Rogers and Bell team up for the biggest play in hockey

By Charlie Gillis, Chris Sorensen, and Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

Before the tentative phone calls, the fevered courtship and the awkward consummation of a blockbuster deal, there were breakfasts between Ted and Larry. They lived across the street from each other in ritzy Forest Hill, home to Toronto’s ultra-well-monied. They talked about sports franchises in the way car buffs talk about their favourite set of wheels.

Ted Rogers had bought baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays in 2000 with the idea of boosting his company’s profile in southern Ontario. Larry Tanenbaum was chair of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., the company that owned the coveted Toronto Maple Leafs and basketball’s Toronto Raptors. So once or twice a year, they noshed beside the Rogers family pool, talking pucks, bats and player salaries over scrambled eggs and orange juice. “Ted couldn’t tell you the latest scores,” recalls Tanenbaum. “He was more interested in the concept of sport as something that brought people together. But for as long as I knew him, he and I talked about the idea of one day hooking up and becoming partners in the Toronto Maple Leafs.”

Chances to buy into the crown jewel of Canadian sports and broadcasting don’t come around very often. For 16 years, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had watched the value of its interest in MLSE skyrocket, and was in no mood to sell. Moreover, any Rogers bid would surely meet a competing offer by Bell Canada Inc. (BCE), Rogers’ great rival in the cable, phone and wireless business (Rogers also owns Maclean’s). So when Teachers put its 79 per cent stake up for sale last year, the inheritors of Rogers’ corporate mantle quickly signalled their interest. Reports of a pending deal soon surfaced, and the coronation of Rogers Communications Inc. as winner of the MLSE sweepstakes seemed a matter of time.

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The unlikely partnership behind MLSE deal

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

Content has long been King. But in the wake of the joint Rogers Communications/BCE takeover of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, it has been upgraded to Emperor, if not Supreme Galactic Ruler. How else does one explain two of Canada’s fiercest business rivals coming together to pay an astounding $1.32 billion for the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan’s 79.53 per cent share of the company that owns the NHL’s Maple Leafs, NBA’s Raptors, major league soccer’s Toronto FC, the minor league Toronto Marlies hockey club, and the Air Canada Centre?

It is a premium price, for what the rival communications giants and broadcasters—Rogers owns Sportsnet, and Bell TSN—believe is a premium TV product. And the driving force for the surprise deal was clearly self-preservation.

When the Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan let it be known that they were willing to sell their 80 per cent stake in MLSE last spring, (purchased 17 years ago for $180 million) it was obvious that it would take very deep pockets indeed to seal the bargain. Both Rogers and Bell kicked the tires, fearing the other was motivated to buy. Regional TV rights for the Toronto Maple Leafs—a team that attracts viewers and advertisers like no other in Canada—currently split between the two sports networks were to come up for renegotiation in 2015. The national broadcast rights, shared between TSN and CBC, are up for grabs in 2014. In Canada, any sports channel without NHL hockey—and more specifically the Leafs—wouldn’t last for long. And in wedding themselves in MLSE ownership, BCE and Rogers have gained perpetual access to the most sought-after content in the land. Continue…

Comebacks: the Winnipeg Jets

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Bill Wippert/Getty Images

There is discreet, and then there is Mark Chipman: zipped tight. A sealed vault. Sphinx-like. Cat got his tongue and buried it in an undisclosed location. It’s not that the 51-year-old chairman and co-owner of the reborn Winnipeg Jets is unfriendly, or even uncommunicative. It’s just that he can keep a secret. Even a really big one.

Virtually from the moment the original Jets decamped to Phoenix in the spring of 1996, Chipman was working on a plan to bring the NHL back. First, he brought in a minor-league franchise, the Moose, to fill the hockey void. Then, he and his colleagues at True North Sports and Entertainment succeeded where so many others had failed—partnering with David Thomson, the country’s richest man, to build a new downtown arena, the MTS Centre. They ran their team with class and efficiency and turned the venue into a cash box. All the while scarcely breathing a word of their larger ambitions.

Chipman had started quietly lobbying NHL commissioner Gary Bettman about a return to Winnipeg as far back as 1999. It was a topic of conversation when they met at the Salt Lake Olympics in 2002. As the new, 15,000-seat building went up in 2004, he kept the league in the loop. After the NHL’s 2005 lockout and salary cap changed the economics of the game, Chipman and his team went to Edmonton and Ottawa to research how to make a small Canadian hockey market work. All involved were sworn to secrecy.

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When Buddy met Pedro

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

On a grey and blustery November afternoon, the lovebirds nestle together for warmth. Scrunched into a corner by a large boulder, they seem oblivious to the gawkers and shutterbugs that ring the path above. Even another couple mating furiously at their feet fails to draw much more than a quick, beady-eyed glance. Buddy and Pedro, the Toronto Zoo’s suddenly famous gay penguins, are lost in the moment. Or maybe they are simply digesting lunch. A gut full of smelts and enduring passion are difficult to differentiate when it comes to small, flightless waterfowl.

Truth be told, there is little to set the pair apart from the 10 other African penguins that make up the park’s newest exhibit. At 21, Buddy is more portly and has a notched beak—the sign of a distinguished older male. Pedro, 10, while not exactly a hardbody, could be described as lithe, and tends to be more energetic. Both are around standard Spheniscus demersus height, just a tad over two feet. But even zoo officials rely on their colour-coded flipper bands to pick them out—pale orange for Pedro, flamboyant yellow for Buddy.

In the beginning, few took notice of their May-December romance. When they arrived in Toronto from an all-male colony at the Toledo Zoo last November, they were placed in quarantine, then gradually introduced to the other penguins, imported from two different U.S. facilities. The group then spent the winter indoors, in a building next to the exhibit, getting to know each other and their keepers. In May, when the display opened, they moved outside to the large pool—a former seal pen with vantage areas up top and windows down below for the underwater view. Zoo workers were pleased: the penguins spent about 70 per cent of their time this summer swimming, a sign of contentment for the species. But Buddy and Pedro proved to be a little aloof—especially to the girls. While the others frolicked, they would repair to a shady nook underneath a large rock for alone time. Soon it was apparent that they had bonded.

