The Buch stops here

It has been an interesting road for Roy Williams. The University of North Carolina Tar Heels’ basketball coach has come full circle. He’s now back at his alma mater, but he’s about to face the program that made him nationally famous, and there’s only a berth in the national championship final on the line Saturday to raise the stakes.

Williams played for the Tar Heels’ junior varsity team during his collegiate career, and graduated from North Carolina in 1972 with an education degree. He went on to become a high school coach and athletic director and then returned to UNC in 1978 as an assistant to coaching legend Dean Smith. He served as an assistant coach for 10 years at UNC and then got his big break when he left in 1988 to take over the University of Kansas Jayhawks from famed head coach Larry Brown, who had just led the team to a national championship. Brown jumped up to coach the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs, leaving Williams with both high expectations and recruiting violations to deal with.

Williams did remarkably well, though, for a man whose first job as a university head coach was taking over a huge program after an unexpected championship. His team went 19-12 in his first year, despite the sanctions handed down by the NCAA for violations committed under Brown’s tenure. The best was yet to come.

In the years to come, Williams’ Jayhawks went on an amazing run. They made every NCAA tournament between 1989 and 2003 and advanced to the Final Four three times. Over that span, Williams’ teams won 418 games and only lost 101 to record an incredible winning percentage of 80.5 per cent. He was named the National Coach of the Year four times.
Unfortunately, Williams’ greatest triumph with Kansas came just before his departure. He took the Jayhawks to the 2003 national championship game, but they lost a 81-78 heartbreaker to the Syracuse Orange. There was speculation a return to North Carolina was imminent, even though he had publicly avowed to stay with Kansas only three years earlier. Kansas did everything they could to accommodate Williams, even firing athletic director Al Bohl, who had publicly clashed with Williams on several occasions. Still, it wasn’t enough, and Williams flew the Jayhawk coop to rejoin the Tar Heels.

Kansas fans were rightly outraged by Williams’ departure, and showed their disapproval in many poignant ways. One of the most memorable was the relocation of the sketch of Williams hanging in the Downtown Barbershop, a local landmark and hair-cutting business which also serves as a shrine for all things Jayhawks. It went from a place of honour on the wall to hanging above the toilet in the newly-rechristened Roy Room.

“We figured if Roy had stuck around, they would have named a building after him,” John Amyx, owner of the Downtown Barbershop, told the Associated Press. “So we decided to name a room after him. That seemed to be the best place to see his picture, too.”

As J. Brady McCullough of the Kansas City Star wrote, the resentment still runs hot in Kansas five years later.

“For some, that’s what makes KU-Carolina a dream scenario,” he wrote. “Beat Williams, North Carolina and those diamond-patterned shorts on the way to a national championship, and it’s even sweeter.”

This should be an epic game. You have Kansas coach Bill Self, who has had great runs in the tournament but is cracking the Final Four for the first time, against Williams, who is third all-time in NCAA winning percentage. You have two great teams, both top-ranked in their regions entering the tournament, set to duel for the right to go to the championship match. Most importantly, though, the Jayhawks’ fans finally have a chance at revenge. They’ve been waiting five long years for this moment but have never come up against Williams in the NCAA tournament. On Saturday night, it’s Williams and his old/new team against the program where he built his reputation. There will be plenty of people rooting for Williams to get another crack at the elusive championship, but very few of them will be from Kansas.

Update: I incorrectly wrote that Williams had never won a national championship. In fact, as Mike pointed out, he won the 2005 national championship with UNC. Apologies for the error.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge told the Associated Press yesterday he doesn’t want to see a boycott of this summer’s Beijing Olympics despite China’s recent crackdown on Tibetan protestors, which Tibet’s self-proclaimed government-in-exile estimated to have killed at least 80 people thus far. Rogge, who’s on a six-day tour of the Caribbean instead of consulting with the Chinese government, apparently “expressed condolences for the victims and said he hopes calm will be restored immediately,” but declined to comment on the situation beyond a brief statement against boycotts.

