those neo-nazi skinheads and jackboot loyalists like, well, like Prince Harry that fast-talking racist, and brown-shirt-sporting son-of-an-inbred-monarchist, for instance, feel about immigration policy.
While we’re on that topic. Prince Harry recently called one of his fellow soldiers a “raghead.” This after recently sporting a nazi shirt with swastika on Halloween. Hah! What a prince. Charming. Dropped lovingly from that weak-limbed Family Tree. With lamentably few branches to soften his fall.
And of course the Greens, those high-minded, low-life, populist iconoclasts, always looking for an ethical dilemma, have lunged upon this slaughter with unabashed abandon, relishing the fact that this may indeed pose a simple solution to the unethical slaughter of warehoused chickens and managed beef refineries.
Experts say the Grey Squirrel’s new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials. “People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles.”
Others offer sweeping genocide as argument for the cull.
Restaurateur David Ridley reckons that patriotism plays a big part since Red Squirrels, the indigenous variety, are threatened by the Greys. “Eat a Grey and save a Red. That’s the message,” laughs Ridley.
Four legs good, two legs bad. Animal Farm on steroids.
We know these Brits and their penchant for colonial paternalism. India, North America, Northern Island, Scotland, the Falklands, the list is long and nefarious.
Nice to know that the British people can still revert to form, still bring the weight of a pistol-toting monarchy to bear on the weak, the downtrodden and the defenseless.
Save our Grey Squirrel dear readers. Boycott that trip to London and write a letter to the UN. These Grey Squirrels deserve our support.
Write, blog and speak out against the rampant Grey Squirrelicide.
Remember what Gandhi said, some time before rooting those Loathsome Limey Louts from India’s soil.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
So help us save the Grey Squirrel. Can I get a fshizzle for a hunger strike?
And while we’re here.
Can we get that mumbling old Queen off our currency?
Replace her with our own mumbling old queen.
Steven Harper.

Cherry V Ovechkin - Alex Stays - Cherry Goes

“The Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin celebrated his 50th goal by putting his stick on the ice and then mimed warming his hands over it. Some observers called it hot-dogging; when Alex was a toddler in the Soviet Union it was called central heating.” — Comedian Torben Rolfsen, on the Web site of Vancouver’s The Province.

Alex Ovechkin’s Hot Celebration Leaves Pundits Fuming
The Burning Stick Routine Looked Good from here
By Terrance Gavan
Let’s get one thing straight.
Alex Ovechkin isn’t trying to rekindle the Cold War.
He hasn’t invaded Czechoslovakia.
He hasn’t moved any strategic missiles into Cuba.
And he has not, as far as I am aware, popped poison from an umbrella tip into any rogue secret agents.
So far he has no ties extant to the Russian mob.
He’s a young Russian hockey player.
He obviously loves playing the game.
He brings exuberance, excitement and a certain joie de vivre to this game.
Maybe we should just leave the kid alone.
Maybe the pundits, like Michael Farber (Sports Illustrated, TSN’s The Reporters) and Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, and yes, maybe even Don Cherry should just cut him some slack.
The three guys above, who all get paid a King’s ransom for popping off like popinjays at all things hockey, have taken fulsome swings at young Alex the Great for his on-ice celebrations.
Last Sunday on TSN’s The Reporters both Farber and Cox slavered loopily on about Ovechkin’s inappropriate celebration after scoring his 50th goal of the season.
For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it during the 2,134 replays on TSN, it involves young Alex dropping his stick as if it’s too hot handle, and then warming his hands over the presumed flickering flames on the titanium shaft.
Fifty goals. Anyone else from Estevan, Saskatchewan or even Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia scored fifty yet?
Give the kid his celebration. Let him rant, jump, and burn that stick up. Smoke to the rafters.
Beautiful. Remember folks, this stick burning was an allegory, a metaphor if you will. People pay great money on Broadway to watch these little passion plays roll out across the stage.
Cox, for his part, just shrugged, in that way that young Damien has, going on about the lack of professionalism and yadda, yadda, yadda … forgive me I can’t remember the rest, because frankly Damien Cox is just plain boring when he gets on these “good for the game of hockey” screeds.
Farber, a Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa graduate and an erudite writer who has risen to hockey guru status at SI, said last Sunday on TSN that he found Ovechkin’s celebration trivial and banal. “It was staged and I thought it was stupid,” said Farber. Yeah, take your Phi Beta Kappa and go Kappa Beta bye-bye Mr. Farber.
Take your whine and cheese, go out to Central Park and have a picnic. Invite Cherry and Sydney Crosby and have a group groan and moan session where you pop, prattle and poop endlessly on about the lack of decorum in the NHL today.
We are raising hockey robots here in Canada. Most of the guys in the NHL today sound like Harvard MBA grads on a mission.
Think about this. In 1972, during the Summit Series, the Russians were pegged as robots, incapable of celebration. The Canadians won, it was said back then, because we brought heart and soul to the game.
There is a case to be made that the tables have swung full 180 since that Summit Series. Young Russians are showing the heart and young studs like Sydney and other Canucks are fast becoming the grumps.
And the pundits like Farber and Cox last Sunday on TSN are even grumpier.
Luckily, for us, those two guys are just plain boring. They’re not dangerous, they’re just well, ho-hum, banal, and frumpy.
The Mad Hatter, Don Cherry, is another story all together. Don Cherry is probably borderline dangerous.
But because he comes to his audience pimped up like a latter day dime store mannequin, dressed in material gleaned from the drapery section at Woolworth’s, we have tended to cut poor Don some slack over the years.
But people get grumpier as they age. Don is no exception. He’s morphed from joke, to funny, to sad and now to just plain precarious.
And please don’t tell me about those good deeds and the causes he supports.
The Teflon Don, Mafia Boss John Gotti (deceased from natural causes in prison, by golly) was loved by the residents of his old neighborhood, was a generous contributor to hospitals that help abused children, and to Hale House, which cared for infants exposed to illegal drugs.
That didn’t change the fact that John Gotti was John Gotti. Head of Murder Incorporated, and someone you probably shouldn’t follow into an alley at 2 am on a Saturday morning.
When Crosby Stills and Nash penned, “Teach your Children Well” they were not singing about John Gotti.
And for gosh sakes I’m not comparing our Rose-bedecked, dapper-dappled Teflon Don with the guy from Murder Incorporated. I’m just sayin’ that, good deeds notwithstanding, it’s time maybe for the CBC to pull the plug on the antics, the rhetoric and the borderline balkanism that Mr. Cherry is bringing to the airwaves at a chock a block and frankly scary rate.
Cherry, in an on-camera rant a few weeks ago (sounding somewhat Stalinesque, while we’re on the topic of Russian misdemeanors) even posted a verbal warning - a little pas de deux, sprinkled liberally with that oh so dainty jingoist rhetoric - that Alex the Great better watch his back lest some dull-meloned Canadian farm boy, not quite enamored of his boyish celebrations, greet him in the crease during one of those goal celebrations and “cut him in half.”
Please let this nifty piece of Canadian-exuberance sink in, for just a moment.
And forget the good deeds and the loving portraits painted of our boys in Afghanistan. And the beautiful little moments shared with our up-and-coming boys of winter. And his lovely dog Blue.
Forget all that, and remember what Don Cherry said, with muffled glee on our tax-funded network.
Don Cherry said someone’s “gonna’ cut him in half.”
And left unsaid, but certainly implied, was the concomitant fact that Alex Ovechkin would deserve it.
In the same piece Mr. Cherry teed up a clip of some black soccer players celebrating after scoring a goal.
He stared into the camera and warned aspiring young players that this was un-Canadian and not the way we civilized lads from the great White North do it.
Implied here, well, it’s actually too distasteful for me to imply. I’m wondering why the clip was of black players celebrating and not some English star or some Italian player sliding along the grass.
What’s implied in the clip is less important than what’s implicitly inferred by the clip. Inferred by me and some others, who have stated categorically that it made them very uncomfortable.
Let’s just say that Crosby Stills and Nash didn’t have Don Cherry in mind either, when they penned that seminal song on mentoring.
Let me put Mr. Cherry on notice here.
There is no place on any network anywhere and especially not on the CBC for that type of rhetoric.
We’re too busy right now, but perhaps there will be a time, when this economic tsunami subsides, for an MP to take this to Parliament.
Mr. Devolin, can a brother get an amen?n

