Category: Sports

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Olympian Rip-off

According to Avery Brundidge, the Olympics “embraces the highest moral laws. NO philosophy, no religion preaches loftier sentiments.”

Well, if the highest moral law is “he who has the gold, makes the rules”, then he’s right.

For all the hype, the Olympics is nothing more than a two-week long commercial with athletes. During the first few days of competition, I would estimate that there was about three minutes of competition to about three hours of meaningless chatter about scandals and politics and about twelve hours of commercials. Someone with more patience should sit down with a stop-watch and get the actual figures.

During an important curling match, the CBC actually cut away for commercials while rocks were being thrown in the late ends of an extremely close semi-final match between Britain and Canada. It’s almost as bad as ABC News Nightline. Could anything have made it more clear what the Olympics are really all about?

There will be some great competitions, no doubt, and men’s hockey is shaping up to be one of the best. On the larger ice surface, we might actually get to see some skating, passing, and stick-handling. Why did the NHL agree to this? Don’t they realize that viewers will be appalled when they are forced to watch the ridiculous thuggery of the NHL again after this treat? Maybe that’s why they announced there will be a crack-down on clutch-and-grab tactics after the Olympics.

As for figure skating and ice dancing, if everyone knows that the judging is decided on the basis of back-room politicking, why can’t anybody seem to do anything about it?

The reason why is simple: the International Olympic Committee is the personal fiefdom of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the former youth fascist, who runs the organization with an iron fist behind walls of secrecy. He appoints new members to the committee. He controls the purse strings. And he is accountable to no one.

This kind of structure should not be able to survive the modern era. Most large corporations have begun to realize that without clear lines of accountability, they cannot be competitive. Everyone is too busy covering their own rear end to serve the genuine interests of the company.

When Ross Rebagliati tested positive for marijuana at these Olympics, someone should have looked at the receipts for the Atlanta games. As Dan Morgenson pointed out in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 9,000 cases of beer, 1,800 cases of wine, and 600 cases of liquor, were delivered to Hyatt Regency hotel for the benefit of the 106 members of the International Olympic Committee. Hypocrisy run amok!

All of the world’s national Olympic Committees should meet together this year and announce that a new structure must be created by a committee elected from the National Olympic bodies. The first task of this committee will be to create a code of conduct which all of the national bodies must subscribe to or suffer ineligibility. This code of conduct must stipulate that the committees are accountable to the athletes they serve and to the supporting community. This code should set a fixed ratio of “officials” to athletes to attend each sporting event. All officials must be legitimate representatives of their sports– not sycophants of some politician or general.

The second task will be to set up a new International Olympic Organization with a board that is democratically elected from among all the member national bodies. No nation will be allowed to nominate from their own country. At least 50% of the board members should be elected directly by the athletes.

The third task will be to impose stringent limits on the amount of Olympic dollars that are allocated for administration and promotion. Nobody knows what the exact numbers are, but nobody doubts that a huge proportion of Olympic spending is devoted to the comfort and pleasure of the same idiot officials and appointees who decided that Ross Rebagliati should lose his gold medal because of trace amounts of THC in his blood.

Finally, the baloney should be removed from the selection process for hosts for the Olympic games. Once again, everybody knows that the process is incredibly corrupt– officials are almost handed suitcases of cash by representatives of contending cities– but nobody seems to have the guts or the means to stop it.

We have seen the U.S. press become hysterically obsessed with the salacious but insignificant scandal of Bill Clinton’s undisciplined sexual urges. Millions of words and thousands of hours of television program have been devoted to this non-news story. Compared to the Monica Lewinsky story, the way the International Olympic Committee operates is a major scandal of outrageous proportions. The only way it will ever get on the front page, however, will be if Samaranch hires himself a lovely little intern…

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Black Eye for Canadian Athletes at the Olympics

CBC Radio just reported on a “visit” by Canadian Olympic athletes to a Japanese elementary school near Nagano. This event had been planned months ago and the school had been told that even Wayne Gretzsky and his wife might show up.

Well, the only people who showed up were a few Olympic Committee Functionaries and Atina Ford, an alternate on the Canadian Women’s Curling team. The entire event became a dismal embarrassment to all concerned. The children had prepared elaborate gifts and ceremonies, and games designed to include the honored athletes. The teachers had brushed up on their English and arranged an assembly and invited parents.

Atina Ford saved the day to some extent. She is a teacher by profession, and she quickly gathered the children around her and got some games started and had the children laughing and clapping. The Japanese were exceedingly polite and gracious, but there was no hiding the crushing disappointment, especially among the staff of the school who had been preparing for the event for three weeks.

