The Buch stops here

Sunday saw a tremendously successful Grey Cup game take place in Toronto between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. As the Globe and Mail’s William Houston observed earlier this week, the CBC averaged 3.34 million viewers—the sixth-highest audience ever for a Grey Cup telecast—despite fears by many that the small-market nature of the competing teams would lessen national interest. It was the first time the Grey Cup had been held in Toronto since 1992, when thousands of unsold tickets detracted from the atmosphere.

This time around, the organizers got it right: tickets were sold out; tremendous acts such as Great Big Sea, Spirit of the West and Lenny Kravitz were lined up for the festivities; and the whole country was talking about three-down football for a week. The on-field product didn’t disappoint either, as the expected Saskatchewan blowout of a Blue Bombers team without their star quarterback failed to materialize and a thoroughly enjoyable closely-contested game appeared in its place.

The success of this Grey Cup speaks volumes about where the CFL is at. The league continues to produce an enjoyable, distinctly Canadian product and has shown with this Grey Cup they can stage events with the best of them. In fact, according to Houston, the TV audience was only slightly smaller than the 3.37 million who watched last year’s Super Bowl. It was a thrilling conclusion to a great season.

What keeps this from being a complete success, however, are events external to the league, closely related to the aforementioned Super Bowl. As the Globe’s Stephen Brunt commented on Monday, “Bringing the great celebration of pigskin nationalism back to the country’s largest market after a 15-year absence was always going to be a referendum on the health and relevance of the Canadian Football League here at a time when threats loom to the south.” Those dangers to the CFL, namely Buffalo Bills’ owner Ralph Wilson’s plan to bring his team (and by extension, the National Football League) north for eight games over the next five years, have never been so clear and present.

It seems obvious that Wilson’s plan is only the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps the NFL’s ploy to get its foot in the door of one of the few large North American markets without its presence. In fact, in the prelude to the Grey Cup, Mark Cohon became the first commissioner in CFL history to directly address the threat of an NFL team relocating to Toronto on a permanent basis.

“All of the tea leaves are indicating that it’s shifting,” Cohon told the media in a press conference last Friday. “You have guys like Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum and Phil Lind, very powerful Canadians who are interested, you have an owner in Ralph Wilson in Buffalo who has said, ‘When I die, my estate will sell the franchise,’ you have the Bills interested in marking Toronto as part of their territory, which I believe is indication that, ‘Hey this our territory, we don’t want another NFL team coming here.’ So I think there’s all these things lining up as an indication that it could happen. So, I’m not sticking my head in the sand, that would be the worst thing for the CFL commissioner to do. ”

Cohon deserves applause for taking so bold a stand. The threat is imminent and is greater than it has ever been. As a Nov. 23 Canadian Press story stated, “Talk of the NFL coming to Toronto has existed since the 1970s. But the combination of Wilson’s statement, the Bills’ playing regular-season games at Rogers Centre, the strength of the Canadian dollar and deep pockets of the Toronto NFL group headed up by Rogers and Tanenbaum has many believing the NFL’s arrival here is inevitable. … The overwhelming belief is that if the NFL does come to Toronto, it will not only spell the end of the Argos and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, but ultimately the CFL.”

B.C. Lions offensive lineman Rob Murphy—recently named the CFL’s top lineman—didn’t go quite as far in his comments on TSN’s Off the Record show Friday, but still made it clear that the NFL coming to Canada would severely damage Canadian football.

“It will definitely be a detriment to the CFL,” he said.

Murphy added that trying to stop the NFL would be a difficult task.

“The NFL is the big bad brother on the block,” he said. “If they want to come here, they will come here, no question about it.”

Some have suggested that the CFL could survive as a regional entity if it abandoned the Southern Ontario market to the NFL. However, this logic is highly questionable. Without Toronto (and to a lesser extent, Hamilton), the league loses its national TV exposure, most of its sponsors and a significant portion of its fan base. As unfortunate as it is for westerners who are sick of hearing about the “Centre of the Universe,” you can’t hope to exist as a high-profile sport in Canada without a franchise in Toronto.
In his press conference, Cohon stated that maintaining these markets is vital for the CFL.
“I’m not going to preside over a league that has a Grey Cup just out west,” he said. “That’s not what I was hired to do. Any type of relationship that we have [with the NFL] has to make sure that the eight existing franchises are strong, growing and healthy. I think southern Ontario is critical to this league and I’ll make sure I protect it and grow it.”

