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Twin Billed Terrorism

Posted by :James Howden On : February 24, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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It was necessary to get away from Frank and Gordon (God help me, but I liked dem beavers) and the rest of the Olympic circus on my television, and the mighty Mayfair Cinema gave me a perfect excuse. (I’m normally a Bytowne Cinema loyalist, but the twin bill was tough to resist. Capital readers, these are Ottawa’s two best ways to see the best films. Check ’em out, and then you’ll be glad you read this.)

Yes, it was double-header terrorism: Steven Spielberg’s Munich and a film by the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad called Paradise Now. I staggered out of the Mayfair feeling a bit bludgeoned, and on the 360 degree lookout for spies and assassins and suicide bombing candidates. Almost everybody I saw was a suspect, and why not?

Munich is anything but subtle in its effect, though it tries to be nuanced in its discussion of the ethics of violence. We follow the hand-picked Avenging Angel of the Israeli secret police, the Mossad, as he systematically (though uncertainly) exterminates the Palestinians behind the Munich Olympic massacre of 1972. At least, Avner (laconically played by Eric Bana) is assured that the disturbingly human, even charming men that he incinerates, ventilates and mutilates are, indeed, the bad guys. He wonders. He asks questions. He and his team keep on blasting.

Spielberg is at great pains to do two main things. First, he does not want to come across as a Jewish apologist for Israeli policies. We recall the full horror of Munich in documentary footage (Peter Jennings on the ground for ABC) and painful recreations of the hostage-taking and the killings of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. However, Munich insists that we  also get to know the Palestinian victims of Israeli revenge (beyond the several hundred Palestinian peasants killed in the air assaults that immediately followed the Munich conflagration). One is a literary scholar. Another is a diplomat with a lovely French wife and an adorable daughter. A third is an altogether likable guy who shares some hotel balcony chit-chat with Avner.

Mr. Spielberg’s second imperative is to stun us with the violence of their various demises, and that of the dozens of other graphically depicted bits of savagery in the film. It works. We’re supposed to be compromised by the gulf between the carnage and the (often) appealing camaraderie of Avner’s team, just as we are by the presentation of sympathetic characters on the Palestinian side. (Spielberg includes, for example, a most unlikely tête à tête in a stairwell between Avner and a young, preternaturally eloquent operative who delivers the Palestinian side of the story.) So, moral ambiguity is the order of the day, and the doubtful utility of violence is hammered at in an extraordinarily violent way.

And yes, I was stunned, but somehow not too deeply moved; riveted, but not very involved. Acting takes a distant third place to spectacle and philosophical debate, though Geoffrey Rush as Avner’s shadowy chief is terrific, and Daniel Craig is compelling as the blunt, remorseless thug of the Israeli team (and not only because we’re wondering how those bright blue eyes and blonde hair became so furiously Zionist). But though we are required to sympathize with Avner—his ghostly heroic father, his cold mother, his radiantly pregnant and pretty wife—I didn’t, much. It’s just a massively ambitious movie that can’t quite sustain the weight of all that it is trying to be and do. And those monologues! Still, it is strong and thoughtful stuff.

It was Paradise Now that really took me in. It’s ambitious, too; it’s the story of two young men from Nablus getting ready to die for the Palestinian cause. Their chance for martyrdom arrives, and we watch their preparations with fascination, dismay and even a few quiet laughs. (For Israelis, though, I’m sure the dismay was torturous and the humour rather bitter.) In blunt contrast to Munich, the violence is implicit. Hany Abu-Assad shows us life in Palestine, without some of the obvious tugging at heartstrings that Spielberg is prone to. Against the war-ruined (but often lively) backdrop of Nablus — everything was filmed there and in Bethlehem, if I remember rightly — we are shown the lives of Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Saïd (Kais Nashef), a couple of car mechanics and close friends who are shuffling through their fairly pointless days.

