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Encore, Nash?

Posted by :James Howden On : April 15, 2007
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Don’t look now, but is Mr. Nash hunting for his third MVP? Surely the short, tat-free Canadian couldn’t be voted the Association’s best again? How many shoes is that going to sell?

After his first win in 2005, he proceeded to play and fill stat columns even better last season. The NBA hasn’t seen players that improve on MVP years. It was weird. He crosses over and spins past obstacles that other players won’t. And it’s happening again; a few games ago, he posted his career high in “double-doubles” for a season, and that’s not about caffeine and cholesterol, Tim Hortons lovers! He has been in double figures in two major categories – in his case points and assists – more than fifty times this year, higher than in either of his two MVP seasons. He’s shooting the three-pointer for an absurdly high percentage (46%), and shooting in general (53% from the floor overall) among the lead leaders in that category, who are generally big men, dunk machines like the über-athletic receiver of many of Nash’s immaculate deliveries, Amare Stoudemire.

The Suns are in a playoff push, and blew out the Jazz in Utah last night for their fifth straight win. Nash needed to score only 13, but fired 18 assists without a single turnover. (A 2-1 ratio of assists to turnovers is considered good work for an NBA guard.) Sheesh. He’s on everybody’s MVP ballot, and people might be forced to vote for him again, yea though the marketing machine would surely wish for another more poster-friendly young god of the hardwood. And on a weekend for honouring great sporting pioneers, well, Nash is no Longboat or Robinson, but he is a thoughtful and worthy bearer of the mantle of great athlete who is also a fine man.

Sports Justice Pioneer: I Meant to Tell You

Posted by :James Howden On : April 4, 2007
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Something in yesterday’s post about the guys from Concrete Hoops – young men who see sport as a chance to better their communities – reminded me of a story that I read last fall. Chances are excellent that you missed it, too, so let me introduce you to Peter Norman, today’s posthumous hero.

You may have heard of the Black Power salute given by 200 metre Olympic gold medallist Tommie Smith and his American compatriot, bronze medallist John Carlos. It was 1968, the year of the Mexico City Olympics. There were also bitter riots over Mexican poverty. Yes, and there were also the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and a level of social unrest that American culture had never seen before, or since. At least, not in the same way. During the medal ceremony, as the Star Spangled Banner played, Smith stood erect, bowed his head and raised a black-gloved right hand. Carlos raised his left.

Conservative America was outraged. Smith and Carlos were dismissed from the Olympic team for their perceived disrespect of country, and their athletic careers were over. I was too young to understand the implications of what happened then, but I was far from alone in missing entirely the significance of the silver medallist who shared the Black Power podium. He was a white Australian named Peter Norman. When he died last fall, Carlos and Smith were pallbearers. John Carlos said of Norman, “Peter was a piece of my life….I was his brother. He was my brother. That’s all you have to know.”

Norman, it turns out, was not an accidental bystander. He was a fellow activist, and though he did not raise a gloved fist, he stood beside his fellow athletes not only by athletic chance but by shared conviction. (The story goes that, when Carlos realized he’d forgotten his black gloves back at the hotel, Peter Norman suggested that each of them wear one.) In Australia, it was noticed that he showed no surprise at Smith’s and Carlos’s actions, that he wore the same badge on his Aussie warm-ups as they did: Olympic Project for Human Rights. He was vilified. He never ran for Australia again. He also never apologized for standing quietly for a principle that, to him, was a simple fact: that racism tainted the world of sport at many levels, and that it had no place.

There is a film on Norman coming out sometime this year. Meanwhile, it is once again thanks to American writer Dave Zirin that this significant passing, on the other side of the globe, did not pass me by. You can read his very fine tribute to Norman here. He called it “Brother of the Fist: The Passing of Peter Norman”.