Cohon has the right idea in mind here: taking on the NFL head-on is a recipe for disaster due to their massive supremacy in resources, but it’s absolutely un-Canadian to fly in the face of American invasion. It’s necessary to try and make accommodations, but there are certain concessions (such as giving up Ontario) that cannot be made. If the NFL is willing to ensure the CFL’s survival and continued growth, fine, but otherwise, in the words of Canadian cultural heroes Bob and Doug McKenzie, “Take off, hoser!”

The last time Americans tried to push into what’s now Southern Ontario, they were repelled by heroes of the War of 1812 such as Tecumseh, Laura Secord and General Isaac Brock. Hopefully Cohon, the rest of the CFL’s leadership and our current government will follow in that proud tradition and continue to stand up to the Americans. In the 1970s, the federal government passed legislation to stop the just-formed Toronto Northmen of the World Football League from operating in Canada, forcing them to relocate to Memphis before ever taking a snap. Cohon said such measures aren’t needed yet, but he may discuss them with the government if the NFL is unwilling to co-operate.

The ultimate summary of this year’s Grey Cup came during Lenny Kravitz’s great halftime performance. To strong applause, he cranked out his jazzed-up version of the Guess Who’s Canadian classic, American Woman, the words of which still resound as strongly as they did when the song was released in the Vietnam era. The coloured lights of the NFL can continue to hypnotize, but with any luck, they’ll be sparkling in someone else’s eyes. An invasion from their league will be no good for this country. Canada still has our rules, our teams, our cup and our pride, and the American league should stay away from us.

Earlier this week, the Chinese government announced an extensive database will be kept on journalists covering the Olympics next summer. According to a Nov. 12 Associated Press story, Liu Binjie, minister of the General Administration of Press and Publication, said the government’s rationale was to stop people posing as journalists. The AP story was based off a report that ran in the state-sponsored China Daily, which also mentioned that the database was supposed to hold information on 30,000 reporters.
This proposal is incredibly troublesome. It appears as if the government will make sure the Olympics only receive shallow, positively-spun coverage. You can bet legends of investigative journalism such as Andrew Jennings—the journalist who broke the IOC’s long history of corruption and bribes in his books The Lords of the Rings, The New Lords of the Rings and The Great Olympic Swindle—won’t be allowed in: they might expose what’s really going on.
The most interesting part was yet to come, though. The next day, another AP story appeared featuring prominent Chinese officials denying all knowledge of the database. Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said the story was simply due to reporting error.
“The report you mentioned is incorrect,” Liu told the AP Tuesday. “There is no such database. I have confirmed that it was a mistake by the reporter.”
Jianchao’s denials were backed up in principle by those of Li Zhanjun, director of the Beijing Olympic Media Center.
“China’s policy for foreign reporters is quite open,” Li said. “The surveillance of reporters or a blacklist does not exist. I do not know the function of the database you have mentioned.”
Li did admit the existence of a database, though. He told the AP his office was compiling “simple data” on reporters, largely to know if their main interests were sports, economics or politics, and claimed this would help his staff give “better service” to journalists.
“The major purpose is to provide better service to reporters. The purpose is not to monitor the press or anyone,” Li said.
At best, these denials are somewhat suspect. Firstly, the initial report was in a state-run paper and quoted one of the most important press officials in the country. It was only when international furor began to rise that the government sought to distance themselves from the story. Also, Li acknowledged the existence of a database: it would require a massive leap of faith to believe that it’s solely intended to provide “better service” to journalists.
China’s history with regards to freedom of the press is quite shoddy. Reporters Without Borders ranked China 163rd out of 169 countries in their latest (2006) Press Freedom Index, beneath such noted bastions of free journalism as Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, and Libya. Their comments in the accompanying press release further condemned China, and referenced the upcoming Olympics as well. “We also regret that China (163rd) stagnates near the bottom of the index. With less than a year to go to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the reforms and the releases of imprisoned journalists so often promised by the authorities seem to be a vain hope,” they said.
Moreover, the U.S.-based China Aid Association released a statement last week that was referenced in the AP article about a secret order from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security banning members of such clearly-defined categories as “antagonistic elements” and “members of illegal organizations,” in addition to “media employees who can harm the Olympic Games.” This would seem to provide grounds to fear censorship during the Olympics.
An remarkable sidebar to this was the censorship that recently took place in Canada on Chinese-related topics. Globe sports writer James Christie wrote a post criticizing the proposed database for the Globe on Sports blog on Nov. 12 when the initial story came out, but it was later pulled off the site after the denials emerged the next day.
Also interesting was the CBC’s rescheduling of the prime-time debut of their documentary on Falun Gong practitioners in China. The documentary examines allegations of persecution, labour camps, and organ-harvesting that former Canadian MP David Kilgour drew attention to in a report last year.
CBC spokesman Jeff Keay said the move was necessary in order to ensure the piece was “journalistically rigorous”. However, the documentary had already aired uncensored on CBC in the early hours of the morning, and had also aired on Radio-Canada. The unedited version is airing in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and New Zealand.
Peter Rowe, the documentary’s veteran Canadian director, told the Globe’s Colin Freeze the CBC’s holding and revamping of the piece was unlike anything he’d seen before.
“We have to, quote-unquote, give balance,” Rowe said. “… I’ve never experienced anything like these kinds of demands.”
As Freeze’s Nov.8 story pointed out, the move was likely due to political pressure from the Chinese government. Keay told Freeze he had personally been contacted by a “cultural consultant” from the Chinese embassy. During the Cold War era, such consultants and attaches were frequently intelligence operatives masquerading as embassy staff to gain legal cover.
Given that CBC holds the Olympic broadcasting license, it appears to be no coincidence that this rescheduling and re-editing occurred the same week as the government’s announcement of the media restrictions. In fact, Rowe originally praised the CBC in an Oct. 29 interview with the Epoch Times for daring to run a piece that featured some criticism of the Olympics.
“The fact that they’re willing to broadcast a film that has people in it advocating the boycotting of the Olympics, which they themselves are the broadcaster of in Canada, is remarkable,” he said.
Unfortunately, it seems the CBC’s backbone disappeared when push came to shove. The reworked version of the documentary is airing Nov. 20: it will be interesting to see what’s been left in. In any case, though, it’s highly disappointing our own media outlets appear to place more importance on keeping the Chinese government happy than exposing the truth at all costs.
What will be even more interesting to see this summer is how those journalists who do make the hallowed list respond. Will they stay away from pieces reporting on the untold stories of the games, such as the terrible smog, the mistreatment of the area’s poor and the shoveling under the rug of China’s other dirty laundry, such as the alleged organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners? Or will some of them have the guts to stand up to a powerful regime, dig beneath the gold-plated veneer of the Olympics and expose the grime beneath? Here’s hoping it’s the latter.

