Politics, hockey and the French Language

No place in Canada takes the matter of language quite as seriously as Quebec. Go to Montreal and look around for some English. It’s generally not there and when it is, it’s buried under the French, smaller too.

That’s all part of the physical manifestation of Quebec’s ongoing culture wars, their attack on the English language. Bill 101, passed in 1977 made French the official language of La belle province. And everything in Quebec is French, Quebecois up the wazoo. The original intent of Bill 101 was to essentially banish English from the province: it banned English from commercial signs and restricted education in English to those who had siblings already in such programs.

It was later amended in the Henri Bourassa years, allowing some English signage, so long as the French was twice as large as the imposing, lesser language. Mordecai Richler once wrote of well-meaning citizens who would stalk the streets, tape measure in hand, photographing offending signs.

Make no mistake; French is an endangered species in Canada. With the vast majority of the country speaking English, with media from all sides coming into the province in English and with a slackening support for traditional powers like the Bloc, it’s not too hard to see Quebec changing. The actual impact of the silent revolution is something to argue over all day, but it’s intent was simple enough: protect the language of a loud, vocal minority.

The loud, vocal minority has a proud history of stirring up shit in Quebec. One of the first moments of the Silent Revolution was the Maurice Richard Riot, where a suspension led to an act of domestic terrorism. Indeed, between riots sometimes spring up during the playoffs, either on the street or on the ice. Arguably more than anywhere else in Canada, Quebec takes it’s hockey very seriously.

These two passions – protecting their language and winning hockey – have met occasionally in the past and flared up in recent weeks. In the midst of a rocky season, the Canadiens fired head coach Jaques Martin and replaced him with assistant Randy Cunneyworth.

The problem isn’t that the firing came too late, after the Canadiens found themselves in the cellar of the Northeast Division. It’s not that he has zero coaching experience in the NHL. It’s that he doesn’t speak French. It’s not an issue of speaking to his team – only three of their players are from Quebec – but one of fitting into a province that is predominantly French speaking.

Fittingly, it’s the media that keep banging this drum: the same media that is mostly French. There are five French newspapers, three French TV stations and a French talk radio station. Cunneyworth’s languages was been drummed by them, and amplified by the national media, into A Real Story, a news cycle of it’s own. Never mind that the Canadiens are winners of just three of their last 10 games, Cunneyworth should resign because he doesn’t speak French.

A French-language advocacy group, Mouvement Quebec francais, has taken Cunneyworth’s hiring personally, like a slap to the face, calling it the latest in a series of insults to the French language. According to a National Post story, their laundry list of complaints includes everything from ambient music to the team’s roster; not enough French players.

It’s reminiscent of Bill 101: they have a good idea – serve the French fans as you would the English ones – and they make an interesting points about post-game interviews. But they immediately go too far and all but call for blood. A comfortable medium – say, hiring someone from Berlitz for post-game media scrum translating – never comes up. The kneejerk reaction is the blunt one, a hammer to pound away any traces of anything that isn’t pure laine Quebecois.

And what would that solve? Would bringing in more French players – last I checked, Patrice Brisebois was available – bring more wins? Pounding the drum of Quebecois nationalism is an easy trick for the media (witness how it was pulled this spring) and it helps mask whatever problems beat reporters and columnists have with a person who can’t communicate with them.

Working a country away, in Philadelphia, Mark Bowden wrote a great book about the Eagles and explained how the pack makes coaches, and especially Buddy Ryan. “…he understood The Pack. You let them stand on the sidelines during practice and you feed them a steady line verbal stingers and you reminded them at least once a week that they really knew jackshit about football… and before long, they were eating out of your hand.”

That feeding, or rather the lack of it thanks to Cunneyworth’s language barrier, could end his coaching career before it even began. Is it right? Maybe not, but it’s certainly Quebecois.

