If winning isn’t everything, why bother keeping score?

By Dave Bidini - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 7:18 PM - 0 Comments

The morning sucks. Especially with a family; especially with kids.

Before my daughter was born, I remember watching SportsDesk (now SportsCentre) on TSN at 2 a.m. and wondering whether this would be the last time I would ever willfully be awake to watch the late broadcast. It was. As my kids have grown, I’ve managed a few instances of evening consciousness, and being a musician, I’ve sometimes wandered in just as the highlights have started. Still, there’s always a price to pay on the back end.

This winter’s post-Christmas holidays started with the dreadful bleeping of the bedside alarm, and tired legs hitting the cold floor. It got even worse once I started thinking about the next six months: six months of early mornings, stupid breakfasts, school lunches, and napsacks packed with books and pencils and flutes and volleyball runners. In the kitchen, The Fan’s Brady and Lange were on the radio. They tried their best, but they could not. Continue…

Hockey and the prime ministers: Harper vs. Trudeau

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Over at the Globe and Mail, Lawrence Martin writes today that Stephen Harper is the first prime minister to use his passion for hockey to political advantage. Certainly Harper’s plan to finally publish his much-discussed book on early professional hockey history should allow him to stake a claim to being our most hockey-wonkish PM.

But I think Martin went off side in dismissing Pierre Trudeau’s shinny credentials, asserting that Trudeau preferred individual to team sports, and “could barely tell a hockey stick from a tennis racket.”

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The World Junior Championships are obscene. But we better win.

By Dave Bidini - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

This is not a Leafs column, so let’s put the sorrow and hope and impossibility of faith aside for a moment. Let’s take a breath, let’s launder that blood and mustard-splotched Boimstruck sweater. Let’s set aside the schedule and the standings and forget that Luke Schenn was ever born, for in a few weeks, NHL teams won’t matter. Pro hockey won’t matter. What will matter is what happens in Calgary and Edmonton, and even there, the Oilers and Flames won’t matter. Soon, it will be Christmas and New Year’s: junior hockey time. Players you don’t yet know yet will fill your screens and busy your papers and crowd your radio dial. Canada will be playing. Canada is always playing. And they better win. They better.

That our country—or rather, the dominant hockey-loving pie slice of our country—will bend routine and design days and evenings around games is a given. What’s not a given is whether this is necessarily, unequivocally, a good thing. A few questions: Are we putting too much pressure on kids to carry on Canada’s obsessive desire to succeed at all things blade and skate? Does that obsession mean that we unconsciously absolve the trappings of the junior game: young men playing for peanuts while owners get rich off their dreams; the dirty secret of hazing and alcohol and drug abuse; youth fight culture; and a citizenry that emerges from the pro hockey derby having learned nothing through their formative years except how to take a pass and throw a hit? Lots about junior hockey is good—giving identity and economy to small places; allowing kids, in the best case scenario, to absorb lessons about leadership and courage—but there’s a certain obscenity in blanket coverage of awkward kids posing for TSN promos like the gladitorial men they are not. And if discussions about the failings of the NHL to make the ice friendlier and more concussion-free—consider wider rinks and small equipment—then shouldn’t that be part of the junior hockey discussion, too? Continue…

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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How Bauer emerged as hockey’s undisputed top equipment brand

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, December 12, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

Aside from world-class skill and athleticism, there’s one thing nearly every player in today’s NHL has in common: they wear something made by Bauer Performance Sports. In recent years, the hockey equipment maker that pioneered modern skate technology has become an industry behemoth, controlling 49 per cent of the global market for hockey gear. “We are number one in every category,” boasts president and CEO Kevin Davis.

Roughly 90 per cent of NHL players wear at least one piece of Bauer equipment. Seven out of 10 wear Bauer skates. As the puck dropped on the current NHL season, Bauer was the top hockey stick provider for the league’s players—beating out rival Easton—thanks in part to the introduction of the new Vapor APX model. Meanwhile, Bauer says it has surpassed legendary brand CCM—bought by Reebok in 2004—to become the leading seller of sticks, helmets, skates and goalie equipment.