CIS Championship Sunday

Posted by :James Howden On : March 22, 2007
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Game 9 (Consolation Final): UBC v. Concordia.  Now, they pay attention to winning streaks in RavensLand, where I live, as witness Carleton Athletics’ chronicling of an (admittedly incredible) 87-game winning streak in league and playoff action, which excluded a couple of Canadian losses and several to NCAA schools in pre-season action. (I believe that the gods of basketball struck them down when they went for number 88 last season, which would have tied the immortal streak of the “Walton Gang”, the early-70s UCLA Bruins. That streak had no exceptions or provisos, nothing but wins.) I bring this up to point out that Carleton’s current winning streak at Nationals, an absurd 18 games, includes their consolation-side wins in the last Halifax appearance in which they did NOT win the big trophy. I wasn’t that aware of Carleton basketball then, although I wondered about this Dave Smart character, a young guy I’d met at basketball camps, a fine and rather funky player who was going back to Queen’s to complete his last season of eligibility before turning to his burning ambition to coach. I was curious to know if he’d be any good on the sidelines. HA! When his Ravens, in ’01, lost in the opening round at Nationals, I have no doubt that they took the consolation games with the utmost seriousness. Shoot, practice scrimmages at Carleton look like life-and-death struggles.

But this year, the nation’s number 1 and number 2 seeds ended the tournament playing for very few of the marbles. It certainly looked that way, too, especially for the UBC Thunderbirds. I’m not saying they didn’t TRY, for goodness’ sake, but, as the hockey folks say, they didn’t play with desperation. (The Ravens, meanwhile, more than any team I’ve ever paid attention to, come close to treating each game, each possession, as a matter of great urgency and team pride.) The ‘Birds’ Casey Archibald was sweet to watch, once again, at least when he had the ball in his hands, and finished with 89 points in the tournament. He doesn’t rebound or defend with a lot of energy, and Kevin Hanson and his staff don’t seem to require it of him. And so Patrick Perrotte, Benjamin Sormonte and the Buckley brothers took the Consolation title for Concordia. It just meant more to them, and this seemed clear. Concordia has an ever-deepening pool of Montreal basketball talent to mine, and though Perrotte and Sormonte are through, maybe these Nationals wins do matter to the future of Stingers basketball. I think Coach Smart would say that “meaningless” consolation wins in ’01 helped prepare for the Raven Conquests of ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06…

Game 10 (The CIS Championship, live on TSN, not that the rest of the tournament got much media attention…): Carleton v. Brandon. Yes, readers, you know the result: …AND ’07! Brandon, a prairie school with a long (and mainly distinguished?) tradition of attracting American ballplayers to the middle of Manitoba, was good. They are very quick and skilled, but I didn’t believe they could gut out the kind of championship intensity that I knew Carleton would bring. But they did, and they never cracked. Like UBC, they are very talented, starting a 6’9” basketball vagabond from Las Vegas and three terrific athletes from Quebec, especially the guard tandem of Yul Michel and Dany Charlery, both from Montreal. (They also start a Brandon boy, Chad Jacobsen. He was superb, and hit one of the gutsier shots you’ll ever see to keep Brandon in it at the end. He must’ve grown up worshipping the great teams of the Jerry Hemmings era, when Coach H brought four CIS titles to the Plains.)

If you watched on TSN, you saw what I thought was a hokey, cliché-ridden and rather stiff you been disrespected all year! pre-game speech from their young coach, Barnaby Craddock. But maybe this stuff still works. Despite being held to 23 points fewer than their previous season low, the fastbreak-happy Bobcats were tough as nails against Carleton. Their mental resilience was remarkable, because they are not used to playing the game this way. And for the first time, the Ravens’ two-time CIS Player of the Year, Osvaldo Jeanty, played only a solid game in the national final, where he had been the Player of the Game in each of his previous four appearances. Mind you, although his shooting was off, he still fired 15, defended like a madman, and hit a circus shot to (nearly) seal the game. But this time, it was junior Aaron Doornekamp, the fourth of Smart’s nephews to star for him, who was the tournament and championship game MVP. A finesse forward, he rebounded furiously and his two late threes were the killer strokes in the final 52-49 slugfest over the Bobcats.