MacGregor gets it wrong, even though he's right

You know, I could have sworn the war was over when it cames to statistics, bloggers and sportswriting. It's been three years since the Oilers kicked a blogger out of the Rexall Centre and 15 since the first Baseball Prospectus came out (and about a decade since it started to become mainstream). Teams, leagues, newspapers and TV stations all have bloggers on staff. Some, like The Score, not only have blogs for every sport, but they've even given them broadcast slots.

I thought the war was over, could have sworn stats and blogging were accepted now. After all, aren't stats like On Base Percentage on TV now? Don't box scores include things like Faceoff Percentage? So why is Roy MacGregor contemplating them as the end of sports journalism?

His piece, The Dumbing Down of Sportswriting, argues that things like "Blackberry Journalism", over-reliance on statistics and social media are destroying good storytelling and hard-hitting journalism. From his piece:

"It is called, derogatorily, “BlackBerry Journalism.” Television, ironically, is the worst offender, with the most visual of tools reducing so much of sports journalism to talking heads reading off rumours or various crumbs of minutiae handed off to them by those in a position to control such information..."

He argues great storytellers like AJ Liebling, Gay Talese or Roger Kahn would have been hamstrung by today's requirements: posting information on Twitter, transcribing tape, shooting video, etc, ad infinitum (Never mind that, for one, Liebling's habit of making stuff up wouldn't fly in today's landscape). That as networks start to rely on statistics provided by the respective leagues, they can lose sight of the message. And that more people need to read Paul Gallico's Farewell to Sport, a very cool book written by a guy who quit sportswriting to devote his life to writing novels.

It's not as troubling a column as the reaction would have one believe. MacGregor makes some very good points about how easy it can be to lose sight of the big picture by focusing on small, irrelevant details. And he's absolutely right on the overburden some reporters now have. The always-cool Rosie DiManno said the same in her column last week. To wit:

Perhaps young’uns just entering the business enjoy all this multi-platform clutter and embrace the challenge of reinventing newspapers. From my perspective, it takes the eye off the only ball that should matter to print journalism: words.

Both DiManno and MacGregor rightly argue that reporters have to do a lot more these days and it's harder to tell good stories as a result. Hell, when I was in J-School, I experienced it first hand: I once went to an interview adorned with a digital SLR, a handheld camcorder, a digital audio recorder, about 20 feet of assorted cords, notepads, pencils and cell phone. I had to shoot video of the interview for the online news segment, audio for the part to air on campus radio plus shoot still photos and make notes for the written story, too. And that was 2008, before social media. Now I'd have to tweet, live-blog, etc., ad nauseam.

I don't mean to give MacGregor a complete pass, though. His column is wrong in how it argues nobody cares about small details like suspension length or that statistics get in the way of things. Thanks to the rise in popularity of fantasy sports, even the most mundane statistics can be meaningful. Even Face Off Percentage.

When he suggests the media needs to focus more on storytelling, he omits mention of all the great writing going on right now, from Spencer Hall to Joe Posnanski to Jeff MacGregor. One might refer him to Grantland or The Classical, where such storytelling is the norm. Twitter has hurt none of today's Taleses. Hell, thanks to sites like SportsFeat, Longform or Byliner, it's helped make it more popular.

It's too bad he's used such a broad brush because he makes a lot of good points. Sports reporting on TV now is a lot of noise and not much signal: take TSN's heavy reliance on ex-jocks, for instance. And newsrooms are understaffed, leaving reporters overworked, thanks to a shrinking media market.

The reaction to his column is kind of ironic: it's easier to pick up what he missed and spread it through Twitter than it is to sit, read and think about what he wrote. Nowhere does he actually say blogs are killing sportswriting. It does say he respects the power of Twitter and that too many are focused on getting hits rather than doing good work. But it's easier to pick out and focus on the smaller, more mundane things in his column and focus exclusively on those: a snide comment on Talese tweeting DiMaggio 140 characters at a time, a quote about statistics he took from a book.

That reaction's exactly what his column is warning against.

Not buying the Bills in Toronto

Sunday's Buffalo/Washington game was awful, horrible and boring beyond words. It was such a dull game it should count as an act of international aggression. It was Must Not See TV. It was brutal.

