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…

Hockey: the cure for rape?

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 7:48 PM - 26 Comments

Hi! Here’s a table of reported sexual offences for the city of Vancouver for a particular group of months.

If you adjust the figures slightly for Vancouver’s population growth and look at the annual playoff progress of the city’s beloved Canucks, what you’ll find is that you can’t use these numbers to prove much of a link between NHL hockey and sexual violence. But if there is one, it’s probably negative. July is (at a high level of statistical significance) the worst month for sexual offences; it’s also the only one of these months in which hockey is never played. In months during which the Canucks were eliminated from Stanley Cup contention, the rate of sexual offences was, on average, more than 20% lower than in other months. There were more sex offences in months with less hockey even if you correct for pure date effects, and the lockout year (2005) had a higher rate of sex offences than either the year following or the year prior.

If I took these data nuggets and attempted to argue from them that hockey prevents sexual violence, you would probably not be impressed. (Indeed, it would probably occur to you that reports of sexual offence are a poor proxy for the overall level of sex violence in the population.) Unfortunately, this kind of reasoning, even in much weaker and less rigorous form, isn’t a problem for Laura Robinson and the Winnipeg Free Press. (For fine details of the horror, see Tyler Dellow’s reaction to Robinson. For other examples of Wade Belak’s death being used irresponsibly in sociological arguments, simply pick up absolutely any Canadian newspaper at all.)

James and the Giant Poo

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 11 Comments

Getstock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Many kids are currently off at summer camp, away from the lure of electronic devices and the strictures of personal hygiene—and far away from their parents, who yearn for correspondence from their children when not secretly delighting in their absence.

What follows in italics is an actual letter home from Algonquin Park from our 12-year-old son James. It is presented with its original spelling and grammatical errors. Commentary and analysis are provided for your edification. It begins:

One of the many things I am looking forward once I get home is a tolet that doesn’t get clogged so easily and when it gets clogged people don’t keep pooing in it until there is poo two inches over the water level.

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Love the team—hate the name

By Tom Henheffer - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 2 Comments

Tom Henheffer

It’s the vodka fuelling their jigs, the blended cappuccino expanding their waistlines, the frozen islands sinking their cruise liners—ice caps are ingrained in Newfoundland culture. But many islanders don’t want the iconic iceberg adorning the jerseys of St. John’s new AHL franchise.

“It’s probably a little bit close to the Tim Hortons thing,” says Gerry Taylor, chairman of Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador. A recent online poll by the Telegram, St. John’s daily newspaper, found a full two-thirds of residents are unhappy about calling their team the Ice Caps. Many critics simply don’t like the association with the creamy summer beverage, but Taylor also feels that the designation is too St. John’s-centric. “It should be more than a capital city team,” he says.

Team director Danny Williams, the former premier of Newfoundland, says the name was actually chosen to appeal to the entire province. “We make Iceberg Vodka, Iceberg Water, we’re the leading jurisdiction for Arctic research. The ice cap is iconic here.”

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A Vancouver rioter speaks

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

During the Vancouver riot, Coquitlam, B.C. native Robert Snelgrove was caught on camera walking out of The Bay Sears carrying stolen cosmetics. The next day, he turned himself into police. Snelgrove, 24, a cell phone salesman, has been suspended without pay from his job and may be fired. Below, he tells Maclean’s what prompted his actions, how sorry he is, and what it’s like to be shamed by an Internet mob.

Q: Tell me about Game 7. How did you end up downtown?

A: I’m not really a sports fan. I got involved because all my friends started watching the games. I live on Seymour at Robson, right above Granville Street, and I got caught up in the whole excitement of the city. It was really, really exciting. I was watching Game 7 at a friend’s condo in Coal Harbour.

Q: When did you hear about the riots?

A: I had heard about it briefly on the news. Then, walking home, I found myself in the middle of it. It was like nothing I’d ever seen in my life before—like WWIII.

Q: At what point did you decide to jump in?

A: I don’t have a criminal record. I’ve never stolen anything in my life. I was standing outside The Bay, watching people breaking windows, smashing things, and lighting things on fire. I didn’t do that at all. When I saw multiple people break the window and walking out with stuff, I got caught up in it… It was a spur of the moment thing. Normally I would never think like that. I’m not trying to defend it, but it was one of those things—everyone’s doing it, so I might as well try it. I was quite intoxicated. I wasn’t in the best state of mind. Continue…

How do you solve a problem like Roberto Luongo?

