Category Archives: Sports (MC Archive)

Sports columns that appeared on Jason Menard’s previous Web site, Menard Communications.

NHL Draft Serves Up Hope

Leave a reply

By Jason Menard

Columbus Ohio. Tonight and tomorrow, this is the place where dreams are made.

In less than a couple of hours, the first young man – maybe even London’s own Pat Kane – will stride to the podium and don the colours of the National Hockey League franchise that selected him. He will shake hands with the commissioner, embrace his new general manager, and flash a toothy grin – well, at least what teeth remain – to the assembled media masses and fans.

And then he may not don that jersey for years to come, if ever again.

So much fuss, so much hype for players who – in large part — won’t make a significant impact for their NHL clubs for at least three or four years down the road. And why? One word: hope.

The NHL entry draft is all about selling the promise of hope to thousands of fans throughout the planet. It is about catching a glimpse of the future and embracing the promise that’s represented by these talented youth. It’s a day where every pick is the right one and success is a foregone conclusion.

Tonight the first round of the draft takes place and shortly thereafter, from the comfort of their La-Z-Boys and barstools, instant armchair general managers will debate the merits of their club’s selections while denigrating the draft prowess of their competitors. People who have never seen these players lace up will suddenly be experts in the field of player projection and their opinion will carry more weight than that of the NHL scouts who toil night after night in cramped press boxes in arenas from Chibougamou to the Czech Republic.

And, in all honesty, it’s a wonderful thing to behold.

Only one other day carries as much weight – and suffers from as much instant analysis – as the NHL entry draft and that’s trade deadline day. And in both cases the catalyst for the excitement remains the same – hope.

In the end, only one team skates away with the Stanley Cup. And by late season, the field of legitimate contenders has been winnowed to just a handful of clubs. So only a few lucky fans get to embrace the idea that their club could end its season on a winning note.

But the future is a constantly changing landscape. Every draft choice, every free agent signing, every trade adds another brushstroke to the canvas. And although every work of art takes its time to come to completion, the hope is always there that those in trust of your favoured franchise will be painting a masterpiece.

Like buying a lottery ticket, the NHL entry draft enables fans to access a dream – one wherein their club becomes the only one to win its final game and hoist Lord Stanley’s grail high aloft.

The players, who in large part have toiled in relative obscurity, are suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. A seventh-round project selection is scrutinized by the masses and everyone dreams that their club has chosen the next Dominik Hasek, whose impact on the game has far outstretched his projected worth when 198 other players were selected before him in 1983.

Alas, for every late-round gem like Henrik Zetterberg and Luc Robitaille, there’s a Brian Lawton or – and what would a list of draft busts be without him? – Alexandre Daigle. At best, drafting is an inexact science. At worst, it’s a crapshoot. Scouting staffs do their best to assess players for talent, character, drive, and heart. However, there are so many other factors that go into successfully transitioning to the NHL – and if even one goes off the rails, your express ride to success can quickly be derailed.

Fans should enjoy this weekend’s festivities for what they are. Like a lottery ticket, it’s great to dream of the millions. But you’d also be pretty happy if you won $20 right? And if none of your numbers come up, you just shrug your shoulders and move on. After all, there’s always next year.

In the end, today’s a day for hope. This weekend, fans of all 30 franchises – even Leafs’ fans — can dream that they’re on the right path to the Stanley Cup.

2007© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Union Must Decide Who it Represents

Leave a reply

If the NBA’s players’ association actually appeals the suspensions levied this weekend against noted bad boys Stephen Jackson and Ron Artest, then they’re doing a disservice to the rest of its constituency.

I get it. You’re a union. And unions protect their membership without fail. There’s something admirable in that for sure, but the positives are grossly outweighed by the negatives.

After all, there are no absolutes in life, and this is one case where the players’ association should realize that discretion is truly the better part of valour.

Jackson and Artest were each suspended seven games on Saturday for off-the-field incidents: Artest’s May misdemeanor domestic violence charge and Jackson’s June shoot-‘em-up outside of an Indiana strip club. And while Jackson, for once, has shown grace in accepting his punishment, his union representation is already floating trial balloons about the inherent unfairness of these punishments in light of past precedents.

Let’s just hope those trial balloons pop — and soon.

Maybe, when compared with previous suspensions for off-the-field transgressions, these suspensions are a tad harsher. But the union has to understand that this is the dawn of a new era in sport.

There’s a huge backlash against thug culture. What started innocently as the big, bad Raiders, morphed into the more gangster lean of the NBA. Tatooed bad boys with a heart of gold like Alan Iverson, for a while, were the poster boys of the league. Long gone were the days of crew cuts and nut huggers — piercings, ink, and baggy shorts were the style and the kids ate it up.