With any luck, it'll be one of the last Bills games in Toronto.

When the series started a few years ago, in 2007, the inclination was somewhat towards optimism. The series was conceived by a group that included heavy hitters like Larry Tanenbaum of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment and Ted Rogers. It came at a time when the Argonauts were doing poorly (they’d finish 2007 with a 4-14 record) and Rogers was upping their financial commitments to the Blue Jays: they had recently added AJ Burnett, BJ Ryan and Frank Thomas to the team.

Enter the Bills. They’re a team with a sizable chunk of fans in Ontario and, it appeared, an uncertain future. Owner Ralph Wilson was just shy of 90 when negotiations started; once he left the Bills, it was far from a given that the team would stay in Buffalo. After all, Buffalo’s one of the NFL’s smallest markets and it’s shrinking, too. Between 2000 and 2010, Buffalo’s population dropped by over 10 per cent. Ralph Wilson Stadium is old, too: it first hosted games in 1973, nearly 40 years ago. Earlier this year, the National Football Post ranked it 20th among all NFL stadiums, saying, “When it comes to architecture and amenities, RWS is going to rank at the bottom of the list.”

It was a great match: a team with a bad stadium, a group that wanted to bring pro football to theirs and was willing to throw money around. It was such a good match that the NFL issued a statement saying the Bills were not going to permanently move to Hogtown.

But nobody was really suggesting that was an option. While the Rogers Centre is an okay place for an exhibition game, it’s capacity of 54,000, is too small to regularly hold NFL games. A new stadium would solve that problem, but who’s going to build it? Toronto’s government is slashing budgets all around – the gravy train, as their mayor put it – so don’t expect a hand there. Why build one? For just eight NFL dates a year? The Argonauts are locked into a lease at the Centre and the TC have their own stadium.

The games have always been a way to make money. Tickets at a Toronto Bills game are more expensive than a game in Buffalo (at one point, costing three times as much: $180 Canadian to $51 US). A Rochester newspaper was blunt, calling the games cash cows. Indeed, the Bills made $78 million from the five-year deal. How much is that? A 2011 Forbes valuation put their yearly operating income at $40.9 million.

It’s been successful on that front. It’s less successful on the field. Sunday’s win was the first time the Bills won in Toronto. It came only a few days after Buffalo’s George Wilson suggested that it’s not really a home game, because the fans don’t care who wins.

And Wilson’s right. Toronto is not a Bills town. It’s not even a football town. It’s also not a Raptors, Argonaut or Blue Jay town. It’s a Leaf town. Hockey will always come first here. Yes, NFL fans will show up for the game, but that doesn’t suppose they’re Buffalo fans. Just take the moment when Scott Chandler jumped into the stands and was greeted by indifference (I distinctly remember one guy filming it on his smartphone).

At best – and one could argue with the Bills 5-2 record, this is their best – the games feel like a neutral field novelty. Despite how good Buffalo’s been this year, Sunday’s win featured a less-than-packed house.

Next year is the final year of the agreement. A lot has changed from when it was first signed. Ted Rogers is dead, the Canadian dollar has strengthened and the Bills are suddenly good. A new agreement would likely cost Rogers more than $78 million – and that’s even if the Bills want to keep giving up home games.

Simply put, the whole series feels like a tease. It’s a taste of NFL action, but without any of the payoff. It costs more than a game in Buffalo, but has little of the atmosphere: tailgating, packed stands, cold weather. It’s a sanitized, suit-wearing, straight-laced version of pro football, the equivalent of Mitt Romney. Yes, the Bills finally won a game in the cavernous Rogers Centre. But they couldn’t even make that interesting.

The Toronto experiment isn’t working: why pay more for games that feel like they mean less? That the players don’t even like? Next year’s series should be the last. 

Karma and Fate in the Motor City

I don’t really know if I believe in stuff like karma or fate. If you want to throw all caution to the wind and say this will happen because it is supposed to, like you have no sense of free will, feel free.