But don’t look now, Carleton-haters – and there are more than a few in CIS circles – but the Ravens did it again AND they return 11 of the top 12 guys in their rotation, most of them for two or more seasons. They were a young squad this year; their serious opponents here will all lose several fifth-year contributors. And who knows what Smart’s high school recruiting class will look like? Certainly there are many young star athletes that won’t go to Carleton because of the lofty and incessant demands of playing for Dave Smart, but kids like to win. The best (and smartest) young players also can’t ignore that he’s with the Canadian national team as its top assistant coach. What will happen to Ravens’ opponents if they actually get a dominating post player? Or the creative point guard they’ve played without for the last two national championships?

But they also won’t have Osvaldo Jeanty any more, and that is a leadership gap that won’t be filled anytime soon. A basketball lifer close to the Carleton program has it right: “Os is far from the best basketball player I’ve watched in the CIS, but he might be the greatest one.” Along, perhaps, with McMaster’s great point guard, Steve Maga, Jeanty has fewer of the natural gifts that hoops junkies look for than any other national Player of the Year, let alone other two-time winners. He is not tall or long. He is not especially fast. He does not leap well, and has at best only reasonable quickness. What he does have are a fabulous work ethic, a phenomenal ability to accept coaching, superb hands, and what John Wooden put at the top of his famous Pyramid of Success: Competitive Greatness. Real love of a hard battle. And the will not only to win – and he has it in spades – but the will to prepare to win. I’m anxious to see how much the talented Mr. Doornekamp has absorbed from the captain in this last regard. He clearly has talent, and he clearly has the fire.

Pay attention, people. There’s something awfully special brewing in CIS basketball, has been for a good stretch, and most of the sporting public is missing a good story.

CIS Halifax: Day 2

Posted by :James Howden On : March 20, 2007
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This is stale-dated, unfortunately; I wasn’t able to post directly from Halifax, but here are my notes on Day 2 (Saturday’s semifinal play) of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championships.

Games 5 & 6 (Consolation Semifinals): The tournament’s top two seeds, Concordia and BC, overcame their first-round disappointments to advance on the Consolation side of the draw. Some consolation. It’s another distinguishing feature of the Canuck national final that there even IS a chance for first-round losers to play again; it is universally win-or-go-home in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, where even the third-place game in the Final Four was done away with 35 years ago. It’s hard for CIS athletes – especially those who genuinely believed that they were in the championship hunt – to commit mentally to the consolation round, but the competitive jones kicks in sooner or later as long as the game doesn’t get away from them early. For the administrators, it is simpler: Look, if we’re travelling all that way, we have to get at least two games. It’s money, but I’m not sure it makes even economic sense to play a game that nobody much wants to play or watch. At development levels, of course there has to be the chance to play the extra games, but with elite athletes? I don’t see the point, really. I must be missing something.

That having been said, top-seed Concordia pulled away from a lethargic Windsor team that was never really in it. Down 20 midway through the first period, the Lancers made a minor comeback in the second but never made it interesting. Yesterday’s doubts were confirmed: Windsor’s Wilson Cup home-court win over Carleton, which had little bearing on seeding for the Final 8, was their national championship, emotionally. The Stingers’ Patrick Perrotte, after a tough game one, was dominant inside against the Lancers. He’s an odd-looking player, a “Mister 5 by 5” who plays the post at a wide-bodied 6’1”. You’d never pick him out of a police lineup as a basketball player – he looks more like the guy who owns (and is the bouncer for) the slightly seedy bar downtown – but he’s powerful, skilled, very intelligent and has remarkably nimble feet for a man of his heft. Perrotte’s running mate, Benjamin Sormonte, also shot the lights out.