But now the pendulum’s shifted too far. Not a week goes by without some NFL player getting busted for some sort of transgression — usually involving alcohol, violence, or both — a fact that inspired ProFootballTalk.com to set up a Days Without an Arrest counter. NBA players have gone from Thug-lite Iversons to full-on, remorseless punks like Artest and Jackson. It wasn’t that long ago that these two were at the centre of a disgraceful display in Detroit — and they apparently haven’t learned their lesson.

Yes, the NBA Players Association has a mandate to protect its membership. But who needs protecting here? Two childish morons who think slapping women or endangering innocents with a firearm are just fun and games, or the majority of hard-working NBAers who are going to have their reputations tarnished simply through guilt by association?

Artest and Jackson have had chance after chance. Of course, this is also an association who felt that a suspension for a player choking his coach was unjust, when in truth jail time would have been warranted.

It’s a changing world. People are fed up with the inmates running the asylum. The average sports fan isn’t sitting on the couch, polishing his 9 and running down a list of people in whom they’re going to bust a cap. They’re not making it rain at the local adult emporium and then getting their posse to rough up a poor kid just for looking at them cross-eyed.

No, they’re at home with their kids, looking for an evening’s diversion with their kids. They’re looking to root for their favourite club without wondering if they’re supporting drug runners, rapists, and murderers. They’re looking to the LeBron Jameses, Shaquille O’Neals, and Ladainian Tomlinsons of the world to entertain them.

Unfortunately, too often they’re getting the Artests, Jacksons, Tank Johnsons, and Michael Vicks. Eventually — and arguably it’s already started – they’re going to get fed up and show their displeasure with the only resource they have at their disposal — their money.

When the fans leave, so too do the mega-million salaries — and that impacts each and every player, not just the goons who brought this cloud of negativity.

So the NBA players’ association needs to make a choice. Who is it protecting — the majority of players who are solid, hard-working players who are representing the union’s membership to its fullest, or the few bad seeds who are taking advantage of their position and poisoning the rest of the league with their selfishness.

A union is supposed to be a collective working together to support each other’s best interests. So before they rush to a negative judgment, maybe the union should consider in whose interests Artest and Jackson have been working.

2007© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Painting F1 Win in the Wrong Colour

Leave a reply

By Jason Menard

Until this weekend I didn’t know that there WEREN’T any black winners on the Formula 1 circuit. So you might want to forgive me for feeling that the media hoopla centring on the fact that Lewis Hamilton became the first black driver to win an F1 event is simply making an issue out of something that doesn’t need to be raised.

Maybe I’m naïve, but aren’t we past the time where we should care what colour somebody’s skin is in any field – whether it’s sports, politics, entertainment, or commerce? And while people are lauding Hamilton ’s win as a huge step forward in the sport, I see the coverage of the event as one huge step backwards in acceptance.

After all, Hamilton ’s not getting the recognition because he won the Canadian Grand Prix. He’s getting recognition because he’s black – and he won the event.

Now, I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest F1 fan in the world. I never saw the appeal of the sport, even though I have friends who are avid watchers. I could probably name a half dozen drivers both past and present (and two of them are named Villeneuve), so I’m not an aficionado of the sport. But the one thing I do know now is that the biggest news in this sport is that a black guy won.

You know, I never gave any thought to the skin colour of the drivers in the past, so why am I supposed to care now? When do we move on and stop recognizing colour-based feats and simply recognize people for their skills?

Maybe I don’t get it because I’m a 34-year-old white male. But don’t I have the skin tone that’s allegedly the problem in this situation? After all, if it’s such a big deal that someone who doesn’t possess my skin colour wins, shouldn’t I have experienced an epiphany somewhere?

I didn’t. And I won’t. Simply because I don’t care about skin colour. It doesn’t mean anything to me. And I’d hazard a guess to say it doesn’t mean a lot to most people.

Look, I love hockey, football, basketball – any number of sports. And not once have I ever contextualized a person’s achievement by the colour of their skin. I wasn’t born into a world where Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the colour barrier was a brave exception. I was born into a world where that was history – that interracial mingling was the way life was. When I watch a sport, all I care about is the quality of play – not the ethnicity, colour, religious beliefs, or sexuality of the players.

I don’t deal with words like acceptance and tolerance because I don’t see that skin colour is anything that I should have to accept or tolerate. It is a part of a person’s body, but it does not define who they are. The words acceptance and tolerance indicate that something is beyond the norm and is, in some way, unappealing to your established norms. I was never brought up – nor have I raised my children — to believe that there was anything “wrong” with someone’s skin colour. So just as I never saw reasons to denigrate someone because of the colour of their skin, so too do I not see the reason to raise someone up because of the same factor.