But I wonder sometimes since things can even themselves out over time and twists can sort out if you let them. And when I think about the Detroit Lions, I think about if karma and fate are really a thing.

The Lions have long been a pretty awful team. I can remember watching a Thanksgiving game played in Detroit a few years ago where the most interesting thing was when security chased a guy with a “FIRE MILLEN” sign around the stadium. I remember that fan popping up two, maybe three different times in different places at Ford Field.

Meanwhile, what was happening on the field became secondary. I don’t suspect this is an unusual circumstance in Detroit.

A lot has been written this year about a renaissance of sorts in Detroit recently. One-time resident and author Jeffrey Eugenides recently praised the city and said he’s trying to convince his wife to move back to the city with him. There’s that Chrysler ad you’ve probably seen, too.

More recently there’s a story in Sportsnet Magazine about the success of the Lions and Tigers this fall; one of whiom got off to a hot start and the other finished the season strong. Justin Verlander’s not only a likely Cy Young winner, but is getting serious MVP talk, too. And the Lions won their first five games in row too, their best start since 1956.

Things have not gone quite as good in the interim, though.

The Tigers fell apart in the championship series, losing in six games. They dropped three of the first four and lost game six 15 to five. In four postseason appearances, Verlander’s ERA jumped to 5.31 and his WHIP to 1.45, both much worse than his regular season numbers. His first start now seems like an omen: a game in the pouring rain, delayed after an inning until the next day.

In so many words, the Tigers ran aground against one of, and maybe the, best teams in baseball. This isn’t meant to disparage what they did. It’s more of a “hey, things even out sometimes.”

The Lions are doing their own evening out, too. Since a 5-0 start, they’ve dropped two games in a row: a surprising loss to San Francisco and a more maddening one to Atlanta.

Granted, the Niners are their own good story. It used to be a given that whatever NFL preview magazine I picked up would always ask “IS THIS THE YEAR THE NINERS PUT IT ALL TOGETHER” in breathless hyperbole and big, bold letters and every year the answer was usually no, it wasn’t. They haven’t had a winning season or made the playoffs since 2002. Remember, Seattle won the NFC West last year with just seven wins.

So it was inevitable that when two good stories met, one would stop being so good. That’s fine; the Niners were the better team that day. Sunday, it was a more traditional loss: the Falcons got to Matthew Stafford, sacking him three times, picking him off once and generally banging him up.

That Falcons defence shut down the Lions. Atlanta held the ball for nearly 10 minutes more and picked up nearly twice as many first downs. No Detroit running back picked up more than 50 yards or scored. Indeed, Detroit was one-for-12 when it came to third downs. Later, Lions tackle Ndamukong Suh is said to have taunted and mocked Matt Ryan after the Falcons quarterback went down hard, kicking his feet and saying stuff like “get the cart.”

Admittedly, it’s pretty tame stuff (I’d be surprised if this wasn’t said all the time, really). But Yahoo Sports’ Mike Silver put it best: “If you believe in karma, you are cringing as you read this.”

Any football fan will remember that Stafford is pretty fragile, as far as athletes go. He’s never played more than 10 games in a season. He’s hurt his knee and both shoulders in his three-season career. And he’s got hurt against Atlanta, too, limping off the field as the game ended. A MRI was negative, but still, this is someone with a history.

Ultimately, the two losses make me wonder about the Lions’ hot start. Stats like Simple Rating System or Point Differential suggest they’re one of the better teams in the NFL, not just the NFC. They’re there largely from a great passing game (Calvin Johnson’s season is an underreported story, I’d argue) and a good passing defence (10 picks, 17 sacks and about 204 passing yards allowed per game).

But last year, I thought they looked like a good team. And after injuries to key players they finished with six wins. It could easily happen again this year. It could happen any year, really.

I don’t know if I believe in karma. I don’t know if ALCS was more about the Tigers settling down than it was about powerful hitting by the Rangers. I don’t know if a few taunts led to a MRI on Monday. I don’t think they did and they probably didn’t. I just know that if I was a Detroit fan, I wouldn’t want to chance fate

The ying and yang of the Blue Bombers and Alouettes

Last Saturday, Montreal went into the fourth quarter of their game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers up 25 to 10. When the game ended, the Alouettes lost by a single point, 26-25.