I surprised myself at how ashamed I felt about the behaviour of the Canadian athletes, far, far more ashamed than I did about Ross Rebagliati testing positive for marijuana. In the back of my mind, I think I understand how busy their lives are and how it must feel to have everyone clamoring for a piece of you all the time. But this story twists a knife in your guts. Maybe it’s because we do know how busy our athletes are: signing endorsement contracts, going to parties, receiving congratulatory calls from the Prime Minister, posing for pictures, exchanging Olympic paraphernalia with other athletes, meeting with their agents, their trainers, their personal chef, or whatever… and none of them had a few moments to spare for a group of hopeful Japanese school children?

I just know that when our athletes find out about this humiliating situation, a number of them will step forward and immediately schedule a visit to the school as soon as possible. If they do, we’ll know they really do have class, and all will be forgiven. If they don’t, I know what my strongest memory of these Olympic games is going to be.

* * *

What’s all this blather about how beautiful and elegant and graceful the figure skaters are? As far as I’m concerned, Joan McCusker of the curling team is the only goddess on ice at these Olympic games.

 

* * *

The Canadian men’s hockey team is far more dominant than I think most people give them credit for. I’ll go on record: they will stroll into the Gold Medal. Remember, you heard it here first.

March 8, 1998: Obviously, I was wrong. However, I will observe that Canada lost to the eventual champions, Czechoslovakia, by the slimmest of margins. Then they lost an embarrassment to the Fins, but did anybody really believe the Canadians cared deeply about the Bronze medal?

* * *

The Canadian women’s hockey team deserved to lose, but I wish they had won just so I wouldn’t have had to watch the U.S. women actually sing their national anthem after receiving their medals. Don’t they know that you’re supposed to just move your lips up and down vaguely so, just in case anyone accused you of patriotism, you could always say you were mouthing the Lord’s Prayer or just chewing gum instead?

Anyway, Women’s hockey should not be an Olympic sport. There were only two countries in serious contention. It was a medal giveaway for the U.S. and Canada. Come back when there are at least six contenders.

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Olympics Notes

Other Olympic Notes
Catriona LeMay Doan won the gold medal for Canada in the women’s 500 meters. She discussed her faith with a CBC interviewer, with slight defensiveness. She obviously didn’t want to be confused with other Christian athletes who believe that God awards the gold medals. Sports Illustrated picked her to win the 500 and to place 3rd in the 1000.

The Canadian Women’s Hockey team is very poorly coached. On February 14, they were leading the U.S. 4-1. The U.S. team scored a goal, which rattled the Canadians, who responded with a foolish penalty. Another quick goal, and the Canadians were really rattled, disorganized, and confused. Coach Shannon Miller merely kept pacing behind the bench, while the Americans kept scoring. They lost the lead. She didn’t call a time out, she didn’t speak to her players, she didn’t change goalies… nothing. This was a golden opportunity for the Canadians to take the high road, play clean, determined, defense, and show the U.S. how unflappable they were. Instead, they fell apart. With more than a minute left in the game, Miller pulled the goalie without securing possession of the puck or a face-off in the U.S. zone. The Canadians lost 7-4. This is merely the most recent in a long series of negative indicators– Miller cancelled the team Christmas party after a poor game against the U.S., and imposed a gag order on star player Haley Wickenheiser. There was also some controversy about the selection process for the team.

Brian Stemmle has CLASS. His terrific run at the downhill, in which he was leading 3/4 of the way through the race before hitting a fluke rut, was electrifying. In an interview afterwards, he blamed no one but himself, even though a lot of us were tempted to think the hill should have been better maintained.

At the 1994 Olympics in Spain, the U.S. basketball team stayed in private villas and hotels and refused to mix with the mortal athletes in the Olympic Village. The NHL players deserve high praise for choosing to live in the Olympic village with the rest of the athletes. Class again.

CBC coverage is the worst I have ever seen. Brian Williams is boring. Most of the “features” are poorly conceived and weakly presented (read “cheap”). There is very little insight into either the competition or the character of the athletes.

There was a time when the viewers were informed when what they were watching had been taped earlier. It is a kind of fraud to present 12 hour old events as if they were just happening. And when it really is happening, you don’t know.

Please please please get rid of those drab middle-aged men who present the medals. Who are they? What are they doing there? How did they get those jobs?!. They are the self-serving crony-apparatchiks of the IOC. Wouldn’t it have been great to have Eric Heiden, for instance, present the gold medal for speed skating, or Peggy Fleming present the medal for figure skating, or Nancy Greene for skiing? Come on, wouldn’t it? The Olympics remind me of war when I see those men: wasted, hollow old functionaries without courage, grace, or skill, controlling the destinies of the young and innocent.