It’s a radical change of fate for the company, which just a few short years ago seemed all but down and out. Sports giant Nike bought Bauer in 1994, when hockey’s growth in the U.S. market seemed almost limitless, buoyed by the latest fad of in-line skating. But by 2008, with the economy in a tailspin, hockey participation rates in Canada falling and the U.S. hockey experiment in shambles, Nike dumped it, selling to investment firms Kohlberg and Co. (best know for buying distressed companies) and Roustan Inc. for US$200 million—a steal compared to the US$395 million Nike paid in 1994. Davis admits it was a “very uncertain time.”

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Among the ink-stained wretches at the Air Canada Centre

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:54 PM - 0 Comments

A light, twinkling snow fell against the towered streets as I made my way to the rink last night, my first visit in two years. That this blog had such pull with the Leafs’ press office made me remember the means by which I’d crashed other media rows in past years: fudging credibility to sit in old Memorial Auditorium to watch the Sabres; an anthem-singing guest appearance at the Gardens on the eve of my wedding; and a plea to a novice university pop writer from Expos’ brass in the late 80s to cover a team that no one outside of Quebec wanted to cover. On this visit, however, it appeared as if I’d found legitimacy, passing easily through the glass doors of the rink to the tableclothed media desk in the guts of the Platinum Club, securing my card—my name on it and everything—from a nice woman in whom I confessed procedural unfamiliarity. “That’s okay,” she said, adding, “The elevator is just around the corner,” guiding me with the voice of a nursemaid and a flight attendant’s wave.

I found my ride, walked past P.J. Stock and secured my station—number 81—sitting on high across from the Sittler banner at the north end. Then two anthems, a Coke, a Leafite whispering team scratches into our ear from the press row speaker, and a stick save by James Reimer off an early Devils power play. Excited is too small a word to describe how I felt. So is old, for legitimacy rarely finds the young.

In the first period, the Devils scored two quick power play goals. Continue…

My marriage is better than the Leafs—but the Leafs are pretty good, too

By Dave Bidini - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 1:54 PM - 0 Comments

This past Sunday came my wedding anniversary: 19. We were married at St. Lawrence Hall in 1992, and I remember walking home in the mild weather to our hotel—the King Edward—where we immediately ordered room service, having been too distracted during the ceremony to eat much of anything. The voice on the other end of the phone told us that the hotel’s chef was in the throes of apendicitis, and would we settle for soup and a clubhouse sandwich between us? We said that would be fine, and besides, it would give me a chance to check Leaf highlights, maybe on SportsDesk at 2 am. There were no iPhones, no instant scores in 1992. Back then, you went to the car and turned on the radio to know what was happening. Continue…

What do you get when you mate a Leaf with a Lion?

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

Never mind the wins and losses—well, at least for a moment—and consider the most significant news to come out of bluebloodland last week: the deal between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Zurich Lions of the Swiss League. In the 1970s, Peter Ustinov said Toronto was like “New York run by the Swiss,” and while things are a lot more lively these days, much of the city still operates like the reliable and steady gearworks of a Geneva pocket watch. Partnerships with teams in Lisbon, Barcelona, Assiago, and Paris would have been more alluring, but these are still your father’s Leafs. Few are allowed either in or out of the room with the velvet rope.

I’ve been wondering what might have precipitated this engagement and why this was celebrated as a significant event in Leaf media land. Was it to distract fans from that which has been rumoured over the past few weeks: James Reimer’s brain injury. Another thought: I think if we started calling concussions “brain injuries,” it might get people wising-up to the seriousness of this business. It’s easier to conjure notions of dementia and madness out of brain injuries. Calling them concussions is like calling them pulled hamstrings or separated shoulders. “Brain injury” is a more frightening term. And if the bluebloods aren’t already frightened by Reimer’s, they should be. Continue…

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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This is the Leafs fan’s weakness: we get way too high and way too low

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 7:07 PM - 0 Comments

The editor is laughing. He is laughing and holding his Habs belly. He is laughing and slapping his Habs knee and pointing at the screen with his Habs finger because he knew this would happen. He bet some friends that it would. He is filling his Habs wallet with his winnings. He is getting a beer. This is too funny. Way too funny.