Khaled is excitable — the closest thing to violence in the film is him taking a crowbar to a difficult customer’s front fender — while Saïd, the still centre of the movie, is quiet and diffident. He eventually emerges from his morose silence to quietly but powerfully speak the thematic heart of the piece. Yes, it’s another monologue, unfortunately, and the only real misstep in the film. “A life without dignity is worthless,” he tells a militant leader, trying to convince him to allow the suicide operation set for Tel Aviv to go forward after a false start. I couldn’t believe the silence of this father confessor, but I did understood the deep sadness in Saïd’s eyes. In this picture, we are shown the hopeless lethargy and the chronic indignation that can make suicide bombing seem a worthy option, but it is far from propaganda. Abu-Hassad, with his frank depiction of the clumsiness and hypocrisy of the “martyrdom operation” recruiters, as well as a brief but fiery rebuttal of violence by Saïd’s pretty new friend, Suha (Lubna Azabal), is no advocate for terrorism.

The quiet balance of the director’s approach is what allows Warner Independent Productions to promote Paradise Now with the tag line, “From the most unexpected place, comes a bold new call for peace.” I’m not sure that’s what the movie is, because aside from one stagey soliloquy, it mainly does what any good storyteller should. It shows, it doesn’t tell. I guess that’s what Spielberg tried to do with the special effects violence, though it becomes too blatant. Munich falters when he lapses into telling, and this is one of the reasons I found myself more moved and intrigued by the more gentle yet deeply suspenseful arc of Paradise Now. Both are eminently worth seeing, but I’m not sure if I’d recommend a double bill.

Women (and Women) First

Posted by :James Howden On : February 22, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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First things first: I come not to bury the Canadians, but to praise them. Cindy Klassen made her fourth Turin medal a golden one in the 1500 metres and right behind her was another Canuck, Kristina Groves. I think it was Klassen that I heard interviewed – another of these wonderfully appealing, superb-role-model Canadian women – who voiced the thought that speedskating was the most beautiful sporting movement there is. And it’s true: all that power, all that glide, all that grace, all that rhythm and sway.

I can remember a small-town school gymnasium with a TV on a stand. It was September 1972, and we were watching game 8 of the series with the Soviets. I remember dancing and yelling like a fool — we all were — when Paul Henderson scored The Goal. I went on to spend thousands more hours in high school gyms as athlete and especially as coach, and the CBC television inset of Klassen’s old high school gym rocking as she rolled just about made me burst. Those kids will be walking on air for a week. Sport is good. Now, Bob Knight is no model for me as a coach, but I admire his mind and his resolve. And he said it true when he noted the value of sports in a school: “It’s pretty hard to rally around a math class.”

Yes, and the Klassens and the Groves and that sweet surprise gold in the cross-country sprint by Chandra Crawford (and silver in that crazy short-track skating relay), all these great performances by Canuck women are almost certain to be bumped aside by a rather predictable loss by the men’s hockey team. Stumbling through the round robin got them Russia, and the Russians were just better. I am an official member of the Alexander Ovechkin fan club, and not just for that enormous winner he scored. He’s electric  out on the ice, power and speed and skill. Whew! Sad to see our boys go down, but the Russians played not only a victorious but a beautiful brand of hockey.

And how’s this for analysis? Sam, my five-year-old, is learning to skate on our Tiny Perfect Backyard Rink™ and his hockey baptism is coming along nicely, but he’s never really watched a game before. He came in to watch the last few minutes of Russia-Canada, and though he had trouble finding the puck, he quickly began to be able to follow the game and knew which team was in red. He heard his old man moaning a bit, but he came up with this insight completely on his own: “Hey, don’t go in the corner, go to the net!” And on that wide Olympic surface, Ovechkin and company were regularly able to get to prime scoring territory while the Canadians spent most of their time in the offensive zone mucking in the corners. It was obvious even to a little sprout like Sam. Grinders ‘R Us, even with our best guys (?) on the ice. Sigh.