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On Theo Fleury’s drug- and alcohol-addled memories, and the Bob Probert she knew

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Chris Bolin for Macleans Magazine

Her name comes second on the book covers, but there’s little question who leads Canada’s hockey writers. Since 2009, Kirstie McLellan Day has piloted the “autobiographies” of Theo Fleury, the late Bob Probert, and now Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean, to the heights of bestseller lists. She is our unlikely Ice Queen.

Q: You’re now the country’s most successful hockey writer, but as a mother of five with a background in entertainment TV, you don’t exactly fit the profile. Is that part of the secret to your success?

A: I do write about players and those around the game, but they are people stories too. And I sure hope they appeal to a broader audience.

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In conversation: Walter Isaacson

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, November 7, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

In his final months, Steve Jobs opened up all aspects of his life to his sanctioned biographer, Walter Isaacson, granting more than 40 interviews. In an exclusive Canadian interview, the author of Steve Jobs talks about the computer mogul’s genius, and his dark side.

Q: You write that Jobs was “the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination and sustained innovation,” but you could also add master salesman to that list. Wasn’t his greatest product himself?

A: No, I think his greatest product was actually Apple, because it combines his marketing skills with his engineering and design skills. At Apple, everything is integrated—all functions of the company. He was a master showman; he knew that the unveiling of a product should be a grand moment. But he personally helped design the packaging, so when you opened an Apple product you felt a bit of excitement as you saw the iPhone in the little cradle. I know that seems silly and small, but it was marketing tied in with the sort of whole aura of owning an Apple product.

Q: So was his ability to synthesize all of these various things in itself singular?

A: Yes. Look at the grand philosophy of Steve Jobs: it’s to control the user experience from the silicon chip to the shirt on the store clerk. The hardware, the software, the content and the devices are all tightly integrated, and the marketing is part of that as well. Companies like Microsoft and Google make software they license out to other people who put it on hardware and it’s sold in other people’s stores. That’s a good business model, but it doesn’t make for artistically pure and delightful products.

Q: When Jobs first approached you to write a biography about him in 2004, you turned him down. Why was that?

A: Well, in a casual conversation, he said, “Would you ever think of writing a biography of me?” And I thought, well, he’s younger than me, and in the midst of an up-and-down career, so I said: “You know, maybe 20 years from now, when you retire.” I didn’t realize that he was sick, and once I did I also realized he was transforming industries while battling cancer, and what a dramatic story that was.

Q: But the turning point came when his wife, Laurene, approached you in 2009 and said it was sort of now or never?

A: Yes, we just happened to be together, and she mentioned, “If you’re ever going to write about Steve, you ought to do it now.” It was right after he went on his medical leave that involved a liver transplant in ’09, and I hadn’t really focused on the fact that he was that sick. He had just transformed the music industry and was doing it to the telephone industry, so it was a pretty dramatic time.

Q: He was a famously controlling guy, yet he pledged that he wasn’t going to interfere with your work. Did he keep that promise?

A: Yes, except for a cover he thought was ugly. He started expressing that sentiment strongly to me, and said he would only keep co-operating if he got some say over it. I thought that was a great offer, since he had a great design sense.

Q: What did he object to about the first cover?

A: Oh, it had a little picture of him when he was young inside of an Apple logo. It was gimmicky.

Q: When he called you, was it one of those infamous Steve Jobs conversations?

A: Well, he expressed himself clearly and forcefully, but I knew enough about Steve that it neither surprised me nor worried me, because that was his way of being honest. He could be brutal, but it wasn’t something you were supposed to take personally.

Q: He was also a charismatic figure with an ability to get people to buy into his vision, which was so powerful his friends referred to it as his “reality distortion field.” How did you deal with that?

A: I tried to talk to as many people as I could. The tough thing about Jobs is that he had such a strong personality that those around him remember the exact same meeting in different ways, like the movie Rashomon. Even the scene of his resignation from Apple—I interviewed Steve and three other people, and I got four different versions.

Q: Your book is filled with examples of Jobs’s wilful cruelty to others. Is there one instance of his callousness that really stood out for you?

A: No, just the opposite. He could be tough on people, [but] it was never deeply cruel. It was all about the moment, and it ended up creating a team of brutally honest star players who loved to have strong conversations and disagreements. Once you learned to take it, it was in some ways inspiring.

Q: Inspiring for some people, right? I mean, you’ve quoted one of his friends saying that his big question for Steve was, “Why are you so mean?”

A: Right, but that’s about snapping people’s heads off, or saying rough things. You judge it by the outcome, and even the friend who said that remained close to Steve to the end, and was at the memorial service.

Q: One of his former girlfriends suggested to you that he had narcissistic personality disorder, and the former CEO of Apple called him bipolar. Do you think there was an element of mental illness in Steve Jobs?

A: He had an incredibly intense personality, and certainly felt like he was special and all the rules didn’t apply to him. But I don’t think there was a mental disorder.

Q: Jobs was adopted at birth into what was a pretty loving family, but some people still see that as an explanation for his later behaviour. Do you think he had abandonment issues?

A: He said his adoptive parents made him feel special and chosen. But I do think that there was a journey throughout his life for understanding and enlightenment that had, as one of its elements, figuring out who he was and his place in the world.

Q: You’ve dealt with that spiritual side of Jobs too, what you call “his compulsive search for self-awareness.” Was he self-aware?

A: Oh, yeah. He even had a good sense of humour about himself. If you asked, “Why are you so tough on people?” he would say, “That’s who I am. I don’t want to be one of those artificially polite people who never can make a dent in the universe.”

Q: That attitude manifested itself in a kind of binary viewpoint as well, where products were “amazing” or they were “sh—y,” and people were “enlightened” or they were “a–holes.” How was that outlook linked to his success?