Winnipeg roared back into the game in the fourth on 16 unanswered points: two majors and a field goal. Blue Bombers quarterback Buck Pierce completed 9 of 13 pass attempts for 97 yards. Chris Garrett ran for two scores. Most importantly, the Bombers defence shut down Montreal: Anthony Calvillo was picked off three times in the game. In the fourth, he was limited to four completed passes. Five, if one counts the one intercepted by Winnipeg's Jonathan Hefney.

How complete was the shutdown? Montreal picked up just two first downs in the final quarter.

The loss wasn't just a blown lead. It was a complete collapse. And it's happened before. About a month ago, Montreal nearly blew another game to the Bombers: a Montreal lead of 19 points was whittled away to just six. The game ended with Winnipeg on Montreal's one-yard line after two failed quarterback sneaks.

That's two games where the Blue Bombers have taken it to Montreal late in the game. That's twice their meetings have ended with the two tied for the Eastern Division lead. The funny thing is, it shouldn't have been that way.

The Alouettes have been good in recent memory. They've led the division for the last three consecutive years. This season, they have the best home record and a quarterback leading the CFL in passing yards, touchdowns and passer rating.

Earlier this season, Calvillo set the all-time record for total passing yards. Not the CFL record. The record for all of professional football. He even made the leap to the US, getting a profile story in Grantland. It's not unfair to call Montreal the class of the CFL; in an offence-driven league, they've amassed the most points and set the standard.

But the Bombers are also good: they have an identical record as the Alouettes, 10 wins, five losses. They've taken Montreal right to the brink twice in the last month. And it came despite losing two running backs and questionable quarterbacking.

Their starting running back, Chris Garrett - the guy who scored two fourth-quarter touchdowns on Saturday - was released by the team after training camp and was only resigned in August. He only got onto the field after two Bombers running backs had season-ending knee injuries against Toronto.

Winnipeg quarterback Buck Pierce has not has a good year, either. He's right in the bottom of CFL quarterbacks, with only Toronto's two starters below him in passing yards. He's thrown for just 14 scores (again, only above Toronto's two quarterbacks) and his 17 interceptions are the most in the CFL. He is not their Calvillo.

So with a QB who has passing issues and a running back that wasn't even on the team for most of the season, how are the Bombers tied for first in the east? Well, for the same reason why they've been such trouble for the East's other good team: defence.

On Saturday, the Blue Bombers defence kept the Alouettes at bay. Not just in the fourth, but throughout the game. Calvillo was picked off three times, sacked six times and held to just 199 yards and zero touchdown passes. It was one of the worst games of the season for the CFL's best passer. But this game was no outlier: the Blue Bombers defence has allowed the fewest points in their division.

Two Blue Bombers - Odell Willis and Jason Vega - are among the CFL leaders in sicks; together, they've picked up 22 sacks. And there's three Winnipeg players among the top six in interceptions, too. As a team, they have 24 picks. This is not a defence to sleep on.

The Bombers had some luck, too: a call that went their way led to the league firing an official. And weak teams in Toronto and Hamilton hasn't hurt their season, either: they've posted a CFL-best 7-2 record division record.

And they've had surprises, too: in only four games, Garrett's ran for 353 yards, 13th in the CFL. And his 88 yards per game is highest in the league. Who expected that from a player so deep in the team’s depth chart?

There are issues. As said above, Pierce is not an ideal quarterback and Garrett's far from proven. Their offensive line's had troubles, too: in their victory over Montreal, Pierce was sacked three times; this season, . There's special team problems too: their kicker missed twice on Satuday; this season he's hit just over 72 per cent of his kicks, one of the worst percentages among the CFL's kickers.

