You might be expecting some sort of update or interesting take on Rooney's ankle, or how the NHL season is winding down, or how the baseball season is shaping up, or perhaps a little March Madness, but that would be predictable. No, dear reader, instead, may I present a commercial for Protest boardwear which, if you find yourself viewing this from the safe confines of a cubicle, will most certainly bum you out to no end. So yeah. Commence punching self in face..... Now.
OK, so, we all know how much everyone likes to talk about new NHL franchises making their way north of the border -- between Balsillie, the mayor of Quebec City and everyone in Manitoba, the discussion is never-ending... BUT! New rumours are wafting up from the desert today saying that the NHL "is working on a backup plan with Toronto
billionaire David Thomson and Winnipeg-based True North Sports and
Entertainment that could send the Phoenix Coyotes back to Canada if a
deal with Ice Edge Holdings or Jerry Reinsdorf to keep the team in
Arizona falls through."
The Phoenix Business Journal goes on to say it could happen as early as next season if the financial fecal matter really hits the fan. Sure, there's no named sources in the story, but the fact it's coming from Phoenix is at least veeeery eeeeeeeenteresting...
Sweet tears of Reggie Dunlop, is there nothing sacred? Today, the Associated Press reports that the Johnstown Chiefs -- the team founded in 1988 to honour the film "Slap Shot" -- are leaving town and moving from the Pennsylvania town to the hockey hotbed of Greenville, South Carolina.
In the movie, the fictional Charlestown Chiefs are threatened with folding. The real Chiefs current owner and head coach, former New York Rangers GM Neil Smith, says, "'Slap Shot' was a big factor in me, personally, having the team here,
owning the team. I
was fascinated by that: the original building, the small town, the
whole thing." Smith has tried to find a local owner to take the team off his hands, to no avail.
In a world that would allow a "Slap Shot" sequel starring Stephen Baldwin to happen, it's no surprise something like this would happen. Perhaps everyone should've just let the Chiefs exist in its original 1977 perfection and left it at that. Wait, what? Oh.
We all know that sometimes emotions get the better of our sports heroes and that often leads to loud, awkward yelling of semi-coherent statements intended to make a point about something or another. I'm not talking about Coach's Corner, either. I'm talking about RAW emotion. Anger. Swearing. Not-so thinly veiled threats of bodily harm. The usual.
But now comes this shocking report that many of these spur-of-the-moment rants were actually scripted by a little-known playwright named Charles Hoard...
Chances are, you've dropped a few bucks to get involved in the annual North American ritual that is the March Madness Bracket Pool. You do the background reading, study the stats, and then someone in accounting who picked their entire bracket based on uniform colour and mascot wins the whole thing. It's fun.
Well, Chicago teen Alex Herrmann claims to
have correctly picked winners for all 48 games played so far in the NCAA hoops tourney, according to nbcchicago.com. The odds of picking that many winners? According to the story at NBC, it's 13,460,000-to-one.
OK, I know this ANCIENT in interwebs time (read: four days), BUT! It's from Europe and it's about rugby, so c'mon, cut me a little slack here.
Anyhoo, timing and rugby ignorance aside, above is a Nike ad that greeted England's rugby team when it traveled to France for the Six Nations grand slam. The tiny type reads, "France welcomes her English friends" You see what they did there? With the "welcomes" and the "friends" alongside a once-gaping head wound? It's obviously a clever psychological reversal of... Just kidding, I'm not THAT guy.
According to the Guardian, the ad was posted all around the Stade de France, on bus shelters and at stations
en route to the stadium, as well as all weekend in
L'Equipe newspaper.
I like where this is going. Maybe next time we host the World Juniors (we host that tourney every year, right?), the Almighty Swoosh should do up an ad that has broken teeth spelling out "Good day, eh."
In today's Globe, John Leicester looks ahead to the Champs League match-up of Arsenal and FC Barcelona and deems that little Lionel Messi will be too much for the North Londoners. And he's right. Well, as a Tottenham fan, at least I hope he's right.
Either way, it's an excuse to bring up the conversation at to whether Messi does measure up to the all-time greats. As Leicester points out, if Messi can lead Argentina (with Maradona as manager, no less) to World Cup glory this year, his legend will be written. Still, goals like the second one versus Zaragoza last week (above) don't hurt either.
