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Canwest News Service
Items that may grow up to be columns, Vol. XII, Chapter 11:
No Head For Business
Two passages from a National Hockey League press release issued Monday:
1. "Calgary Flames forward Curtis Glencross has been suspended for three games, without pay, for delivering a high hit to an unsuspecting opponent, Chris Drury of the New York Rangers . . . "
2. "No penalty was assessed on the play."
In a nutshell, that's the NHL. "High" is code for "head," a word the league avoids like the plague.
Naturally, there was no penalty on the play, because there's no rule against a "clean" hit that happens to make contact with another player's head. So each time it happens, and a player like Drury is injured, and his career is nudged one step closer to the end, NHL senior VP of hockey operations Colin Campbell has to come in behind, like the guy who picks up horse manure after a parade, and sanitize the crime scene.
Poor Drury. He is a hollow shell of the player he used to be. So are a lot of other high-skill players who will never be quite the same after repeated concussions, some of them unreported. One day, this generation's NHL general managers – who seem quite content to accept the loss of some of their highest- profile players as collateral damage – are going to have much to answer for. They think so little of their game that they worry it wouldn't be worth watching without catastrophic collisions, and the only answer they ever have is: "Keep your head up."
Sobering Reading
Speaking of head injuries and sport, you owe it to yourself to read Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece in The New Yorker. I guarantee you'll never look at football quite the same way again.
Grapes Going Soft
Don Cherry must be getting sentimental in his old age. There was a time when Mr. Rock'em-Sock'em would have dumped all over any player who pussy-footed into the corner to play a puck in order to avoid getting creamed. Or else he'd have called him a Swede. But maybe even Grapes has been sickened by the increasing incidence of violent blows to the head.
His list of suggestions to kids who want to avoid the kind of fate that befell Kitchener Rangers' Ben Fanelli – whose skull and several facial bones were fractured in a hit by Erie Otters' Michael Liambas on Oct. 30 – made so much sense, I had to look twice to make sure I hadn't accidentally switched channels.
The one that stood out a mile was: don't be first into the corner. Cherry: "When you go into a race for the puck in the corner, don't be a dummy. You give the other guy a chance to hit you. Never do that. Go in as a tie."
Showboating Cats
Not a big fan of touchdown celebrations, but laughed out loud when members of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats leaped into a motorboat that was parked in the endzone, on display, at CanadInns Stadium in Winnipeg on Sunday. After former Lions linebacker Markeith Knowlton scored the TD that officially sank the Blue Bombers (and resurrected the B.C. Lions), a pack of Ticats climbed aboard, one pretending to row, another miming reeling in a fish, one sitting at the wheel .. .very funny stuff. Also got them an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, but it was worth it.
Michael Recycle: Wonder if Bombers' pathetic quarterbacking performance Sunday means the CFL has finally run out of teams so desperate for a warm body at QB that they are willing to exhume Michael Bishop. By the second quarter, this man couldn't hit farmland from the back of a hay rack (note the prairie analogy). Someone said the other day: "The guys on the other team genuinely seem to like Bishop." No wonder.
Flatlanders Rule
TV networks can do tricks with numbers that would make a CPA blush at tax time, but TSN has announced that its overall average audience for CFL games in 2009 was 600,000, a 51% increase from last season. The most-watched game? Lions' overtime loss in Regina, Oct. 24, a whale of a football game that ended with that unfortunate Casey Printers interception.
In fact, four of the five most-watched games, all topping the one-million mark, involved the Roughriders, which pretty much settles the argument about the real heart of the CFL.
Make Mine Grey Poupon
Remember when Canada's Jeff Buttle won the world men's figure-skating title in Goteborg, Sweden in 2008, and responded to Frenchman Brian Joubert's pouting about Buttle's superior marks by pointing out that there was more to figure skating than just doing quadruple jumps?
Well, here was Joubert, the 2007 world champ, after winning the NHK Trophy in Japan on the weekend: "I don't want to be just a jumper, but I want to be a figure skater."
Joubert said he was still going to try to land three quads in his free program, "but I also want to show that I can do choreography between the jumps. And I try to improve myself on the spins. I want to show a different Brian Joubert."
Having heard countless skaters make promises about the jumps they intend to land and somehow never do, tell you what: if Joubert lands three quads in his free skate at the Olympics, I'll eat this column with a tablespoon of mustard. Dijon.
ccole@vancouversun.com