Still, Winnipeg and Montreal feel like the two sides of the same coin: where one has the league's best offence, the other has the best defence. Their last two matchups have not only gone down to the wire, but have played a role in the division's lead. With two games left in the regular season, each has a chance to clinch a bye-week. Montreal's facing Calgary and BC, two teams who have clinched postseason spots but are still competing for a bye week. Winnipeg is also facing Calgary but they play Toronto, a team that's living in the CFL's cellar.

What that means is either team can still win the division. And while it's no given that the two will face each other in the postseason, it feels like they will. If it's been anything like their last two meeting have been, look out: the team that shouldn't be there on paper could be the one that makes it out.

There'll never be another like Al Davis

The Raiders press release called Al Davis a maverick. If there ever was an understatement, this was it. Davis was a maverick of the old school, from when the word wasn’t a political cliché or a fighter pilot. He was unpredictable, cunning and a hell of a lot of fun to have around.

Al Davis was a lot of things, including a progressive. He hired the first black coach in the modern era, the first Hispanic coach and quarterback and hired the NFL’s first woman CEO. He gave many of his players a chance to play pro football when nobody else would – just think of how many people he picked up off the scrap heap.

He was a champion of the rights of owners, challenging the NFL’s monopoly and asserting the right to move his team as he saw fit. He was the person whom so many clichés originally described: a maverick that did things his own way and just won, baby.

There are less fun details. He shuttled his team up and down the California coast, twice leaving behind a vibrant community of fans. He gave off the sense of a paranoiac, especially in dealings with coaches and the media. And he was a constant thorn in the side of former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle; one biography of Rozelle all but blames Davis for the commissioner’s health problems and early retirement.

Everybody sees the Raiders are Davis’ team. But his contributions to pro football far outweigh just one team. As commissioner of the AFL, Davis led a drive to sign away NFL talent, a move that all but pushed the competing leagues together and ushered in the modern era of pro football.

But by 1970, when the two leagues merged, Davis had long since returned to the Raiders as part owner and head of football operations. The teams he built in that decade are some of the NFL’s most infamous and talented, with players like John Matuszak, Kenny Stabler and Fred Biletnikoff. In the golden years of the Raiders, they were good on the field and wild off of it.

When Stabler’s biography details on training camp with the Raiders, it reads like a Hunter Thompson story: all-day practices and all-night parties, fuelled by pills and booze (Matuszak was partial to Crown Royal and Quaaludes). Indeed, Hunter Thompson once described the Raiders as the flakiest team in pro football and compared Davis to Sonny Barger.

In his seminal book on football, Paul Zimmerman was more blunt: he called Davis a “master spy, master trader wheeler-dealer and rogue.” He detailed the tricks Davis used to pull: changing visiting team’s practice spots at the last minute, have his grounds crew unroll tarps while the visiting team is still practicing and the time he snuck workers into Shea Stadium on the eve of an AFL championship game to build an illegal heating tent on the Raiders bench. Davis cultivated an aura of pushing things to their breaking point, doing everything he could to give his team the advantage.

Every obituary on Davis makes one point crystal clear: Davis personified the Raiders like no other owner, coach or manager ever has or will. The Raiders were his baby, right from the get-go. Everything, from team colours to management went through Davis. As the recent years have shown, he was a control freak. He’d fire coaches with little warning and even less pretext, once burning through three in five years. When the move to Los Angeles gave the Raiders ownership of luxury suites, the Raiders started charging rent to the stadium’s other users.

And culturally, it’s hard to think of another football team that mattered more than the Raiders. When asked why NWA wore Raiders colours, Ice Cube said “it’s a thing where you looked right, it felt right.”

One is tempted to define him on the above, with a glance to his long-term successes: the Raiders once went from 1968 through 1978 without a losing season. They won three Super Bowls with Davis around and went to another in the 2002 season. Doing this misses the point.

I didn’t know Davis, but it’s pretty easy to say he was complex man. A story that paints him as a colorful rogue(“His clothes seemed to matter more than half the players he ever drafted”) looks past how he helped former players. Another that suggests maybe he overdid it (he “often pushed the boundaries of what some people thought was acceptable”), never mentions how often he won when challenging the NFL.