On Oct. 30, FIFA announced that Germany won out over Canada in their bid to host the 2011 Women’s World Cup. For FIFA, it was perhaps an easy decision. The German women’s team were re-crowned as world champions in September’s tournament, while Canada bowed out at the group stage thanks to a late equalizer from the Australian team. The women’s exit was only the most recent heartbreak this year for the long-suffering Canadian soccer fans, who saw their men’s team fall in the CONCACAF Gold Cup to some suspect officiating and their U-20 team achieve the ignominious mark of being the first hosts not to score a goal.

Germany also has proven facilities and a tremendous track record from staging the 2006 World Cup, while Canada appears to have somehow found a way to lose money on this summer’s U-20 World Cup despite shattering the tournament attendance record, according to Angus Barrett, a director-at-large of the Canadian Soccer Association. More details of this sordid financial affair should come out in the near future, but it is yet another event demonstrating the complete and utter disarray of the CSA, responsible for organizing everything relating to soccer in this country.

The CSA is without a president, technical director, or chief operating officer. They only decided on an interim president—Dominic Maestracci—on Oct. 20, almost two months after the resignation of Colin Linford. They haven’t had a chief operating officer since Kevan Pipe was fired on Nov. 2, 2006.

The straw that may have broken the CSA’s back came this summer when their board shot down the appointment of Fred Nykamp, who was successfully lured from Canada Basketball, as chief operating officer. Nykamp was hired, but never allowed to start work, and eventually let go Aug. 26 after the CSA board voted not to ratify his hiring. He’s now claiming wrongful dismissal and suing the CSA for more than $1.75 million, 14 per cent of their annual budget of approximately $12.5 million.

The Nykamp saga is only the latest to mar the CSA. Their carefully crafted facade of competence began to crack last November, when chief operating officer Kevan Pipe resigned. Pipe had a long and perhaps checkered career with the CSA for over 25 years, achieving great success at times but frequently by rather dubious methods. The next thing to go wrong was in the hiring of a national coach. Linford favoured Brazilian Rene Simoes, and thought he had a deal worked out, but the board intervened in tried-and-true political style to insist on Canadian content, which led to the promotion of Dale Mitchell instead.