Rogge’s probably right to stand against boycotts. The Olympics have been boycotted for all manner of reasons over the years. 28 African nations skipped the 1976 Montreal Olympics because New Zealand was allowed to participate despite their rugby team playing an event in South Africa that reinforced the apartheid regime, 64 countries stayed out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and 14 Eastern Bloc countries refused to travel to Los Angeles for the 1984 Summer Olympics in retaliation. Boycotts aren’t a viable solution, though: all they accomplish is to make the Olympics more political than they already are, and they raise serious questions about whether the medal-winners were truly better than those forced to stay at home by their governments.

Rogge’s lack of comment on the Tibet situation is disturbing, though, and it serves as further evidence that he doesn’t really see China’s atrocious human rights record as a problem. The real issue here is why the Olympics were awarded to China in the first place. Over the years, there have been many Olympics held in countries under problematic regimes with spotty human rights records, such as the 1936 Summer Olympics in Nazi Germany, the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico (preceded by security forces killing hundreds of protesting students), the 1980 Summer Olympics in the USSR and the 1984 Winter Olympics in Yugoslavia. The IOC’s prevailing rhetoric has always been similar to Rogge’s claim to Reuters last August that the Olympics will be “a force for good,” which he’s been repeating frequently since. These changes have rarely materialized, though: in fact, the 1936 Olympics in particular were seen by Hitler’s regime as a great propaganda success. Groups such as the American-Israeli Co-operative Enterprise have even linked the lack of protests during the Berlin Olympics to Hitler’s subsequent increased aggression towards Jews and foreign powers.

“For two weeks in August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics,” their website states. “Soft-pedaling its antisemitic agenda and plans for territorial expansion, the regime exploited the Games to bedazzle many foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the United States and other western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that—some observers at the time claimed—might have given Hitler pause and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny. With the conclusion of the Games, Germany’s expansionist policies and the persecution of Jews and other “enemies of the state” accelerated, culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.”

The point is a valuable one. It’s unclear what difference, if any, stronger protests at the Berlin Games would have made, but the Games as they unfolded certainly didn’t hurt Hitler’s cause or reputation. Today, the defining image of those games remains African-American athlete Jesse Owens besting the Aryan supermen, but as heroic as that was, it didn’t seem to make much of an impact at the time. It definitely didn’t change the views of Hitler and the Nazis on racial superiority, and it didn’t even do much for black athletes in the United States: the NFL was segregated until 1945, Major League Baseball remained segregated until 1947, and the NBA didn’t integrate until 1950.

Rogge’s inaction here illustrates the contradiction in his statements. On the one hand, he has said multiple times the Olympics were given to China to be “a force for good,” but on the other hand, he told the Associated Press in February that the IOC “is a sporting, non-political organization and we cannot solve the problems of the world.” He can’t have his cake and eat it too: either the Olympics are political (which they’ve proven to be over the years) and he should back up his words with some lobbying to actually make the Games change things for the better, or they’re purely non-political, in which case China should never have been awarded the Olympics in the first place. It’s hard to rationalize a “non-political” movement acting as a political “force for good”.

On-field performances are great, but it’s the political statements associated with them that really matter: consider the black-gloved salute of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos after the 200-metre race in Mexico City, which remains one of the defining sporting images of our time and did great things for the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. Without Smith and Carlos taking that bold stand on the platform provided by their athletic achievements, they would have quickly faded into obscurity as merely talented sprinters. Unfortunately, as Duke University professor Orin Starn lamented in a March 3 opinion piece for the , it seems “the era of the activist athlete is over.” As Starn later wrote on Duke’s website, “It would be nice to see more sports stars try to wield their immense influence in positive ways. Now it’s too often just about winning and getting your face on a Wheaties box.”