A Win is a Win, But…

Posted by :James Howden On : February 21, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Well, the scoreboard read Canada 3, Czech Republic 2 in Olympic Men’s Hockey, but it’s surely another of those cases where a win isn’t that helpful, and I’m not just talking about getting a different quarter-final draw than the Russians. It’s not helpful because, as one commentator quoted Canadian hockey man John Muckler as saying, “You never criticize a win.” And there’s probably not enough time to learn and apply anything from that game anyway, but I can’t see us beating the Russians if their goaltending is decent.

That first-period 3-0 lead was a relief at the time, but it seemed to make the announcers think the Canadians were playing well. They were better than they’d been, Brodeur was good in the net, and he was about to be sensational in the second and third periods where the Czechs skated and skilled rings around our guys. But even in the first period, I thought the Czechs had more good chances, and without two gift goals would have been down only a singleton. I can understand Canadian national soccer sides playing an effort-based, toughness-centred, keep-it-simple style, because they are consistently out-talented. But I hear us crowing all the time about the wealth of Canadian talent available to selectors. There is sure a lot of volume, but if we are indeed more talented than other nations, it sure seems odd that we play the game we invented as if underdog pluck and desperation were the only cards we had.

Olympic Hit List, Part X

Posted by :James Howden On : February 20, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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When it comes to the individual Olympic sports, I’m pretty much a traditionalist. Alpine skiing does it for me far more than snowboard stuff does. The latter, in addition to the aggressively care-less attitude of some of the competitors, strikes me as a sport that Americans invented because they weren’t dominating skiing. Sorry for the cynicism. Anyhow, the deep traditions of alpine skiing mean at least a couple of things. One, there is a history to the sport, and great competitors and brilliant events, that give greater lustre to the renewal of a relatively longstanding event. This leads inevitably to a second fact: because of this history, there is also an enormous body of young athletes and experienced coaches and a competitive system that produces greatness.

In so many of the marginal or new-kid-on-the-block sports, on the other hand, I have to wonder, “How many people actually DO this?” Can’t remember who wrote it – Stephen Brunt from the Globe and Mail is a likely candidate – but one retrospective on Canadian performances at the Sydney Olympics argued that the greatest was Kevin Sullivan’s 5th place in the 1500 metres. Given the number of possible countries and athletes vying for this elemental and prestigious track race, an Olympic top 5 is worth any number of synchronized diving medals. Not many Africans (not many anyones) have the facilities, the economic privilege, of even recreational diving.

I can’t help thinking about beach volleyball. (Warning: a severe rant warning has been posted. Too late to say “Don’t get me started!!” Sorry.) No doubt these are good players – I’ll ignore for the moment that over-the-hill Real Volleyball players can then be put out to pasture on the beach – but this should not be an Olympic sport. It exists because of partial female nudity; the men’s competition is tacked on for gender equity reasons. Because it is an Olympic Sport, we get to watch shots of (admittedly quite remarkable) upper and lower female cleavages, salacious views that would normally be intolerable during day- or prime-time viewing. It’s cheesecake. Soft porn with spiking, mud wrestling with sunglasses and some bonus athleticism.

I won’t even go into how repetitive and limited it is compared to the variety and power of the real thing, actual Volleyball. I’ve played a little beach and, though I’m a poor volleyball player, I liked it. I know how good these beach players are, and I’m sure the game makes for great off-season development. If I was a volleyball coach, all my players would be encouraged to play. I was a basketball coach, and I wanted my guys to play all the summer driveway one-on-one, all the half-court 3 on 3 in the park that they could. But that doesn’t mean I’d want Asphalt Basketball in the Olympics. The real game is already there.

Hockey Fright in Canada

Posted by :James Howden On : February 19, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Let me be the 7,758,901st to join the national hand wringing in Canada over the desperate fate of Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team. Let’s say, first, what it’s NOT about.