A: I think it gave him the temperament of an artist, which is either “It’s perfect” or “It sucks.” That separated him from most technology executives, who put out version 3.1, then 3.2, and never try to nail it. I think that passion was also the reason he wanted end-to-end control over all the products he made. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know what causes somebody to become such a perfectionist, but that’s the way he looked at the world. Even the original Macintosh team, he made them sign the inside of the computer case because, he said, “real artists sign their work.”

Q: In the book there are a lot of scenes of Jobs crying when he’s confronted, or told no, or even when he’s happy. Was that manipulative, or was he really that fragile underneath it all?

A: I don’t think his crying was manipulative, I think he was a very emotional person who could be deeply touched by the people he loved, such as his wife, or by a great design, or even a beautiful piece of ad copy.

Q: In 1985, he was ousted from Apple, the company he had founded. What lessons do you think he absorbed from that?

A: I think his real learning experience was after, at NeXT Computer, where he got to indulge all of his best and worst instincts. He wanted to make the product a perfect cube, and over-designed it so that it became overpriced and flopped in the marketplace. So I think that once he came back to Apple he realized he had to be more sensible and more mature. In a broader sense, that’s the whole narrative arc of the book, whether it’s in his personal life or in the way he ran Apple the second time or even the way he handled cancer, which was in a romantic and poetic way at first, but he quickly then looked for the most advanced scientific ways to handle it.

Q: What about his relationship with money? Compared to a lot of moguls, he lived a fairly simple life with a modest house in Palo Alto.

A: Yes, he lived in a normal house in a normal neighbourhood, having dinner almost every night around the kitchen table with his family. He didn’t try to become a celebrity or have an entourage. When he was very young and went to India on a pilgrimage, he was penniless, and a few years later he was worth more than $100 million. He said money didn’t matter to him much when he had none, and it didn’t matter to him much when he had all he could possibly want.

Q: He was a guy who was capable of acts of generosity, but not particularly generous. You write that his philanthropic foundation was left to wither.

A: Right. His wife is a very noted and active venture philanthropist who has started Education Track, which is a great after-school program in America, but Steve focused more on work. And I think that when we look at what’s going to transform education, all the good work of the non-profits might not end up being more important than the invention of the iPad, which could transform education for everybody.

Q: You quote Bill Gates as saying that he wished he had Steve’s taste. But in some ways Jobs’s obsession with design was almost paralyzing. You tell this amazing story about him refusing to put on an oxygen mask after his liver transplant because he didn’t like its looks. Did he care too much about form?

A: Well, he cared passionately about it. But how else do you explain why the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad were completely transformative, whereas rival products have trouble catching hold? There’s an artistry infused into them that doesn’t exist in HP tablets or Microsoft music players.

Q: You write that Jobs was a genius, but not overly smart. What do you mean by that?

A: He didn’t approach things in the rigorous, analytic way that a Bill Gates would. When Steve came back from India, he said, “I learned the importance of intuition as opposed to just relying on Western rational thought.” And that ability to use intuition, imagination and aesthetics in assessing a problem allowed him to think differently. He was ingenious more than simply being really smart.

Q: Sometimes that became a trap. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he spent nine months trying to heal himself through juices and diet. How he could he be so dumb?

A: Well, he had a poetic, alternative aspect to his personality that went back to his hippie days. His romantic side first looked for alternative ways to deal with it. Then he engaged his rational side and ended up with the most advanced cancer treatments based on DNA sequencing and targeted therapies. So, as always, with the cancer, with his work, with his personal life, the romantic side of Steve connects to the sensible side of Steve.

Q: The devices he created or helped create at Apple are a huge part of his legacy right now. But technology changes so fast that soon even the most amazing of them will be obsolete. Will his accomplishments seem so amazing 20 or 30 years down the road?

A: I think he will be judged by how well his greatest creation, Apple the company, fares. Devices come and go. The question is, can you continually reinvent the future by connecting artistry with great engineering? And I think at the moment, the people at Apple who trained under him can keep that legacy alive, just as the people who trained under Walt Disney could do it.

Q: Did the public reaction to his passing surprise you?

A: The emotion surprised me, but it’s connected to the emotion inherent in the products he made. He knew how to make a connection. I can’t imagine any other business leader provoking this outpouring upon their death. I just think people felt that Steve Jobs was able to create things that showed he had an understanding of our desires.

Q: In the book, you compare him to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and say he’ll be the sort of business leader who will be remembered 100 years from now. But you’ve also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and you don’t invoke their names. Jobs doesn’t belong in that pantheon?

A: I think he’s very much like Benjamin Franklin in being inventive. Franklin knew how to tie imaginative ideas to practical products—the lightning rod being the best example. And he was always curious, always driven. As for Einstein, he’s in a different quantum orbit. He was the ultimate person who knew how to think different, to use the words in Steve’s famous advertising campaign.

Olympic champion bobsledder Heather Moyse switches gears

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Micahel Kappeler/Getty Images

This past June, Heather Moyse decided that she would compete for Canada in track cycling at next summer’s London Olympics. Then she went out, bought a bike and introduced herself to the sport. That is not how these things are usually done.

To be fair, the year-long learning curve is more generous than the one the 33-year-old gave herself to master pushing a bobsled before the 2006 Winter Games in Italy. Back then, her first-ever trip down an ice chute came in mid-October. Four months later, she and pilot Helen Upperton broke the start record in every heat at the Olympic track in Cesana, but missed out on bronze by 0.05 seconds. That heartbreak was more than mended by a gold on home soil with Kaillie Humphries at Whistler’s sliding centre in 2010. (Upperton took the silver along with her new brakeman, Shelley-Ann Brown.)