We’ll have to see what happens this summer, but it’s certainly not looking promising. These Olympics have already been marred by accusations of the Chinese government harvesting organs from Falun Gong practioners, clamping down on Tibet, evicting many of their own citizens to make way for Olympic construction and funding genocide in Darfur, but Rogge and the IOC are content to spin off platitudes about the Olympics being a force for good without providing the lobbying or political pressure to actually bring about change. China’s desperate to look good on the world stage at these Olympics, and the time is ripe to use the leverage of the Games to bring about some meaningful change. So far, Rogge and company have been unwilling to step up to the plate and call the Chinese government out, though, preferring instead to fiddle around on tours in the Caribbean. Maybe Starn is wrong, and the era of the activist athlete isn’t over. Hollywood director Steven Spielberg has led the way, pulling out of his role as a consultant on the opening ceremonies due to concerns about the government’s involvement in Darfur. It’s now up to the athletes to use the platform the Olympics gives them, as the IOC has spectacularly failed to make use of it thus far. Boycotts aren’t necessary, but taking a stand would be greatly appreciated. As Smith and Carlos showed, sometimes you don’t even need to say anything.

Related: My previous writings on the Olympics.

Playoff prediction wrap-up: I went 7-2, with the only mistakes being a prediction of a first-round win for women’s basketball (they lost to Carleton) and a OUA finals win for men’s volleyball (they lost to McMaster)

Today could have been a crucial day in the English Premier League title race. Arsenal won 3-1 in an early game at home against Manchester City to retake the top spot, and then Manchester United looked sure to lose for 92 minutes against Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane. To keep things interesting, though, Argentine striker Carlos Tevez fired home the equalizer in the third minute of stoppage time to earn United a point and avert a disastrous defeat.

Tottenham played a brilliant game, defending with a ferocity that has rarely featured in their side. They’ve always been strong in attack but have had trouble taking care of business in their own end until recently: things appear to be different under new manager Juande Ramos, though. They were able to shut down United’s midfield passing game and occasionally created chances of their own off dangerous counter-attacks. Their goal was somewhat questionable, as Jermaine Jenas clearly hit the ball with his hand as he fell, nudging it to Aaron Lennon. Lennon’s shot was stopped by United keeper Edwin Van der Sar, but the rebound fell straight to Russian striker Dmitry Berbatov, who made no mistake and drilled it home from six yards out. Despite doubts about the integrity of Spurs’ strike, they certainly deserved to take at least a point from this match given their effort.

United, on the other hand, were less than impressive. They struggled to get any sort of flow to their passing game, and weren’t able to create too much offensively. They also didn’t seem to play with the same intensity Tottenham brought to the match, which shows how sorely they miss former captain Roy Keane, who’s now managing Sunderland. The most likely successors to Keane seem to be hard-tackling Canadian midfielder Owen Hargreaves and English striker Wayne Rooney, but Hargreaves isn’t the vocal presence Keane was and Rooney is certainly intense, but not always effective. Rooney had a good game, though, tracking back all the way to his own 16-yard box several times to help out the defenders. As Setanta Sports match commentator Martin Fisher pointed out, however, Rooney’s own frustration showed at times—particularly towards the end when he went down easily to try and draw a free kick rather than pressing on and taking a shot.

“He got away from Dawson, and chose the easy option for once of going to ground,” Fisher said.

As Fisher said, this was certainly out of character for Rooney. It does raise questions about him as Keane’s successor, though: Keane probably wouldn’t have gone down with the ball loose if he had broken his leg. That drive and determination are what United could surely use at the moment, and someone will have to step up. One possibility is wing back and captain Gary Neville, who’s still trying to recover from an ankle injury he suffered last year. If Neville’s able to return, his leadership will certainly make a difference down the stretch.

Spurs did a great job of neutralizing United’s most potent offensive weapon, Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo looked dangerous at times but never really threatened the Tottenham goal, which is highly unusual for him this season. As commentators Fisher and Lou Macari pointed out, though, the rest of the team needs to step up, offensively: they can’t rely on Ronaldo to do everything.