The editor is laughing and I am writing, and that the Habs have struggled to find themselves over the last few days is beside the point. By contrast, the Leafs have completely lost themselves, and even though the writer knew that he would eventually be forced to write this column, he thought that maybe his instincts would betray him; maybe luck would sway and a new day would find him and the team and the land. Continue…

Rebuilding Sidney Crosby’s brain

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Vuich/Sports Illustrated

Ted Carrick is listening to Sidney Crosby’s heart. The NHL superstar is strapped into a computerized rotating chair that has just spun him like a merry-go-round. It is, as Carrick likes to tell people who visit his lab at Life University near Atlanta, one of only three “whole-body gyroscopes” in the world, and it’s integral to his work as the founding father of “chiropractic neurology.” He uses it to stimulate certain injured and diseased brains.

Crosby, who plays for the Pittsburgh Penguins and has been famously sidelined with a concussion since January, is Carrick’s newest patient, and this day in August is the first time they’ve met. Carrick leans in close, his balding, tanned head looming inches from Crosby’s face, and rests the stethoscope on his chest. “Let’s make sure you’re not dead.”

Satisfied, Carrick turns to the others in this cramped blue room, who include Crosby’s agent Pat Brisson, trainer Andy O’Brien and several chiropractic neurologists or studentsin- training wearing white lab coats. “He’s fine,” Carrick says. “It’s going to be good.”

Nodding to his colleague Derek Barton, who usually operates the lab equipment, Carrick signals to restart the gyroscope—with one difference. This time Crosby will be turned upside-down while he is also spun around. He hasn’t experienced this dual action yet.

MAKE THIS STORY COME ALIVE WITH AUGMENTED REALITY

Barton and Carrick discuss the appropriate speed setting the gyroscope. Then Barton enters Carrick’s directions into a computer that controls the gyroscope (chiropractic neurology uses no drugs or surgery), and tells Crosby to keep his head pressed against the back of the black cushioned seat. Crosby, wearing a grey T-shirt, black shorts and white ankle socks, scans the crowd on the other side of the clear plastic cylinder surrounding the machine. The door clangs shut. Above it, a stack of red, yellow and green lights shines while 10 high-pitched beeps signal the gyroscope is about to start. Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Continue…

It’s a bad time to be a loser

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:13 PM - 0 Comments

It’s a bad time to be a loser. Everything seems just a little wrong (which is to say, a little right) and everybody seems not to be themselves (embodying the posture and attitude of a winner).

Take, for instance, last Sunday’s game vs Ottawa. It turned into an L for the Leafs, but the disappointment slid down the shoulders of fans like beading October rain. The previous night, Toronto had risen to best the Crosby-less Pens, a substantial win in the face of an injured starting goalie and a second line that has yet to find its zone. Were Reimer at full-strength, it would have meant games split between the suddenly able netminding duo, and a better chance in back-to-back contests. Besides, losing to Ottawa felt more like an early-season mulligan, and even if this amounts to misplaced confidence, that any kind of misplaced confidence exists among blueblooders is a not insignificant achievement. Continue…

Everything that goes wrong in the world, I blame on the Montreal Canadiens

By Dave Bidini - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 8 Comments

F—in’ Habs. There, I said it. It’s not like I don’t say it at least 30 times a day. The paperboy misses the porch: F—in’ Habs! The Windows and Doors people wake me up from my afternoon nap with one of their incessant calls: F—in’ Habs! I burn the noodles: F—in’ Habs! An earthquake levels Bali: F—in’ Habs! Everything that goes wrong in the world, I blame on the Montreal Canadiens. It’s convenient and it fits. I believe we would all be much happier and the world would work better and there would be no more stress or pain or misfortune if only the Habs would throw their skates into the river already. But this isn’t going to happen. I am realist and, yes, I am learning to cope.

Someone once said that great clubs need great enemies, but why it can’t be Dallas or Florida or Buffalo, I don’t know. Instead, it has to be the most arrogant and self-satisfied of all teams grinding against that which I love. It has to be the (F—in’) Habs. Argghhhh. Once more, only longer: Arghhhhhhhhh! Continue…

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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Prospect Porn: Leafs v. Colorado

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 4:47 PM - 1 Comment

Okay: I like porn. But not just any porn: Prospect Porn. I can’t get enough of it. I spend way too much time tapping on a screen in the dark—actually it’s more mouse-thumbing then tapping; screen over screen over screen—staring at young men from distant places; gifted young men; lithe, goofy-looking with sculpted arms and stats to drool over. Thirty year olds with long careers are one thing, but give me the hairless fulsome buck who has emerged as if from a fine mist. Give me his promise. Untested, pure. Maybe a little overbitten and acne’d. A prospect.