Let’s see… Elvis Stojko skates a 3 1/2 minute routine including several triple-triple and triple-double jumps, makes all of them perfectly… but he can’t skate from the centre of the ice to the boards without practically collapsing in pain? Why did this remind me so much of the Keri Strug farce at the summer Olympics? My guess is that Elvis was really in some pain– every athlete at this level of competition always is–and probably had a bit of the flu. My guess is also that, knowing he couldn’t win on merit alone because he didn’t include a quad in his program, he made a play for audience sympathy. Stojko’s not stupid: he knows when the camera is on close-up. He wanted us to be impressed with his courage and determination. He wanted the judges to know that he could have done better if he hadn’t been injured. Maybe he really hoped it might win him a mark or two. Whatever the reason, I thought it was coy, and I wished he’d shown a little more class. And I’ll bet you most of his competitors think so too.

I hope the people who arrange housing in the Olympic village had the genius to put the curling teams into the same dorms as the snowboarders. But then, marijuana probably is a performance enhancing drug for curlers….

This is about the fifth Olympics in a row for which it was predicted that Canada would take a “record haul” of medals. Who is responsible for these predictions? Whoever it is should be sacked.

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Alan Eagleson’s Friends

I was, in my youth, somewhat of an enthusiast for Marxism. Our society seemed to me to be based on greed and corruption, and I thought a good dose of Marxism would solve a lot of social ills. Of course, I knew that the Soviet Union was an oppressive, unjust society. I just didn’t think the Soviet Union represented Marxism any more than I thought the United States represented Christianity. In each case, the high ideals of the state religion was propounded but the actual practice was ruthlessly materialistic. Nowadays, I suppose I could be called a liberal.

There are days when I miss the idea of overthrowing the established order. Like today, when I read in the Toronto Star about Alan Eagleson’s friends.

Alan Eagleson has been charged with more than 44 counts of fraud committed since 1994, when he was head of the National Hockey League Players Association. Among other things, he stole money from players he represented and he colluded with the owners to keep player salaries low.

Some players now say they did kind of wonder about why their union leader was spending so much time on the owner’s yachts. They did, did they?

There is not much dispute about his guilt: Eagleson has admitted to some of the charges, and has been sentenced to 18 months so far, of which he will probably serve six. He is presently serving his time in Mimico Correctional Centre.

The Law Society of Upper Canada, hilariously, is now trying to decide whether or not Eagleson has engaged in conduct “unbecoming a barrister or a solicitor”! Like what? Did he donate some of the proceeds of his fraud to a charity?

In the same article, the Toronto Star reports that Mike Gillis, a former Boston Bruin, sued Eagleson successfully in 1996 for $40,000, part of a disability payment which Eagleson had swiped from him. Gillis was awarded $570,000 but Eagleson has appealed. The trouble is that almost all of that money is going to go to Gillis’ lawyers. Conduct unbecoming? Eagleson is a crook precisely because he behaves like a lawyer.

Look at this system! A man is owed $40,000 by a lawyer. The lawyer refuses to pay. Is he arrested? No, hell he’s a lawyer! So the victim of the fraud has no recourse but to go to court. The judge says, you can’t represent yourself– get yourself a…. lawyer! So the victim hires another lawyer to get his money back. But he can’t afford to pay this lawyer, you see, because he lost his money to the first lawyer. So the second lawyer says, no sweat, we’ll sue for what he owes you and for what you will owe me!

Now, you might observe that Mike Gillis, having been enlightened as to the courageous, unselfish, righteous needs of his own lawyers, has the solution. This solution is carefully suggested and facilitated by his lawyers: he sues Eagleson not only for the $40,000 he is owed, but for an additional $500,000 to pay his lawyers. The lawyer says, “I’ll help you get back your $40,000 and while we’ve got him down, I’ll rob him blind.” The man doesn’t care because it won’t come out of his pocket. So the system “works”.

Everybody’s happy, right? Consider Eagleson’s lawyer. Does he mind? Hell, no. He will charge Eagleson at least $500,000 himself, to spare him from having to pay out $40,000! But if he does a lousy job and loses the lawsuit, does he give the $500,000 back? Now, don’t laugh yourself silly. If he was going to do that, would he have advised him to fight the lawsuit in the first place, knowing it would cost a lot more than any possible out of court settlement would cost?

The truth is that this system is insane. It is absolutely, totally, completely, irrevocably insane. And everybody knows it. This system destroys everyone consumed by it…. except, of course, for the lawyers. And who, pray tell, makes these laws under which these cases are heard? Who is the judge? Who is the defense, the prosecution? What profession is represented in our legislature at numbers all out of proportion to their share of the population? Lawyers!