At the time, Mitchell appeared a solid choice: he had led the men’s U-20 team to the quarter-finals at the 2003 World Youth Championships, and had also done well with the team in the 2005 tournament. However, some doubt was cast on whether he was the right man for the job when the Canadian U-20 team he coached through the U-20 World Cup this summer not only failed to win or draw a game, but also couldn’t even score a goal. Meanwhile, interim coach Stephen Hart—who had been in the job since Frank Yallop vacated it in June 2006 to go coach Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy—was achieving spectacular success with the senior team at the Gold Cup, advancing to the final against the U.S. and only losing after a linesman prevented an Atiba Hutchinson goal by noticing an imaginary offside. Fortunately for Canadian soccer, Hart put his ego aside and agreed to stay with the senior team as an assistant to Mitchell.

Soon after, the women’s national team was off to China for their World Cup tournament. However, a foreboding air above and beyond the Beijing smog hung over their trip from the beginning. Head coach Even Pellerud blasted the CSA—legitimately, in this writer’s view—for failing to arrange sufficient pre-tournament games for the team and also bowing out of a bid to host the Olympic qualifying tournament in 2008. According to the Globe and Mail, the CSA said they couldn’t afford the $300,000 to $400,000 it would cost to stage the tournament. Pellerud said the CSA had become so focused on the U-20 World Cup that they were ignoring the women’s team, and even offered to chip in money from the women’s team budget to host the tournament. Also, the CSA apparently failed to notify Pellerud that FIFA had suspended him for the team’s first game at due to an ejection in a Gold Cup match the previous November against the United States: he got the news less than a week before Canada’s first match from reading a paper in his home country of Norway.

The ominous atmosphere appeared justified when the women’s squad, historically the greatest strength of Canadian soccer and ranked ninth in the world as of October, narrowly crashed out of the tournament’s group stage following the late draw with Australia. It seemed as if Pellerud’s words about the lack of preparation handicapping the team had indeed come true.

Things came to a head on Sept. 12, “Black Wednesday,” when a badly promoted international friendly between the men’s national team and Costa Rica took place at BMO Field in Toronto. The early timing and weeknight scheduling of the game, combined with the CSA’s lackadaisical promotion, led to many empty seats at a venue usually packed to the rafters with enthusiastic soccer fans: only 9,325 people attended, less than half the stadium’s capacity of 20, 500. However, many of those present (including noted soccer columnist Ben Knight, who recently joined the Globe and Mail’s sports section) made a profound impression by their attire, dressing in black “Sack the CSA” T-shirts made by the Canadian Soccer Supporters United group.

The protest and the events leading up to it led to deeper scrutiny than usual of the CSA by the mainstream media, including an appropriately titled piece by famed Globe columnist Stephen Brunt called “Storm the barricades, it’s time for change.” Many, including Brunt, suggested getting rid of the CSA entirely and replacing it with a new federation, similar to steps taken in Australia a few years ago. National team striker Tomasz Radzinski even lent his support to the cause, telling the Toronto Star’s Cathal Kelly, “If I’m in the stands next time I’m going to wear a black shirt as well.”

To their credit, the CSA appeared to finally get the message that they couldn’t continue to operate in a manner more suited to a pub soccer league than a government-funded body responsible for overseeing the world’s most popular sport in a country of more than 33 million people. They finally got around to appointing Dominic Maestracci as interim president on Oct. 21. Their representatives also attended a protest meeting held by the North York Soccer Association and tried to address some of the concerns raised. However, it’s still obvious that fixing the CSA will be a painful, drawn-out process.

The timing of the CSA’s unraveling is unfortunate. Canadian soccer has made so many strides forward in recent years: the building of BMO Field in Toronto, the introduction of Toronto FC into Major League Soccer and the record-breaking attendance shown for the U-20 World Cup this past summer. World-class clubs from the United Kingdom such as the English Premier League’s Aston Villa and Sunderland and the Championship’s Cardiff City have all played friendlies in Canada in recent years, with the David Beckham-led Los Angeles Galaxy joining the trend Wednesday in a match played against the Vancouver Whitecaps before 48, 172 fans at B.C. Place. More Canadian players are joining high-class teams all the time, such as U-20 goalkeeper Asmir Begovic who plays for Portsmouth in the English Premier League. As mentioned above, both the men’s and women’s national teams have made large strides recently as well.

Hosting the Women’s World Cup, which Canada would be ideally suited for given the amount of national interest in the women’s team, the success they have enjoyed recently, and our proven ability to stage international soccer competitions would be a logical next step on the path to becoming a true player on the international soccer stage. However, the current state of the CSA leaves us in no position to host anything larger than a world championship for eight-year-olds (and even that might be a stretch).