To date, Moyse has had fewer than a dozen practice sessions in the type of velodrome where she hopes to race wearing Canada’s colours next summer. Her inaugural ride on her new $8,000 road bike in mid-June was the first time she’d ever been on skinny tires and clipped into pedals. Yet the dream of moving from the Winter to the Summer Games is real and serious. Spurred on by another barrier-breaking Olympian, cyclist/speed skater/now cyclist again Clara Hughes, Moyse reached out to the national team and found a receptive audience—even more so after she clipped a power meter to her bike and proved she possesses some startling raw energy. “When someone walks in your door with over 1,000 watts, you take notice,” says Tanya Dubnicoff, a three-time Canadian Olympian in track cycling who’s now a national coach. She won’t reveal the exact figures, but leaves little doubt they were elite-calibre. “She definitely put numbers out that were higher than I’ve seen in Canadian cycling.”

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The last Liberal standing in Manitoba

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 4 Comments

Trevor Hagan/CP

Jon Gerrard looks down at his mushroom crepes and sighs. It’s not that breakfast isn’t to his liking, just the discussion accompanying it: the painful, post-mortem examination of an election that left the leader of Manitoba’s Liberals perhaps the loneliest man in Canadian politics. On Oct. 4, Gerrard’s party captured a sole seat in the provincial legislature—his own—and just 7.5 per cent of the popular vote. And his fellow Liberals didn’t even wait for the ballots to be counted before planting their knives firmly in his back. “It hurt and it had an impact,” he says, voice barely audible over the Sunday morning din at Winnipeg’s Pancake House.

In late September, when opinion polls showed the party dipping into single digits, Harry Wolbert, a member of the provincial executive and one of their few “name” candidates, started musing in the local media about electoral wipeouts and leadership reviews. Then two former federal Grit MPs, Anita Neville and John Harvard, publicly endorsed the NDP health minister—the principle target of Gerrard’s political attacks. “When it hit, it was a total surprise,” says the 64-year-old physician and one-time junior minister in Jean Chrétien’s cabinet. “I had spent the last 12 years being very concerned over what was happening in the health care system.”

“The media played it so high,” Gerrard’s wife, Naomi, a palliative home care nurse, chimes in from the other side of the table. “It was a bombshell, I thought.”

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In conversation: Brendan Shanahan

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 9 Comments

Steve Simon/Maclean's

In 21 NHL seasons as a player, winning three Stanley Cups and an Olympic Gold, he always made things happen on the ice. But now Brendan Shanahan is out to change the game itself. As the league’s new senior vice-president of player safety and hockey operations, the 42-year-old is charged with both enforcing and rethinking the rule book. And he’s drawing a lot of heat from the game’s “purists.”

Q: The NHL season has just started and already you’re under fire. Were you surprised that the honeymoon was so short?

A: I knew that it was a controversial position, but it’s an endeavour I believe in. There’ll always be those who think every decision is too much, and there will be those who think every decision is too little. I try to keep my focus on the goal: keeping hockey physical and entertaining and passionate. But I think it can also be safer. And I think the players are already showing their ability to adapt.

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Tim Cook: Apple’s most humble servant

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Sakuma/AP

Tim Cook took the stage, but not the spotlight. In his public debut as Apple chief at the unveiling of the updated iPhone on Oct. 4–the day before Steve Jobs died—the 50-year-old seemed comfortable enough, dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt and his trademark Nike runners (he also sits on the sportswear giant’s board). He even cracked a couple of jokes in his measured Alabama drawl. “This is my first product launch since being named CEO,” he said, the threat of a smile crossing his face. “I’m sure you didn’t know that.”

But it was the things that Cook didn’t do that garnered the most notice. There were no stirring Jobs-ian speeches about future-altering technology. The “ta-dah” introductions of the new phone, a social network, and a greeting card application were all left to other Apple executives. And the CEO’s sales pitch—such as it was—was all about the brand, rather than the vision. “I’m so incredibly proud of this company,” Cook told the assembled journalists. “I consider it the privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for 14 years and I am very excited about this new role.” The message was clear. Apple’s cult of personality begins and ends with its founder.

And all indications suggest that is just the way the new boss likes it. A lifelong number two—he even finished second in his class at high school—Cook has always preferred to stay in the background. He almost never gives interviews, or speaks in public settings. (The exception being his beloved alma mater Auburn University, where he gave the commencement address in 2010.) He was raised in Robertsdale, a small farming town near Alabama’s Gulf Coast, whose only other “celebrity” son appears to be Obie Trotter, a college basketball star now playing in Szolnok, Hungary. The middle of three boys born to a shipyard worker and a homemaker, Cook played in the marching band and was voted “most studious” by his peers. He went on to take engineering at Auburn, where professors remember him as “very quiet, very reserved.” After graduating in 1982, he took a job at IBM in North Carolina, distinguishing himself as the guy who volunteered to work over the Christmas holidays so that the company could fill its orders by year-end. In 1994, he joined the computer-reselling division of an electronics wholesaler, rising to COO before jumping to Compaq in 1997. Six months later, an executive recruiting firm came knocking on Apple’s behalf.

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Newsmakers: Sept. 29-Oct.6

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Graham/NBA/Getty Images

Knox walks

Amanda Knox was whisked home to Seattle shortly after an Italian court overturned the 24-year-old’s conviction in the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was also freed; a third defendant, Rudy Guede, remains in jail. Once home, Knox, who was offered complimentary champagne on board her British Airways flight, will reportedly enjoy a 21st birthday party she never had. Her sister Deanna is also planning a more low-key outing: “We’re going to go down to Lincoln Park, which is right by our house,” she told ABC News. “We’re going to sit in the middle of the park and paint.”

Buddhist grounded

All Archbishop Desmond Tutu wanted for his 80th birthday was a visit from the Dalai Lama. Unfortunately, South Africa’s prolonged hedging over whether or not to grant His Holiness the necessary visa forced Tutu to cancel his party this week. It is widely suspected the South African leadership is reluctant to do anything that might complicate its strengthening ties with China, to which it exports $5.5 billion in mineral resources annually, and which views the Dalai Lama and his Tibetan government-in-exile as a separatist movement. “You are disgraceful. You are behaving in a way that is totally at variance with the things for which we stood,” said Tutu, rapping the African National Congress government, which received global support in its fight to end apartheid. “I really can’t believe it. I mean, the Dalai Lama!”

