Wade Belak was always the life of the party. In fact, quite often he was the party.
The former NHL enforcer was the funniest, most engaging, most self-deprecating player on every NHL team he played on. This was especially true on a Toronto Maple Leafs team in the early part of the last decade. The Leafs were a team full of veteran players who took themselves way too seriously. They weren’t bad people, mind you. They just didn’t know how to loosen up in front of the note pads and television cameras. If they were happy to be in the NHL, you’d never know it.
Wade Belak was different. He was the one player who would greet visitors with a smile and a handshake. And it was all very natural for him. There was nothing forced about his personality. He was so full of life and love. He had it all. And now, just months removed from the end of his NHL career, he’s gone.
Belak was found dead on Wednesday in his Toronto condo. There is no official word the cause of death, but a Toronto tabloid newspaper is reporting it was suicide, that he hung himself. He leaves a wife and two daughters, aged seven and five. The sadness his friends and family feel tonight is unimaginable. The most we can offer them in this time of immense grief is a prayer.
Belak, of course, is the third enforcer to pass away this summer. Derek Boogaard of the Rangers died tragically in June, the result of mixing alcohol and pain medication. Just a few weeks ago the Jets' Rick Rypien took his own life after battling depression for the better part of a decade. All three were prairie boys, born and bred. And all three made their living as bare-knuckled fighters in a sport which condones, even encourages, such a spectacle. The connection between such a violent occupation and their early deaths may never be full understood, if there is even a connection to begin with.
There is, however, a general consensus among NHL insiders that this is not a good time to be an NHL player. There are whispers that more players are struggling with issues such as addiction, chronic pain and depression than we could ever imagine. Many are seeking help, privately of course, through the NHL and NHLPA’s substance program. But there is a real fear more players will fall through the cracks.
Right now we don’t know why Wade Belak’s life ended far too soon. We just know a person isn’t supposed to leave this world at 35; isn’t supposed to leave behind a young family, a legion of friends, and thousands of people who never met him but tonight feel as though they’re in need of answers that may never come.
A Nashville Predators spokesman has confirmed that former Toronto Maple Leafs enforcer Wade Belak has been found dead in an upscale Toronto-area hotel, he was 35.
The Saskatoon native retired after playing 15 games with the Nashville Predators accumulating 18 penalty minutes and 0 points in the 2010-2011 season.
He is the third NHL tough-guy to die in the last four months. Both Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien passed away this past summer after hard-fought personal battles.
Belak was slated to participate in the CBC's upcoming season of Battle of the Blades.
Too often play-by-play commentators call upon the term hero and affix it to an athlete’s name to emphasize his on-field successes.
“No!” the hyperbole watchdogs will scream. “The true heroes are in the armed forces, they’re riding around in red trucks equipped with hoses and giant ladders, they’re in the operating room holding a scalpel, and they’re in the classroom. They are not grown men playing a child’s game for millions of dollars.”
Yes, the term hero can be overused. It does not always take supreme courage and a noble spirit to clank a buzzer-beating three-pointer off the glass, off the rim and in. (What else are you going to do? Not shoot with a second left?) But sometimes even the lowly selfish professional athlete will do something truly worthy of the hero tag.
In this NFL preseason (at least) two such instances have occurred—and neither protagonist in these tales has played a snap of pro ball yet.
On Aug. 3, during an upbeat morning practice, Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Mike Patterson suddenly collapsed. He began convulsing. Rookie teammate Danny Watkins immediately tried to help during the seven-year vet’s four-minute seizure, eventually assisting his fellow player onto a spine board. Watkins, a Canadian firefighter with emergency training, was simply acting on instinct.
“He wanted to jump right in there and Rick [Burkholder, the Eagles’ trainer] was stabilizing [Patterson]," Reid head coach Andy Reid explained to The Express Times. “I kind of held [Watkins] back a little bit, but his first reaction was to dive in.”
“You never want to see a teammate go down like that,” Watkins told the same Times reporter after the practice. “It’s not an easy thing to see. I’m sure any one of the other guys would have done the same thing [trying to help]. My heart goes out to him. He went down and it’s hard to not jump in there and want to help the guy, especially since he’s your teammate.”
But the person in danger doesn’t necessarily have to wear the same colours in order to spur a good man into action.
On Thursday, it was another rookie, Baltimore Ravens wideout Tandon Doss, who pounced to the rescue. Mere hours before the Ravens were to kick off against the Washington Redskins at M&T Bank Stadium, a fight broke out at 4:30 p.m. at the Inner Harbour’s Five Guys restaurant. According to The Baltimore Sun, two male former employees of the restaurant, one whom the police believe to be furious over getting fired, used a knife to cut the restaurant’s manager before Doss jumped into the fray.