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 15 Comments

He’s never been one to pour out his soul, so one might reasonably interpret the phone call Roberto Luongo placed on April 21 as a full-on cry for help. After two straight blowout losses to the Chicago Blackhawks, Vancouver’s superstar netminder had lost the starting role in Game 6 of the Western Conference quarter-finals to his backup, Cory Schneider. Now, with the Hawks threatening to erase a 3-0 deficit in the series, Canucks coach Alain Vigneault was having a public crisis of confidence in his $10-million-a-year goaltender. Luongo’s future hung in the balance.

So he reached out to his brother Leo, a goaltending instructor in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, and like any good coach, Leo steered the conversation toward the positive. Roberto’s recent failures went unmentioned, as did the attendant pressures of his epic 12-year, $64-million contract. “We talked about him staying focused and sharp and being ready,” Leo told Maclean’s. “In hockey, you never know what’s going to happen.”

As it turned out, Schneider went down in Game 6 with leg cramps, and Luongo entered the game in the third to make a series of impressive stops in an overtime loss. Continue…

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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Vancouver's 40-year-old virgins

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 6:04 PM - 9 Comments

Deep in the fuggy, aromatic basement of TD Garden, in a corner of the Boston Bruins’ dressing room, Johnny Boychuk’s words to live by loom above his stall: “Move your feet, play physical, shoot the puck!” They are not so much a credo as a command, penned on a strip of yellowed masking tape like a reminder to an errant child. The defenceman reddened last week when a visitor noticed. “Just something I wrote to myself,” he mumbled through his playoff beard. But there was no need to be sheepish, because here was Bruin hockey boiled to its essentials—skate, hit, shoot. Thus did Boston find its way to the 2011 Stanley Cup final. They would forget it at their peril.

They didn’t, of course. The Bruins championship was a masterpiece of blood and sweat, forged from the work of role players and a goaltending performance for the ages. And the Canucks? They might have used that bit of tape. Continue…

Photo gallery: Riot in Vancouver

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 4 Comments

Good news, bad news: June 2-9, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Good News

Wrongfully convicted in her son's death, Tammy Marquardt is freed. (Lucas Leniuk/Toronto Star)

Boots on the ground

Canada’s combat tour in Afghanistan is entering its final few weeks, but the military is already preparing for its next deployment—wherever it may be. Months after being forced out of their secret staging base in Dubai because of a diplomatic spat, the Canadian Forces have reportedly reached deals to open new bases in Germany and Jamaica, and are in talks with Senegal, South Korea, Kenya and Singapore. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay said, Canada has become a “go-to nation” when it comes to responding to natural disasters and other NATO missions—requiring a much bigger bootprint on foreign soil.

A revamped battle plan

Forty years after Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” a new report has confirmed what police, prosecutors—and traffickers—have long known: we’re losing. Released by a consortium of world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, the report says it’s time to start treating drug abuse as a public health problem, not a criminal one, and consider legalizing certain substances to undercut criminal gangs. The war on drugs has cost billions of dollars and countless lives. But, to borrow a phrase, admitting the old strategy is broken is the first step to recovery.

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Stella Ambler's maiden metaphor

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:56 AM - 36 Comments

Conservative rookie Stella Ambler was given the honour of moving the motion in reply to the Speech from the Throne on Friday. She decided to go with an extended hockey metaphor.

If I may invoke a hockey metaphor, which seems appropriate with the whole country riveted on the Stanley Cup finals, the success of our Conservative team rests first and foremost on our great chemistry. It is true that we are little short of left-wingers but our members from communities in every region of the country have excelled at every position, and our captain, as the best ones do, has raised the game of all of his teammates.

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Have you hopped aboard the Vancouver Canucks bandwagon?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 9 Comments

Concussions: the untold story

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 15 Comments

Photograph by George Widman/AP

Before there was Sidney Crosby, there was Eric Lindros. Both were hockey prodigies as young teenagers. Both were drafted first overall into the NHL. Both won the league MVP in their early 20s, both were captain of Team Canada at the Olympics, and both were hailed as the next Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux. And then, in a fraction of a second, both fell victim to devastating concussions. The toll on Crosby, who has been sidelined since January, remains to be seen. But most fans know that Lindros was never the same after a series of blows to the head—at least eight by the time he retired in 2007. What few know, however—what he’s never talked about publicly before—is the psychological and emotional toll of those concussions.

