The Buch stops here

The New York Giants’ 17-14 upset of the 18-0 New England Patriots in Super Bowl XLII last Sunday has to go down in history as one of the greatest upsets of all time. Ruining a perfect season, beating an unstoppable team and doing it in the biggest and most crucial game of a season in which everyone expected them to fail means their place in the pantheon of immortal underdogs is forever assured.

Reconsidering the win with the benefit of hindsight, however, there are plenty of ways to rationalize it. The only challenge is picking the best one. Here are some of my favorite candidates:

The Dewey defeats Truman Theory:
After the Boston Globe had a book titled 19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Undefeatable Patriots available for pre-order on Amazon.com a week before the game, surely it was clear that the Patriots couldn’t win. The moral of the story for newspapers and writers everywhere: planning ahead is great, but don’t leak your planning; things often won’t work out the way you had hoped.

The Shadows of Spygate Theory:
Perhaps Senator Arlen Specter’s questions about why the NFL quickly destroyed the video evidence of the Patriots’ Week I signal-stealing—combined with the Boston Herald’s revelation that the Patriots may have used similar tactics in the lead-up to their 2002 Super Bowl win over the St. Louis Rams—distracted the Patriots from their mission.

The Joe Namath Theory:
There was once a quarterback on an underdog New York team favoured to lose Super Bowl III by an 18-point spread (even larger than the Patriots-Giants 14-point spread) who boldly guaranteed a victory before the game. At the time, he was treated with derision, much as Giants’ receiver Plaxico Burress was when he made his own prediction. But Joe Namath’s guarantee led to his immortalization after he backed it up on the field, despite the rest of his career stats being somewhat lacklustre. Burress not only got the winner right, but got the score almost right (he predicted 23-17), which was even tougher. Perhaps the Namath parallels were strong enough that the football gods looked down on Burress and the Giants and decreed such a bold statement of faith couldn’t go unrewarded.

The Bill Simmons Jinx Theory:
After one of America’s most famous sportswriters wrote a column comparing the Patriots to the 1986 Boston Celtics and debating which one was the greatest team of all time, there were many assertions he had inevitably condemned the Patriots to losing. He even admitted it in this week’s column, saying, “And by the way, I think we have a final verdict. And then some.”

The Mike Woods Jinx Theory:
Similar to the Simmons Jinx, but on a much more local level. Our esteemed sports editor predicted an undefeated season for the Patriots not once, but twice, and came far too close to being right for my liking: I originally didn’t think they would get even an undefeated regular season. But perhaps his endorsement’s weight got to the Patriots’ heads. Funnily enough, Mike’s uncle wrote a humourous letter to this paper suggesting that this theory was the real reason New England lost.

The One Man Can Only Have So Much Success Theory:
Everything went right this season for Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady: he set numerous career, franchise and league records, he was named the NFL’s MVP (with 49 out of 50 votes), he won the ’ Sportsman of the Year award , was named the ’s Male Athlete of the Year and continued to date Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen. Surely there’s a limit to what one guy can accomplish.

The Curse of the ’72 Dolphins Theory:
The only NFL team to go undefeated, the 1972 Miami Dolphins (who went 14-0 due to a shorter schedule in those days), made themselves as prominent as always when a team threatens perfection. There’s a rumour that they always get together and share a bottle of champagne when the last undefeated team falls each year. They were certainly urging on the Giants, and perhaps added even more motivation to the fire, as was obvious in TSN’s post-game interview with New York cornerback Sam Madison. At the end of his interview, Madison shouted into the camera, “To the ’72 Dolphins: Pop that champagne, baby!” Perhaps their looming spectre (and they’re old enough that some of them look like spectres these days) got into the Patriots’ heads.

The Hug It Out Theory:
After Brady led the Patriots on a go-ahead touchdown drive with little time left, the cameras caught Patriot linebackers Tedy Bruschi and Junior Seau in a sideline embrace. They looked jubilant enough to have already won the game, which perhaps means that the defense was too overconfident on the last Giants’ drive. It also could just mean that pro athletes should wait until the game’s over to “hug it out” on camera.