Facebook and the Face of the Beast

Facebook a Looming Assault on Sense and Sensibility
Some Scientists Say there’s a cure.
By Terrance Gavan
I’m a sucker for new technology. But I have my limits.
I’ve been on Facebook. But rapidly left.
Facebook scares the beejeezuz out of me.
I have heard the stories.
Stories of people with 22,567 Facebook friends.
Pardon me just a moment here. But if you have 22,567 friends on Facebook, you are in dire need of some therapy.
I have two good friends. I’ve had them since university. I find it very hard today as I careen into my senior years, to maintain and cultivate those friendships. We are all three of us really busy with our separate preoccupations and life’s languid streams.
I send them a column once in a while and in the next few weeks we will be Twittering and emailing like fiends because we are involved in our yearly NCAA March Madness basketball pool. We’ve been doing it since college.
It’s just an excuse to get together vicariously, and renew that camaraderie that we negotiated back at the University of Manitoba.
We are busy. We, none of us, two writers and a Manitoba Union activist can afford the investment in another 22,565 extra friends, who poke, nudge, and stream pithy little net aphorisms like LOL and LMAO frequently and with apparent disregard for decorum and the rigors of the day.
We are all leery of Facebook. We are pragmatists. We are old. Wiser. We all grew up Catholic and we know the face of the beast.
We have heard the sordid tales of Facebook addiction. We follow the scary and vaguely loopy stories of Facebook: the bullying and coercive contracts made in the dim wee hours of the morning between 13-year-old girls and their 15-year-old boyfriends.
Contracts made in the subdued, salsa light of a Lava lamp set beside an Apple MacBook Air at 2 am on a Friday evening.
A teenaged girl, Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty, has just lost a spot on the cheerleading squad and nudges her Facebook boyfriend GothBoy13997, aka Jeremiah O’Hoolihan, telling him that something needs to be done.
“I’m very, very, very angry GothBoy13997. And you won’t like me when I’m angry! I think Amanda Ryan [aka Peachy4944] is such a weasel OMG I hate her! Sure, she can do the 1080 spin with the blunt force splits landing, and her teeth are perfect since those bloody braces came out last spring, but that’s my spot on the squad she took GothBoy13997. She needs a poke, a nudge. She needs to meet with an accident. Got it Goth Boy? She’ll be in the quad alone tomorrow after school. I got HannahMontana19876 to poke her with news of a special cheerleading meeting. LOL! No meeting; except with Destiny? LMAO! The tire iron is in my locker. You know the combo. Time for a good old fashioned Tonya Harding trailer-park beat down GothBoy13997. One good whack to the kneecap and I’m back on the pep squad. You’re blocked from my Facebook until I hear the wail of those sirens and see the whites of a paramedic’s eyes on the quad. Do it for me GothBoy13997. Do it for love!”
You will tell me I’m paranoid. That these incidents form the exception and not the norm.
But, I read the stories and I see the detritus of disappointment in those faces of the lonely, disenfranchised laptop languishers. I see the pasty white skin, the cross-eyed stares, facial tics and carpal tunnel syndrome, all first signs of Facebook palsy, a degenerative malady.
A few recent studies also indicate that Facebook is addictive.
A deep sucking wound on the heaving chest of society. It is disrupting workplace habits, reducing productivity, and slowly eroding our ability to conduct face-to-face conversations.
A University of Victoria Psychologist Rob Bedi says that Facebook is enslaving. “Notifications, messages, pokes, and invites reward you with an unpredictable high, much like gambling,” says Bedi. That anticipation can get dangerously addictive.
“Heroin addicts and alcoholics have it pretty easy,” adds Bedi. “They just put away the needle or flush the Jack Daniels down the toilet. Facebookaholics have the peer pressure and Apple ads. The pushers from the Best Buy Geek Squad are preying on us all, tempting us to the dark side of WiFi.”
Bedi and a group of psychiatrists on the front lines of this War on Nudge say that there may be a solution. “For some people, talking with someone might be the answer,” says Harvard Psychiatrist Manny Dangerfield.
Hah. LMAO! Talking! What the hell is that? Why the hell do you think God gave us opposable thumbs? Ask the brain trust at Research In Motion. We have opposable thumbs so we can communicate via Blackberry. Talking is dead.
But we digress.
This all comes too late for poor Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty.
At a recent basketball state championship young Samantha was launched 121 feet into the air by cheerleader Rob Luckenwold, aka KarmicBounce666.
As young Samantha completed her 12th twist on the way back to earth, Rob suddenly left his spot underneath the rapidly descending Lolita5912, and sprinted over to high five a pretty young lady in a wheelchair wearing a full leg cast.
You guessed it. The pretty girl was Amanada Ryan, aka Peachy4944. They both turned to watch the empty spot on the hardwood.
Seeing the danger, GothBoy13997 left the stands and positioned himself under the somersaulting McGilicutty. But whereas Rob stands 6’4, weighs 225 pounds and bench presses 459 pounds, GothBoy13997 is just 5’6 and weighs in at about 148. He has carpal tunnel syndrome, myopia, and a bad back. He did his best to catch Samantha, but sadly it did not end well.
Samantha and GothBoy13997 are both recovering in the County General. Lolita5912 is not accepting GothBoy13997’s pokes or emails and her mother is negotiating a deal with Fox for a movie of the week.
We need to do something about this Facebook thing.
Alas, good professor Bedi (aka BediTheJedi1313) offers solace in irony.
“You could join one of the 155 Facebook Addicts Anonymous groups on Facebook itself,” offers BediTheJedi – obviously not taught by Yoda or Obe Wan.
Poke me. I must be dreaming.
DNLOL!
Definitely Not Laughing Out Loud.
And … OMG! Help!
For I have seen the beast … and he is Facebook!n

John Mackey and Doug Harvey - Condolences

John Mackey and Doug Harvey – But for the Grace of God
Twin Pyres Burning – Broken Warriors and Retirement
By Terrance Gavan
You are always just one hit away from oblivion.
No one says it out loud.
But it’s there on the dais of any professional player’s career.
It was there when John Mackey redefined the tight end position. He was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1963 and his career never ended with one hit.
Instead, he rallied through a succession of hits and numerous undiagnosed concussions in the 60s and early 70s. He won a Super Bowl and was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Of course John Mackey can’t remember any of that today.
John Mackey is a victim.
Mackey suffers from frontotemporal dementia, which makes him particularly protective of personal possessions and suspicious of anyone who tries to control his actions.
Frontotemporal dementia is not a pretty disease. It’s heartbreaking when it hits someone still young and in his prime.
Less pretty yet is the fact that the care necessary to keep Mackey safe from himself and others is not fully funded by the NFL Players Association or the NFL proper.
Ironic, considering that as president of the NHLPA, Mackey was there on the front lines, early in the game, when owners didn’t consider unions as part of their operations’ template. Mackey and his union fought on. And they eventually earned the right for arbitration, settlement strategies and free agency.
Alas, he can fight no longer. His wife Sylvia finally had to put John in the custody of a care facility.
She even went back to work as a flight attendant when she was 56 to make ends meet, and to get John the health insurance he needed to cope with the trauma of a mind lost.
What the hell happened?
Columnist and author Frank Deford wrote a nice little piece about John just before Christmas last year.
“When John Mackey starred for the Baltimore Colts, he pretty much created the modern position of tight end,” wrote Deford in a column for National Public Radio. “He was also bright and a leader, the president of the NFL Players Association. But as singular as he was, now he's just like so many other old pro football players: John Mackey has dementia.”
And that’s what happened.
John Mackey lost his marbles. And the NFL and the NFLPA couldn’t give a diddle.
Deford goes on to say that it’s been left to the wives and loved ones to carry the weight, a ball that the NHLPA and the NFL have thus far been loath to lug.
“Largely because of (Sylvia) and a few other loyal wives and children, the NFL and the players union started the 88 Plan — named for Mackey's old number — to help players with dementia,” Deford explained. “Ninety-seven of them are already receiving assistance, though the league is quick to say this certainly doesn't imply any link between football and brain damage.”
You can bet your right butt-cheek that the league is quick to distance itself from this particular controversy. They would prefer that it remain buried in a tidy, secure ward of a full care retirement facility.
Thankfully, this particular dirty little secret is gaining leverage as more doctors begin to plumb the deep, dark and deadly depths of brain trauma in contact sports.
I was watching hockey the other night when one of the announcers mentioned that a certain player had already offered to donate his brain to a medical study on brain trauma. It was met by a few chuckles and the de rigueur speculation from his on-air partner that he might have already done it.
And I chuckled too, before remembering Doug Harvey.
If Mackey redefined the tight end position, well, Harvey certainly did no less for the defense position in hockey. He patented the hard charging headman era of the flying juggernaut known as Les Habitants, playing with legends like Maurice Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard and Dickie Moore. He won six Stanley Cups with the Habs.
And like John Mackey, Harvey was also a player activist, involved in the creation, with Detroit’s Ted Lindsay, of the NHL Players Association.
And, like Mackey, Harvey’s retirement did no go as well as his career.
I grew up in Ottawa and I remember my father telling me the disturbing story of Harvey who was then eking out a ravaged existence sweeping floors at an Ottawa area race-track and living in a converted railway car.
On December 26, 1989, at the age of 65 Doug Harvey died of cirrhosis of the liver in Montreal General Hospital. He had stopped drinking three years before he passed away, but at that point it was too late.
Harvey’s problems stemmed from depression and untreated bi-polar disorder, and it’s hard to judge if shots to the head actually exacerbated Harvey’s condition.
It matters not.
What matters are two disparate lives, parlayed like chattel midst the callous indifference of professional sports.
Maybe we could take something from this.
Maybe the owners and the players associations could take some ownership, step up to the plate and dig in on the front lines instead of working like quirky Luddites in the wings.
Maybe it’s time to remember the guys in the trenches who long ago fought to bring some equity to the playing field and to the arena.
A point five percent cut on the gate and a similar surcharge on player’s salaries donated to player retirement and health care would not place an undue burden on owners or players today.
And I know it’s exactly how John Mackey and Doug Harvey might have drawn it up.
Back in the day.
When they were professional athletes; young, strong and invincible.n