In the end, though, United did what great sides do: they pulled something out of absolutely nothing (or as Journal photo editor Harrison Smith would say, turned lead into gold). A corner from Ronaldo on the last play of the game—which looked as innocent as the eight before it that were cleared away—fell straight to Tevez, who made no mistake and drove it into the net to salvage a point. It was really the only weakness Tottenham showed all day, and United took full advantage, as Macari said.
“They made one mistake in 90 minutes, the Spurs defence, and they paid for it,” he said.

That single glimmer of hope for United in what was otherwise an uninspiring match means today’s results are far less significant. Sure, they drop behind Arsenal for the moment, but there’s still a lot of football to be played. The ability to salvage a point from a tough fixture like this indicates there’s likely better to come down the stretch, and means the title race is still very much a dead heat. This should make for some great games as the season goes on.

Last weekend may have been a turning point in the race for the English Premier League title. In an early game Saturday, Arsenal was held to a shocking 1-1 draw by lowly Middlesbrough. Defending champions Manchester United then took the field for a later game against Newcastle United, knowing that a win would put them back into the lead based on their better goal differential. Newcastle defended well at first, and the game was scoreless at the half, partly due to a couple of strong United penalty appeals denied by referee Rob Styles. For a moment, it looked like Newcastle could hold on to a draw, and United would be unable to make up ground on Arsenal. Everything changed in the second half, though, as United poured in six straight goals for a decisive victory, throwing down the gauntlet of a determined title challenge to Arsenal.

What was most impressive was the quality of the goals, demonstrating the undeniable attacking flair this United team. As a Setanta Sports commentator remarked after Rio Ferdinand’s stunning goal, “It emphasizes what Manchester United at their flamboyant best are all about.”

United’s domination of the second half was so absolute, they easily could have had a couple more goals.

United manager Sir Alex Ferguson told Setanta Sports their success in the second half was due to the team’s cohesion.

“I thought there were too many individuals in the first half,” he said. “Once they got the passing and movement, they were a fantastic team in the second half. It was a marvellous performance.”

The game also showcased the continuing evolution of United winger Cristiano Ronaldo into one of the undisputed best players in the world. Ronaldo notched his first hat trick for United, improving his league season goal total to 16, only one shy of the 17 he scored last season that led to his selection as Professional Footballers’ Association Player of the Year. He also had a penalty appeal denied, and could have easily notched even more goals. There’s still four months to go, so he should easily pass last year’s total, barring injury.

Ferguson said he favoured Ronaldo to surpass last year’s stunning performance early on in the year.

“They said he couldn’t match that, but why not?” he said. “He’s a young lad, he’s improving, and his decision-making’s been better all the time.”

Newcastle interim manager Nigel Pearson recognized United’s overwhelming superiority in his post-match comments.

“That is a very difficult day,” he said. “They were just a lot better than us.”

The stunning performance from United against Newcastle was a clear statement of challenge to Arsenal, as the play-by-play announcer remarked at the end of the game.

“In the most resounding possible fashion, Manchester United say to Arsenal, ‘It’s our title, and we intend to keep it,’” he said.

This weekend showed a return to quality for both sides, with United pulling off a 2-0 win away against Reading and Arsenal recovering to win 3-0 at Fulham. Both sides are still tied at the top of the table at the moment, but United should continue to gain momentum due to the return of some key players. Regulars such as Owen Hargreaves and Wes Brown started Saturday, along with Korean winger Ji-Sung Park. Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Louis Saha should be soon to follow down the stretch. This will boost their chances of clinching the title, but nothing is certain competing against a strong Arsenal team that delivered a strong display of their own Saturday. Chelsea could pose an outside threat for the championship, but their lack of consistency thus far, and their four-point deficit to the leaders, suggests it will be United and Arsenal in it at the end.

United still has an edge, however. Their squad is generally equivalent to Arsenal’s, but most neutrals would likely take their star playmaker/striker pairing of Ronaldo and Rooney over Arsenal’s Fabregas and Adebayor, both of whom are terrific players in their own right but don’t quite seem to be at the all-world level yet. As Reading manager Steve Coppell pointed out after his side’s loss today, those two can make all the difference.