As Best Ever candidates go, Messi's sure a compelling one, especially given his physical challenges growing up, as told in this Adidas promo from 2008.
So, in case you haven't heard, Tiger Woods decided to check-out of sex rehab camp to make a comeback to pro golf at next month's green jacket jamboree Masters tourney. In what must be an effort to cut the tension and dilute some of the insanity surrounding his return, Woods yesterday gave televised interviews -- WITH NO RESTRICTIONS ON QUESTIONS! -- to the Golf Channel and ESPN, so you know they were going to ask all kinds of crazy stuff, right? Well, not really.
Woods issued the same standard It's-all-my-fault lines from that stilted and amazingly awkward press conference, except this time he seemed a lot more comfortable in golf clothes, even flashing those glorious chompers a few times. Still, it all predictably sounded a whole lot like this, ""It was all me. I'm the one who did it. I'm the one who acted the way I
acted. No one knew what was going on when it was going on."
And this, "I tried to stop and I couldn't stop. And it was just, it was horrific."
He told ESPN that he's a little nervous about the reception he'll get at Augusta and that, "It would be nice to hear a couple claps here and there." Don't worry Tiger, there will be plenty. Everyone knows you can't swing a dead caddy around a country club without hitting a philandering drunk who needs to work on his short game.
Sean McManus, head of CBS, who televises the final two rounds of
the Masters, conservatively predicted it "will be the biggest media event, other than
the Obama inauguration, in the past 10 or 15 years." There's an "Audacity of D'oh!" joke in here somewhere.
Ahead of tonight's game between the Boston Bruins and Pittsburgh Penguins -- the two team's first meeting since the Pens' Matt Cooke decided to put Bruins forward Marc Savard out of commission with a blindsided head shot -- a Boston newspaper has issued a challenge of sorts.
The Boston Herald is calling for someone on the B's to step up and teach Cooke a lesson, with the help of the above poster. Writer Stephen Harris saying if NHL disciplinarian Colin Campbell won't do anything, than the team needs to. It all rings a tad familiar doesn't it?
Remember 2004? When Steve Moore injured Canucks captain Mats Naslund with a head check, and no penalty was called on the play? Well, we all know where that led. Bruins players certainly remember, as Harris points out, "Fully cognizant of the trouble then-Canuck Brad May got in for his
pre-game threats of revenge against Colorado’s Steve Moore in the
infamous 2004 situation that ended in Moore’s career-ending injuries -
and the far greater problems Todd Bertuzzi faced and still faces for
his assault on Moore - B’s players have chosen their words very
carefully in recent days."
We'll just have to wait and see if, with Campbell at the game, the decision not to suspend Cooke will come back to haunt the league.
How do you respond to a head-shot check on a teammate? Well, if you're the Anaheim Ducks' James Wisniewski, you reply with what TSN's Bob McKenzie tweeted, "Charging, Interference, Boarding and pre-meditated malice..."
During last night's Ducks/Chicago Blackhawks game, 'hawks blueliner Brent Seabrook clipped the Ducks Corey Perry at the side of the net with what appeared to be a questionable hit to the head. A few seconds later, Wisniewski tattooed Seabrook to the end boards with what looked like a flying forearm to the chin (or what I like to call a "Darian Hatcher"), but very well COULD have been a chest hit that had double impact based on Seabrook standing in that danger zone of about two-feet off the end boards. Either way, Seabrook looked like he'd just been hit with a Louisville Slugger and left the game shortly after. That led to Chicago's Duncan Keith jumping in to fight Wisniewski.
The CBC's Elliotte Friedman wrote today, "Right now, we're averaging one spectacularly dirty play per night. The GMs maintain there are only about six hits per year the league must
eliminate, but the players appear determined to prove them wrong... All of the talk about respect for 'the brotherhood' is nothing but hot air. This week is proof." And he's right.
Neither McKenzie nor Friedman are softies who wish hitting and fighting would be banished from hockey, but the rate of head shots, even in light of all the recent media attention, is a bit ridiculous. As McKenzie pointed out in the same twitter feed, "Tough part of today's NHL is most violent/questionable plays come on hits/contact. Once upon a time, it was mostly xchecks/hsticks/slash." Things are a bit more complicated now and it needs to be the league that steps up and sets some new ground rules. That, OR we can just say $#%! it and turn hockey into Rollerball. (The James Caan one, NOT the LL Cool J one.)
February 2010