That a Herculean hockey legend such as Lindros (he is six foot four and 255 lb.) is speaking out with disarming candour about the panic and desolation that he has endured is unprecedented. “You’re in a pretty rough-and-tumble environment with this sport. Talking about these things—you don’t talk about these things,” says Lindros. So while he was playing in the NHL, Lindros mostly kept his game face on. “You got to understand, you want to wake up in the morning and you want to look at yourself and say, ‘I’ve got the perfect engine to accomplish what I need to in this game tonight.’ You are not going to look in the mirror and say, ‘Boy, I’m depressed.’ ”

But there were signs that the concussions had transformed him, both as a man and a hockey player, for the worse. “I was extremely sarcastic. I was real short. I didn’t have patience for people,” says Lindros, 38. That rudeness mutated once he stepped on the ice into fear that the next concussion was just one hit away. “That’s why I played wing my last few years,” he explains of changing positions late in his career. “I hated cutting through the middle. I was avoiding parting the Red Sea.” Off the ice, Lindros developed a paralyzing sense of dread at the very thought of public speaking or of being in a crowd—once routine activities for the sports superstar. “I hated, absolutely hated, that. I’d avoid those scenarios. I didn’t like airports. I didn’t like galas. It would stress me out.”

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This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Andy Clark/Reuters

Vive la France!

France played a crucial role this week in the surrender and arrest of the Ivory Coast’s defeated president Laurent Gbagbo and his militiamen. With its troops on the ground, France has publicly pledged to help the troubled nation in its reconstruction. Along with its recent calls for greater NATO involvement in Libya, France has suddenly become a robust player on the international stage, flexing its muscle in the name of democracy and global stability. It’s just too bad that same spirit isn’t on display back home, where French police arrested two women under the ban on wearing face-concealing veils in public.

In the classroom

The organization that regulates Ontario’s 230,000 teachers issued a new rule this week: no more connecting with students on social media. Teachers have been warned not to “friend” their pupils on Facebook, subscribe to their Twitter accounts, or use Flickr, LinkedIn or MySpace to interact online. Give the College of Teachers an A+ on this. The student-teacher relationship belongs in a classroom, not a chat room.

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Dust-up in the Phoenix desert

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, April 11, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 39 Comments

Norm Hall/NHLI/Getty Images

The clock is ticking for the Phoenix Coyotes. Down 1-0 to the St. Louis Blues with less than three minutes left in the first period, the team is fiddling away a two-man advantage. The wingers are having trouble controlling the puck, and the one shot Keith Yandle manages from the point misses the net by a country mile. When a fumbled pass results in a short-handed rush for the Blues, the boos rain down in Jobing.com Arena. It’s surprisingly loud given the size of the crowd—10,977 tickets sold or given away, but at least a thousand fewer actual bums in the seats. On a Tuesday night in late March, matched up against a team bound for the golf course instead of the playoffs, hockey is a tough sell in Phoenix. Hand it to the fans who do show up, though—they’re as apt at expressing their displeasure as any in the game.

The chant that rises out of the upper bowl during the second period isn’t quite as lusty, but perhaps even more telling. “Goldwater sucks! Goldwater sucks!” NHL catcalls aren’t usually directed at libertarian think tanks. Then again, nothing about the saga of the Phoenix Coyotes is business as usual.
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This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 8, 2011 at 11:02 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

This dog was found drifting on a rooftop 1.8 km off the coast of Japan Japan Coast Guard/AP

A Canuck Cup fave?

The Vancouver Canucks captured the President’s Trophy, awarded to the NHL’s top regular-season team, despite playing in the superior conference and suffering an unearthly skein of injuries to its defence corps. This marks the first time Vancouver has won the trophy, introduced in 1985. The Canucks dominated impressively in 2010-11, surrendering far fewer goals than any other team, running the best power play, and ranking second in overall scoring and penalty-killing.