“You look at their incisive individuals—and by that I mean Ronaldo and Rooney,” he said. “By and large we handled the other nine well but over the course of 90 minutes their appetite will create openings and opportunities. In the end it was one too many.”

Coppell also sees it as a two-team race, and favours United.

“It is between United and Arsenal. European commitments will be key because from now on for them it will be a game every Saturday and a game every Wednesday,” he said.
“If either team lose any key individuals that will be significant. But if both sides stay healthy then I would say United by a nose.”

As Coppell points out, both sides are almost equally talented and either could legitimately take the championship. The X-factor of injuries also makes predictions tricky, but I tend to agree that United’s depth gives them a slight advantage. Regardless of whether United can defend their title or Arsenal rise to the challenge, either case should make for a great showdown and a tremendous stretch run towards the Premier League title.

The soccer world is abuzz following the much-publicized sacking of manager Steve McClaren after England’s dismal failure to qualify for the 2008 European Championships, as several interesting candidates have emerged to replace him. Many high-profile candidates have already declined the job, such as Aston Villa’s Martin O’Neill—the only British citizen judged to be among the favourites. The best man available is still out there, though: former Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho.

Mourinho has all the qualifications necessary for the job. He has proven he can lead an underrated group of players to unprecedented success, winning both the Champions League and the UEFA Cup with FC Porto and knocking off giants such as Manchester United along the way. He also won back-to-back league titles with Porto before his move to Chelsea in June 2004. At Chelsea, he proved he can succeed in the opposite situation, leading a team of underachieving superstars to back-to-back league titles before leaving due to conflicts with wealthy owner Roman Abramovich. Both experiences will be crucial to leading England, a team that often underachieves but may need to overreach its talent level to have any significant success.

Perhaps the most vital qualification Mourinho possesses is his ability to survive a media maelstrom. A tabloid feeding frenzy that makes the Toronto Maple Leafs’ press circus pale by comparison surrounds the English national team. In many ways it was the press that proved McClaren’s undoing, as he seemed unable to cope with the pressure and eventually gave into their wildest demands with his ill-fated team selection for the crucial match with Croatia, as the Globe and Mail’s soccer columnist Ben Knight wrote shortly after the Croatian game and the demise of England’s qualifying campaign.

“This is tabloid soccer at its worst,” Knight wrote. “McClaren, in the centre of one of the world’s most horrendous hype-storms, appears for all the world to have bought into the hype! Given the choice between two experienced, talented goaltenders who’ve been savaged in the English papers, and a sweet, shining kid who just shut out the Austrians, McClaren … went … with … the … kid.” The aforementioned kid, Scott Carson, made a memorable hash of an easy shot early on in the match, allowing Croatia to score a goal that proved to be the critical nail in the English coffin.

Mourinho, on the other hand, manipulates instead of letting others manipulate him, as ESPN Soccernet’s Jon Carter explained perfectly in a recent piece advocating Mourinho’s selection.

“He is well versed in the art of media seduction, has experience of how the English press works, and his unique interview style would certainly provide a welcome change from the likes of Steve McClaren and Sven Goran-Eriksson,” Carter wrote. “Charm is an important characteristic for a national manager. McClaren missed that trick, but Mourinho is master of the art and it would be refreshing for the FA [the Football Association, responsible for overseeing the national team] to appoint someone who the fans were actually in favour of.”

Mourinho’s ability to use the press to his advantage is an asset that will desperately be needed in the England job, and he refined this talent to an art form during his Chelsea days. He’s outrageous and controversial but revered in spite of it. Knight perhaps described him best with the ultimate analogy for Canadian fans: “Hockey fans, imagine a Don Cherry who can kick Don Cherry’s ass – and outcoach the heck out of him, as well.”

The outpouring of support for Mourinho has been massive so far. In addition to the aforementioned columns by Knight and Carter, many other journalists and commentators have selected Mourinho as the best candidate. Current England captain John Terry, who played for Mourinho at Chelsea, has also given him high praise.