It’s not about Wayne Gretzky’s choice of wives or assistant coaches. The possible existence of a betting ring involving an NHL coach (Rick Tocchet, not the Wayner) is a serious matter for the integrity of league play, but it has nothing to do with Canada’s performance in Turin. And now for a few suggestions about what is going on.

Europeans play great hockey, and it is a generally more highly skilled brand than Canadian kids are encouraged, coached or, I daresay, even allowed to play. (So long as Don Cherry’s anti-finesse opinions are taken as gospel in Canadian hockey circles, a genuine commitment to skill development has serious obstacles. The kind of Canuck chauvinism that he quivers with makes learning from what the European system does well more difficult than it ought to be. They have not hesitated, it seems to me, to learn from the best of Canadian hockey – and there’s a lot to love. And emulate.)

If having the best team win is your object, the Olympic “lose and go home” system after the round robin is not a good system. The nature of the hockey beast – especially that dominating presence, the Hot (or horseshoes-up-his-hind-end) Goaltender – does not lend itself to one-game eliminations, although it does allow for vastly inferior teams to ice the occasional miracle, which makes for sappy but popular movies. (See: Lake Placid, men’s hockey. The United States got to have its cake and eat it, too, being the sympathetic underdog and still getting the golden glory. Perfect! Sweden’s defeat of the American women, despite being outshot by more than 2 to 1, is the karmic companion for the Americans. Sweden’s turn to make the movie.) Hockey is best played in elimination series, but I’m flaying a dead giraffe. That’s the Olympics. Deal with it.

It’s too early to tell if the Gretzky Gang, though, have chosen the right players. Our two most mobile defenders are hurt, it’s true. With four years between Olympics, we may have favoured experience too much; it downplays the experience gained by the youngsters in between Games, not to mention the eroding skills of vets who were on top in ’02. It seems certain that we would have been loyal to Lemieux and Yzerman had they not had the grace to bow out. On that big surface, with all that youth and speed, Canada would have been hobbled by them, I’m sorry to have to say about such wonderful players. Like a lot of people, I wish that Staal and Crosby were there; watching the young Russians, with their furious speed and skill, is breathtaking when they’re going well.

I repeat: it’s too early to tell.

Bobsleigh Silver

Posted by :James Howden On : February 19, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Well, now I’m compromised. I hate it when Canadians win at sports I don’t respect much. (See: Sydney Olympics, synchronized diving. Sheesh.) The bobsled competition reminds me of what Larry Walker said when the Rockies outfielder wasn’t Canada’s top male athlete after a National League MVP season: “I got beat by a car.” (The nominal winner was Jacques Villeneuve, whose career went south when he no longer drove that car.) It’s not quite the same situation, except that when the equipment is as important as the athletes, I just can’t get too excited. I’m irritated, too, when success looks far less interesting to the TV audience than failure does. (Take a memo, snowboard cross.) The morbid allure of catastrophe can’t be a criterion for a good and worthy sports event.

Unless they’re Canadians named Pierre Lueders and Lascelles Brown and they’re winning a silver medal. (And refusing to talk, afterwards, and to their credit, about their suspicions on the mysterious but widely alleged modifications to the gold medal German sled. Digression complete. Well, except for noting the ironic timing of the similar grumbling after the Daytona 500 was won by a car – yes, I said a car, and not Rusty or Jimmy or whoever it was at the wheel – whose chief mechanic was suspended for illegal monkeying. But I digressed again.) Lueders is a tough and competitive guy. Brown seems a pleasant fellow, too, and his story of getting his Canuck citizenship in the nick so that he could compete was a sweet one. So was Lueders’s reaction to it as he hearkened back to understand why his own immigrant parents had come to Canada and how lucky he felt as a result. Go, Canada! Go, Citizenship and Immigration Canada!