Full Contact Curling - Some Thoughts

It’s Brier Time
An Homage to Chucked Granite
By Terrance Gavan
If you’re smart, you will not admit an addiction to the game of curling.
You will not tell your friends that you’re too busy to come out tonight because you’re home watching curling.
People give you a hard time.
They will say things like: “What are you serious? Curling? Do you actually have a life, or are you just a congenital moron?”
I can take the insults.
What I can’t handle are the attendant slurs aimed at the roaring game. People who feel obliged to spout invective about you and your preoccupation with curling never stop there. They like to enforce their opinion by saying derogatory things about the game itself.
I find this intolerable. Insult me, fine. Do not carry on with the pop and prattle about the grand old game.
People who know nothing about the nuance of the sport feel entitled to sputter vile bile and vitriol.
“It’s a stupid game … it’s boring … people who like it are morons … like you Gav.”
It’s okay.
I forgive them. Most of them are not that bright anyway. And they have no idea about the niceties and the subtle flow of the great and glorious roaring game.
I have a friend, Jamie McBlarney, who compares curling to moronic pastimes like Frisbee Golf. “Curling is the most boring sport ever invented. It’s like watching paint dry, and I can’t believe that you can just sit there and watch it, like some moony-eyed couch potato in the last throes of a degenerative brain disease. What’s next, the World League of Frisbee Golf?”
Hey hold on here. Curling is much more exciting than Frisbee Golf. There are no pink brooms in Frisbee Golf; no Teflon sliders; no granite. People do not yell “hurry hard!” or “no,no,never!” in Frisbee Golf. Good-looking people like Jennifer Jones, Kevin Martin and Jeff Stoughton do not play Frisbee Golf.
Also, and this is paramount. In curling we are not subject to the whim of the terrorist canine.
Like that border collie in Head Lake Park who continuously patrols the Frisbee Golf playing field, You’re on the tee at number three and let fly with a perfect Frisbee Golf drive, and then bam, all of a sudden, that little black and white S.O.B. is sky-bound, soaring high in the air like some seminal refugee from Alice in Wonderland, and lickety-split, in a wink, he grabs the Frisbee, and then disappears over the creek and into the distance. Frisbee Golf game is ‘Over by Rover.’
I explain this to my friend Jamie McBlarney. “What’s that got to do with curling? Are you a total idiot?” asks Jamie. Jamie is not fond of the quick cut and thrust, suave parlay, or the facetiously simplistic argument for that matter.
“Simple,” I explain. “It is unheard of in curling circles for a dog, even a very, very, big dog like a Great Dane or a Newfie or a St Bernard to wander onto the curling surface and make off with the tools of the trade. A: No dog is fond of fetching a 45 pound lump of granite; and B: Big dogs find it very hard to walk on ice… especially when carrying an 60-pound rock.”
This of course sets Jamie off. “You bag of hammers. First it’s 45 pounds and then 60? Which is it, you simpleton? Here’s a suggestion: Turn off the curling and give your brain a rest … it’s turning to mush.”
It’s what a lot of people say to me. And I could google rock weight, just to keep Jamie in the loop, but you only need to know that those rocks are very heavy. And that a very very very big dog would get develop a huge hernia if he decided to fetch one home.
I will continue to watch curling.
I watch it because I fell in love with curling as a youngster in rural Manitoba.
And also because I was there when my Auntie Alice brought full-contact to a bonspiel.
It happened at the Halcyon Golf and Curling Club back in 1985.
My 75 year old Auntie Alice was playing in an early A-Side round in the local year-end spiel. She and my Uncle Baldur, my cousin Radnur and his wife Cheryl were playing mixed doubles.
They just happened to get locked into a duel with the spiel favorites, a team of ringers skipped by my cousin and another of Alice’s nephews, Thor Bjornason - who just happened to be skipping a Halcyon men’s foursome that finished second in the Manitoba Provincial Tankard in 1985. Thor was a killer on a sheet of ice. A baby-faced assassin.
My Aunt Alice liked to have a few sherries during a game, but this was her third draw of the day. And the sherries had somehow morphed to tequila shots. Don’t ask.
In the fourth end, with Thor up 6-1, Aunt Alice began mumbling. Thor had a beautiful delivery and a seamless slide to release.
He was removing rocks with abandon, but always apologizing deferentially to Auntie Alice after every made shot.
Thor was nothing if not a nice guy and genteel competitor.
I was down at ice level taking some pictures when I heard Aunt Alice’s muttered refrain. “Look at Thor, that young bugger; he’s sliding past the hog line; he’s holding that rock too long, dammit.”
It was the tequila talking, and we tried to reassure her that Thor’s release was legal. She mumbled again. Her mind was set.
And sure enough, on Thor’s next slide out from the hack, as he slid effortlessly to the hog line, I remember clear as polished ice, this tiny little lady sliding from the sideboards, and then the sudden flash of Aunt Alice’s old straw broom as she shoved it between Thor’s delicately balanced legs.
The rock went south and Thor went north. And Aunt Alice watched with glee as Thor’s stone jammed hard into the sideboards. And then just before leaving she gave poor Thor two whacks to his backside with the old straw broom.
“Let go of that damn rock or you’ll get the same again,” Aunt Alice said to Thor, who was, to his credit, smiling sheepishly. And everyone in the old curling club was laughing.
Why?
Well, because Auntie Alice used to give hundreds of curling students in Halcyon a few whacks on the backside when she was teaching us all how to curl over her four decades of volunteer coaching at the ol’ Halcyon Golf and Curling club.
Auntie Alice never again switched from sherry to tequila shots at a Halcyon Bonspiel. And Thor?
Well he went on to win that game 10-4, but he never slid out more than 10 feet from the hack for the remainder of the contest.
That’s why I watch curling.
Because today, every time I watch a Kevin Martin, or a Jeff Stoughton sliding smooth and serene from the hack, my mind flashes back to 1985; and just for a moment I see Auntie Alice’s old straw broom, flashing.
And as rock is released, a smile.n

The Code is BIG FAT LIE - Ban Hockey Fighting

“The players, the fans, the coaches, the general managers like it … who doesn’t like it?”
Don Cherry
“To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.” Brian Burke, Maple Leaf GM
Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.”
Gary Bettman
The Code Airs to Clear The Fog of Icy Wars
CBC’s Fifth Estate Drops the Gloves on Fighting and the Big Lie
By Terrance Gavan

The CBC’s Fifth Estate documentary The Code hosted by Bob McKeon aired last Friday and it will take some hits on the chin for its forthright examination of hockey’s bullyboy mentality.
The Code featured interviews with a few NHL enforcers, and the de rigueur talking head shots of some pro-brouhaha gurus including CBC commentator, Don Cherry, Leafs GM Brian Burke and NHL Commissioner and pugilistic apologist Gary Bettman. The father, the son and the holy ghost. Who’s who? It’s a Vegas pick ‘em.
What irks me most about this triune coven of contrarians - Cherry and Burke and Bettman - is that inordinate air of haughtiness. Speaking like Moses from the burning bush.
They dismiss anyone harboring anti-fighting ideals with an opulent puissance and a self-aggrandizing conceit. They remain insufferably arrogant and self-important on the subject of fighting.
Cherry regards people in the anti-fighting camp as simpletons or no-nothing leftists. Tree huggers, pansies, patsies and traitors. Cherry, in his fist-popping, ham-handed glee, accuses the anti-fighting set with conspiracy; conspiracy to bring down “hockey … the only thing we (Canadians) do well.” Yes Cherry said that in the course of an exchange with McKeown.
Apparently Donny-boy was somewhere getting his melon frazzled in the A-League when Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize or when TC Douglas put up his dukes, chugged into a political void, and brought a world-renowned health care system to Canada.
According to Cherry, Bettman and Burke there is no room in the fan base for those wimps who feel hockey could survive without the punch, bump and grind.
Cherry, Burke and Bettman remind me of Rush Limbaugh, that Republican Party mouthpiece, who, like Cherry, has access to a national microphone and who is similarly prone to wielding hyperbole, cynicism, and fanaticism like an AK-47 stuck on auto.
Recently, on his nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh said that returning soldiers and war veterans who espouse contempt for the conflict being waged in Iraq are “phony soldiers.”
The comment sparked an outcry against the overstuffed redneck conservative flak. An outcry from those soldiers who had lost legs, arms and their sanity in the conflict. They carried the guns and feel they earned the right to speak yea or nay about the topic of Iraq. They are seriously pissed at Rush Limbaugh.
Forgive poor Rush. He’s only using a time-honored tactic of the morally ambivalent. When challenged on ethics, shoot the messenger. Limbaugh and his neo-con ilk utilize the legacy of the “big lie” as their set piece.
Primary principle of the big lie? “Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
That quote, of course, taken from an excerpt of a US army psychoanalytic report on Adolph Hitler commissioned during World War II. Hitler was a big fan of the big lie.
I prefer New York comedian Richard Belzer’s take on the “big lie”: “If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap.”
The big lie in hockey states that, “fighting is part of the game.”
In the Fifth Estate last Friday evening the big lie was punched, pooped and propped ad infinitum, ad nauseum by that legion of fighting proponents. And when challenged they sounded like Limbaugh. They offered disdain, they grabbed statistics from thin air, and they lashed out at the flower children, and the “phony fans.”
Phony fan? According to Cherry it’s a hockey aficionado with leftist tendencies that deigns to challenge the entrenched cognoscente with their lily-white abolitionist rhetoric. We are pansies, we followers of hockey who prefer the even-tempered dance of an International Olympic event with its attendant concentration on free-flow and exuberant dedication to skill, skating and style.
Fifth Estate host Bob McKeown interviewed a few non-pugilist activists including Fan 590 radio host Bob McCown who remains steadfast in his quest to staunch the bloody legacy of NHL fighting, and has for years been a no-nonsense dissembler and activist.
“I said somebody is going to get killed in a hockey fight and when it happens we’ll see the hockey world turned upside down,” said Bob McCown in the documentary.
McCown explained that when he first professed that very sentiment many years ago on his national radio show, Don Cherry didn’t talk to him for four years. McCown had done the unthinkable. He challenged the Big Lie long before it was fashionable. And he earned the ire of the mainstream pundits, including Cherry. Cherry branded McCown as a “phony soldier” engaged in a struggle to ban fighting from the game. McCown was deemed a threat. An insider and sports guy who should know better. He became the enemy at the gates. The first tenet of the big lie kicked in. “Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy.”
An interesting exchange between McKeown and Cherry serves to illuminate just how fervent this struggle has become. McKeown told Cherry that a poll found that 60 percent of fans wanted a ban on fighting in hockey.
“No, no, no, no,” said Cherry. He then went on to cite his “real” poll, which suggested that 70 percent or the “real fans” of the game and the bulk of hockey insiders supported fighting. Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” and Cherry’s “phony fans.” Part and parcel of the propaganda. Dismiss with disdain the “fakers.”
A more disturbing excerpt was the little ditty came from Commissioner Bettman who said, “Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.” Again, flirtation with the big lie, which has been refuted in basketball, in soccer, in football, and in countless other world sports events where fighting is rewarded with an automatic ejection.
And from Burke that sourpuss, newly-minted savior of the Leaf Nation comes this gem: “To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.”
Which sums it all up quite nicely. Fighting for peace.
A beautiful little snippet of inevitable logic sliding from the big lie that begs the question.
Is Burkey being oxymoronic or just moronic?
Or both?