It’s foolish to think about Davis and the Raiders without addressing everything the man did for pro football. What he did with the team almost never happens in culture, especially in so short a time. The Raiders almost exist outside of pro football. Their black and silver are iconic, representing not just a team, but also an attitude.

It cannot be said enough: no owner will ever mean as much and make the same impact on professional sports as Davis did with the Raiders. And that's a shame.

Words from the worst sports city in the world

Grantland, presented by Subway, published a story on Wednesday calling Toronto the worst sports city in all the world. This is a unique distinction which, if I understand it correctly, makes it a worse place to be fan than Tehran, home of Azadi Stadium; worse than Pyongyang, where all soccer is played under the guidance of Fatherly Leader and his invisible cell phones; worse than Yangon, Burma or Freetown, Sierra Leone.

How did it get to be such a bad place? Because the teams lose, mostly. Most of the time, anyway.

After all, it's horrors beyond horrors that Toronto hasn't won anything since 1993 (unless you count the Argos, which Marche doesn't do until it suits his hypotheses). I wake up in the middle of the night with a jolt, sweat-drenched, angry beyond words about Tie Domi on a semi-regular basis. But it also isn't that big of a deal: so what if the Leafs lose every year. The Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908 and life has gone on there ever since. The Jays lost tonight. C'est la vie.

It's worth noting that in his slam on Toronto, Marche gets a few little things wrong. Like who owns the Blue Jays (Rogers, not MLSE), the Argos record, the idea the Leafs haven't purchased any players despite a vast riches (never mind that the NHL operates on a salary cap) or that Toronto never took to Mats Sundin (never mind the ovation he got as a Vancouver Canuck). And it's Marche's opinion that the Leafs best chance at winning a cup was in 2001, but don't forget they made it deeper in the playoffs the next year.

To me, the biggest question about the whole piece is why. Why does he think Toronto is so bad for fans? It certainly doesn't bother me that the Jays are missing the postseason since I'm not the guy from Big Fan. Toronto teams lose; every city has losing teams. When Marche calls out the Leafs for not making the playoffs in six years, one wonders why that's some violation of his fandom. The Pittsburgh Pirates haven't made the playoffs recently either and nobody proposes the "inverted statue" for their owners. And nevermind that Marche doesn't mention the Leafs were a two points - one NHL win - away from the playoffs in 2007.

There's a kernal of truth when he says the city loves scrappy overachiever; the mundane player who shows up on time, all the time. John MacDonald was beloved here and the Jays went as far as to honor Kelly Gruber's number. Every Leaf fan I've ever known - myself included - has adored Wendel Clark, who - lets face it - was a not a strong first-overall pick.

But find me a city where this doesn't happen. Boston, recently named the best sports city in the world, idolized the Lunch Pail Gang teams of the late 1970s. Find me a media market that didn't award David Eckstein the title "scrappy."

He only focuses on the minor teams when they fail, too. The Argos are underwhelming right now, but they won the Grey Cup in 2004. He ignores every season of Toronto FC except their first, when they were an expansion team. Even the Toronto Raptors get shortchanged: they're mentioned twice and their postseasons - 2008 and 2007 - go unnoticed.

If Toronto sports are failing you so completely, Marche, maybe it's time you took a break to one of the world's better sports towns. I hear Pyongyang is nice this time of year. And they have a good soccer program, too.

Canada's team, Canada's sport, Canada's national migrane

It was 35 degrees here the other day. A hot, sticky, humid trainwreck of a day. Summer has arrived and it's too late in the year for hockey, but here it comes, stealing headlines and keeping itself at the forefront of the Canadian sports media scene. The sport has led MacLean's for the previous two weeks, leads TSN's SportsCentre pretty much every day and has provided story after story after story. It hasn't, isn't and will not let up - not yet, not with the Finals just starting.