But come on. The sport is fast, it has deep roots, but when the brakeperson can make the Olympics a few months after their first run, as was the case with a couple of Canadian sleds and presumably some others, it’s somewhat discredited in my mind. Find a not-quite-good-enough track athlete or football player, and teach him or her how to push a souped-up toboggan for 5 seconds, jump in and pray. Olympia! Sorry, Pierre, and you, too, Lascelles, but bobsled doesn’t make the Howdy Olympics. If pressed to pick a sliding sport for the Big Owe, I’m surprised to be leaning toward skeleton, the crazy, X-games-ish, new kid on the adrenalin-rush block. Tradition isn’t my only criterion, apparently.

You Call THAT Olympic?

Posted by :James Howden On : February 17, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Snowboard cross. Yes, friends and neighbours, if the inclusion of snowboarding in the Olympics didn’t strike you as JunkSportFriendly enough, we get to combine it with braying hopped-up motorbikes ‘n’ mud (and, of course, roller derby) to get this goofy thing. “Boardercross” the cool kids call it. Oh, it crossed the border, all right. OUT of the Olympics, say I! It emphatically lands on the Howdy Hitlist of alleged sports to be dumped from the Summer and Winter Olympics. More on the List anon.

One good thing about “boardercross”, though: it did get me to snap the friggin’ television off. The women’s final, I decided, was something I would watch because there were, after all, two of our great Canadian girls in it, ranked one and two, Ricker and Maltais, an Anglophone and a Francophone, storybook time! Storybook, that is, if you like trainwrecks. So Maëlle Ricker goes down in a scary heap for no reason the cameras picked up. (And has at least a concussion, apparently.) Dominique Maltais goes flying through the netting. Two to go, ye smiting and petulant gods, but I’d had enough. “This is ridiculous.” Click.

This was almost as bad as an overmatched but fabulously lucky Australian somehow becoming the short-track speedskating champion in Salt Lake City. (Yes, the Steven Bradbury factor. “To Bradbury” is now in the Aussie lexicon, a verb meaning to succeed when you had no business doing so. Luckily – well, by “virtue” of being slower than his competitors – he avoided the crashes of the fast guys. I like it when “slow and steady” works in the steadfast course of a long life, but not in an Olympic race.) (Yes, and short-track speedskating is out, too. What’s next in the Summer Olympics: 400 metre hurdle races run in high school gyms? Now there’s an idea…) Anyway, back to boardercross: I flipped it off in disgust, and therefore missed the Olympifarcical sight of the (should’ve been) easy winner, the American Lindsey Jacobellis, falling flat on her hot dog buns and allowing a surprised Swiss, Tanja Frieden, to Bradbury her way to one of the silliest gold medals ever awarded.

Boardercross is too random, too made-for-TV, and the Olympic event has little enough importance to the competitors themselves that a show-off move is worth the risk of winning, and chaotic results are met with a shrug. That’s boardercross. Yes, my point, exactly. Gonzo. (And don’t come back.)

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SKILLS, STUPID: Hockey, Learning & Heart

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2006
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Category: On Second Thought

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(This article was written in January 2003, just after the Canadian Junior Hockey Team had lost the gold medal in the World Championships of that year. They lost to the Russians, which is no shame, but...)

Silver is silver, and we can still bask nationally in the sun of Salt Lake, but there was something in that oh-so-close loss to the Russian juniors that was irritating.  Our man Fleury was superb in goal and probably won his M.V.P. award on the strength of that last game, and the Canadian boys were plucky but overmatched.  It really wasn’t that close.  The thing that got to me, though, was the tearful commentary of one of the lads, trying to figure out what had happened to him, his mates, his nation.  “We gave everything we had, we played with lots of heart…”  Ugh.  Heart.  When will we realize that’s not enough?

Of course they played with heart.  That’s a given, isn’t it?  Yes, and our Canadian men fought with brilliant heart at Dieppe, too, but we remember equally the criminal lack of preparation with which they launched themselves against a mighty foe.  Please don’t mistake me, I don’t equate the two enterprises; I just wonder, with the 30th anniversary of the Summit Series having just passed, when Canadian hockey men will finally admit that we can learn about Our Game from people who don’t come from Kingston, Ontario?  Captain Scottie Upshall did (“that’s a great team over there, they must be doing some things right in Russia”), and it’s astonishing, from where I sit, that we still teach our young players that heart is pre-eminent.