Tennis Needed a Boycott

Tennis Tournament Bars Israeli Player – No Fair Play in Sight
Roddick Walks Saying Politics and Sports Don’t Mix
By Terrance Gavan
As reported on the wire and throughout the world press last week, religion, unbridled jingoism and shortsighted neo-fascist national policies are running rampant on the battlefield of sports.
Last week, Israel’s leading female tennis player, Shahar Peer, was refused a visa for entry into the United Arab Emirates, and politics threatened the future of one of the world's richest tennis tournaments.
The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and tournament organizers believe the decision to refuse entry to Peer was a reaction to the recent conflict in Gaza.
This is wrong. Unacceptable.
Sports, that humble but often illuminating backdrop, has performed admirably as effervescent and consuming catalyst against ethnocentric intolerance, racism, balkanism and fanaticism.
The world held South Africa and apartheid accountable through a boycott on trade and sports. The pressure, the embargo and the shame staunched a tide of jackboot colonialism that imprisoned Nelson Mandela for most of his adult life, and many aver that apartheid fell as a direct result of that worldwide pressure. Sports played its solid, bubbling, and textured role in the stemming of apartheid.
Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson danced a dilly of a duet in 1947 and down went the color barrier in major league baseball. Robinson, the catalyst, and Rickey, the mentor, eschewed together the petty thoughts and dalliances of an entrenched hierarchy, preferring to ignore the spills, the jeers, the death threats, the taunts and the epithets. Forging an alliance for the greater good. Clearing the path.
Sports is like that. It moves vaguely in the shadows, blunting the sharp sword of intemperance, applying comradeship judiciously and placing a modicum of sense midst the madness.
Big Bear Don Haskins sounded a death knell for a Jim Crow platform of all-white college basketball when he started five black players for Texas Western College against an all-white University of Kentucky team, winning the 1966 national NCAA championship.
He beat court legend and Jim Crow practitioner Adolph Rupp, a coaching guru. Kentucky, despite being beaten in that game, spent another decade bucking the trend, eschewing the recruitment of black players and appeasing their big-buck-wielding and not vaguely racist southern alumni by continuing to boycott black players.
Too late. Haskins and his freewheeling five proved the point. Basketball conformed and the Big Bear’s dance down Glory Road sparked the turn.
In sports a great leveler. A thin edge of a wedge. A foot in the door. A jackhammer at the gates, dispensing with niceties of the norm, and refusing to commit to the status quo.
Because sports is just that. The bulwark against the norm.
World conflicts are borne from fear. Fear of religion, of humble practice, of the color of skin; fear of difference. Fear promulgated by the hierarchy of intemperate souls who rule blithe in haughty impertinence.
On the platform, on the dais, on the rink, the field, and the pitch and in the raw heat of competition there is fear, but seldom does that fear translate to hatred.
Players know that sports remains as the great leveler.
Players play and they play by the set of rules they are given. They play peer to peer.
Players seldom ask another player what god they worship. They care not about the color of another player’s skin.
They simplify the equation. Can I win?
Is he faster? Are we better? Does she rise higher than I?
And so tennis was presented with a problem. The UAE tournament in Dubai banned Shahar Peer. We remain stunned by the lack of player action.
Every player should have walked.
Every woman player on that circuit should have told Dubai and their 10-star hotel accommodation and their multi-zillion dollar purse to stick their tourney where the sun never shines.
They should have stood solidly in support of Peer. That’s, after all, what peers do.
It’s what Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Don Haskins, and a legion of other committed athletes have done.
Instead women’s tennis did nothing.
Even the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena agreed to uphold their contracts to play the tournament in Dubai.
Shame. Two players who should know better. Two players who should have learned from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, American players who worked very hard to pave the way for black players on courts everywhere.
Venus and Serena should have stepped to the plate.
Their countryman Andy Roddick did.
He withdrew from the men’s side of the Dubai tournament.
Roddick is the defending champ and he said that he was pulling out because of his concerns over the treatment of Sharar Peer and her denial of a spot in the draw. “I don’t know if it’s the best thing to mix politics and sports,” said Roddick.
And then he packed up his rackets and went home.
Good on you mate.
We need the voices in the wilderness.
To keep the wolves from the door.

A Fraud is A-Rod

Asterisks in the Hall of Fame?
Sure, But include apartheid era
By Terrance Gavan
With the Alex Rodriguez admission of duplicity regarding his use of steroids comes a bellowed demand for redress of an era.
An era that seems to line up increasingly in favor of Jose Canseco’s rabid anecdotal steroid prognostications and against the gentler, kinder, vaguely naïve, and more muzzled form-enhancing meanders and ruminations of baseball’s hardball, hard-nut commissioner Bud Selig.
Canseco wrote once that 60 to 80 percent of ballplayers in the late eighties, nineties and beyond were motoring around the basepaths juiced, cleared, or needled.
Canseco was tarred, feathered, and pilloried for his then outlandish output. Many sportswriters, broadcasters, owners, and a broad swath of the lumpen baseball proletariat felt that Canseco had taken too many pop-ups to the melon. Or that he was ingratiating himself to the loopy conspiracy theorists in some Oliver Stoney claw for a prodigious publishing payday and a large advance on his next book.
This latest admission of steroid use by A-Rod, once thought to be the poster boy for Selig’s less jaded version of events, comprises a blunt force fungo bat blow to baseball that enhances the demarcation of what has come to be known in the modern baseball lexicon as “the steroid era.”
This all coming on the heels of a very convincing interview A-Rod did with heralded CBS baseball insider and analyst Katie Couric a short while back. Look, I love Katie, but for gosh sakes, if we want to prod and poke a grumbling and mumbling baseball bear, let’s get someone who knows what the heck they’re asking and why. Someone who possesses at least a modicum of baseball bona fides, and someone schooled in the art of the quick-quip and jive.
Where’s Howard Cosell when you need him?
A-Rod lied in that interview with Couric, everyone’s favorite whitebread, lob-ball chucking media darling, and there’s very little he could say right now that would promulgate a belief that he’s telling the truth now. The admission conveniently covers only three years of his career. And it eschews any damning admission of performance enhancing in the period after steroid use was specifically banned by major league baseball - and the dulcetly duplicit Selig - in 2004.
Sorry A-Rod but the mea culpa looks a little too natty, neat, nifty and nimble. As in, “Rod be nimble, Rod be quick; Rod beat those newsmen away with slick schtick.”
A-Rod, like a lot of similarly disenfranchised switch hitters, is now playing for a stake in baseball’s greener field: Enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. Cooperstown is calling. But the walls surrounding that halcyon stage and green, green grass of home are crumbling under the weight of a looming asterisk.
Sportswriters who vote yearly on Hall of Fame nominees are seriously advocating adding an asterisk to the whole era. An era where Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and then Barry Bonds were credited with renewing the fan base after a debilitating lockout and strike in 1994-95. They brought people back to the parks and the corporate boxes because of their unique penchant for ripping cover from ball.
In the same time frame, Roger Clemens asserted himself as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Prodigious hitting, superhuman pitching, and maturing veterans playing quixotic games, tilting at separate windmills of time and age. Getting better like Bordeaux wine in weather-beaten old oak casks.
Someone should have asked the right questions back then. Facts remain. Arms break, old hitters slump, numbers go down with age. Dorian Gray had that weathered portrait in the attic. Baseball had the roids, the bulls, the junk, the gear, and the clear. Sportswriters, owners, commissioners never thought to traipse up to the cobwebbed old garret to investigate why shirt sizes, necks, bat speed and deliveries rose so exponentially. Why the old guys were suddenly flourishing in their declining years. The curious case of Benjamin Button hit baseball long before Brad Pitt put us all to sleep this year in a Multiplex.
Nothing much is new here. Baseball’s list of cheaters is long and legend. Gaylord Perry juiced the ball. Legions of hitters corked their bats. When hitting percentages dropped, baseball lowered the mounds. When pitching suffered, baseball raised the mounds. The ball was wound tighter when baseball realized the fan power of the parked pitch. Teams regularly moved outfields in or out to accommodate team strengths.
Ty Cobb was a racist. Drug abuse of the recreational kind was rampant in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Pete Rose lied, Whitey Ford regularly nicked, scuffed, spat and shined balls to bend them to his will from his hill on the infield. Bat boys and third base coaches steal signs. Amphetamines or greenies, blues and uppers were once dispensed like Pez in major league locker rooms.
Sportswriters are saying that we should mark this era with an asterisk. Let the McGwire and Sosa and Clemens and Bonds into Cooperstown, but mark their passage with that lovely little stigmatizer, the lowly asterisk.
Websters defines it as: the character (*) used in printing or writing as a reference mark, as an indication of the omission of letters or words, to denote a hypothetical or unattested linguistic form, or for various arbitrary meanings.
Talk now turns to the condemnation of an era through an all-encompassing use of that little slice of delicious and delectable punctuation. An arbitrary catch-all.
The asterisk.
Funny little jumped up starburst.
In saying so little, it says so much.
Let it go people.
Or put an asterisk baseball’s apartheid era. That lovely little gentlemen’s dance that preceded Jackie Robinson’s smashing dalliance with baseball’s Jim Crowe hierarchy.
Put an asterisk on Ruth who never had to hit against black hurlers like Satchell Paige or Smoky Joe Williams. And add another because Ruth never had to be compared with that legendary long ball hitter, slammin’ Josh Gibson, who was credited with a not quite apocryphal exit of ball from the old Yankee Stadium and who caught for the Pittsburg Crawfords and Homestead Greys from 1927 to 1946. Gibson’s own induction to Cooperstown in 1972 accompanied by the all-purpose asterisk, if not literally then figuratively, on a colorless panoply of injustice. Gibson, labeled with that lumbering nickname, the “Brown Bambino” a hunkered homage to Babe Ruth, which belies Gibson’s own prodigious accomplishments.
Buck Leonard, regarded as the greatest first baseman in the history of the Negro leagues, was known as “the black Lou Gehrig.”
But that was not exactly the way the Hall of Famer and onetime Negro leagues star Monte Irvin saw it. “Buck Leonard was the equal of any first baseman who ever lived,” Irvin once said. “If he'd gotten the chance to play in the major leagues, they might have called Lou Gehrig the white Buck Leonard.”
Leonard was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.
But Buck never got to play in the major leagues. He was of an age that precluded playing when Jackie and Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey brought down the color barrier.
Who knows? With some HGH and an ample sampling of the clear, Buck Leonard might have had a few seasons in the sun, playing with Jackie at Ebbett’s Field, hitting scuffed spitters, with stolen signs, over a short porch down the line and out into the clear blue sky over Brooklyn.
And the Hall of Fame? It’s too late for the due diligence that should have been done a decade hence when Dorian put the painting in the loft.
Let ‘em all in I say. Pete Rose too.
Save the asterisks for the historians. Let the chips from the corked bats fall … where they may.