In the end, wouldn’t it say much more about our society if we could simply state that Lewis Hamilton won the event without any reference to the colour of his skin? Wouldn’t it be a greater comment on our understanding of the nature of diversity if we focused on the things he directly controlled — his skill, his dedication, and his effort – than a factor of birth over which he had no choice?

In the end, maybe I’m naïve. Maybe we do need to bring the fact that Hamilton is black to light because there are still those in the dark. Maybe we have to have Rooney Rules and other affirmative action practices because there are still those who discriminate in their hiring policies. Maybe I’ve just been extremely lucky not to have met anyone who hates people or judges them based on their skin colour.

Maybe I live in a world where my friends come from all over the world with all types of backgrounds: Muslim and Jewish, black and Oriental, male and female, gay and straight. Maybe the majority of people I know who share my idea that one’s ethnicity or skin colour has no relevance to the quality of the person are, in fact, the minority.

Maybe I’m wrong in thinking that the world had changed. Maybe I’m wrong for holding no guilt for the tragedies committed in the past by those who share nothing with me more than a skin colour. I define myself by the quality of the person I am, by the values I hold dear, and the way I try to live my life in the best way possible. And I look for that in those with whom I choose to associate. Just because crimes have been perpetrated in the past by Caucasian people, am I to be painted with the same brush? Does a shared skin colour trump the fact that when it comes to things that matter – ideology, values, and beliefs – I don’t have anything in common with those people other than being white?

What I do know is that I didn’t care what colour Hamilton was this weekend, and the only reason it’s become a factor is because other people made it into an issue. And maybe we won’t be a truly interracial, culturally diverse society until we can stop inserting colour into the definition of one’s achievements.

To me, it’s a simple as black and white. But the coverage of Hamilton ’s win and the focus on his skin colour shows that there are still shades of grey out there.

2007© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Storm Clouds on CFL Horizon

Leave a reply

By Jason Menard

Look off in the horizon Canadian Football League fans. That faint patch of grey out there could be storm clouds brewing. And while the threat of inclement weather is often worse than what develops, a proposed new professional football league south of the border could eventually rain on the CFL’s parade.

The most recent edition of Play, the New York Times’ sports magazine, featured an interview with Bill Hambrecht who is spearheading a campaign to start a rival football league – the United Football League – designed to combat the National Football League’s monopoly on the sport in the U.S.

Unfortunately, if this battle ever comes to fruition, it is CFL fans who are going to be caught in the crossfire.

There have been other contenders in the past who have shown themselves to be nothing more than pretenders in the long run: the USFL, the World League of American Football, the much-maligned wrestling-inspired XFL, and even the niche Arena League. All came in full of pomp, circumstance, and bluster ready to bring the NFL to its knees with their new business models, style of game, or atmosphere. And they all, in varying degrees, fell by the wayside.

But this one seems different. Maybe it’s because there are already some big names attached: Google’s Tim Armstrong is on board at the league level and Maverick (and maverick) owner Mark Cuban has pledged support for the league and may take the league’s Las Vegas franchise. Or maybe it’s because the business model is appealing to the fans – the club is evenly distributed between its owner, the league, and fans who can purchase one-third of the franchise through buying shares in the team.

Or maybe because the talent is out there – and those would much rather be showcasing their wares in cities like San Antonio, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles than Regina, Calgary, and Hamilton. And if there’s a viable business plan out there that would facilitate the jump to the brighter lights and bigger cities south of the border, it would be hard for any CFL player – American or Canadian – to resist the call.

In fact, the article expressly stated that while the new league, with its salary cap and financing, wouldn’t be able to afford the elite players and prospects, they would be able to make financially compelling offers to its targeted demographic – the players on the lower rung of the NFL roster, practice squad players, Arena leaguers, and CFLers.

The CFL has been on an upswing for a few years now. Talented players stock each and every roster. Fans in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver are embracing the league in much the same way as those in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Regina always have. The depth and quality of the league’s Canadian content continues to improve and it has been complemented well by talented American-born players. But what’s fuelled the CFL’s engine is the steady stream of players who are just not good enough to make the NFL. The fact that the CFL is a de facto minor league that allows players entering their option years to fly the coop for the smaller fields and bigger paycheques south of the 49 th has also been appealing for American college football grads looking to audition for a future role.

But let’s face it. If you’re a Texan, playing at the University of Texas, where would you rather go when you college career is finished? San Antonio or Saskatchewan? The NFL doesn’t have a presence in 21 of the top 50 markets in the U.S. Those are attractive destinations for anyone looking to play professional football – and those are exactly the cities in which the UFL is looking to set up shop.