It was disappointing to see Canada lose out to Germany, but the decision was not only logical, but probably best for our country in the long run. There will be other chances to host in the future, and hopefully by that time our national association will be in competent shape to handle an international event. As famed TSN and CBC soccer commentator Dick Howard, who is also a member of FIFA’s Technical Development Committee, remarked in an Oct. 30 cbc.ca article on the failure of Canada’s bid, “It’s quite honestly a blessing in disguise.” It says a lot about the tragic state of a country’s soccer association when losing is a victory on its own.

The Philadelphia Flyers have been doling out a lot of punishment over the course of the NHL season thus far. First, Steve Downie, a player with a history of violence so long that he’ll undoubtedly be played by Viggo Mortensen in any biopic, jumped up to hit concussion-prone Ottawa Senators’ forward Dean McAmmond. For his trouble, Downie wound up with a 20-game suspension and McAmmond received another concussion. The Flyers then pulled an incredibly classy move, trying to evade the suspension by reassigning Downie to their AHL affiliate. Fortunately, they weren’t able to pull the wool over either league’s eyes, and the AHL reciprocated the suspension.

Earlier this month, the pattern continued when Jesse Boulerice cross-checked Vancouver Canucks’ forward Ryan Kesler across the face with his stick. Kesler was fortunate to escape without serious injury. For his actions, Boulerice was suspended for 25 games, the longest-single season ban in NHL history. Kesler told the Vancouver Province that Boulerice deserved more punishment than Downie for his actions.

“Downie’s was a hockey play, but a dirty hockey play,” Kesler said. “Crosschecking someone to the face isn’t a hockey play—it’s someone taking advantage of someone not being aware of a guy blindsiding him. … He could have possibly ended my season. Luckily, he broke his stick because he could have broken my jaw. He deserves whatever he gets.”

Kesler’s right, here: a dirty hit is a dirty hit, but is only slightly over the line that differentiates finishing checks from taking players out. Swinging a stick at someone’s face, on the other hand, doesn’t even come close to justifiable as a part of hockey. Thus the league was right to hand out the longer ban to Boulerice. Perhaps both punishments should have been more severe, though, as later events demonstrated the Flyers’ attitude was unchanged.

The latest event in the sad saga was Randy Jones’ hit from behind that concussed Patrice Bergeron. It wasn’t as bad as the preceding two acts: if the plays by Downie and Boulerice represent the highest level of dirty hockey, then Jones’ hit would be off toiling for the Belfast Giants à la Theoren Fleury. However, it was still a hit from behind, and more troublingly, the third in short succession from the same franchise. With this in mind, NHL discipline czar Colin Campbell handed Jones a two-game suspension.

What these plays collectively demonstrate is the return to character of the Flyers, historically one of the roughest teams in the NHL. In fact, their only Stanley Cup wins came in 1975 and 1976, where they were appropriately known as the “Broad Street Bullies”. Those teams featured such stellar characters as Bobby Clarke, famous for the slash right out of a mob drama that broke Soviet star Valery Kharlamov’s ankle back in the Canada-Russia 1972 Summit Series, Dave “The Hammer” Schultz, who established a single-season penalty-minute record that still stands today, and Ed Van Impe, whose brutal cross-check on Kharlamov in a 1976 exhibition game caused the whole Soviet team to retreat to their dressing room in protest.

It’s no shocker that the Flyers have stuck with the same institutional philosophy of smashing their way through the NHL, particularly considering that Clarke was the general manager of the franchise for 19 years and is currently the senior vice-president of the team. In fact, the mafioso nature of the Downie and Boulerice incidents, clearly designed to knock a specific opponent out of the game, suggests that they were attempting to emulate their vice-president as best as they could.

The way I see it, rough play itself is not the problem. There have been plenty of teams that have excelled both with skill and grit, such as the 1982 Vancouver Canucks (which incidentally, Colin “Soupy” Campbell was a member of), the 2004 Calgary Flames and the 2007 Anaheim Ducks, who led the league in fighting majors on their way to claiming the Stanley Cup. However, all of those teams largely stayed within the bounds of what is acceptable in the game of hockey: they finished their checks, they took their penalties, but they didn’t set out to knock opponents out of the game in the fashion that Clarke demonstrated back in his playing career, which Downie and Boulerice have now adopted.

The troubling aspect is when an organization’s entire philosophy—in everything from drafting players to signing free agents and developing coaching systems— is devoted to battering their way through the league by any means necessary. Three incidents in less than two months (and incidentally, the only three suspensions handed down to players in that period) is far too many for any franchise, particularly when the first two are of the particularly macabre grade of the Downie and Boulerice hits. If the Flyers do anything else to cross the line this year, the league office should come down on them as heavily as a Dave Schultz hammer punch.