Mikey Phelps and the Apologetic Shrug

Phelps and Tinkering with the Paradigm
Boys Just Wanna’ have Fun
By Terrance Gavan
Mike Phelps hasn’t been charged with any offence. He was caught on camera at a University of South Carolina frat party in full-bong bas-relief.
He issued the de rigueur chaste apology.
“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps said. “I'm 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public it will not happen again.”
Now, he’s young. And he’s been caught doing something that several US presidents have admitted to doing. He smoked some weed. No biggie as far as I’m concerned. If the wacky cell phone image, a little blurred – perhaps mimicking the moment - can be believed, unlike President Clinton, Mike Phelps almost assuredly did inhale.
President George Bush not only inhaled, but he was prone to mixing the Haile Selassie treat with a certain white powder and a liberal dose of Jack Daniels. This might explain why the once-AWOL fighter pilot was never asked to set an F-16 onto the bobbing deck of an Aircraft Carrier on NATO maneuvers.
The mewling, meticulous and mincing Michael Phelps who issued the apology seems a little different from the joie de vivre gung ho troubadour of swing described at the University of South Carolina frat bash held just three months after his return from Beijing.
Quoted in News of the World - the British Tabloid that broke the photo and the story - some members of Phelps’s hastily formed entourage of hangers-on and paparazzi-in-waiting college goofballs said that Phelps looked right at home in the over exuberant milieu of the typical low angst, high octane frat bash.
One exuberant swim fan who witnessed the star’s behaviour told the News of the World: “He was out of control from the moment he got there. If he continues to party like that I’d be amazed if he ever won any more medals again.”
As he basked in his hero status, Phelps knocked back beers and tequila shots. And when a student offered him the glass bong engraved with red writing, he did not hesitate, says the source at News of the World.
“You could tell Michael had smoked before. He grabbed the bong and a lighter and knew exactly what to do,” said the frat-tat-ta. “He looked just as natural with a bong in his hands as he does swimming in the pool. He was the gold medal winner of bong hits. Michael ended up getting a little paranoid, though, because before too long he looked like he was nervous and ran out of the place.”
Aha, probably heading to the 7-11 for a late nite post-toke hit of 4-liter Big Gulp, six chili-dogs and 3-pound cardboard crate of jalopeno-cheese-melty nachos.
So you can see my problem with Phelps’s new-found evangelical spasm and the airy fairy apology. Phelps issued a similar apology in 2004 when he was caught drinking and driving and was subsequently hammered with a court ordered 18-month probationary sentence.
News of the World sources tell us exactly what that apology was worth. The night after being caught on digitized camera, Phelps returned again to party. “Like the night before he was holding court, throwing back shots two at a time and pouring drinks to every cute girl.”
We are hoping that Phelps did not follow up this night at Pavlov’s Bar with a moonlight spin in his tricked out Lexus with the moon roof and built in barf bag.
I got no problem with Mike Phelps having fun. Busting out. Cutting loose.
I got a problem with the fact that he’s collecting close to $10 million large in endorsements (cut by a mill or two since Kellogg decided to suspend his endorsement rights) which, knowing lawyers and big corporations, are most assuredly liberally sprinkled with all manner of manhole-cover-sized morality loopholes.
Clauses like: “The party of the second part acting on behalf of the party in the first part shall endeavor to act in a manner commensurate with the good name of the party of the first part’s upstanding and relevant world view. To wit: the party of the second part shall not act out in a manner that may cause the party of the first part embarrassment. This may include things like armed robbery, cavorting with members of the Communist party, hanging with Bloods or Crips, dating Amy Winehouse, being caught on video with Paris Hilton, or assaulting Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. The party of the first part should also not act like a morally repugnant idiot by being caught on camera with his speedo trunks wrapped and twisted in a shepherd’s knot around his ankles. Failure to comply may result in the party of the second part pissing away $4 million into an Olympic Sized puddle of chlorinated water.”
Again, no problem at all with Michael risking it all on the big duck, duke and dive. It’s his money to fritter and I couldn’t give a spit.
My problem was with his searing promise lo those many years ago to act as a significant role model for youth in America and around the world.
Here’s what I know about role models.
By definition, role models do not indulge in idiotic and semi-comatose activity that will necessitate a public apology – twice - on the world stage.
So please Mr. Phelps.
By all means go out and have some fun.
Sew your wild oats, hang out at the animal house, crank back a few liberal hits of whatever suits your fancy.
But don’t expect the thinking members of society to be placated by the mince and mewl of those hurried virtuous words issued with blank stare and broad-shouldered shrug.
I don’t believe you.
And I know the kids don’t.

Bullyboy Coach Needs Refresher

Dallas Coach Refuses to Apologize for Lopsided 100-0 Loss
A Bully to the End Fired for No Remorse - Thus Endeth a Good Life’s Lesson
By Terrance Gavan
I’ve never been a big fan of the bully.
They live in the schoolyard, they prey on the weak, and they are almost inevitably destined to spend the better part of their productive lives wondering why no one much cares for their company.
They live in a cocoon of bubbled frenzy. They remain forlorn antiques. They squint often and question why the real world doesn’t mimic high school, an arena where things were so nicely stacked in their favor. Where the quick fist, blunt threat and blank sociopath’s stare always seemed to turn the trick.
They find life in the real world, cold, hard, complicated and inconsistent. They hate the gray shades, preferring the ersatz reality of the black and the white, sometimes taking that theme to another time-worn and inevitable conclusion. Bullies become racists, Republicans and jackboot control freaks. Once in power they revert to the schoolyard. Sometimes they sashay into politics. Sometimes they become leaders. Sometimes they become Governors of Alaska. Sometimes they shoot their friends in the face with a twelve-gauge shotgun. You know the type.
The bully in charge. He refuses to delegate and he muzzles cabinet ministers. He attempts to mollify the hard edge by donning demure cardigans. He placates his minions with soothing tones, but somewhere behind the grin, the 90-pound weakling and the schoolyard runt will detect that telltale glint in the piercing blue eyes. These leopards might alter cashmere spots but ye shall know them by that frozen grin.
They often seek therapy in their middle age.
Their psychiatrist, collecting $300 per, will tell them things they want to hear.
Things that will shift blame to some manifest destiny.
Their mother failed at nurture. Their dad was demanding. They grew up too fast. They were victimized by a deconstructive family paradigm. They were too good looking. They are Mensa candidates. They were ahead of their time. People didn’t understand them.
These things the Shrink will affirm over 10 years of intense psychotherapy and group-based dynamic sessioning. Anger management will play heavily in the mix. Spooner, Jung, Freud with spates of Dr. Phil will jangle around the loose-fitted neuron’s of the bully’s bulletproof brainpan. Each session will end the same.
“Not your fault. Well, that’s the hour Adolf. I think we’re making progress here. Don’t forget to pay the receptionist on your way out. See you next Thursday.”
In a worse case scenario, the bully may return to that arena where doubt and the harsh world is dispelled by security’s comforting blanket. In the case of bully Micah Grimes, well, he went back to high school. Grimes made headlines all over America and the world when he coached his Covenant High School girl’s team to a 100-0 decision over rival Dallas Academy a few weeks back.
For the record, Dallas Academy has eight girls on its varsity team and about 20 girls in its high school. It is winless over the last four seasons. The academy specializes in teaching students struggling with learning differences, such as short attention spans or dyslexia.
It didn’t take long. Associated Press, NBC, ABC, Fox, and CBS came a calling to Covenant and last week officials from the winning school said they are trying to do the right thing by seeking a forfeit and apologizing for the margin of victory.
In a statement Thursday on The Covenant School’s Web site, the head of school said, “It is shameful and an embarrassment that this happened.” He went on to say that Covenant has made “a formal request to forfeit the game recognizing that a victory without honor is a great loss.”
And how did the tyrant coach respond to this wringing of hands and public apology?
In a statement posted last Sunday on www.flightbasketball.com, Grimes offered his first public comment since the story was reported.
“I respectfully disagree with the apology, especially the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel ‘embarrassed’ or ‘ashamed.’ We played the game as it was meant to be played and would not intentionally run up the score on any opponent. Although a wide-margin victory is never evidence of compassion, my girls played with honor and integrity and showed respect to Dallas Academy.”
While a case can be made for the dubious scheduling of this lopsided contest, Grimes is reverting to Vlad the Impaler form when he maintains that there was anything honorable about the win or his part in the reenactment of Little Big Horn.
It was duly noted by observers that his Covenant girls came out with a full court press and they continued to shoot three pointers into the fourth quarter. There was no respect. There were high fives and there was an assistant coach urging the girls to triple digits.
It was a bullyboy job from beginning to end.
Grimes apparently did not consult his shrink or his anger management group before issuing his lamentable screed against his employers.
The school summarily and unceremoniously fired his butt. Grimes will be looking for another job.
If we’re very lucky.
The Dallas school system will make mental note of this incident.
And Micah Grimes will never again have responsibility for the melding and nurture of young minds.
A Texas high school soccer coach Matt Colvin jumped into the Texas-wide debate sparked by the game with some pretty cogent and insightful words.
“Part of the job of coaching is more than the score. We want to teach to these kids that, yeah, winning and losing are important, but there are other values and core values that you can learn and carry throughout your life. Embarrassing somebody doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing your job.”
We can only hope that this sage piece of advice is grist for the mill during Grimes’s next foray to comfy couch

Serbs - Croats Hugging that Grudge

The Serbs and Croats Sure Know How to Hug a Grudge
Interview with a Chair Thrower
By Terrance Gavan
This just in on my Twitter from the Guardian of London.
“The Australian Open is fast getting a reputation as the Fight Club of the tennis world after fans from the Serb and Croat communities clashed yesterday, hurling chairs and missiles at each other and injuring an innocent bystander.”
You may have seen it on the news or maybe on TSN, our all-star sports network that kept the Serbo-Croat riot incident on a continuous and riotously funny loop for about 72 hours last weekend.
This year’s hijinks bubbled to frothy fruition as defending Aussie Open Champion (and Serbian) Novak Djokovic hugged Bosnian-born American Amer Delic at the net after the defending champ’s third-round win. This was apparently too much for some ex-pat Serbs and Croats, now living in Australia, who harbor deep and rooted fears that letting bygones be bygones may lead to tolerance, peace and understanding between the two internecine factions.
The London Guardian reported that, “Under the hot Melbourne sun tensions boiled over in the beer garden outside center court. Drinks, tennis balls, punches and dozens of chairs were thrown, the first of which knocked a female Bosnian supporter to the ground. A witness said the woman ‘got the full force of it’ and lay on the ground for some time.”
Both Djokovic and Delic had pleaded with fans before the match to forget the past. Delic wrote on his personal blog: “As we all know, Bosnians and Serbs have had some differences in the past, however, this is not the place nor time to settle those differences,” he wrote.
What’s causing this and why, oh why, can’t the Serbs and Croats just unclench the fists and let it go?
I phoned a guy in Melbourne who should know. Professor Dukit Outic is a Serbian who holds doctorates in Functional Flagrant Anthropology and Abnormal Political Science and he teaches at Melbourne University. He was also one of the chair-wielding idiots holding forth at the Aussie Open beer tent last Friday.
“Are you sorry it happened professor?” I asked.
“Sorry? No, never. We had a few Fosters, I cheered as my countryman Novak ground that piece of crap Croat-born Yank into the ground with the heel of his very stylish Nike Avenger boot,” said professor Outic. “The trouble came when these mealy-mouthed Croats in the beer garden begin to whine like puppies about this and that and how their precious Yankee-defector Delic should have won. Bah! Babies, whiney snobs. One thing leads to another and chairs begin to fly. I take off my left boot, a nice Birkenstock, and begin to pummel a very drunk Croat on his brainless noggin. This is very normal with us; we are passionate people … we live, we love, we fight. Case, as you Canucks say, closed. No big deal.”
I was a little stunned. “But professor, a Croatian woman was taken to hospital after being hit by a flying chair, that just doesn’t seem right to me.”
“Ah, I know for a fact that was a friendly fire incident. The woman was hit by her husband, another drunk Croat. Classic case of collateral damage. And, as you said, she was a Croat. Casualty of war. No biggie. And by the way what don’t you get. You Canadians kill me. No passion, no fire, and all this peace, love and tenderness. You are phonies.”
“Phonies?” I said, a little incredulous. “Explain that professor, because you’ve lost me.”
The good professor just laughed. “You are a simpleton or what? Let me break this down for the feeble-minded Canadian reporter. I am saying that you must harbor some political grudge. Surely you have some issues, some people who have tried to separate you from your country. Usurpers, traitors, people like the Croats. People to hate. You have them. I know it. It is part of being citizen.”
“Well, hmm, let’s see,” I said, wracking my brain. “There were the Fenians.”
“Aha, there,” said Outic. “I knew it! And what did these Fenians do?” asked Dukit warming to his task.
“Well they shot poor old Prime Minister Thomas D’Arcy McGee on the Sparks Street Promenade in 1868,” I said.
“Eureka!” screamed Dukit Outic. “I knew it. There, Terrance, is something to grasp onto. Run with this. Find a mantra; wake up in the morning with the words ‘I hate the Fenians’ burning on your lips. Next time you see one, summon your inner zeal, seize your hate. Yell like a banshee: ‘I hate you Fenian!’ And then grab your Macbook Air with the hard shell aluminum body and hit that bloody Fenian over the head with it till he screams for mercy. If he doesn’t go down, grab a nearby credenza or love seat, and badda-bing, baddam-bam, badda-boom you chuck it at this Fenian with much gusto. And then you must yell at this Fenian miscreant. ‘Hah, Fenian, this is for shooting my friend Thomas D’Arcy McGee in April, 1868. Take that you traitor.’ You will, I guarantee Terrance, feel immediately and fervently, the power and the passion of the hugged grudge.”
I thought and pondered. “Problem, Professor. No Fenians. “
Dukit Outic was outraged. “No Fenians? What happened?”
“Well,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I think we just evolved and grew into country, and the Irish Catholics and the Fenian brotherhood all came to realize that as Canadians we just might have to learn to put all those old feuds with British colonialism and our Irish past behind if we wanted to flourish as a nation.”
“Ah, bull, no nation is that nice,” scoffed the Prof. “There must be something. An obnoxious griping entity that you can come to despise and hate with verve and vigor. We all need a foil, a resentment, a target for spite, even you whiney Canucks.”
And as he spoke it suddenly hit me like an airborne ottoman.
“Leafs fans, professor!” I shouted. “We all hate leafs fans!”
“Good, good! Hah, I knew it. You know what to do Terrance. Follow the worn footpath of we Serbo-Croats, and find that passion. Grasp a resentment, hug that grudge, sally forth, throw a chair, chuck a bar stool, fire a pound of chicken wings at an obnoxious Maple Leaf’s fan.
“And shout at the top of your lungs.
“That is for subjecting all Canadians to your oppressive regime and constant whining. I hate you Leafs’ fans!”
I tried it at home. Feels good.
We’ll see how it flies at Mckecks next Saturday night.

Me and Bama -Twittering Friends

My Letter from Obama
Being Part of the Transition Team is Daunting Work
By Terrance Gavan
I wrote a column recently about me and the President-Elect Barack Obama.
It was about an apocryphal game of one-on-one hoops played out in a gym in South Bend, Indiana.
I sent it over to Barack’s peeps on his website about a month ago.
I didn’t expect a reply.
But I did get one which was in retrospect a little surprising. Relayed by a staffer, the letter, addressed to me personally, said that the President-Elect had read the column, liked it, and wanted to convey that to me.
I have been getting emails ever since.
Emails like the one that follows.
“Dear Terrance,
“Last Thursday, President-elect Barack Obama gave a major speech outlining his plan for getting us out of this economic slump we're in, called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. It's a far-reaching and aggressive plan, and we think it's what the economy needs to get going again.
“But it's going to take a lot of work to get the plan approved, and your involvement is essential. That's why we asked some of the leading members of the Transition's policy teams to sit down and talk a bit about it -- why it's necessary, how it will work, and how we'll make sure it's as efficient and effective as it is bold.
“We're committed to keeping those promises -- and now, given the challenges we face, they're more important than ever.
“We're counting on your help and your support.
”Thanks, John”
John is John Podesta, Co-Chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.
They want my input.
Heady stuff.
Hard stuff.
But all things considered, nice stuff.
Good to be respected.
Beautiful to be wanted.
I’ve been working nonstop over the past two weeks to put together some seminal thoughts.
I got another cellphone beep recently, urging me to get on it. Pronto.
Well, not so much a letter, but a quivering twitter.
From the President-elect himself.
“Gav … loved the article … man we need that input … I got a speech to write … and some things that need to be fleshed out … we are of course relying on you … to provide that insight … that acumen … that velvety nuance … counting on you man … keeping it real … always …. Bama!”
I do not, dear friends, work well under pressure.
I twittered my new best friend back.
“Hey Bam … it’s cold here in the Highlands … and I have recently been diagnosed with Adult Onset Attention Deficit Disorder (AOADD) … my doctor has prescribed pills … she told me how many to take … but apparently I was so engrossed in a chipmunk dancing down a hydro line outside the clinic that the dosage info that she relayed didn’t quite reach my firing synapse … so I apparently took seven pills when I got home and slept for the next 32 and a half hours … my bad Bama … a waste of quality time that could have been spent pumping out economic reform … but really, hmmm … where was I? it’s like … oh my … a bluejay … in my feeder … look Bam … I am tryin’ … I have all these suggestions for you and the team … but my editor … that scowling son-of-a-bitch Stephen Patrick … has mandated that I get my sports stuff in before I even consider changing the course of the free world as we know it … I apologize Bam my good dear friend … I lie awake at nights pondering the state of the nation … I am taking this very seriously dear Bam … oh look … a raccoon on a surfboard … YouTube … oops sorry … my pills dammit, where are those pills? … this AOADD thing Mr. President is wreaking havoc on my thought process … hah, did you know that a bear can ride a unicycle … arggh! where was I … let me add dear Bam that I am fully entrenched in this quest to get you my input … phone dammit … sorry Bam, phone call … that s.o.b. Patrick is asking for a rewrite on that curling story … let me just say that I have some suggestions that will literally blow your mind … starting with universal healthcare … and now dear Bama … I am feeling strangely tired … hey, did you know that a bulldog can pilot a skateboard? … Bama, I think I took another 7 pills by accident … and your inauguration is in an hour … oh look, a bear just fell out of a tree and onto a trampoline and now, ouch! Off the tramp and onto his noggin … god I love YouTube and bear pranks … oops, getting sleepy … have to set my PVR to the ceremony … talk to you in about 33 hours or so … I’ll have something I’m sure by then … my best to John and Joe and everyone on the Transition Team … for now … my dear Bama … it’s to sleep … perchance to dream … of policy … hah … a Dachshund on water skis, hah, goddam YouTube ... thank you lord for YouTube! … oops! ... pills more pills! dammit… Love Gav”
My cellphone twittered just before I sank to slumber.
“Gav … don’t sweat the small stuff … we love you here at Transition Central … Sleep tight good friend and peace always … your pal … Bama.”
He’s right of course. Hah. A cat has just jumped off my roof. How the hell did he get up there?
ZZZZZ....