African denouement

Laurent Gbagbo, the strongman clinging to the presidency of Ivory Coast, faced a reckoning as UN and French armies intervened in support of forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, recognized internationally as the winner of a 2010 election. Peacekeepers entered Ivorian borders and airspace after Gbagbo’s militia began targeting civilian Ouattara supporters. The capture of the capital, Abidjan, soon followed. Gbagbo, trapped within a small perimeter around a personal bunker, was said to be negotiating a surrender.

Lessons learned

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 landed safely at an airport in Yuma, Ariz., after a panel tore open and depressurized the cabin at 36,000 feet. Southwest, whose short-hop business model, say experts, is hard on airframes, inspected its fleet for metal fatigue after the mercifully inexpensive warning. Meanwhile, underwater robot vehicles operating off Brazil’s coast found wreckage from Air France Flight 447, promising new clues to a mysterious 2009 crash that killed 228 people.

Fries with that recovery?

In a gesture of faith in the U.S. economy, fast-food giant McDonald’s will hire 50,000 American personnel in a single day (April 19), expanding its U.S. workforce to 700,000. (McDonald’s Canada will add 4,000 workers the same day.) Of the 8.7 million jobs lost in the U.S. during the recession, only 1.5 million have been regained since 2009. “McJobs” is a byword for tenuous, low-paying work, but McDonald’s U.S.A. observes that half of its franchise owners and 75 per cent of managers started behind the counter.

Bad news

Afghans stage a deadly protest after a Florida pastor burned the Quran Rahmat Gul/AP

The troublemaker

Violence wracked Afghanistan after Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who backed down on threats to burn the Quran last year, followed through and immolated the holy book after a webcasted mock trial. Protesters stormed a UN facility in Mazar-e-Sharif, killing three staff and four Nepalese Gurkha guards; at least 17 more people, mostly Afghan civilians, died in further riots. The White House denounced Jones’s action as “un-American,” as did U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, who says his forces now face “an additional serious security challenge.”

A referee’s regrets

South African judge Richard Goldstone, who led a UN investigation into the 2008-09 Israeli invasion of Gaza, added a postscript to his 2009 report criticizing Israel and Hamas for war crimes. In the Washington Post, Goldstone wrote that he had hoped his report would introduce “a new era of even-handedness” at the often anti-Zionist UN. But he found that only the Israeli side followed up the report and investigated its own conduct; Hamas, meanwhile, continued unlawful attacks on Israeli civilians.

The scribbler

A nurse in Dartmouth, N.S., was reprimanded for poor handwriting, sparking a national debate about hospital records. Wilfred Gordon’s illegible scrawls on charts had been a problem “for many years,” declared a disciplinary panel of the province’s College of Registered Nurses, but he “had not successfully addressed the issue.” Gordon was ordered to take a course in documentation and will face penmanship reviews by a manager.

It’s bad for your arteries, too

Another mess in Nova Scotia emerged when a sewer backup in a Bedford neighbourhood proved to have been caused, in part, by bacon grease. A Halifax Water investigation into flooded basements in the Ridgevale subdivision revealed that clogs of fat and oil, accumulating at levels “more often associated with commercially zoned areas,” played a role in damage to five homes. Local homeowners were sceptical, and a councillor noted that in at least one case, it was steamers used by sewer workers to melt the grease that sent sewage blasting upward into a Ridgevale domicile.

What really happened to Max Pacioretty?

By Cathy Gulli - Friday, April 1, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

Shaun Best/Reuters; Andrew Post/Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory/University of Ottawa

By now, the stomach-churning footage of Max Pacioretty of the Montreal Canadiens slamming headfirst into a post during an NHL game on March 8 is well-known. The hit, delivered by Zdeno Chara of the Boston Bruins, happened in less than a second, but it took several unnerving minutes for medical personnel and teammates to carry an unconscious Pacioretty off the ice. Doctors later diagnosed him with a concussion and a fractured vertebra, from which he is still recovering. Considering the powerful collision, it’s stunning that the 22-year-old wasn’t hurt worse or even killed, as many fans and players feared that night.

