Another Sunday morning smorgas-bored…and I’m not protesting against anything today, but you might protest my still being here…
Social issues like racism, domestic violence, homophobia, sexism and misogyny tend not to have lengthy shelf lives around the ol’ sports hot stove, at least not with mainstream media.
They’ll use it as a chew toy for a few days—sometimes as long as a week—then abruptly turn their attention back to the scoreboard and more pressing matters, such as the Tranna Jurassics’ bid to repeat as rulers of the hardwood or Tiger Woods’ duck hook.
There’s a reason for the short attention span: They can’t relate.
I mean, the toy departments of Canadian newspapers are diverse like a Chihuahua is an elephant. It is an enterprise consisting of 99 per cent men, all of them white. They’ve never felt the sting of the barbs. Thus, it is head-shakingly laughable and absurd that numerous jock journos, print division, have been lecturing and preaching about proper protest protocol re racial injustice.
Worse, they’ve been scolding the National Hockey League and its players for a stutter-step before Planet Puckhead joined a professional athletes’ “racism is bigger than sports” call-to-action last week.
Some samples:
Ed Willes, Postmedia Vancouver: “On Thursday, the NHL bowed to pressure from the players and cancelled the two playoff games set for that night. Predictably, it was followed by a self-serving statement in which the league—along with the NHLPA in a joint statement—pledged unwavering support to the fight against racism. But it also came a day late and a dollar short. It was also perfectly in keeping with the league that it sat on the sidelines for 24 hours and let the players take the responsibility when it should have been leading the way.”
Mad Mike McIntyre, Drab Slab: “One thing we were reminded of today: The NHL and the vast majority of its players will care about a cause when it’s convenient to them, their schedule and their bottom line. Otherwise, all bets are off and the games go on. Actions really do speak louder than words.” He later called the NHL players’ retreat from the rink “an overdue step.”
Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star: “Instead of Black Lives Matter, they said We Skate For Black Lives. They said they were fighting against racial injustice and for health care workers, like it was a buffet menu. The NHL is a small white town on the US-Canada border and the same people have been in charge forever.”
Damien Cox, Toronto Star: “Apparently response from most NHL players will be ‘we didn’t know.’ What they don’t know is how clueless that makes them sound.” And: “Hockey players are really demonstrating themselves to be clueless.” And “By playing on, NHL is basically saying racial unrest is someone else’s problem. Undermines all the words said earlier this summer.”
Terry Jones, Postmedia Edmonton: “Hockey missed its moment to make a major statement and act in solidarity with the basketball players the night before. The way it worked out, however, was better late than never. The puck players got it right in the end and doubled down for effect. The NHL players thus managed to pull themselves up by the skate laces and emerge by making a significant statement after all.”
Steve Simmons, Postmedia Toronto (in a string of tweets): “Shouldn’t somebody on the Boston Bruins, who share a building with the Celtics, have taken a knee? Anybody? The NHL players tonight didn’t even take a knee. Sad. If you want to be disappointed, be disappointed in how NHL players responded last night.” Later he wrote: “The fact that NHL players chose to play on Wednesday night without any kind of sign of political awareness or togetherness—not a symbol, not a knee taken, not an arm locked—is a condemnation of them, not the league. This didn’t reflect on the league. It reflects on the players.”
Whoooo, boy. That’s a tall can of righteous ranting. Basically, what we have here is a bunch of white men from a very white business telling white men from another very white business what to do about something they’ve never experienced.
What next? They tell Paul McCartney how to write songs? Show Eric Clapton how to play the guitar? Explain method acting to Tom Hanks?
Look, racism ought to be an everybody issue, but it seems to me that the sports scribes should be asking questions, listening and learning, not telling people what to do and how to do it. Nor should they be tsk-tsking anyone, not when their own operation is naked in its whiteness.
Really what does it matter that NHL players were a day late and a dollar short in moving into lockstep with athletes from the National Basketball Association, the Women’s NBA, Major League Soccer, Major League Baseball and tennis players, who walked off the job earlier last week? As venerable Zen master Dalai Jocklama has been heard to say, “One is never late to the party if one brings good wine.”