The Sibling Rivalry Theory:
Eli Manning has probably felt pressure to live up to older brother Peyton’s performances ever since he was taken first overall in the 2004 draft largely based on his last name. With father Archie (himself a famous NFL quarterback) and Peyton both watching from the stands, Eli possibly felt the need to live up to their legacies. Also, this was his best and greatest chance to step out of his brother’s shadow and make a name for himself, which he certainly did: it never hurts to have that extra motivation.

The Million-to-One Shot Theory
Manning’s miraculous evasion of two Patriots’ linemen who were hanging onto his shirt and his ensuing Hail Mary pass downfield to little-used receiver David Tyree—who made the even more improbable
“Helmet-Catch”—certainly comes across as having a million-to-one chance of success. But as British author Terry Pratchett points out in his classic novel , narrative convention means million-to-one chances happen nine times out of 10, as long as the probability is exactly a
million to one. This sequence, given the identities of the quarterback (Manning, who has never been known as the most mobile pivot in the league), the receiver (Tyree, who actually had more tackles than catches this year due to primarily featuring on special teams), the pass rushers and the defensive secondary (both among the league’s better units), was certainly improbable enough to qualify.

The Hollywood Theory
Closely related to the Million-to-One Shot Theory, this theory assumes sporting outcomes are driven by the kind of movie they would make. A movie about an undefeated season is cool, sure enough, but wouldn’t you rather see the underdog triumph in the end? This is the reason we have umpteen Star Wars, Rocky and Mighty Ducks movies: no one likes to see the overwhelming favorite win. Rather than see an insignificantly small rebellion thoroughly crushed by the might of a totalitarian empire, we want to see the snubfighter blow up the massive battle station, the nobody take down the fiercest boxer, and the cold female goalie stop “Gunner” Stahl on the patented triple deke. We like to see the Average Joes knock off the Globo Gym gladiators, filled with guys like “Blazer” and “Lazer”. This outcome produces possibly the greatest scenario for a true underdog movie ever (the “Miracle on Ice” came close, but the Americans’ 1980 upset of the Soviets occurred in the semifinals rather than the championship match, and nothing much actually happened in the last 10 minutes of the game). Thus, things had to go this way.

The Sportswriter’s Dream Theory
For those like myself who approve of some corny sports-based humour, particularly of the ironic variety, this scenario provides the ultimate gold mine. What else gives you the chance to talk about Giants playing David, or a New York team in terms usually reserved for small-town heroes? There are infinite puns within the game itself as well, such as riffing on the Patriots’ QB (who looked more like a “Brady Bunch” cast member than a NFL MVP), discussing the halftime show (which appropriately featured Tom Petty performing “Free Falling”) and my usual takes on the fine band They Might Be Giants (Terry Pratchett should get credit for the one I used as this post’s headline, though). Clearly, comedic laws also required a Giants’ victory.

The Stick it to “The Man” Theory
This comes out of reports that Vegas sports books lost $2.6 million on the Super Bowl, due to the great odds they were giving on the Giants and the many people willing to take them. As Jay Kornegay, the executive director of the Las Vegas Hilton’s book, told the Associated Press, this shows the impulse towards underdogs. “People came into Las Vegas and they wanted to root for David,” he said. “The last two days, all I hear is, ‘I told you so.’” Other interesting tidbits from this article: it was the first time the Vegas casinos lost money on the Super Bowl since 1995—when they only lost $400,000—and the
so-called “smart money” from experienced handicappers heavily favoured the Patriots. But the average fans gravitated towards New York. Perhaps the little guys were due for a win.

The Karma Theory
My personal favorite. As Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star reported on his blog, Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick had been an absolute jerk towards the media and the fans from his first days in Cleveland. More recently, he had continued that public persona while also embroiling his team in “Spygate.” As shown by an e-mail Simmons quoted in his Thursday mailbag from reader Mike from Nashville, TN, there are plenty of people who hate Belichick’s guts.
“Let there be no mistake, Bill Belichick is an evil man—evil in every way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the devil can understand. He is utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Few have trusted him, and let’s hope that no one ever trusts the cheating *$&*#! again.”
Maybe you really only can be evil for so long before it comes back to haunt you …

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.

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.