Are we really so surprised that they have cleverly evolved us a system that pays only them?

And now the most distasteful part of this particular story. Eagleson’s loyal friends have written him letters of commendation. Eagleson is a good man. Eagleson is honorable. Eagleson is a loyal friend. Eagleson never done me wrong. Here’s a list (side bar) so you can remember their names. If you bump into Bobby or Willard on the street, please restrain your desire to punch one of them in the nose. And remember that Bobby Clarke is the hero of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series for breaking Valery Kharmalov’s ankle with a wicked–and unpenalized– slash in game 5. Sittler? Shame on you.

Yes, this is how it works. These are Alan Eagleson’s friends.. So while he was cheating Mike Gillis and Glen Sharpley and Bobby Orr, he was carefully cultivating loyal friendships with Bobby Clarke and Paul Henderson and John Turner. What does this tell us? That, contrary to the testimony of Gillis and Sharpley and Orr and all the others that Eagleson was actually an honest man? That’s what these “gentlemen” want you to believe. Their signatures on their letters are a slap in the face to all the honest, hard-working NHL players whom Eagleson has cheated over the years. Paul Henderson is saying, “hey– he didn’t cheat me. Why should I care if he cheated you? Go to hell, Orr…”

The only thing their letters prove is that even a brilliant lawyer like Alan Eagleson couldn’t screw everybody at the same time.

We often hear about the two tiers of justice in this country, but we don’t often get such an intimate glimpse into how it works. You rob a string of banks of various amounts up to $40,000 and get caught and brought before a judge. If you don’t have your friendly letters from wealthy members of the establishment, judges, members of parliament, and retired professional hockey players, you can look forward to a long stay in prison. But if you are a lawyer and you rob a disabled hockey player of $40,000, and numerous others, and if you have invested that money wisely by acquiring the clothes and cars and boats and homes that allow you to move within the ranks of the privileged and blessed… you’re not likely to serve any time at all. Well, maybe 6 months. In mean old Mimico Correctional Facility.

Eagleson moves in conservative circles and was a member of the provincial Tory caucus at one point. I wonder if he ever partied with Mike Harris, who grew almost hysterically angry at the teachers who defied the law and went on strike last year. At moments like this, it seems transparent to me that the law has nothing to do with justice or fairness or good order. The law is there to hold you down while the lawyers rob you blind.

 

Who wrote letters asking the courts to be lenient on Alan Eagleson?

  • Bobby Clarke
  • Paul Henderson
  • Douglas Fisher
  • John Turner
  • Darryl Sittler
  • Willard Estey
  • George Gross
  • Darcy McKeough
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Stupidest Rule in Professional Sports

Hockey would be a great sport if they could only do one thing. Well, actually, there are a lot of things they could do, like get Wayne Gretzky to fight Tie Domi. But one thing really, really bugs me: it’s late in a close game, the teams are battling back and forth, the tension is building, the goalie is getting ready to skate to the bench, and then suddenly… it’s time out.

Yes, those dorks who run the NHL decided that the right thing to do at the moment the game is most exciting is call all the players over to the bench and just chat about things for a bit, while two million fans (or, in the U.S., two million fans) sit in front of their TV sets and grind their teeth.

This is the stupidest rule in pro-sports, or maybe the second stupidest, if you count “field goals” in football, or football itself, which consists of large, well-paid, mobile appliances running across a grass field and bumping into each other.

Of course, everything is relative. When I mean “stupidest rule in pro sports”, I mean, of course “stupidest rule in hockey” since most other pro sports–except for real football (soccer)–do exactly that all the time. American football, in fact, consists entirely of time-outs interrupted briefly, occasionally by short bursts of action. It takes how long to play the last two minutes of basketball? How many times may a batter step out of the batter’s box to adjust his batting gloves?

There is one thing they could do which might make the 30-second time-out a little interesting. They could put one of those mini-cameras with a microphone on the coach and let all of us in on the discussion. Better yet, we should be able to phone individual players and make suggestions like, “Mats, you gonna try and get a goal, or what?” or “Hey, Wayne, I hear that Tie Domi said some awfully crude things about your mother last night”.

And don’t do it like baseball did during the World Series. They let us in on the conversation, all right. It was apparent to everyone that the players and coaches were told before-hand when they would be on the air. What’s the fun in that? “Hey, Kenny, you gonna try and steal a base or what.”

I think they should have done it without warning anybody. Wire everyone on the field and let the broadcasters choose who to broadcast at any given moment.