Since I was knee high to Howdy Doody, athletes have been using their voices to pitch products from Gillette razor blades to ravioli in TV commercials, but now they’re using them to hopefully change minds, change habits and change built-in biases. More significant, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. before them, they’re speaking with their feet. That’s boffo stuff, but it’s also a risky bit of business. What happens the next time a cop kills a Black woman or man? Do they walk away again? If so, do the fans they still have give a damn if they ever return?
Not sure what message Nazem Kadri was trying to send when he wore a Cassius Clay hoodie for a show of solidarity re racism by NHL players last week. Muhammad Ali considered Cassius Clay his “slave name,” so I don’t get it. I’ve been waiting for Kadri to enlighten us, but so far no explanation.
Lived experience is, of course, the best of teachers and, yes, I have felt the sting of the barbs. Too many times and to the point of suicide ideation. I have been denied work, denied service, bullied, ridiculed, taunted, stalked and groped. I’ve been made to feel a lesser-than based on gender, and I’ve received physical threats. I once was told that I shouldn’t be allowed to sit at the bar in the very nightclub I cleaned for a living. “This is where the boys sit,” a longtime regular advised me, his voice dripping with contempt. “You should respect that and sit somewhere else.” All that in the past 12 years. Which is the reason I’ve written more than 100 essays on sports/social issues since I began blogging. Awareness leads to conversation and conversation hopefully leads to understanding and change.
Devin Heroux, a terrific CBC Sports reporter who happens to be gay, tells us he hears homophobic slurs “with alarming frequency during media scrums and in the press boxes and at sporting venues today.” That’s very disturbing. I mean, experience has taught me that the language on press row can get rather raunchy and salty, but homophobic? Call me naive, but I thought that would be strictly taboo in the year 2020.
Devin’s essay recounting his experiences listening to anti-gay slurs as a closeted gay kid playing sports (“I quit hockey because of it.”) is excellent. It’s the kind of stuff you’ll rarely find in a mainstream newspaper sports section because, again, the jock journos can’t relate. Thus they ignore issues like homophobia, sexism, misogyny and domestic violence until it becomes an inconvenience they can’t avoid.
Hey, for the bargain-basement price of $349, you can have your name engraved on the new base of the Canadian Football League’s biggest bauble, the Grey Cup. Which is sort of like having your name engraved on the hubcap of a 1958 Edsel. I mean, neither the CFL or the Edsel are up and running.
If CFL Commish Randy Ambrosie and the three downs overlords insist on panhandling shamelessly, why not go all in? Hold a nationwide telethon. If folks across the land care about our quirky game—and they surely do on the Prairies—they’ll pony up. If not, I guess it’s garage sales, weekend car washes, bake sales and lemonade stands.
Telethons have worked for the Saskatchewan Roughriders, who were near extinction more than once. Rob Vanstone of Postmedia Flatlands has an interesting piece on the club’s history of financial challenges, which included a bank account that once showed a balance of exactly 30 cents. It’s worth a read.
So, a Mike Trout rookie bubble gum card has sold at auction for $3.936 million. Scant seconds later, millions of parents across North America grounded their kids indefinitely for putting baseball cards in the spokes of their bike wheels.
Just wondering: Do they still include that rock-hard, sugary bubble gum in a pack of baseball cards? I’m guessing dentists everywhere hope so.
Well, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriquez are no longer in the bidding to buy the New York Mets, and that’s really too bad. It would be nice to have another female owner in baseball not named Marge Schott.
Last week I suggested some local news snoops went double-ply Charmin soft on the Winnipeg Jets after their failure to qualify for the NHL Stanley Cup tournament. Basically, they gave the local lads a high-five because they tried really, really hard. Ugh. Therefore, it was with much interest that I read Stu Cowan’s take on the Montreal Canadiens, who, unlike the Jets, actually won a qualifier series and took the Philly Flyers to six games before bowing out. “This year, the Canadiens were a bad team that didn’t deserve to be in the playoffs,” he wrote in the Montreal Gazette. “There aren’t many NHL cities that will celebrate a first-round playoff exit, and Montreal definitely shouldn’t be one of them.” I trust the softies on the beat in Good Ol’ Hometown are paying attention.
And, finally, what’s the over-under on the number of positive COVID-19 tests it will take before the U.S. Open tennis tournament is double faulted? And, if they manage to finish what they start this week at Flushing Meadows, will it be a walkover for Serena Williams in the women’s draw, since six of the world’s top eight players have chosen to give the Grand Slam event a pass?
The River City Renegade 
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