Joe Two Rivers and My Grizzly Encounter

In the Locker Room
Golfing with Bears and Ursus Horribilis
How Joe Two Rivers Saved my Life
By Terrance Gavan
One of the perks wrapping around a job as irrigation manager on a golf course deep in the heart of cottage country in the East Kootenays in BC includes the Fairmont Range. A jackdaw jumble of jagged clefts, which hiccups nimbly from Invermere to Cranbrook. It’s celebrated as one of the five prettiest ranges in the Rocky Mountain Chain.
Another perk includes serene holes played out on the back nine, overlooking the Columbia River, in those hours just between dusk and full moon. No one else on the course. The sprinkler heads already dispersed on the front nine. The John Deere Turf Pro four wheeler acting as ersatz cart. There is jazz playing through the sound system in the John Deere.
Dave Koz, Jacksoul and Steely Dan float mellifluously over the green parapet toward the high arching cliffs on the east and down the steep sides of the wide drooping Columbia Valley on the west.
I play two balls per hole. Never look for a ball. Another perk of working irrigation in the heart of the Rockies on an upscale course. In three days without even breaking stride we can collect 150 balls. Nice balls mind. High-end Titleists, Srixons, Top-Flites.
When it gets too dark to see the pin I plot a course of sprinklers on the back nine, always making sure to head out to 14 and shoo the herd of 37 or so elk from the greens and fairways and back down the steep terminus of the Columbia Valley.
One year, work included another perk. Getting to know a family of Black Bears who had made Mountainside Golf Course their summer home. We worked the same hours, the bears and I. Molly was the mum and Polly and Lolly were her two yearling cubs. They, like me, seldom ventured onto the course in the heat of the day, when the course was busy with shouts of fore, madly swaying carts and the crack and crumble of underbrush ingenuously cleared by mashie-wielding plaid and pastel colored lumberjacks.
Molly, Polly and Lolly preferred the late evening and the pitch of night. When it was quiet, except for the nuance and sway of tenor sax and Bradford Marsalis wafting above the gentle spzzt-spzzt-shzzzz-sprttt of the sprinkler heads. We were never what you might call fast friends, Molly, Lolly, Polly and I, but we did, after a few weeks, come to an understanding of sorts. Molly would “rowfff” deeply when Lolly or Polly ventured too close to my cart, and she would stamp the ground and indulge in some mock charges when I got a little too familiar. But mostly I could go about my business with little fear. Twenty-five feet was the chosen buffer. Any closer and we both got a little nervous. Twice, the cubs attempted to broach the recognized “Maginot Line” and both times I simply turned a sprinkler head on them and they soon learned to keep their distance. Bears hate water, especially when fired from a sprinkler head at 600 psi.
Now bears are not generally regarded as a perk of night work on a golf course, especially in the heart of the Rockies where bear vigilance often goes hand-in-hand with self-preservation. In fact, because we were working alone in open cart at night, night irrigation staff were treated each year to a “Bear Aware” class held by legendary BC Natural Resources Officer Wombat Kerzinski.
I took the course for three seasons and Wombat started each seminar with the same bold spark. He would unbutton his light brown BC Resources khaki shirt, revealing the upper part of his torso, and a nasty alabaster scar stretching from shoulder to belt line. Then he would pull up his trouser leg revealing an equally hideous ankle to thigh ragged and sallow rip.
“And that ladies is how Ursus Horribilis says hello,” chuckled Wombat. “For those of you who never took Latin in high school, ursus means bear and horribilis … well you get the picture. We call them Grizzlies and you don’t ever want to meet one alone on a lonely trail at sunset. And if you do, well, I hope you are right with your god, have your papers in order and are carrying a change of underwear.” And here Wombat would laugh, gently, knowingly. “The clean shorts will come in handy, just in case you’re one of the lucky few that come away from this little tête-à-tête with Ursus Horribilis unscathed.”
And then he would proceed to take us through our paces. The tips came like staccato burps from a popgun.
Wombat’s tip number one: “Never run from a bear, because you will be mistaken for prey. Remember that bears are like people, they just love fast food,” chuckled Wombat, a joke that is met with the usual smack and smatter of nervous giggles, especially from the new staffers who have just arrived for the summer from Great Britain.
Wombat’s tip number two: “Popular misconceptions. Please my ladies, don’t climb a tree. Bears can climb trees and they do it faster than most humans. You are not Tarzan ladies. And also, don’t run downhill … we have heard that bears don’t run downhill very well … news flash here ladies … humans are not particularly good at it either … and you don’t want to be rolling downhill in front a tumbling bear, because when you reach the bottom and you both stand up, that bear is going to be very, very angry, because bears get pissed when you make ‘em look stupid. And when that happens you will want to have your bear spray handy. You will want to point it at the bear and press the button when the bear is within three feet. That way when the wind blows it back in your face and blinds you, you will not be able to see as the bear runs you down and proceeds to swat away at your noggin like Sugar Ray Robinson on a speed bag.” Wombat was not a big fan of the bear spray.
Wombat’s tip number three: “Challenge a Black Bear … yell, shout, whistle, stand on your tiptoes, wave your arms, stomp the ground, make a few fake charges. And now … listen very carefully,” Wombat would say ominously, leaning into the group. “When you meet a Grizzly, avert your eyes, get small, say a prayer, and never assume a challenging posture … oh … and if you have a cell … the number to call is 911. Just so they’ll know where to send the coroner.” This last bon mot, followed by a large guffaw.
Johnny Elton, the summer worker from Liverpool, asks: “How, do we know it’s a Grizzly, Wombat?”
“Well, ladies,” whispers Wombat, “I could give you the textbook flash, but let’s just say … you’ll know … and we’ll leave it at that.”
And of course Wombat was right. A night in August, back in 2001. It was 10 pm. I was just popping out to chase the elks off the back holes. Usually they required some urging. But not this night. The herd was skittish and had already started toward the bank sloping to the valley.
In hindsight this should have presented a warning. Instead I decided to play a ball onto 15 at the very back edge of the course. My ball wandered just off the fringe and I detoured into the brush. My cart was 100 feet away and so was my walkie-talkie. I had a seven iron and two provisional balls in my hand when I heard the noise. I peered through the brush and noticed the dark form. “Molly … what are you doing back here,” I yelled, at the same time looking around for signs of Lolly and Polly. The shape moved again, and so did every hair on my body. Wombat’s words came back like the cold hard crack and slap of a wet towel in a grade-nine gym class.
“You’ll know.” And in that nano-second blink, I knew. This was not Molly. Molly liked to spend her time on the front nine, near the cottages and the time-shares and the berry trees. I was on the back nine, in the gentle folds of a Rockie night, alone, seven feet from Ursus Horribilis. He was on his hind legs and he was sniffing the air. The wind was at his back. He (she?) had been stalking the Elk on the far fringes of the course. The Elk had picked up his scent and that’s why they had moved off. I cursed my stupidity. The hairs on the back of my neck were up and I had a tingling sensation of raised flesh up and down my spine.
The clouds suddenly drew back revealing a full moon and it fell on us like a theatrical spot. We were suddenly etched against the night. I gripped the seven iron. I forgot all I had ever read about Grizzly bears, anything that Wombat had said in three years of bear aware tutelage.
What popped into my head was a long-forgotten call sign. “XNY556 A for Apple calling XNY556 G for George … come in George.” The Forest Rangers, that iconic CBC television staple from my youth. And then a picture of Joe Two Rivers (Mike Zenon), flooded my neuron-knocking noggin. Joe Two Rivers. Of course. He would talk, gently in Ojibwa to the bear; the bear would cock its head; Joe would talk some more; the Grizzly would then return to all fours, nod gently and amble away.
My problem. No Ojibwa. I spoke one sentence of Saulteaux-Cree, and I wasn’t going to tell this 500 pound grizzly to “go to hell.” Instinctually, I knew that English would simply not suffice. Joe Two Rivers spoke excellent English and he never once used it to commune with the bears he met once or twice per Forest Rangers episode. My mind raced.
Icelandic! I spent summers on the farm with Icelanders. My mother had grown up speaking Icelandic. I grew up with it summers near Gimli, that Icelandic enclave in the heart of Manitoba’s Interlake.
And so I turned to the bear and like Joe Two Rivers (denying Wombat’s advice) I looked my grizzly square in the eyes and whispered “Fara heim, kyssa kýra asnit” over an over again.
We stood eye to eye, for what seemed like an eternity. I never stopped talking, never broke eye contact. Hearkening Joe Two Rivers, I maintained that stoic stance. Calmly I chanted “Fara heim, kyssa kýra asnit” like a mantra. I lost all track of time and space. Suddenly, the bear fell to fours, shook his head gently, turned around and sauntered gently away.
I looked at my watch. And it hit me. Fulsome as that locomotive chugging in the distance. For the past three minutes I had been standing under a cloudless moonlit Rockie sky, frozen in some tangled time-space trance, calmly telling a 750 pound Grizzly to “Go home and kiss the cow’s arse.” In Icelandic.
I did two things when I got back to the cart. I phoned the Fairmont Lodge to ask them to report the Grizzly sighting.
And I reached into my knapsack for that extra pair of Calvin Kleins. Yes, folks, Bo knows football.
But Wombat Kerzinski knows all about Grizzlies and the utility of the standby boxers.