X marks the spot

Two Canadian premiers were re-elected with solid majorities this week. P.E.I.’s Robert Ghiz—son of Joe, who served two terms as the province’s premier from 1986 to 1993—won a second term in office. But he lost two cabinet ministers, including Allan Campbell; the innovation minister oversaw the province’s immigration program, which was marred by allegations of bribery. Greg Selinger, meanwhile, gave the NDP their fourth straight majority in Manitoba.

Who brings a banana to the rink?

Police in London, Ont., charged 26-year-old Chris Moorhouse with “engaging in a prohibited activity” last week, after he tossed a banana onto the ice during an NHL exhibition game. The flying fruit came as the Philadelphia Flyers’ Wayne Simmonds, an African Canadian, was skating in on goal during a shootout. Moorhouse’s lawyer says he was “unaware of the racial overtones of his actions.” But even his own grandmother is appalled. “Who would do a thing like that?,” she asked London’s AM980 News.

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The man who never gave up on the Winnipeg Jets

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 3 Comments

Peter Taylor/Getty Images

Fifteen years ago, he was the one who turned out the lights. That April night, after the Winnipeg Jets had been knocked out of the 1996 playoffs, losing 4-1 at home to Detroit and bidding adieu to the NHL, it was Craig Heisinger who stood by himself in the dressing room, long after the last fan and player had disappeared. As the team’s equipment manager, it was his job to wash the jerseys, air out the gear, vacuum the rug, and lock the door behind him. By then, he had decided he wasn’t going to follow the franchise to Phoenix. Uprooting his wife and four young kids—three then still in diapers—from their hometown and extended family simply didn’t feel right. So “Zinger” did the only thing he could: he shed a few tears and moved on.

Last June, he was crying again, but this time he wasn’t alone. At the podium, in front of the media and hockey fans across the nation, the now 48-year-old was named senior vice-president and director of hockey operations/assistant general manager of the reborn Winnipeg Jets, a title so unwieldy that he jokes about getting a fold-out business card. Barely able to choke out the words, he thanked Mark Chipman, the team’s co-owner, for “taking a chance” on him. He thanked local fans for letting so many players, coaches and managers—himself included—“cut their teeth” with the AHL Manitoba Moose during the city’s decade-and-a-half in hockey purgatory. And he finally let himself believe that what seemed impossible was now true. Even as an insider in True North, the group that brought the NHL back to the Prairies, Heisinger played the doubting Thomas, steeling himself against another disappointment. “I never really bought in. I knew all the work going on behind the scenes, but I never thought it would come to fruition,” he says, as he sits in his office hours before the transplanted franchise’s first exhibition game. “I couldn’t convince myself that they wanted another team in Canada. I just couldn’t see it.”

Yet as of last May 31, it is real. What once was lost has been found; giving back to a city—and a country—something more profound than a place name in the standings. Proof that bigger isn’t necessarily better. That passion can count for more than dollars. That the game we claim still belongs to us.

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More Palin-tology

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 7 Comments

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Finally, conclusive proof that good fences do not in fact make good neighbours. Even 14-foot high ones, like the monstrosity Sarah Palin’s husband, Todd, and his buddies hastily erected on the edge of the couple’s Wasilla, Alaska, property in the spring of 2010. What the Palins were famously trying to block, of course, were the prying eyes of author Joe McGinniss, who had rented the house next door while researching a book about the Republican party’s foremost shopper. Having a writer best known for his critical take on politics and politicians in such close proximity was a “creepy” infringement on her family’s rights and privacy, the former vice-presidential candidate complained. It was a desperate attempt to gather dirt for a “hit piece,” she said.

McGinniss’s newly published tome, The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, proves that his target’s instincts were correct. But she needn’t have gone to such trouble to obscure the sightlines. However close the author’s view, it wasn’t all that perspicacious.

Sure, there are some titillating bits of gossip, like the tale of Palin snorting lines of coke off the bottom of an overturned oil drum during a snowmobiling expedition, at some unspecified point before she became governor. (An anonymously sourced allegation that first surfaced on a blog in 2007.) Or the revelation that she slept with Glen Rice, a college basketball player who went on to play for the NBA’s Miami Heat, back before she married Todd. (A one-night stand that McGinniss uses to advance the thesis that Palin had a “fetish for black guys,” just four paragraphs after suggesting she transferred from Hawaii Pacific University to a small Idaho college because of her discomfort with “people of colour.”) The self-described “Hockey Mom” is also, apparently, an indifferent parent who hardly ever goes to games, has a loveless marriage, and is a completely hopeless housekeeper. “She couldn’t do grilled cheese. She’d burn water,” quoth someone described as “an old friend.”

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Blood, sweat and fears

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 1 Comment

Darren Brown/QMI; Courtesy of Devon Nicholson

His large bald head is covered with scars. The deep vertical grooves on top were self-inflicted—or at least, consensual, by the sure, drive-my-head-into-the-ring-post standards of his profession. Others testify to the passions Larry Shreve, a.k.a. Abdullah the Butcher, a.k.a. the Madman from the Sudan, a.k.a. Kuroi Jujutsushi (the Black Wizard), was able to arouse outside the squared circle. Like the pink line linking his temple to his left ear, courtesy of a folding metal chair thrown by a fan of one of his opponents. Just don’t ask to see where the little old lady once stabbed the blubbery 400-lb. behemoth with a hatpin.

In a career that has stretched 50 years, the Windsor, Ont., native became a superstar in professional wrestling, frightening crowds from Truro to Tokyo with his predictably unpredictable behaviour. Wild-eyed and gibbering in pidgin English, he’d eat paper, bite the heads off of snakes and chickens, and stab opponents with his trademark fork. But mostly Abdullah—Abby to his friends—would bleed. Copious amounts of what wrestlers call “the juice,” set free by surreptitious razor nicks to his head. By the end of a match, Shreve was almost guaranteed to be a gory mess, slick and glistening under the TV lights. So too his grappling partners. Now 70, he can’t really remember the first occasion—or even guess how many times—he cut himself for an audience. He just knows his entire career was based upon such mutilations. “I did it because I wanted to draw people. To give them a good match,” he says from his Atlanta home. “Violence: that’s what they want.”

Lately, however, blood has come to represent something else to the Butcher—an all-too-real threat to his finances and faux-sporting legacy. This past spring, just before his induction to the WWE Hall of Fame, an Ottawa wrestler alleged that he contracted hepatitis C during a 2007 match against Abdullah. Devon Nicholson, who had been building a following as another madman, “Hannibal,” claimed Shreve had cut him without permission, transmitting the disease via a razor blade he had already used on himself. In June, Nicholson filed a $6.5-million negligence suit in Ontario Superior Court, saying the illness cost him a shot at the World Wrestling Entertainment big time, and prematurely ended his career. This past week, Shreve’s Ontario lawyer filed a defence denying the claims and countering that Nicholson, who staged the bouts, not only consented to his injuries, but is himself responsible for the illness through his own negligence.

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Maher Arar’s mind cannot forget

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Blair Gable/Maclean's

It doesn’t take much to carry Maher Arar back to the place he least wants to be. The sight of a mustachioed policeman, any sort of filthy smell, or even the sound of a crying baby has the power to transport him to that tomb-like prison cell. Nine years on, his body has recovered from the beatings the Syrian Mukhabarat inflicted with their fists and thick strips of cable, but the psychological scars of his rendition, imprisonment and torture persist. It is worse when he travels. “When I take the plane, I’m always tense and nervous,” he says. “It just triggers a fear in me that I might be kidnapped again.”

Sept. 26, 2002, was the day U.S. authorities detained him at New York’s J.F.K. airport, as he was heading home to Ottawa from an extended family stay in Tunisia. Oct. 8 was the night he was hustled on to a CIA-leased private jet and flown to Jordan, then driven—shackled and blindfolded—to the border of his native Syria. It was early April 2003, when he next felt daylight, allowed to roam a prison courtyard for a few minutes. Freedom—and a flight back to Canada, his wife and two young children—finally came that Oct. 5.

There’s no doubt, however, of when everything really did change for the 41-year-old telecommunications engineer. On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, Arar was in San Diego, Calif., on business for a Boston-based client. The sun wasn’t even up when the phone in his hotel room rang. It was his friend and colleague David Hilf telling him about terrorists hitting the World Trade Center. At first, Arar thought it was a prank—he and Hilf, who is Jewish, spent a lot of their time on the road joking about their odd-couple alliance. When he was finally convinced to turn on the TV, Arar was devastated by what he saw. One of his first thoughts was of the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash. He called his wife, Monia, then pregnant with their second child, in Ottawa and warned her not to leave the house. “She’s visible. She wears a head scarf,” he says. “There might have been some crazy people trying to get revenge.”

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And that’s the kind of life it’s been

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

CTV; The Toronto Star; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It was two decades ago that the media first started asking Lloyd Robertson when he was finally going to retire. We’re talking 1991, the year of Bush the elder’s Iraq war, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Brian Mulroney was prime minister and the GST came into effect. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and that Coke can were a hot topic. A time so distant that a Kevin Costner movie won the Best Picture Oscar. Nirvana, then the world’s hottest band, is now played on “oldie” stations.

Robertson, CTV’s éminence orange, was just 57, but had already been anchoring the network’s national news for 15 years, and before that had been a CBC fixture for another 22. “I always thought I’d be out of there by now, that someone would come along and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you’re getting long in the tooth—get out,’ ” he told the Montreal Gazette. Absent the push, the trick, said the anchor, was to “pick a time that’s obvious to you and your audience.” He mused about the big 6-0. It’s possible that some people even believed him.

Should all go according to plan, Robertson will actually step down this Sept. 1. Now 77, and with a combined 41 years behind the anchor’s desk at CBC and CTV, he is the longest-serving national anchor in North American TV history. Not exactly a retirement, since Robertson plans to continue on in his other job co-hosting the current affairs show W5, and will appear for some special event coverage. But it brings an end to his nightly television presence, and an era in Canadian broadcasting.

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The man who fought British journalism, and lost

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Wahl; Special Thanks to Quinn’s Steakhouse & Irish Bar

Sitting in a Toronto pub, Jonathan Aitken recalls the time when he fancied he’d be the one to “fix” British journalism. It was April 1995, and the then-cabinet minister in the government of John Major was launching a high-profile libel case against the Guardian newspaper and Granada television over allegations he had “pimped” girls for a Saudi prince and taken kickbacks from Lebanese arms dealers. “Wicked lies,” he declared at a dramatic evening press conference in the Conservative Party’s London headquarters. “If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight.”

The now 68-year-old gives a rueful smile, and skips ahead in the story to June 24, 1997, the day his life “went up in smoke.” The libel trial had been going well: “Even their lawyers would admit I was winning,” Aitken says, on a break from a conference of the global Christian ministry to convicts, Prison Fellowship International (PFI). That is, until evidence was introduced catching him out in a lie.

Back in September 1993, Aitken, the minister of defence procurement, had travelled to Paris to meet with an old friend, Lebanese businessman Said Ayas, and his associate, Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia. The son of the Saudi king paid the hotel bill—a violation of cabinet ethics rules. But when news of the rendezvous leaked out, Aitken told the press his wife, Lolicia, had settled the account. Years later at trial, he introduced affidavits from Ayas and his own 17-year-old-daughter Victoria backing up the claim. Then Guardian lawyers dug up airline tickets and car rental records proving his wife and daughter had been in Geneva on the day in question. The case collapsed. “He lied and lied and lied,” was the banner headline above his dour picture in the next morning’s paper.