In the second consolation game, a casual UBC team allowed an Acadia club, scarlet from their 48-point spanking by Carleton the night before, to recover some pride. It seemed inevitable, though, that the Thunderbirds — maybe the most talented crew in the country — came back from a large early deficit to win fairly comfortably. Casey Archibald was a revelation, seemingly able to dial up a graceful offensive sally whenever it was needed. What a beautiful jumpshot. “How is this guy not on the national team?” was a conversation running through my section; he wouldn’t dunk on international competition as he does here, but he’s a 6’4″ guard who can shoot the long bomb and the pull-up mid-range shot. At this level, he takes over when he feels like it, and notched another 30-point effort. At the same time, the other thread running through the knowledgeable fans in the Carleton section was that he “couldn’t play for us”. Too soft? Not committed to defence? I’m not sure what was meant by that, other than Ravens Pride, but it was great to see him play after all that I’ve read. He’s the real deal, and what a great career, despite the T-Birds’ chronic failures at the Nationals.

Game 7 (Championship Semifinal): Brandon v. Saint Mary’s. After the Huskies upset Concordia in the opener, this game was exhibit B of the competitive advantage that the small Atlantic University Sport conference has had by virtue of hosting the Nationals for the past 24 years. Three times, for example, their conference runner-up has qualified as the 8th-seeded  host school and knocked off the tournament number one in the first round. It’s home cooking, baby, though not of the refereeing variety, at least not directly. But they’ve played at the Metro Centre frequently, which is a very different venue from the campus gyms that nearly all CIS games are played in, and Halifax comes out in force to yell for the Maritime teams. Here, the Huskies were decidedly outmanned against the Bobcats, but Brandon failed to put the finish on their 17-point second-half lead, and the loud crowd helped Saint Mary’s to come within three in a raucous run to the buzzer. When only one Atlantic school gets an automatic bid to Nationals over the next three years — they’re moving to Ottawa after their long Halifax engagement — things will be very different for the east-coast schools. Can AUS teams have anywhere near the success they’ve had during the Halifax years? One thing they won’t have: scoreboard “rally monkeys” bouncing and imploring the crowd to MAKE NOISE for Saint Mary’s. It clearly rattled the Bobcats, and gave renewed energy to a very tired group of Huskies.

Game 8 (Championship Semifinal): Ottawa v. Carleton. Round Four of the “Canal War” between these Capital rivals had the Carleton fans worried. OU gets up for the Ravens as they do for nobody else, and they had won two of the three tense struggles they’d had. I guessed that this would not be the case when it came to the Nationals, and my prediction of a relatively easy 13-point Carleton win suffered only from being too tentative. Carleton ground down a very game Ottawa team, which knew early in the second half that there were no more miracles in their toolkit. The Ravens were nearly as dominant, at times, as they had been in crushing Acadia in the first round. The lead got near 30, and the final spread was a startling 22 points. For those of you counting these things, that made for a 70-point margin of victory in Carleton’s first two games. If people wanted to see them go down, last year was the time to get them, when second team All-Canadian Aaron Doornekamp was out with a broken ankle. Astonishingly, the Ravens won anyway last year, and I can’t see anybody getting them now. They are SO hard to play against.

CIS: Finally in Halifax

Posted by :James Howden On : March 18, 2007
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Friday, March 16

After a long and wonderful drive down with son Ben, once upon a time a basketball player himself, I am in Halifax for the Canadian March Madness, the Canadian Interuniversity Sport men’s basketball championship. It’s been here for the past 24 years, and mainly because I was always coaching (or recovering from it) during the March Break, I’d never made the trip down. It comes to Ottawa, where I live, next year, so I wanted to see it before it left its Maritime home. I was excited.

And upon arrival, road-weary and just a bit late for Friday’s game 1, I had a little spasm of disappointment. My eighth-row seats were beyond the baseline, not foul-line high as I’d been led to believe. The programme had a hasty feel to it, including two photos of players from the favoured Atlantic school which hadn’t even qualified and one mystery photo in which the tiny shorts worn by the player proved it be at least a dozen years out-of-date. Leafing through, the listing of national Players of the Year (the Mike Moser Memorial Trophy) was not only incomplete, but it misspelled the name of Eli Pasquale, one of the greatest players in CIS history. (Never mind the substitution of “it’s” for “its”.) Brandon University, the second seed in the tournament, had incorrect numbers for most of its prime players that had to be revised at tipoff. High school stuff. The Metro Centre is a fine facility that (mostly) doesn’t overwhelm the event — good crowds here are six or seven thousand, and they have occasionally had more than 10,000 — but the mural of the Saint Mary’s Huskies, a local team, winning the ’99 championship also has a distinctly high school feel to it.