Magic Helmet and Hockey Boors

Miller Donnelly’s Magic Helmet – A Few Words to the Wise
Young Sudbury Hockey Player Calls Out Arena Brats
By Terrance Gavan
Miller Donnelly dropped a puck at an Ottawa 67s home game last weekend (Jan 10).
Later that same day he was invited as a special guest to watch the Ottawa Senators versus the Rangers at ScotiaBank Place in Kanata.
Miller Donnelly is only 11, but wise beyond his years.
A few years ago Donnelly wrote a speech. Nothing special. It was a school project.
He was nine.
It was a public speaking gig penned and delivered for an elementary school contest at Larchwood Public in the Sudbury School Division.
Miller won the school contest and went on to deliver the speech at a regional competition at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 503. Miller’s dad, Mike Donnelly, recorded his son's speech and uploaded it on YouTube for family members in Halifax.
Over 30,000 hits and two years later, Miller Donnelly’s Magic Helmet mantra is being adopted as a theme by minor hockey in Ontario. It may go viral and achieve national prominence if more hockey honchos on this lamentably traditional and entrenched minor hockey dais would take the time to ingest the message.
You see, young Miller is convinced that his hockey helmet comes with incredibly potent powers. Powers that might impress a David Blaine or a Copperfield.
“How is this hockey helmet magical?” asks Miller at the start of the video. “Well, it does something simply amazing. It changes me from a 9-year-old boy to a 20-year-old man. The minute I put on my magic helmet and step on the ice, adults treat me much differently. They yell at me, they curse at me, and they call me names. They treat me like I’ve been playing hockey for 15 years and get mad when I make a mistake, and I know it’s the helmet because when I go to a backyard rink and I’m wearing a toque adults treat me much nicer.”
Sound familiar?
When I was living in Ottawa, a long, long time ago, I used to spend time at hockey arenas. Sometimes I would be reffing a basketball tournament at local high school.
Tired of the stuffy gym, I would wander or drive over to a nearby arena. I noticed a disturbing trend. At house league games or tourneys, I was met by a devoted cognoscente of parents who sat in the stands and berated opposing players and literally screamed at their own children.
I was quite frankly shocked. The level of intolerance and the rudeness of the spectators was something that I just never encountered at any level while reffing basketball for 20 years in the Ottawa area.
I found basketball parents to be laid back, affable and for the most part respectful of the game and the players. There was a different atmosphere in the hockey arena. Tense faces, spat epithets and a general level of complete and utter disrespect for the young players who were only there, after all, to please. To appease their coaches, to help their teammates and to earn the respect of their parents. This is what kids want from sports. Fun.
Instead, young players were met with approbation and an alarming level of vitriol. Eight-year-olds enduring the slings and arrows of raised expectations. How many of these kids were destined for the NHL? Exactly none. So what’s the fuss? I have no idea. I know one thing. The players just didn’t seem to be enjoying the game.
Fun simply wasn’t happening in Ottawa in the 70s. It ain’t happening today. I took in a few games at the Silver Stick tournament in Haliburton recently. The same knot in my stomach. The same old wheel. The same level of intolerance bubbling fitfully and in jerks from the stands. Like a locomotive leaving the freight yards, these games accompanied by much din, scraping and the harsh grate of rusty wheels. It all hearkened seedy memories.
I quit going to rinks after an especially disappointing run-in with the surly denizens of a Bells Corner’s Arena on a Saturday afternoon in 1975, while taking a break from a basketball tourney at Bell High School. I heard 10 parents screaming at their children. I saw fear and confusion on the face of two young hockey players. I saw another 8-year-old player retreat to the end of the bench literally drenched in his own tears. I heard his dad yell, “Quit crying … Baby! … be a man!” I swear to god, I wanted to saunter over and hit that dreadful, dreadful man. I felt my face reddening. My stomach rolled to a tight knot. I fled, ran to my car, and then back to the gym.
I never returned to an arena on a Saturday morning.
As an adult I was embarrassed. And confused.
A little like Miller Donnelly.
Miller at least had the guts to confront the problem. At nine years old, he asked some poignant questions. He told a compelling story that is just now getting the recognition that it deserves. It’s making the rounds and it’s being promoted on some Ontario hockey websites. Miller’s measured tones seeking resonance from the hoards. Those parents and coaches who would seek to insert the pressure of their own griping lives onto the children.
Don’t they realize? Do they need a class? Is there psychotherapy available for the broken psyches of those hockey moms and dads who just don’t seem to get it?
Ask Miller. He’s seen it all, and remember he was only nine when he delved into this Canadian psychosis.
“Many young players are scared of the magic helmet, the yelling that it brings makes them frightened and confused while playing the game,” says Miller. “And most of the times the adults that are yelling are the player’s own parents.”
Near the end of the speech Miller hearkened a heavy hitter and former Maple Leafs’ captain.
“George Armstrong said it best when he suggested, ‘Hockey in Canada would be in good shape when parents decide it’s being played for their children’s benefit and not their own.’ ”
Hail to the Chief.
Is there a solution?
From the mouths of babes and from Miller’s lips to god’s good ear.
“You can help destroy the bad magic in the helmet. Be a real fan, have fun at the rink, cheer loudly, and enjoy the real magic of minor hockey,” says Miller.
And while we’re talkin’. A little post-game shout out to Miller Donnelly please.
Hip-hip-hooray!n

Player Dies in Hockey Fight? Blame the Helmet

The Passing of a Hockey Player should sound the Death Knell for Fighting
Instead? We Devolve to Red Herring Helmet Discussion
By Terrance Gavan
I don’t buy it.
I don’t buy this crap about fighting in hockey as a safety valve. Or a method to ensure the safety of marquee players. Or the fact that no one really gets hurt in a hockey fight.
And I’m also not buying the sturm and drang and tight-fisted embellishments delivered by blathering idiots who support fighting as a valiant and longstanding tradition of the NHL.
You know the idiots I’m talking about. They include a long and hardy laundry list of goon technicians who will stutter and sway and prattle long and windy into their hats about the drop of the gloves and the crunch of the fist. They include the effervescent clown prince Don Cherry, execs like Brian Burke, Bobby Clarke, and the burping hoards of bobbleheaded fans who simply love to watch two guys go at it bare-knuckled, bleeding and broken, because, well that’s the way it is in Hockey Land.
Well, there was a funeral today in Port Perry, Ontario. A young man was placed in the ground, a full six feet underneath the hard frozen tundra. Tears were shed for this young man. A young man with a life full of expectations, hopes and dreams. All of that hope and promise snuffed by a hard scrape of unleathered hand and a subsequent snapping fall to the hard arena ice.
Don Sanderson was 21 when he dropped the gloves in a senior hockey game while playing for the Whitby Dunlops just a month ago.
His helmet came off during the altercation and he was pushed backward, his head hitting the ice with a horrendous thud. This collision with the ice prompted a series of events inside his brain. It provoked coma and last Friday it led inevitably to his death.
Please note an important ingredient in this story. His death and the act of violence that engendered it were separated by a full three weeks.
In the news biz we call this the “diminishing window.” You see, sadly, by the time young Mr. Sanderson succumbed to his injury we, the collective whole, had all but forgotten the circumstances involved. Oh we were told countless times that he had actually died from his altercation with another player and the ice.
But the two events were so far removed. And we are blessed with such short memory when it comes to the news. Sanderson had been on life support since Dec 12, 2008. He died on Jan 2, 2009. Three weeks, and a change in years.
The window of diminished responsibility has worked its magic. The spin doctors in the hockey community have chucked a red herring onto the arena ice.
Lamentably, this discussion has suddenly been detoured and hijacked by the pro-fighting cognoscente. I hear the word accident now. I hear the word unfortunate accident even more. I hear the words, “freak accident,” rising with the tide. And I hear the words “if only his helmet had stayed on.”
Yeah? Bull.
This was no accident. Don Sanderson died as the direct result of a hockey fight and he died for all intents and purposes on that same day. He passed away on Jan 2, 2009, but Don Sanderson’s brain was delivered from this mortal coil on Dec 12, 2008.
Please can we do young Mr. Sanderson a huge favor here. Can we please get tough on those pretenders and frauds who would diminish the argument with heinous and egregious lies. The people who are calling this an accident and those that would like to prompt an inappropriate and insulting diversion to an excursive argument regarding the proper wearing of protective headgear.
Yes, Mr. Sanderson’s death has now engendered an argument about helmets. News reports are suggesting that Sanderson’s helmet came off during the altercation exposing the back of his head to the trauma.
This is the gist of the argument. We are slowly being deflected by this red herring. The harsh reality of a discussion about the legitimacy of fighting in hockey is being clouded by butcher block censors who mandate that no viable discussion about the ethics of bare-knuckled combat should occur in the harsh light of this tragedy.
If the 21-year-old Don Sanderson had been pronounced dead at the arena, and if a coroner’s hearse had pulled up to the back door instead of an ambulance, we may have a different discussion on our hands.
But alas, he was young and strong. He clung to life with the hardwired desperation of the fit gladiator. Make no mistake. Don Sanderson was fit and struggled hard to cheat the reaper. That does not change the outcome.
A young man died on the ice. A young man died as the direct result of a hockey fight. The bump n’ grind Cherry-ists have now taken to calling this an “unfortunate altercation.”
Some of these lovely non-peaceniks and obstructionists have gone so far to say that this could all have been avoided if only Mr. Sanderson had kept the chin strap of his helmet done up tight.
That’s just wrong. Like fighting in hockey. Just wrong.
The NHL has retained its finely honed and detailed every man on deck stance in the wake of this fight-related death.
The NHL has indicated it has no plans to alter its rules in the wake of Sanderson's death.
“Its an issue that from time to time is a point of discussion, so this may prompt further discussion. But I don't sense a strong sentiment to change the rules we currently have relating to fighting.” said NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly in an email on Friday.
Canadian Press reports that OHA president Brent Ladds said the issues arising from the death of Sanderson, who received four fighting majors in the 11 games he played with Whitby this season, will be raised at his organization's next monthly board meeting.
Four fights in 11 games in a league that remains just some passive steps and some grey hairs removed from the beer league should have prompted warning bells. But fighting is part of the game. In his four previous fights Sanderson probably heard the approving shouts of the crowd and the slapping sticks of his teammates as he wandered off the ice. Flaying fists are accepted in no other team sport on the planet.
In hockey, here in Canada we reward our fighters with praise, slaps and post-game beers.
Part of the party, even on the dais of a senior men’s league.
So Don Sanderson continued to fight until that fateful night on Dec 12, 2008.
When the cheering stopped.
Forever.