The situation in other sports is instructive.  Holger Osieck, a German, was brought in to coach our national men’s soccer side.  He deplored the Canadian style of play, which involved a lot of long hopeful kicks and furious running—can you say “dump and chase”?—and immediately required ball-control strategies.  Not only that, he had asked for and been granted the authority to dictate his methods to the feeder elements of the national program; there is a unity of purpose here that is strikingly absent in Canadian hockey.

Last summer’s World Championships of basketball provide an example that Canadian hockey-lovers should recognize.  The Americans entered their “Dream Team” in Barcelona in 1992, their college all-star teams having lost in ’72 (“we wuz robbed!”) and ’88 (“oh-oh, they’re catchin’ up!”).  The youngsters were vulnerable, but when they sent Michael, Larry, and Magic, it was no contest.  Until, ten years later, it was.  The national hand-wringing after NBA players fell so clumsily last summer was eerily familiar to Canadians.  ESPN commentator Jay Bilas, a former Duke University star, was most eloquent.  Even when the Americans still had their chance to win (after losing to Argentina in pool play), Bilas was sounding the alarm.  We can’t just throw all-star teams together.  We need to prepare.  Our kids aren’t learning skills.  They play too much and practise too little.  The Europeans have better fundamentals…Sound familiar?  Their first wake-up call came in 1972, when the Soviets won Olympic gold in Munich, but their true dominance of basketball remained unquestioned.  Last summer, for American hoops, was a closer analogy to the periodic bouts of Canadian dismay that began in ’72.  Our experience in self-examination allows this prediction.  American basketball chauvinists will prevail.  They’ll learn some small technical lessons from Indianapolis, but dismiss it as an aberration.  Shrill voices will occasionally demand a fundamental rethinking of the way “our game” is approached.  They will be ignored.  And the rest of the world will continue to improve…

The Americans could learn a lot from our experience as the erstwhile “first nation” of hockey (or England’s in soccer, for that matter, which finally, desperately, hired Sven Goran Eriksson as its first foreign national coach; imagine that happening in USA Basketball, or Hockey Canada!).  But they won’t.  We haven’t learned.  Our pride in the Canadian Way to Play is quaint, but it is increasingly relegating our top athletes to “role player” status, while the NHL imports its dazzle.  What’s worse is that we’ve accepted this so completely, even romanticizing it as the demonstration of genuine passion, true “heart”, and the virtues of “old-time hockey”.  Amazingly, even the careers of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux have not removed a rather defensive attitude of suspicion toward players, Canadian or otherwise, who are distinguished by their skill and cleverness.  Gretzky seems poised to act as the national face of hockey, and his insistence on a game of puck movement and speed for our Olympic teams bears great promise.  Are Canadian youngsters, and especially coaches, more likely to hear that quadrennial voice, or Coach’s Corner on Saturday evenings?

Hint—yesterday’s National Post had this headline on its front page:  “Oh, stop crying already! Canada still rules hockey”.  Accompanying stats in which Canada had a record superior to the Russians (leading NHL scorers, Olympic wins, world junior wins) was an article peppered with the observations of, you guessed it, Don Cherry.  We were missing players that their NHL clubs wouldn’t release, and so on.  For all the truth contained in the article, it’s a reminder of how defensive Canadian hockey types can get, a sort of emotional left-wing lock.  This shouldn’t be a dark period of national self-examination; Lord knows we have more serious matters to debate. But let’s hope that we teach our kids to better know and love the wizardry and speed of the game.  The heart will follow.