But to truly marvel at the dangerous blow that Pacioretty survived, one must watch a precise five-second black and white video just created by scientists at the University of Ottawa. Led by Blaine Hoshizaki, director of the elite Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory, researchers have reconstructed a hit similar to the Pacioretty-Chara one. The footage shows a dummy head wearing a helmet similar to the one Pacioretty uses. A metal rod covered in two-inch foam mimics the padded stanchion that Pacioretty struck. An air compressor unleashes the rod on the head form, which is pummelled at the exact same speed and location as when Pacioretty rammed into the post. The impact launches the dummy into a sideways extension—the neck stretches until it’s perpendicular to the rod, before the head form snaps back and slightly rotates.

WATCH THE RECONSTRUCTION

Witnessing the hit recreated in the isolation of a lab makes it all the more disturbing to watch. But for Hoshizaki, the goal is scientific. His team is determined to understand the relationship between brain injuries such as concussions, helmet performance, and the risky hits that hockey players give and take during a game—and to find out whether equipment should be improved or whether certain hits should be banned in the future.

YOUTUBE; Andrew Post/Neurotrauma Impact Science Laboratory/University of Ottawa

The Pacioretty-Chara reconstruction confirms that hockey helmets excel at preventing catastrophic brain injuries such as skull fractures and subdural hematomas, which are caused by “linear acceleration” (which happens when players fall and hit the ice or receive an impact directly through their centre of mass). On the other hand, it also demonstrates that helmets are not built to prevent mild traumatic brain injuries such as concussions, which are caused primarily by “angular acceleration” (a rotational impact such as when a boxer throws a hook punch to the side of an opponent’s head).

What’s more, this reconstruction explains why Pacioretty will probably recover from his concussion faster than superstar Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins, who has been sidelined since Jan. 5. As Maclean’s recently reported, Hoshizaki’s team has reconstructed the first of two hits to the head that preceded Crosby’s concussion diagnosis. That hit occurred on New Year’s Day, when David Steckel (then of the Washington Capitals, now playing for the New Jersey Devils) collided with Crosby—shoulder to the left side of the head—and sent him flipping through the air and crashing onto the ice.

By comparing the two reconstructions, especially the 3-D brain models generated by sensors inside the dummy, Hoshizaki’s team can see the different risk of brain tissue damage each player might have experienced. The results are as fascinating as they are perplexing: the brain model from the Crosby reconstruction shows a rainbow of tissue stress, while the brain model from the Pacioretty reconstruction is mostly blue, representing less risk of tissue damage.

Hoshizaki suggests that although the Pacioretty-Chara hit happened at a higher speed than the Crosby-Steckel one (36 km/h versus 27 km/h), and even though Pacioretty was knocked out, the angular acceleration lasted longer in the case of Crosby than Pacioretty (20 milliseconds compared to seven milliseconds, respectively). Since angular acceleration is so closely connected to the risk of concussion, that might explain why the brain model generated by the Crosby-Steckel reconstruction indicates so much more tissue stress. As well, the researchers hypothesize that the location of the impact on each player’s head may explain why the tissue damage varies. Hoshizaki says that the front of the brain, such as where Pacioretty was hit, may be more robust than the sides, which is where Crosby was struck.

Going forward, Hoshizaki’s team are working toward mapping which parts of the brain are most vulnerable to hits to the head. Meanwhile, fans await the return of Pacioretty and Crosby—whenever that might be.

Riding the rocket

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 4:07 PM - 2 Comments

Bettmann/CORBIS

In death, he has become a nationalist icon. But Maurice “Rocket” Richard’s influence on Quebec’s political transformation is, well, complicated, says Charles Foran in his biography of the hockey legend, the latest in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series. Without argument, the fabled Montreal Canadien was the avatar of a downtrodden people—his titanic battles with NHL president Clarence Campbell standing in for the animus between frustrated francophones and the privileged Anglos of mid-century Quebec.

But modern notions of Richard as a sovereignist precursor, or even as a catalyst of the Quiet Revolution, overlook his early career when, in Foran’s words, he served “to hold back, not launch social change.” Off the ice, he epitomized the piety and stoicism of a so-called “small people” adrift in liberal, English-speaking North America: in the early 1950s, he actually campaigned for Maurice Duplessis, the ultra-conservative premier who clung to a parochial, insular vision of Quebec. And he suffered humiliation. In 1954, having publicly challenged Campbell about the NHL’s discriminatory treatment of French-Canadian players, he was forced to make a grovelling apology, and to post a $1,000 bond against future bouts of pique.

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