Flashfact: Remembering Bert Sugar

When Bert Sugar died last weekend, the sportswriting world didn't just lose a colourful character, it lost a unique voice: someone who knew professional sports are hype and bullshit and wasn't afraid to fill his copy with clever jokes. In an age where a backup quarterback commands a press scrum so large they have hold a media conference on a practice field, his less-than-serious while knowing almost everything attitude will be missed.

From my short piece at Flashfact:

I can’t help but wonder if there’s some kind of cosmic connection at work in New York these days. On Sunday, Bert Sugar – the last remnant of the Golden Age of Sports Writing – died at 75. On Monday, Jets quarterback Tim Tebow was introduced to a crowd so large it wouldn’t fit into the media room, forcing the presser to be held on the practice squad. As Vonnegut wrote, so it goes.

Sugar was a reminder of the past, of a long-gone print media sports writing type. He was something of a character, a half-made-up, half-for-real man in his fedora, suit and ever-present cigar. He looked like he could have stepped out of one of the old volumes of sports writing and I half expect to see his byline among the long-dead writers in the great anthology No Cheering in the Press Box.

Read the whole story by clicking here.

Further dispatches from the bottom of the sporting world

It was Brian Burke who said a chanting crowd helped push Ron Wilson out of the Air Canada Centre and onto what I assume is a golf course. It was not a parade of columnists, not a cavalcade of callers into Sportsnet Radio 590 or TSN 1050, not a trending topic on Twitter. It was the crowd.

For a long time the crowd at the ACC has been a joke, even among Leaf fans. The lower bowl, with it's outrageous pricing, years-long waiting list for season tickets and more tweed than Brooks Brothers, is a haven of Bay Street peoples. The season-seats bought by corporations who can write them off as an expense - to treat clients, natch - are what is pointed to by those who say Toronto is a losing team and cannot change. Never will change. These people will always buy tickets, supporting the team without any regard for the on-ice talent.

But what happens when even these crowds begin to boo?

The Good Point: Linsanity and Carmadness

The people at The Good Point were nice enough to let me use a word that doesn't exist in my headline: Carmadness.

I have a few ideas and one I go back to often is the hype and hyperbole of the sports section. Right now, the best example of this is happening in New York, where a seven-game win streak ushered in Linsanity and made Mike D'Antoni some kind of savant for letting Jeremy Lin run amok. And then came a cold streak and D'Antoni resigning amidst claims that Carmelo Anthony wanted him out.

It's a nice story. It's something you can spin into three, five, a whole week's worth of columns. But it's not very accurate and blaming the coach or an individual player is blaming the wrong person. And it's not just a basketball thing, either: just look at the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Anyway, read the whole thing by clicking here.

Flashfact: Slanted and Enchanted, 20 years later

Want to feel old for a second? Pavement's debut album turns 20 later this year; it's old enough to get drunk in Canada. Has it really been that long since Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs first popped up?

Slanted and Enchanted is one of my favorite albums (although I think Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is their best album) and it's the kind of music that will always have an audience: young college people looking for something different that isn't really all that different, really. For all their little tricks and tweaks, Pavement is a pretty normal-sounding band under all the distorted guitars.

And that's a good thing: in the decade or so since Pavement stopped recording new music, Malkmus' solo career has been more or less pretty good, but they're not quite as reckless or dangerous: just compare his solo track Dark Wave to Pavement's Perfume-V. Pavement's earlier stuff rocks a little harder and cares a little less. From my essay:

[Slanted and Enchanted] is alternately noisy, loud, obtuse and catchy. The guitars slink, they’re noisy and screechy. However, Pavement’s pop sensibilities are never far from the surface. There isn’t anything resembling a sing-along here, but by today’s standards, any one of these songs could be slipped into a radio playlist without anyone batting an eye. 

And when it comes to how Pavement sounds 20 years on, how much they sound like the mainstream is something to think about.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Good Point: Durant and Westbrook...

I was thinking about the NBA's MVP race a few days ago and wondered: can your team be too good for you to be the MVP?

It depends on how you define MVP: does it go to the league's best overall player, or to the player who means the most to their team? If one player completely outclasses another statistically, can he still be less valuable?

I guess what I'm really asking is: will Russell Westbrook cost Kevin Durant a MVP award? From my article:

This season, the Oklahoma City Thunder may be the NBA’s best team. They’ve got the best record in the competitive Western Conference and are among the NBA’s best teams in advanced stats like SRS (third with 6.40) or offensive rating (second, with 108.6). This is happening largely thanks to two young stars: Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook.

Their game styles may not completely mesh, but they’re working well together this year. Only a few weeks ago, they combined for an amazing box score in a win over Denver.  Durant scored 51, Westbrook scored 40, plus nine assists, and Serge Ibaka picked up a triple double: 14 points, 11 blocks and 15 rebounds. Most teams would be lucky to have one player with this level of talent. That the Thunder have two is amazing.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Flashfact: The Secret History of Bootleg Records

I used to go this record store in Barrie, a grimy little place on Clapperton, that sold all kinds of stuff: used CDs, LPs, counterfeits, CD-R-sourced bootlegs, everything. It was a really great place, I bought some really interesting stuff - things I've never seen since, at least at a reasonable price - there: Rhino's old DIY series, the original LP of Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East, Rykodisc's reissues of David Bowie's catalogue, those IRS issues of REM's first few albums with bonus tracks. The guy in charge was cool, too: an aging hippie who kept a giant sword behind the counter to deal with shoplifters.

But it was the bootlegs that really got me: those weird little things with odd covers, questionable sound quality and stuff inside I never dreamed existed, let alone hearing. Finding out about these was to find a new world of music. For a teenage me, looking for a little more than just the official releases, this place was amazing.

That store's gone now and so is the old hippie. The industry's changed so much in the past decade it barely resembles what I barely knew growing up: we don't have a CD store here in town anymore and only ones within an hours drive are chains like HMV or Sunrise. Bootlegs are more or less gone now.

Which is partly why Clinton Heylin's book on the history of bootlegs - The Great White Wonders - was so interesting to me: it's a history of that shady industry, why it started, how it kept going even as the RIAA tried to crush it and what it did to the entire industry. From my review at Flashfact:

When Heylin is recounting the history of bootlegs, it makes for great reading: enterprising people sneaking intentionally-mislabelled tapes into mastering studios, running truckloads of illicit LPs around at night to shady figures and trying to keep one or two steps ahead of the FBI and RIAA. It’s a little like reading about Robin Hood, or at least someone who swindled a bunch of rich people and got away with it.

Click here to read the whole thing!