My excitement took a temporary dip, but I emerged from Disappointment Mode before long. Here are some other quick impressions from the Friday games, the four quarterfinal matches of this “Final 8” tourney. For game summaries and general tournament information, please go to the CIS tournament website here. What follows are some quick-and-filthy-clean impressions from this basketball vagabond.

Game 1: The number one seed was one I’d questioned, as the Concordia Stingers had run up victories in the small and undistinguished Quebec conference. And Upset Special it was, as the Saint Mary’s Huskies brought tears to the eyes of championship players from their glory days with a last-second victory. Having placed second in an upset-filled Atlantic qualifying tournament, the HomeBoys took full advantage of the friendly crowd and a curiously bland Concordia team. Sophomore Mark McLaughlin hit the winning free throw, and his toughness belies his slender frame. Nice player. Took me awhile to get into the thing, as the atmosphere I’d expected with an AUS team in it didn’t kick in ’til the last several minutes. When it did, it made a difference. Nothing like home cooking, and Stinger All-Canadian Perrotte was held down. Energizing finish.

Game 2: Brandon v. Windsor. Windsor had knocked off Carleton in the Ontario UA final in their own peculiar barn, and they looked good for a awhile in their first trip to the Nationals in ages, but they didn’t guard Brandon’s point Yul Michel well at all. He’s very quick, and was continually allowed to go right to his favourite moves. This one had the feeling of being over before it should’ve been. When Windsor was down 8, it felt like more. And soon it was. Chris Oliver, Windsor’s coach, is known as an uber-dedicated coach, one of the best technical minds that we have. He’s still a young guy, though, and a quiet, reserved presence on the bench. Maybe I just favour a more activist stance from a hoops coach, but I wonder if he has the fire to inspire. I think we’ll see, because I expect Windsor to be good for long while with him. Brandon is a very talented group. They were more than full measure for the win, and maybe Windsor’s big game was last weekend over Carleton, a great win for their young coach. For his players, maybe being here was enough.

Game 3: University of Ottawa v. University of British Columbia. OU, by contrast with Windsor, looked more ‘n ready to be at Nationals. Beating Carleton, the 4-time national champion, twice during league play will do that for you, as will a two-point loss to them in the OUA East final. Their intensity gave them an early jump on UBC, a talented two-seed, and the Gee-Gees have the horses to run with UBC. Their gifted young point guard, Josh Gibson-Bascome, sat for much of the end of the first half with two fouls, which allowed UBC back in to the game. Casey Archibald hit an effortless jumper to bring the Thunderbirds back to within two at half, but Gibson-Bascombe was tremendous in the second, seeming imperious in answering every UBC challenge. He dominated the first six minutes of the second, mainly with surgical passing. In the Carleton-flavoured contingent where I’m sitting, he’s not very popular, but he and his mates were very tough down the stretch, and UBC just didn’t defend well enough. And so continues the T-Bird tradition of national flameouts, and so another all-Ottawa grudge match is set up for the semi-finals.

Game 4: Carleton v. Acadia. Well, I gave away this one, but there wasn’t much surprise here. Acadia was a surprise winner in the Atlantic, maybe the third best team in the AUS, but put together some wins when it counted. Within five minutes, though CU wasn’t shooting well, I smelled blowout. The Ravens’ suffocating, truly obsessive rebounding and defence had the Axemen perched on their frustrated heels. Acadia depended so much on one All-Canadian guard, Paulo Santana (he’s good, but first team A-C? Come on), and ooh-aah shot-blocks and dazzling dimes. One problem: Carleton neither cares for nor allows much of that to happen. Acadia limped to the dressing room with 17 points at half, and Carleton was already up 21 without having too much going smoothly on offence. The second half was even more stunning. Acadia managed 21 points in the half to only lose by 48… The referees hadn’t the heart to keep calling Acadia for all their charges in the second half, or it could’ve been worse. WOW. An unbelievable butt-kicking, and what a great rest for CU’s stars, especialy the chronically gimpy, two-time national Player of the Year, Osvaldo Jeanty. And because of the way CU is built, garbage time doesn’t allow the pressure to relent. The scrubs play hard and insist on rebounding, because that’s The Smart Way. Coach Dave went berserk and called an angry timeout over boxout failures when the lead was 32. And so now they have to beat OU again. I’m predicting an easy time for a change, not of Acadian proportions but more comfortably than they have in the last couple of years. OU’s inexperience at Nationals will show. And CU looked to be on an implacable mission in their Drive for Five. Incredible performance.