Hockey, Russian Style

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2006
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Category: All About Sports

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Did you see the Russians today? Lord, they play a dazzling brand of hockey! The Red Men looked spectacular in a dominating 5-0 win versus Sweden. Gosh, I wish we were paying more attention to how the Russians train their kids to skate and handle. They are sometimes accused of being selfish, but much of that comes from the resentment of the less-skilled. You know: “Oh, so-and-so’s a hot dog. Yeah, he’s good BUT…” You could even see it in the way that Reverend Cherry rumbled and threatened brimstone last year (remember this?) when Sidney Crosby scored with a lacrosse-like high-altitude wraparound goal. Sounds like sour Grapes to me. (Yes, I meant to do that.) (If you missed the pun, please proceed directly to the next paragraph.)

I like to make sweeping diagnoses that lend gravitas and grandeur to things like, oh, hockey. Try this on for size. In Canada, we still have a lingering and rather Puritan suspicion of the arts, and you can see it even in our approach to hockey. We like determination, a workmanlike approach, aw-shucks humility, and straight lines. Up and down the wing. Shoot it out. Dump it in. Keep it simple. Don’t be a smarty-pants, young fella! Who do you think you are? Russia, meanwhile, has a deep tradition of reverence for dance, music, poetry and all forms of expression. They revere (too much in some cases, no argument here) the great ones, the Talents. They are much less likely than we are, it seems from the outside, to routinely cut down their “tall poppies” for being so gosh-darned, well, tall. So skill and speed and creativity and, yes, artistry are all valued and nurtured in their players. So they don’t play in straight lines. Their number one objective is not to throw the puck into the corner and then grub and grunt to get it back…

At a certain point in the history of our great rivalry, the Russians realized that they could learn something from the legendary Canadian “grit” that we all love to talk about. They will dump the puck and chase it now when teams sit back and clog the blueline. They can be tough in the corners (after all, there’s not a long learning curve for those skills — you have to be tough and you have to be willing). They can cycle the puck in those corners, too, because who else can turn so nimbly and accelerate so quickly? But what have Canadians learned from Russians? Not every Russian can dazzle like Alexander Ovechkin — he is a prodigy — but why is it that seemingly every pro-ready Russian can stickhandle at top speed and get that wrong-foot shot away instantly while even the great Canadians can’t? I answered this question more fully in an article you can find here, but basically it comes down to Canadian chauvinism: we think we’re the best, and therefore have nothing to learn from anybody.

Canada still has far more players in the NHL, the world’s best league, than any other country. We still do lots of international winning, and our juniors did it again this year. But if we weren’t so arrogant about it, maybe we’d have more of the showstopping stars and not only the guys in the orchestra pit or the corps de ballet. Sorry for the arts references, but you know what I mean. Maybe football’s a better example: we produce the hockey equivalent of offensive lineman and tight ends, but the QBs and RBs and wideouts are rare. (And this is no mere analogy: ask any CFL roster!) I want the Canadian lads to lead in the skills department as much as they do in the realms of desire and toughness, and I don’t think they need to be mutually exclusive. Not, at least, if we’re willing to learn something from the Russian (or Czech or Swedish…) way of developing hockey players. As the saying goes, It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Pre-Packaged Romance

Posted by :James Howden On : February 15, 2006
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Category: At First Glance

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Yes, it’s all about the loving. I don’t care much for Hallmark, for commercially driven expressions of personal devotion. But my lady likes Valentine’s Day, and so do I. (There may even be a causal connection between those two statements. Happy wife, happy life, someone smarter than me has said.) No roses this time, and I forgot the chocolate [note to self – it’s never too late for truffles], but big son had little son under control, we were in the Star of Siam for Thai goodies, and my hand-scribbled card did the trick again. [Note to self: it was an interesting choice to guess what the Cyrillic script meant on that Russian card in the bottom of the correspondence drawer. Happy New Year?? Yikes. So close to goodness, though, and it did have some hearts on it.] There has to be something good about being married to a struggling writer. Hallmark needs me!