It occurs to me…
Now that Josh Morrissey is back on board, here’s what I’m curious about: Will the rabble—and at least one prominent jock journo—speak and write the same evil about him as they did Jacob Trouba during the past two years?
Trouba, you’ll recall, failed to surface for Winnipeg Jets training exercises in 2016 and he’s been Darth Skater ever since. It’s as if he’s responsible for all that raw sewage pouring into the city’s river system.
Morrissey was MIA for the first three days of Camp PoMo. Does that make him Darth Skater Lite?
I mean, from what I can determine there’s just one difference between the two young National Hockey League defenders: Trouba declared a desire to get out of Dodge prior to his contract impasse, which stretched into November of ’16, and his hankering for a new postal/zip code became a matter of public record. Morrissey, meanwhile, has expressed no such yearning. The only comments he delivered for public consumption during his prolonged contract discussions sounded like a 1960s love-in: Love the Jets. Love my teammates. Love River City. Want to be on board for the long haul. We’ll get a deal done.
Well, now that the deal is done (two years, $6.3 million), I’m hoping that Morrissey will be spared the unharnessed hostility heaped upon his blueline accomplice, and that’s as it should be.
Like Trouba before him, Morrissey has done nothing wrong.
“You make your decision and you stand up for what you believe in and I wouldn’t expect him to take anything less that what he feels he’s worth,” Trouba was saying the other day, not long after the local lads had assembled for their initial pre-season frolic.
Exactly.
The notion that these players should happily lap up whatever Kool-Aid that Puck Pontiff Mark Chipman and his main bidder, Kevin Cheveldayoff, are serving is absurd.
Let’s be clear: Morrissey and les Jets had agreed to disagree until Sunday. That doesn’t make him a malcontent or a bad guy.
Here’s my thought on those third jerseys les Jets unveiled on Friday: That’s the biggest swing and a miss since mighty Casey struck out for the Mudville Nine. Seriously. Has a beer league team reported a set of stolen sweaters?
Here’s my thought on Tyler Myers playing on the left side of les Jets defence: Egads.
Much has been made of the fact that Jets goal-scoring maestro Puck Finn shed 14 pounds and the worst set of chin whiskers in hockey history during the summer. Here’s betting that if the puck isn’t going in early and often for Patrik Laine, the bread-butter-and-eggman beard grows back.
Speaking of facial foliage, I note that the Tranna Maple Leafs have scrapped their ban on beards. Yup, players can now sprout chin whiskers. Most excited about the new directive is forward Mitch Marner. It gives him something to look forward to when he finally reaches puberty.
I find it interesting that les Leafs and Air Canada would lift their respective restrictions on beards at the same time. As for extra baggage, Air Canada is still charging a fee and Ron Hainsey is still with the Leafs.
It’s a given that everyone in sports lives on Planet Pinocchio, which is to say they tell fibs. It’s part of their DNA. But it’s difficult to determine whose pants were on fire in Montreal recently, when les Canadiens ownership/management and former captain Max Pacioretty engaged in a “he said/he said/no I didn’t” peeing contest.
Geoff Molson, team bankroll: “We’re just going to focus on telling the truth, and that’s that a (trade) request was made. When the request was made to look at making a trade, we started to actively go after that.”
Marc Bergevin, general manager: “Last season, he asked for a trade. I will not go into details. But that’s a fact.”
Pacioretty: “There’s no truth to that. And I can confidently say that.”
Pacioretty is now with the Vegas Golden Knights. No one is denying it.
If you’re looking for some good reading (and you know you won’t find it here), check out Dan Myers’ nhl.com piece on Minnesota Wild head coach Bruce Broudreau and the 9/11 tragedy, and New York Islander goaltender Robin Lehner’s first-person account in The Athletic on his winning battle with the bottle, depression and suicidal notions. As my first sports editor, Jack Matheson, would tell us whenever we wrote something that caught his fancy, it’s “damn good” stuff. Very powerful.
Is it mere coincidence that Antonio Pipkin had his worst day at the office scant hours after TSN’s favorite lousy quarterback, Johnny Manziel, shot off at the mouth about losing his job as the Montreal Alouettes starter?
Pipkin was beyond dismal in the Larks’ 32-14 loss to the B.C. Lions on Friday night, throwing for less than 100 yards and four interceptions, including a pair of late Pick Sixes. What I found myself wondering while watching the carnage was whether or not Johnny Rotten’s rant during the leadup to the skirmish impacted on Pipkin’s performance.
“They traded half of an organization I feel like in terms of what they gave up to get me here,” Manziel had told news snoops. “I would think I would get a chance to come in and still play. That’s where maybe it’s a little bit lost on me. Missing the game because of the concussion and then not getting to play once I was back, it’s been frustrating for sure. Because I felt like there was a lot of hope and a lot of faith in me being the guy here and how quickly that’s changed in two weeks is tough.”
Sounds to me like the bleating of an entitled, me-first rich kid.
To recap, Manziel started two games behind centre for Montreal. He was gawdawful in his Canadian Football League debut, and only marginally better the next time out, when he suffered a concussion. He was 0-2. In his absence, Pipkin won two of three assignments, pumping oxygen into the lifeless Larks and establishing himself as the No. 1. Apparently, none of that registered with Johnny College. Despite missing three days of practice with the flu, he’s convinced he should have been at the wheel vs. B.C.
It’s believe he’ll miss the next month of the season due to hurt feelings.
Oh, joy, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao are going to exchange punches again for a gazillion dollars in December. How will they bill the fist fight between the two boxing fossils, The Wife Beater vs. The Homophobe? And how many suckers will actually pay to watch it?
The is too funny: Last week, Steve Simmons of Postmedia Tranna wrote, “I really hope the Maple Leafs pick a captain soon—so everybody can just shut up about it. The captain stuff: Relatively meaningless.” So what’s the first snippet in Simmons’ latest notes column about? You guessed it. The Leafs “relatively meaningless” captaincy. Does he even read his own stuff before hitting the send button?
I began covering tennis in 1971, when the premier players in the country made the first of their annual summer pilgrimages to the har-tru courts of the Winnipeg Canoe Club for the Canadian National tournament. In the ensuing years, I witnessed no small amount of brattish behaviour, perhaps the most memorable being a classic hissy fit from the tightly strung Dale Power, who, after an unexpected loss, hucked all his racquets and other paraphernalia into an open construction pit that was to become the badminton wing of WCC. In tennis, the men were the divas (hello John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase). McEnroe became a pathetic caricature of himself. Connors was a narcissistic boor. Nastase was a lewd, crude oinker. So where does the great self-promoting female crusader Serena Williams fit in with the bad-ass boys? I’d say she’s a combination of McEnroe and Connors—a narcissistic caricature.
And, finally, chair umpire Carlos Ramos, he of the Serena Williams foofaraw at the U.S. Open, dinged Marin Cilic of Croatia with a code violation for racquet abuse in his Davis Cup match vs. Sam Querrey of the U.S. today. Cilic did not call Ramos a “liar” or a “thief,” nor did he mention anything about parenting or fighting for equal rights. Apparently, he simply played on. What a concept.
The River City Renegade 
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