The CFL is a great league and it’s a great game, but it’s nothing without the talented players that populate its roster. If a start-up league is able to offer a more financially lucrative option for players – one in which they’re playing on American network TV instead of the CBC – the CFL’s rosters would be decimated.

Unfortunately, there’s little the CFL can do but wait and hope that this league falls by the wayside, just like the others before it. In fact, the best thing for the CFL would be if the UFL decided to take on the NFL directly. The NFL juggernaut has shown remarkable efficacy in mercilessly squashing its direct competition, and would respond in kind to a direct assault.

But if the UFL decides to play it smart and complement the NFL as opposed to compete, then those storm clouds over the CFL’s horizon will continue to grow and get darker. And when the rain finally comes, something is bound to get washed away.

2007© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Canadian Hockey Vultures Forgot Their Pain

Leave a reply

By Jason Menard

Canuck puck-heads need to take a deep breath. After all, circling like vultures isn’t an endearing character trait – especially when the prey is far from dead.

The announcement that Canadian billionaire Jim Balsillie has taken the first steps in purchasing the Nashville Predators has sent numerous Canadian hockey fans into apoplectic fits of joy. Already the debates have started: Hamilton or Kitchener/Waterloo? How soon? Where will they play? Copps Coliseum or a yet-to-be-build hockey palace in the K/W region?

The only problem with that scenario? The Predators are still in Nashville and could be for the foreseeable future.

There are a number of contractual obligations that can continue to bind the Preds to the city of Nashville. The much-ballyhooed out clause that could see the club pack up and move after next season can be negated by the current ownership executing a cure clause in the contract that would compel the city to ensure an average paid attendance of 14,000. That’s hardly an overwhelming burden for the city since the club averaged 13,815 spectators last season.

But therein lies the rub. The Predators have some of the lowest ticket prices in the league and had one of the best clubs during the regular season. With all those factors going for them they were only able to draw less than 14,000 fans. What’s to be expected from the fans who may, rightly or wrongly, feel that the club’s on its way out the door sooner or later? If fans won’t support a winner, how will they react to a franchise that is widely believed to be looking for greener pastures?

Or maybe, just maybe, Balsillie will play the role of responsible owner, cultivate a fan base, and invest in drawing local fans to the rink. After all, he’s a business man, and it’s only good business to see your investment pay off. With an established arena, a small-but-dedicated pocket of fans, and a general lack of competition on the professional sports landscape (the NFL’s Tennessee Titans the noted exception), Balsillie is further ahead than where he would be moving this franchise to Canada.

Unfortunately, Canadian hockey fans have infused their desires into their perceptions of Balsillie’s actions. Many Canadians want Balsillie to bring a franchise north of the border. Many Canadians want hockey to fail in the Sun Belt. And many Canadians want to hearken back to a better time.

Too many hockey fans are stuck in the past and are now engaging in a disgusting display ofschadenfreude. They want hockey to fail – no matter how that will impact fans south of the border.

They forget the pain they, themselves may have experienced. The anger over the loss of franchises in Winnipeg and Quebec City is still felt today and colours their perception of the league. Yet the contradiction here is that the very action that they despised over a decade ago – taking a franchise away from a small, but dedicated hockey fan base – is the very same strategy they’re firmly behind today.

Sure, Nashville may not have the tradition and societal attachment that cities north of the border may have for hockey, but that’s no reason to hope for something to fail. After all, this is our game and what greater pride can we have in it than to see it succeed in non-traditional markets?

We all would love to see NHL hockey returned to places like Winnipeg, Quebec City, and Hamilton (interestingly enough the NHL’s Hamilton Tigers, which ceased to exist in 1925, came into existence as a transfer of the Quebec [City] Bulldogs), but we shouldn’t be frothing at the mouth to wrest the franchises away from areas that we deem unworthy. We Canadians love to get indignant when told that cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver are small markets unworthy of NFL, or in some cases NBA or MLB franchises, but we seemingly have no problem being supercilious and looking down at southern regions unworthy of our beloved sport.

Let’s hope that Balsillie makes a go of it in Nashville and the sport enjoys unprecedented success. Personally, I’d rather see my beloved sport recognized world-wide for its greatness – and that means seeing it succeed south of the 49 th, instead of jealously guarding my game in my own backyard.

If after a couple of years of solid effort, the fans and business interests in Nashville continue to reject the Predators, then by all means Balsillie should be free to move the club wherever he likes. But while Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, Quebec City, and Winnipeg are all out there as options so too are Las Vegas, Portland, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Kansas City.

We all want more hockey back in Canada, but hovering over a franchise that’s not even in its death throes is a little unseemly. Maybe Canadians should remember the pain that losing their franchises caused before they’re so eager to inflict that same trauma on someone else, just because we deem them unworthy.

2007© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved