Rob Ford fumbles again, but he doesn’t seem to care
By Emma Teitel - Monday, November 5, 2012 - 0 Comments
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford watches from the sidelines near the Argos bench during a CFL football game between the Argonauts and Stampeders in Calgary on Aug. 18, 2012.(Larry MacDougal/CP)
Sometimes we get leaders whose ascent to power is hard to understand: i.e. how did we end up with this jerk? And other times, we get leaders who make us question whether or not they ever wanted to be leaders in the first place. Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, ever absent, and always cranky, is one of those people.
His life looks a lot like a bad movie, the kind in which a salt-of-the-earth football coach wakes up one morning and realizes that, by some magic, he is the mayor of a metropolis that doesn’t take kindly to salt-of-the-earth football coaches. Suddenly he’s snubbing gay people, tackling reporters, flipping off constituents and before he knows it, he’s embroiled in a series of scandals involving tax payer money and his own high school football team — two things that don’t belong in the same sentence, but so often are these days.
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A prairie football phenomenon
By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments
A small Alberta high school keeps punching above its weight
Photographs by Chris Bolin
“I told my wife last week: you can have the baby any day but Friday,” says Darryl Salmon, head coach of the Raymond Comets high school football team. Stephanie Salmon was due to deliver the couple’s second child on Tuesday, Oct. 18. Her husband’s team had a home game on Oct. 14—a “nothing game,” as even school athletic director Todd Heggie admits. The Comets, 4-2 against provincial Tier I competition, had already secured a spot in the playoffs. Two bye weeks for the team lay ahead, leaving plenty of time for the baby to arrive without disruption.
And Coach Salmon is, frankly, not short of help coaching his squad—not in Raymond, Alta., which generally has a few ex-Comets hanging around who played college or pro football. Fans of Canadian university football will remember Salmon as the starting quarterback for the University of Alberta Golden Bears of 2004, when the team went 7-1 and returned to the Canada West championship game after a 20-year absence. As a head coach, Salmon is not easy to pick out on the sideline, spending most of his time in close contact with his QB while others tend to the complicated choreography of line play and defence.
No one in Raymond—though it’s hard to be certain—would have begrudged the boss a night off. He didn’t get one. Sure enough, Stephanie was awakened by contractions at 5:30 a.m. on the morning of game day. She handled it with the aplomb of an experienced pocket passer, arriving at the Raymond hospital at 8:30 a.m. Seven-pound, seven-ounce Maddie was born at about 11:30 a.m. And when the Cougars of Calgary’s Catholic Central High kicked off to the Comets at 7 p.m., Salmon was there on the sidelines. “He’d have stayed with me if there had been a problem,” says Stephanie, “but under the circumstances, I figured I could spare him for a few hours.”