“I saw somebody start fighting, and I broke it up,” Doss, 21, told the paper. “That’s all it was to me…. I mean, it was two dudes on one,” he continued. Shrug. “I was trying to help the situation out. I broke it up.”
The attacked manager only suffered a minor cut on his chin and was released from a local hospital. But who knows how severe the damage could have been had the fourth-round pick not intervened. Still, Doss doesn’t think the word heroic applies.
“I saw the guy on the ground bleeding, and I saw a guy on top hitting him,” he told the Sun. “So I stopped it.”
In a climate where NFL players’ run-ins with the law get so much media run, one hopes that these stories get just as much, if not more, play. Forget learning from others’ mistakes. Try learning from others’ heroics.
(P.S. For those who believe in karma, it might be worth noting that both the Eagles and Ravens won their respective games after their rookies acted quickly and selflessly.)
If this fan made trailer for BJ Penn vs. Carlos Condit at UFC 137 doesn’t instantly get you excited for the October 29th event you better seek immediate medical attention.
These two predators will meet inside the octagon in just two short months and we can only guess what kind of carnage will take place after opening bell. Expect acrobatics, slick grappling, wild haymakers and flying knees, but don’t expect this fight to last the full fifteen minutes.
‘The Natural Born Killer’ as Carlos Condit is known, is a very fitting nickname for the New Mexico born fighter. With 26 of his 27 wins coming by way of stoppage, the future is usually pretty grim for whoever is standing across the cage from him. His live by the sword mentality has garnered a lot of attention recently, with highlight reel knockouts of Dan Hardy and Dong Hyun Kim; Carlos has proven that everyone watching his fights is guaranteed to be entertained.
That night at the Mandalay Bay, the man in the red corner staring back at Condit will be BJ Penn, a fighter who has literally seen and done it all in his storied MMA career. A Two time UFC champion in two different weight classes, Penn is known for never backing down from a challenge. A great example of this was in 2005 when he went three full rounds with former UFC light heavyweight champion Lyoto Machida with Machida out-weighing him by a whopping 29 pounds. At 32 years old ‘The Prodigy” still has the hunger for competition and he is looking for fights like this one that will continually feed that desire.
Both Penn and Condit need to win and win impressively as they are fighting for a shot at Georges St-Pierre’s coveted 170-pound title, a title that will be on the line in the very next fight that night. GSP will no doubt be watching this fight with vested interested from his dressing room. If he can get past Nick Diaz that night he will be faced with either a third fight against Penn or a completely new breed of challenge in Carlos Condit.
What fight would you rather pay to see? St-Pierre vs. Penn III or St-Pierre vs. Condit?
In the end, Max Domi didn’t even bother giving college a try.
The son of former Maple Leafs enforcer/thug/goon Tie Domi is bound for the OHL after the Kingston Frontenacs traded his rights to the London Knights for three second-round draft picks. One pick is in the 2012 draft and the other two are not until 2015.
Domi is regarded as perhaps the top 16-year-old player in Ontario, but he fell to eighth overall in the 2011 OHL draft, mainly because the Domis informed teams Max was leaning toward playing NCAA hockey with the Michigan Wolverines. He already had plans in place to spend the next two seasons with the Indiana Ice of the United States Hockey League in order to preserve his NCAA eligibility.
The thing, you see, is very few people associated with the OHL ever believed Max was headed for the college route. This was a cooked deal all along, dreamed up by the masters of the cooked deal in the OHL, Dale and Mark Hunter. When the brothers Hunter want a young hockey player to join their program, they usually get him. NHLers Sam Gagner and Patrick Kane went through the London system, shielded all along from other OHL teams. Gagner was drafted in the fourth round of the OHL draft and Kane went in the fifth round, despite both having the talent worthy of the first round.
Using the NCAA as a pawn is nothing new for OHL players. It’s has been going on for years now. But have-not teams, like the Frontenacs, seem to be catching on. Gilmour read the situation and realized that Tie Domi’s son would not elect for the NCAA route. He chose Max, realizing he would never sign in Kingston, with the idea of swapping him to the evil empire for draft picks that will help his team in the future. As it turns out, the Frontenacs will receive a compensatory pick in next year’s draft because Domi was deemed a defected player because he refused to report to Kingston.
This is a win-win-win situation. Tie Domi manipulated the system and will watch his son play for one of the best programs in junior hockey. The Hunters get yet another star to help fill the Labatt Centre, and the re-building Frontenacs get a boatload of prospects for a kid who never intended to play for them.