“He’s a fantastic manager, a fantastic guy,” Terry told The Associated Press. “There’s many more being talked about at the moment but he is one that stands out for me and could make a big difference. He’s a great guy, he’s tactically very aware and he understands the game very well.”

Former national manager Sir Bobby Robson also included Mourinho in the shortlist of five candidates that he revealed in his Daily Mail column. He will present the list to the FA, who will determine McClaren’s replacement. Robson also gave Mourinho strong support in his comments.

“Jose’s advantage is he knows our football and he would be welcomed back with open arms,” he said. “Tactically, there is nobody better—I still remember his dossiers at Porto and Barcelona when he worked with me!—and that’s important for one-off international games.”

The most impressive comments supporting Mourinho’s candidacy, though, are those from one of his former rivals. Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who competed fiercely with Mourinho during his time at Chelsea, was quoted in Carter’s column as saying, “If the FA consult me about it I’ll give them a shortlist of one, and tell them to get Mourinho.”

It’s appearing increasingly likely Mourinho will get the job. He’s supported by fans, media and those on the inside of the game. Apparently he’s even the odds-on favourite, according to British bookmaker William Hill’s spokesman Graham Sharpe. “Jose was the only man anyone wanted to back early on and 80 per cent of the bets we took were for him,” Sharpe said.

Mourinho appears interested in the job as well. In an AP interview yesterday, his media advisor Eladio Parames said Mourinho would be receptive to any offers from the FA.

“It would be an honour,” Parames said. “He likes English soccer, the English people, the country, the players. It would be something he’d consider. But he’s not waving his hand in the air trying to get (the FA’s) attention. If he’s approached, he’ll reply.”

The FA absolutely need to get this decision right. This is the darkest period in the history of the national team since their failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, and they desperately need someone special to lead them out of it. Fortunately, there’s a self-proclaimed “Special One” available. This decision will be crucial for the England national team: they can continue to wallow in mediocrity, or they can land the best man available for the job. Here’s hoping they do the latter.

Jose Mourinho. (Daily Mail photo)

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 May firing of National Hockey League Players’ Association executive director Ted Saskin has brought to light many unsavoury events in the union. Saskin was first suspended with pay, then fired for his role in reading players’ e-mails. The conspiracy Saskin orchestrated to spy on his own players was disturbing enough; however, what’s more troubling are some of the recent revelations in the case.

On Oct. 13, Toronto Star sports business columnist Rick Westhead revealed that league vice-president Bill Daly had forwarded an e-mail from TSN hockey commentator Gord Miller about the efforts to Saskin. This led several media outlets, including radio station The FAN 590’s Prime Time Sports show to raise the question of if Saskin had been in cahoots with the league all along, and if league commissioner Gary Bettman and Daly had played a role in his selection.

These are good questions to be asking, and there may be more evidence of close collusion between Saskin and the NHL yet to come to light. However, the key thing to investigate here is the source of the NHLPA’s problems, which is the same as it has always been: the apathy of the players.

Despite the incredible revelations of the Saskin case, as The Globe and Mail’s David Shoalts reported, only 61 of the more than 700 NHL players showed up in Toronto this August for the end-of-summer meetings where lawyer Sheila Block’s report on the union’s dealings with Saskin was presented. It’s unthinkable that less than nine per cent of the membership in any other union would bother attending a meeting that not only detailed the abuses that had taken place under the past union head, but also laid out solutions for moving forward. Yet, with hockey, this is not the exception but the norm.

Hockey salaries and collective bargaining have always been an odd issue. As famously reported in Net Worth, the 1991 book by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths about the shoddy treatment of NHL players over the years, the great Gordie Howe was one of the lowest-paid players in the league for most of his career due to players refusing to share how much they made with each other. In Susan Foster’s book, The Power of Two, she points out that Howe thought he was being treated fairly by the owners until Bobby Baun, a recent arrival to the Red Wings, revealed that he was making double the amount Howe was. A complete annual list of players’ salaries wasn’t released until 1990.