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From ordinary poker players to big-league pros

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Roman Cho/Getty Images

Jeffrey Pollack has a pithy way of describing his career: “I specialize in things that haven’t been done before.” Like starting the first trade paper devoted to the business of sports. Or creating the Emmy-winning pastiche of in-car cameras and onscreen telemetry that makes NASCAR watchable. Or transforming the World Series of Poker from a Vegas sideshow into an “anyone can enter, anyone can win” big business. And now, if things go his way, catapulting card sharks into the ranks of pampered sports celebrities.

Epic Poker, Pollack’s newly created professional poker league, will host its inaugural tournament at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas next month, promising to turn top players into a gaming elite. “In any other sport there are platforms, brands or associations that are focused on the best of the best. Poker doesn’t have that,” says the 47-year-old entrepreneur and half-brother of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. (Joy, their late mother, married Pollack’s father Howard, an accountant, when Gary was 11.) “We’re going to celebrate skill and strategy above moments of luck.”

Players will be ranked by performance and earnings as in tennis, and awarded “cards” as in pro golf, providing them with entry to Epic’s events for three to five years. All of the US$20,000 entry fees will go into the prize pots (traditionally organizers take a 10 per cent “rake” off the top), which will be sweetened by the league with US$400,000 for regular tourneys, and $1 million for the annual championship featuring the season’s top 27 performers. And players, long used to paying their own way, will receive free food, drinks and hotel suites. “It’s elevating the service level that the pros are used to,” says Pollack.

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Rupert Murdoch’s day of reckoning

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, July 18, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 3 Comments

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The most telling story in Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, didn’t appear in the original 2008, 400-plus-page hardcover. It’s the tale of the media mogul’s reaction to the book, appended as a forward to the paperback version two years later. Eight weeks before the first edition hit the streets, the News Corporation proprietor somehow obtained a copy—“purloined,” writes Wolff, from a rival British newspaper that was bidding on the serialization rights. And as he read the product of the more than 50 hours of candid and profane interviews he had given, Murdoch got upset. Over the course of a single day, he left the author a dozen increasingly agitated voice mails, quibbling with ancient details, and complaining about tone and interpretation. Then he went ominously silent.

For three months after its publication, Wolff’s book received exactly zero mentions in, or on, News Corp.’s globe-spanning network of media properties, which includes the Australian, the U.K.’s Sun, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Then the Murdoch-owned New York Post splashed news of the fiftysomething “bald, trout-lipped” writer’s extramarital affair with a 28-year-old “hot blond” intern all over its gossip pages. For weeks, the Post kept at it, chronicling his crumbling marriage, accusing Wolff of trying to evict his 85-year-old mother-in-law from an apartment he owned, even lampooning him in highly unflattering editorial cartoons. The attacks only ceased when he threatened to post the recordings of his interviews with the paper’s owner on the Internet, in all their unedited glory.

For the author, the painful episode confirmed something he already knew—scandal and bullying are both Murdoch’s trade and passion. The obsession is partly about gathering business intelligence, Wolff writes in his forward: “who is saying what to whom; who might be buying what; who has less money than he says he has.” But the 80-year-old titan also just really delights in the dirty details. “He especially likes to know which liberals are sleeping around (but he will take conservatives, too). It is a prurient interest, but it is also about leverage. He refers to having pictures and reports and files.” At the time, Wolff assumed such claims were part of Murdoch’s trademark hubris, designed to fuel his cultivated image as a villainous billionaire. Now it appears they may have simply been the truth.

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In conversation: Gary Bettman

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Christopher Wahl

A franchise move, a new discipline czar, a controversial hit, and a see-saw Stanley Cup final; it’s been a busy couple of weeks for the National Hockey League’s commissioner. Prior to Game 5, he sat down to reflect on a season of wins and losses.

Q: Not presuming any outcomes, but what would a Canadian team winning the Stanley Cup after such an extended period of time mean for the game of hockey?

A: I think it would be tremendously exciting for fans of the Canucks. But in the final analysis, who wins the Cup isn’t as important as how good the final was—how exciting, how dramatic, how entertaining, how skilful. If you’re a fan of the Canucks—or Bruins—you’ll be excited beyond belief if they win. If you cheer for somebody else, you’ll be more interested in how good the hockey is.

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The return of NHL hockey to Winnipeg

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 12 Comments

Tom Pidgeon/AP

There’s something about the intersection of Portage and Main that only Winnipeggers get. Two busy roads ringed by tall commercial buildings that offer no shops or attractions that might make a visitor stop and linger. But somewhere deep in the city’s DNA, it is imprinted as a gathering place on momentous occasions. Most especially in relation to hockey. It’s where Bobby Hull signed his million-dollar deal with the World Hockey Association’s Winnipeg Jets. Where fans feted the selection of the great Dale Hawerchuk as the first overall pick in the 1981 NHL draft. And where the desperate vigils were held as the franchise started to slip away in the spring of 1995.

And so it was on the morning of May 31, 2011, when big league hockey finally made its long-awaited return to Canada’s heartland. There were kids playing road hockey on a strip of sidewalk complete with goalies and nets. Jersey-clad men, waving Jets flags and hoisting a replica Stanley Cup. Even a couple of guys who had brought along red chairs from the old Winnipeg Arena. But the crowd of around 1,000 mostly stood and watched a press conference being beamed onto outdoor TV screens from the basement of the MTS Centre down the block. Waiting for the words that would set their fandom free.

The preamble took a few minutes, but finally Mark Chipman, the chairman of True North Sports and Entertainment, made it official. “I am excited beyond words to announce our purchase of the Atlanta Thrashers,” he said. “We received the call we’ve long been waiting for.” It’s not a done deal—the purchase still needs the approval of the NHL’s board of governors and is contingent on the organization selling at least 13,000 season tickets over the next three weeks—but close enough to touch off celebrations around the province and across the country. A couple of weeks of frenzied deal-making that continued right through the final night, and then Winnipeg’s civic pride restored at a reported purchase price of US$170 million—US$110 million for the fractious owners of the Thrashers, and a US$60-million “relocation fee” for the league.