Welcome to the ‘O’, where the backroom deals are often more interesting than the on-ice product.
If you're a Mancunian, Red or Blue, this weekend's big fixtures in the Premier League had to leave you smiling. Londoner? Not so much…
Manchester City 5 -- 1 Spurs
First up was Manchester City versus Tottenham Hotspur, with City boasting shiny new signing Samir Nasri. Nasri immediately looked 100-percent at home with his brand new squad and was playing with the kind of verve and creativity that petered out with his Arsenal season last year. Man of the match, though, was City's Edin Dzeko who could simply do no wrong out there. A fairly new blue himself, Dzeko has found the net here and there since his signing, but, out there sans Tevez, Dzeko made Spurs look like children, notching four of the five goals. Check that highlight reel to see some amazing confidence in front of the net. (Real action starts at 3:07).
Spurs had some chances but, once Dzeko caught fire, only a supercharged Bale (a la Inter game hat trick) could have brought them back into it. NB: New Spurs signing Adebayor, a true mercenary, was ineligible for this fixture but would have likely scored a header. (And Spurs -- our favourite team on earth to watch against lesser opponents -- would likely have still lost...)
Manchester United 8 - 2 Arsenal
Sunday's even more murderous fixture pitted an in-form Manchester United against an Arsenal that looked, felt and played like a shell of its former self. Eight to two! It was the Gunners' worst loss in a century. There's no shame in losing to current EPL champs Man Utd., but losing 8-2 screams all sortsa problems. Arsenal boss/French cartoon character, Arsène Wenger, has been under heavy criticism for selling off his best players (Nasri to City; Fabregas to Barcelona etc.) without replacing them. Sure enough, Van Persie looked like the sole ringer out there playing an entire team of ringers. Red Devil Wayne Rooney notched a hat trick, Ashley Young got two (incl. one that could be a ball-curling clinic unto itself) and, after awhile, it felt like United were pulling guys off the bench just to up their individual goal stats. Have you ever seen drunk adults playing little kids at paintball? That's what it looked like out there…
The transfer window closes Wednesday so let's hope Wenger bucks up and restores Arsenal to some semblance of a Top 4 club. (Otherwise, what will ESPN's David Hirshey write about?)
The trials and tribulations of Lord Stanley's chalice are long and much-documented. Children have been baptized from it. Dogs have eaten from it. And barrels of booze have spilled from its sacred bowl. With the relatively new tradition of each winning player spending a day with the Cup, the odds of damage, dings and misadventure have increased. Which brings us to Michael Ryder.
Before heading off to his hometown of Bonavista, the Newfoundland native took some time this morning to show off the Cup at a St. John's hotel. Where the wind promptly blew the Cup over and putting a big dent in the side. Ah well, makes it look MEAN.
Have to agree with the first commenter at The Telegram though, "Why the frig did the police officers grab the table and not the Cup? Priorities people."
We all know what's going on here. It's a season-long rivalry and it's not over yet, but Alec Baldwin has certainly taken things up a notch. Looks like we've got baseball's newest Odd Couple. I smell a sitcom.
Here are the previous New Era ads featuring Alec Baldwin and John Krasinski:
Last week Fred Couples announced he'd already told Tiger Woods that he had a spot on the Presidents Cup team for the event in Australia in November. Now it looks like that might have been contingent on Woods getting some more "reps," and playing in the fall, something he has not done in years.
Today Woods announced he'll play the Frys.com Open in California on Oct. 6 to 9, a rare appearance for the troubled golfer in any of the PGA Tour's lesser events. Woods typically only plays the bigger events on tour but has teed it up infrequently since an injury at the Players Championship last May. The former world No. 1 golfer is currently ranked No. 38.
"I always enjoy competing in my home state, and this tournament fits my schedule perfectly," Woods said in a statement on his website. "I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends."
He added that he'd "heard good things about the event," but it would appear clear Woods wants to get his game into shape before heading to Australia for the Presidents Cup and Australian Open.
"One of my goals this year was to participate in a tournament I hadn't played before, and now, I will," he added.
We're so infatuated with our own hockey culture here in Canada, sometimes it's difficult to peel our gaze away from our own belly button long enough to realize the state of the game around the world. Like in Australia. Apparently, it's not good enough that our Commonwealth cousins have to upstage us in just about every summer Olympic sport, now with the help of that bitter black tar toast spread they love so much, they're gunning for our pride and joy. Have you no shame, Aussies?
July 2011