The players’ association itself also had a troubled beginning. Early efforts by Howe’s linemate “Terrible” Ted Lindsay and Canadiens’ famed defenceman Doug Harvey in 1955 collapsed, largely due to—you guessed it—player disinterest. As Kevin Shea of the Hockey Hall of Fame reported, it was dissension among the ranks and the players’ fears of organization that led to the demise of Lindsay’s unionizing attemps. For his efforts, Lindsay was shipped to the cellar-dwelling Chicago Black Hawks.

Lindsay gave a great description of the players’ treatment back in that era.
“The laws were way different back then,” he told Shea. “If the laws we have today would have been in place back then, all the owners and managers would have been in jail. It was like slavery back then.”
You would think those kind of conditions would convince players that working together might be in their best interests. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Even after Bob Pulford successfully pulled together the current association in 1967 despite tremendous opposition, it was still a major issue to get players to work together. As Stephen Brunt reported in his great book, Searching For Bobby Orr, many veterans were up in arms when Orr was given the most lucrative contract in the league as a rookie, even though his deal would eventually lead to tremendous salary escalation for every player.

As Brunt said, “The instant the deal was consummated, everything about the hockey business changed, though some of the new realities would take years to become apparent. For the players, even the ones who quietly seethed at a raw kid who hadn’t played a minute of pro hockey getting all of that money, it was emancipation day.”
Orr’s contract was also a landmark in that it was the first one negotiated by a lawyer, and was the beginning of the sports agent era. That lawyer, the infamous Alan Eagleson, was appointed the first executive director of the NHLPA later on that year. Eagleson’s work would lead to tremendous benefits for the players, but again, player disinterest in what he was actually doing led to him skimming off money from them left, right, and centre, which resulted in his eventual downfall.

After Eagleson was finally brought down, by a combination of crusading journalists (more on that in a later blog) and his former clients, the players chose Bob Goodenow to replace him. Goodenow was certainly nothing like Eagleson and Saskin, who both preferred cozying up to the league to actually taking it on. However, as Eric Duhatschek pointed out in an October 19 column on globesports.com, Goodenow went too far the other way at times, leading to a player strike and two lockouts, all of which hurt the state of the game.

On Prime Time Sports last Friday, Bob McCown and Brunt postulated that player apathy towards the union was also responsible for the axing of Goodenow. Many of the players were unwilling to stick to the hard-line course advocated by Goodenow during the last lockout, and so the knives were sharpened, the troublemaker was disposed of, and Saskin, a yes-man willing to accede to the league’s demands, was installed in his place.

I’m not arguing that Saskin took the wrong course with the league: at that point, it was necessary to come to terms to avoid a second missed season. However, the possibility that Bettman and Daly were orchestrating events from behind the scenes to get an adversary favourable to them and the shadiness of the process used to hire Saskin truly shows the disinterest of the players.

For a long period, only the small group of voices crying in the wilderness led by Trent Klatt, Chris Chelios and Dwayne Roloson dared to suggest that there could be anything wrong with the hiring of Saskin. The majority of players didn’t look closely at the process used, and more disturbingly, didn’t care. This is not new with the NHLPA: in fact, it’s almost a direct flashback to the Eagleson era, when few players other than Carl Brewer were at all interested in keeping tabs on their union head and his myriad of shady activities and conflicts of interest.

Perhaps things are about to come full circle. It was announced last week that the union had hired Boston lawyer Paul Kelly, famed for his role in extraditing Eagleson to the United States to face charges, to be their new executive director.

Kelly appears to be a good choice for the job, and seems to be willing to stand up to the NHL. However, the true test of his leadership will be if he can get players to overcome their disinterest and stay involved with their union. As Shoalts said in his column Saturday, “The biggest job facing Paul Kelly in rebuilding the NHL Players’ Association is overcoming the apathy of the majority of its 700 members.” Truer words were never spoken.