To this end, the Leafs have done nothing to satisfy my urges, which is why I’ve had to look elsewhere: Colorado, Long Island, and Edmonton. For this reason, I couldn’t wait ‘til (last) Tuesday, which promised a visit by the Avalanche, the league’s youngest and Prospect Porniest team. Not only that, but the Leafs—young, too, I suppose, only not so Prospecty—were hop-skipping along on a three-game unbeaten streak, so my interests were two-fold. I poofed the throw pillows on the couch and prepared popcorn and beer. I sent the kids to bed. Actually, I did not. My kids are baseball brats and they don’t love hockey. Between the two of them, they’ve lived through exactly one Leaf post-season. In 2009, I prepared a chocolate milk chart in honour of the year: two Leaf wins in a row got them gumdrops, three wins got them Twizzlers and four wins got them— yup—chocolate milk. “You’re teaching them about disappointment, aren’t you?” asked my wife, approvingly. But I wasn’t. This is the sad and torturous environment in which they’ve been raised. Continue…

Harper’s facial hair and new gig writing books

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 4 Comments

Photography by Mitchel Raphael

Harper’s final chapter

For several years Stephen Harper has been working on a book about hockey. The PM can finally use one of the Conservatives’ favourite catchphrases: “Getting the job done.” Word is the book is written. A publication date has yet to be announced.

A cake for Clement

During question period, NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus has been counting the days that Treasury Board President Tony Clement has refused to answer questions about what Angus calls the G8 “slush fund.” The MP says that on the 150th day, in the first week of November, he will present the cabinet minister with a cake and, he jokes, “maybe it will have a file in it.” Senior Tory cabinet ministers have expressed embarrassment to Capital Diary that Clement has not risen to explain himself (or apologize, if necessary). Foreign Minister John Baird gets up to answer questions on his behalf, although Clement is sitting right next to him. Perhaps there’s a double standard regarding which ministers can answer questions in the House: Defence Minister Peter MacKay recently rose to answer queries about his use of aircrafts. Liberal MP Judy Sgro says that under Jean Chrétien, ministers had to answer their own questions. There was only one exception: if the opposition called for a minister to resign, Chrétien took the question.

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The biggest losers in hockey

By Dave Bidini - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:33 AM - 13 Comments

The morning after the Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Philadelphia Flyers to win the 2010 Stanley Cup—their first in 49 years—I shuffled downstairs in my pyjamas. It was a warm morning, early June, and the NHL hockey season was over. I pressed my fists to my eyes, yawned, and yelled upstairs for the children to get out of bed. Actually, that’s a lie. My wife, Janet, did the yelling while I stood there in the living room looking under pillows for the remote. Finding it, I kachunked the tv and a station bzzzed on. These words were written across the screen:

LEAFS BIGGEST LOSERS IN HOCKEY Continue…

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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Why hockey is the smartest game in the world

By Adam Gopnik - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

David E. Klutho/Sports Illustration

John Kenneth Galbraith, Martin Luther King Jr., Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margaret Atwood: the luminaries who have delivered the annual CBC Massey Lectures since 1961 are luminous indeed. They are an integral “part of the intellectual life of the nation,” in the words of CBC executive producer Bernie Lucht. This year’s speaker—“deeply honoured and deeply terrified” at being selected for the 50th anniversary—is Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer, author and honorary Canadian. Born in Philadelphia, Gopnik lived in Montreal from the ages of 10 to 25, when he “experienced every significant thing that can happen to a human in those years, from falling in love to being rejected in love,” not to mention becoming a diehard Canadiens fan.

Gopnik’s topic is winter: “I wanted something Canadian but not narrowly Canadian, something that would bring in art, music and sport from across the world.” He offers an engaging account of the artists, composers, writers and intellectuals who invented the modern idea of winter, but the real passion lies in his sports lecture, especially when Gopnik discusses the only game that really matters in this country. His take on hockey describes how, in Montreal over a century ago, the French-Canadian demand for style and skill and the English-Canadian interest in playing rugby on ice saw the fusion of brutality and grace into a game of beauty.