But the biggest story is Winnipeg's coup of the Atlanta Thrashers. True North Sports and Entertainment's purchase and subsequent move of the team to Manitoba's capital - and the amazingly rapid sellout of season tickets - has moved the media like a, er, Jet. MacLean's cover featured their old logo; the Toronto Sun ran picture of a pin-up girl in hockey paraphernalia above the fold. Each of the op-eds and columns reads like a gushing tribute to a national pastime, but nobody really wants to spoil the party by noting all the problems with the relocation.

The easy one is how tiny Winnipeg is: with a local population just under 700 thousand, it's the smallest market in the NHL, behind even Edmonton. Another is how it's not known as any kind of corporate showcase. If wikipedia can be believed, it's home to companies like Boeing Canada, Old Dutch foods and The Great-West Life Assurance Company; one hopes there's enough of a corporate presence to keep luxury boxes and expensive, lower-bowl seats full.

Let's not forget about the logistics which need to be ironed out. How will their schedule look? Will teams from the Southeast have to fly in for every game? And who's going to broadcast their games? It's easy to assume the CBC will pick up a few weekend games (and probably the home opener) and TSN will pick up a few during the week, but what of all the rest? Rogers Sportsnet looks like a likely source, but their West channel is already home to the Oilers and Flames; is there enough room for a third team?

While we're not forgetting, let's remember a column written by the Globe and Mail's Stephen Brunt, who tipped the nation off to the move with a column on May 19th. Wrote Brunt:

"Sources confirmed Thursday night that preparations are being made for an announcement Tuesday, confirming the sale and transfer of the Thrashers to True North Sports and Entertainment.

... some months back, the NHL board of governors quietly approved the sale and transfer of the team, pending the negotiation of a purchase agreement between Atlanta Spirit LLC, the Thrashers’ owners, and True North."

Brunt's column was correct in the most broad sense; the Thrashers are likely to move to Winnipeg. And the announcement was even on a Tuesday! Just, as it happened, on a different Tuesday.

There's a difference between being right and being almost right. As I learned back in my J-School days, the only thing you have in this business is your credibility and you get that by being right, if not by being first. Herein lies the problem with Brunt's column: he was wrong. There was no announcement that Tuesday, May 24. The Jets press conference was a week later. And every report, from the AP to the Toronto Sun is saying the board still hasn't approved the sale.

It's cool he was able to jump the gun on the announcement (one wonders if he burnt some source in running the story so early) and it's nice to see the team actually come, but it shouldn't rectify his column which was, essentially, wrong. He suggested that the move was finished, had been "quietly approved", would be annouced on a set day. It isn't, hasn't been and wasn't. He deserves to be held to that.

The Jets moving has also inspired talk from some rather odd angles. The other night, Toronto radio host Jeff Sammut had an hour of open lines asking if Toronto should get a second team, which is an issue nobody in their right mind talks about. Callers spouted nonsense like how Toronto can support up to five different teams, but they never will thanks to Big America. One I especially liked was the suggestion Toronto doesn't win because of American business interests.

Canada likes to think of itself as an independent nation. It is, but it so often seems to be defined in the oddest way possible, which is that we play up how different we are than the US. It's an oddly insecure kind of way to defend yourself: we're better because we're not. It lies through so much of our collective conscience (at least here). From the Avro Arrow, a jet scrapped for a missile defence system (but really because of UA big business) to the NHL (who are willing to throw the game to the wolves to sell it in the US), so much of our collective conscience seems to be about trying to play up how we're not them.

It goes to the Stanley Cup finals this year. For instance, TSN is billing it not as the 2011 Finals, but as Vancouver's quest to bring the Cup to Canada. Never mind that only 16 of their players are Canadian or that Boston has more Canadians on it's roster, this is somehow Canada's team. Never mind that in the past six Finals - from 2004 to 2010, minus the lockout year - there was three Canadian teams. This isn't a case of Canada making a stand against

It's silly. It doesn't feel like rooting for anything so much as it does feel like rooting against something. It's quickly become another political battle: us versus the US. It comes off from benign things like Boston Pizza crossing the Boston out it's name to nonsensical things like the above call-in talk shows. And TSN sure isn't helping when they bill the Finals in such a one-sided way.