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Can you fight a flood by creating one?

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Greenslade/Reuters

The bright red “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster went up on Steve Ashton’s office wall on May 7. Manitoba’s minister of emergency measures had originally given it to his son Alex as a gift last Christmas, but faced with a massive once-in-300-year surge in the Assiniboine River, the 55-year-old politician figured it might be of more use down at the provincial legislature.

It also happened to be the weekend he and his colleagues were grappling with a stark dilemma: let nature take its course, or intervene and create a smaller, and hopefully controllable flood of their own. The Assiniboine was rising at an unprecedented rate. As the Souris River joined the flow southeast of Brandon, the waters were already 1½ times greater than the last major flood in 1976. And plenty of rain was in the forecast.

For more than a month, Ashton had been locked into a schedule that moved from briefing, to meeting, to media conference, to more obligations. (And continues still: the conversation with Maclean’s was sandwiched in between a helicopter tour of the flood zone with opposition leaders and question period.) But by Mother’s Day it was becoming clear that weeks of frantic work to shore up dikes downstream at a cost of $25 million wouldn’t be enough. Neither would further tweaks to a floodway at Portage la Prairie that diverts water into Lake Manitoba. The predicted peak flows of more than 52,000 cubic feet per second would overwhelm the defences.

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Ultimate ticket

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, April 29, 2011 at 7:10 AM - 10 Comments

Rogerio Barbosa/AFP/Getty Images

Maybe it has something to do with the Maple Leafs missing the playoffs for six straight seasons, but Toronto the Good has a lot of pent-up blood lust. Enough to account for all 55,000 seats for the first-ever Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts staged in the city being snapped up in just 20 minutes. Enough to hand the Las Vegas-based promoters of the April 30 beat-downs a gate estimated at more than $10 million, the most lucrative single event in the history of the Rogers Centre, née SkyDome. So much that even the Bay Street suits have gotten in on the action, with more than 90 per cent of the stadium’s luxury suites sold to bankers, stockbrokers and head office honchos. “We’re not going mainstream,” says a satisfied Tom Wright, the UFC’s point man in Canada. “The mainstream is coming to us.”

Once feared, and infamously reviled by John McCain as “human cockfighting,” mixed martial arts (MMA) has gone from outlaw sideshow to big-time sport in just a decade. In 2001, only Nevada and New Jersey sanctioned the punishing bouts—kitchen-sink combinations of wrestling, boxing, jiu-jitsu, Thai kickboxing and pretty much every other type of weaponless combat ever devised. Today, it’s legal in 45 of the 48 U.S. states that permit prizefighting, as well as nine Canadian provinces. UFC, a privately held company and the sport’s biggest brand, is estimated to be worth more than US$2 billion. Propelled by stars like Montreal’s Georges St. Pierre—who will defend his welterweight title against American Jake Shield in Toronto’s main event—it attracts corporate sponsors like Anheuser-Busch, Bacardi, Burger King and Gatorade. Fights are now broadcast to 150 countries worldwide, and in 2010 UFC’s pay-per-view offerings drew more than nine million “buys” in North America alone, generating upwards of $400 million in revenue. (By comparison, WWE wrestling, which once dominated the sector, sold less than two million buys.)

But for all the global growth, the epicentre of MMA fandom is Canada in general, and Ontario in particular. “On a per-capita basis, this is by far our largest market in the world,” says Wright, a former commissioner of the Canadian Football League. The first card ever held in Vancouver last June drew more than 17,000 people. Two title fights with St. Pierre in Montreal both packed 23,000 into the Bell Centre. The Toronto event will be the biggest live show in the sport’s history. (UFC title fights in Vegas usually draw around 11,000.) Maybe Canada, like Australia, another MMA hotbed, simply has a culture that embraces any and all sport. Or perhaps decades of watching hockey goons duke it out has created a deep-seated appetite for pugilistic mayhem. “What happens at a hockey game when a fight breaks out? It’s 18,000 people on their feet,” says Wright. “We, as a people, just get the UFC.”

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Joey Votto: baseball’s anonymous superstar

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment

There’s an etiquette about batting practice in the big leagues. It’s fine to goof around outside the cage, talking to teammates, opponents, or the various hangers-on, as you wait your turn. But once you’re standing at the plate, it’s all business—take your hacks and make way for the next guy.

Then there’s Joey Votto. It’s not that the Toronto-born first baseman for the Cincinnati Reds violates the convention—far from it. He just makes it seem like an extra commandment. The preceding hitter has barely cleared the box before the 27-year-old is in his crouch, bat at the ready. He slashes the first pitch down the left-field line, then works his way right across the diamond—tock, tock, tock. The next five balls get launched into or over the high netting that tops the outfield walls at the Reds’ spring training complex in Goodyear, Ariz.—three in a row to right, then two to left. It’s all so workaday that Votto doesn’t even bother to watch them go, he’s already waiting for the next pitch. Focused is a term that hardly does him justice.

So when the reigning National League MVP, coming off a season where he hit .324, smashed 37 homers, and batted in 113 runs and led the Reds to their first playoff berth in 15 years, proclaims that he can get better still, who’s to argue? “I want to be great at what I do. I take a lot of pride in it,” says Votto. “And I try not to sell myself short in my work and preparation.” Between awards ceremonies this past winter (Votto also collected the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete, and the Hank Aaron Award as the NL’s top hitter), he worked out five hours a day, six times a week at his Florida home. The guy who had the best on-base percentage in baseball, and went an entire season without an infield pop-out, talks about how he hopes to be a more efficient hitter, stronger defensively, and a better teammate. He speaks earnestly about proving himself all over again, and how he really measures himself against the man who finished a distant second in the league’s MVP voting, Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals, “the best player in baseball.”

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