This year’s lectures are scheduled for Montreal (Oct. 12), Halifax (Oct. 14), Edmonton (Oct. 21), Vancouver (Oct. 23) and Toronto (Oct. 26), and will be broadcast on CBC Radio’s Ideas Nov. 7 to 11. A book of Gopnik’s lectures will be published by House of Anansi Press. BRIAN BETHUNE

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NHL prepared for Lokomotiv-like catastrophe

By Colby Cosh - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Alexey Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images

The catastrophe that annihilated Russian hockey team Lokomotiv Yaroslavl last week was terrible—but not unthinkable. Every top athlete with any significant service time has air-charter horror stories, and while the major North American pro sports have been spared, it is by the narrowest of margins.

In 2009, litigation surrounding the bankruptcy and aborted sale of the Phoenix Coyotes led to the NHL’s hitherto closely guarded bylaws being put on the public record. Those bylaws include an “Emergency Rehabilitation Plan” (ERP) that activates if an NHL club loses five or more players to death or disability in a single incident. Each team is required under the bylaw to carry a catastrophe-insurance policy of $1 million per lost player. The plan foresees an initial, voluntary effort to bring the affected team back up to playing strength, with the insurance money being used to bid for players in outright sale.

Remaining roster holes would be filled in an “ERP draft,” with the other teams protecting one goalie and 10 skaters. Only one player per contributing team could be sold or claimed, and the drafting club would be allowed to replace its losses only on a position-by-position basis. It’s a fascinating exercise for hockey fans to imagine—and one they hope never to see performed.

Can Stephen Harper save hockey?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 9 Comments

The editors of this magazine raise the possibility that the Prime Minister might have a role to play in reforming hockey.

“Football is on trial,” Roosevelt told the coaches. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” While Roosevelt took no effort to dictate what changes ought to be made, with his encouragement the sport completely reinvented itself. The forward pass became legal. First downs required 10 yards, rather than five, which helped open up the game. Plays that put players’ heads and necks at risk were explicitly prohibited. A game characterized by massive pileups, broken necks and eye gouging went on to become the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. today.

Politicians obviously have no business micromanaging sport, but our Prime Minister could use his stature to encourage hockey to abandon its violent status quo in favour of something new and better, as Roosevelt did. 

How the Prime Minister could rescue hockey

By the editors - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 6 Comments

Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty Images

It may be the most thrilling of winter sports, but summer is proving to be hockey’s toughest season.

In June, Vancouver was terrorized by a massive riot following the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals. In recent months three well-known NHL tough guys were found dead by their own hand: Rick Rypien and Wade Belak from apparent suicide, Derek Boogaard from accidental drug overdose.

And head trauma continues to cast a pall over the entire sport. While professional hockey has always involved substantial physical contact and ritualized fighting, new research suggests hockey tough guys such as Boogaard, Rypien and Belak may face a lifetime of degenerative brain disease and depression. Shots to the head are shortening the careers of many talented players as well. Gifted left winger Paul Kariya retired in June due to post-concussion syndrome. In August, the Boston Bruins’ star centre Marc Savard (who signed a $28-million, seven-year contract in 2009) announced he won’t play this coming season because of a concussion. He may never play again.

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Your guide to this season’s hockey parents

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It’s September and a new wave of little kids and their parents are experiencing minor hockey. The boys and girls don’t need any help having fun. As for Mom and Dad, some fair warning: here’s a guide to some of the parents you can expect to encounter over the next several winters.

“Talks Only About His Own Kid” Dad. This plentiful specimen of parent will gleefully analyze for you his child’s every pass, shot, mood swing, haircut, tweet and cereal preference. Come February, he still won’t know the names of half the other kids on the team. You can spot him easily because he’s the only dad keeping a plus-minus stat for a six-year-old.

“Complains About Ice Time” Dad. This father can often be found insisting that the team would have triumphed if only his child hadn’t been shortchanged by 23 seconds there in the second period.

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Sidney Crosby and the NHL’s biggest headache

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 6 Comments

After months of intense speculation about whether or not Sidney Crosby will return to play when the NHL season resumes on Oct. 6, the Pittsburgh Penguins captain broke his silence on Wedensday—but failed to quell the questions about how much longer this concussion will haunt him.

In a meeting space that smelled like a hockey locker room inside the Consol Energy Center, Crosby, his two concussion specialists, and Penguins GM Ray Shero faced more than 60 reporters and a dozen cameras to emphasize yet again that there is no fixed date for when the superstar will get back in the game. Continue…