Basketball’s Forgotten Pioneer (Dave Zirin)

Posted by :James Howden On : March 6, 2007
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[As I mentioned At First Glance, this is an excerpt from an article by Dave Zirin. I wasn’t able to link to it directly.]

Should someone who averaged 11 points and eight rebounds over a four-year NBA career make the Basketball Hall of Fame?….This is the story of…a movement to compel the NBA to do right by their own past.

Everybody knows Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947. Fewer will know the NFL was desegregated by Robinson’s UCLA teammate Kenny Washington and future Hollywood actor Woody Strode. The more serious sports fan will also will tell you that Nate “Sweetwater” Clifton was the first African American to sign a contract with an NBA team and Earl Lloyd the first to actually get off the bench and log some playing time. More will know the immortal Bill Russell was the first black basketball head coach.

But I challenge even the most die-hard hoops junkie…to name the first black NCAA All American. I challenge you to name the first African American to make the U.S. Olympic team. I challenge you to name the first black man to play in the NBA All-Star game….The answer to all these questions is Don Barksdale….Today, Don Barksdale is sports history’s invisible man, a trailblazer who resides in shadows. Barksdale died in 1993 of throat cancer at the age of 69, and there is a push simmering to make sure the history he represents doesn’t die with him….

The charge to put Barksdale in Springfield is being led by…Doug Harris. Harris is the executive director of Athletes United for Peace, and…also directed a documentary on Barksdale called Bounce….

This history is one of struggle against the racial barriers of bigotry, but it’s also the history of a great player who refused to be defined exclusively by play. The Don Barksdale Story is not another tale of a playground legend who ended up wrecked on the rocks of what-might-have-been. When the NBA slammed its door in Barksdale’s face after his All American UCLA career, he switched gears toward his other passion and became the San Francisco Bay Area’s first African American disc jockey….Barksdale at age 25 desegregated the gold medal winning 1948 Olympic team, where he was coached by “The Baron” from Kentucky, Adolph Rupp. (Barksdale was so good, Rupp even gave him significant court time; 20 years before he started recruiting blacks for his own Wildcat teams.)

When Barksdale finally signed with the slowly desegregating NBA in 1951, the 28 year old made sure the cash was worth his time. He signed a two-year deal for $60,000 with the Bullets, a big money deal in its day.  Barksdale’s hoops career stalled after four years and one historic All-Star game….

This past February, the NBA higher ups decided yet again to not include Barksdale on their annual list of Hall of Fame inductees. They need to ask themselves the question: how seriously do they take their own past? Is the history of the game sacred, or just filler material for more highlight videos?

So the question gets repeated: Should someone who averaged 11 points and eight rebounds over a four-year NBA career make the Basketball Hall of Fame? If that person is Don Angelo Barksdale, you’re damn right they should.

 

[Dave Zirin is the author of The Muhammad Ali Handbook (MQ Publications) and Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by e-mailing edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com.]

Need One Ticket

Posted by :James Howden On : March 4, 2007
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And on nights like the last one, I’m also smack-tackled by the need for a basketball team to coach. The hot ticket in Ottawa Saturday was for the OUA East championship game between the hometown Carleton Ravens and their cross-town antagonists, the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees. I’d struck out Wednesday when the tickets sold out in a couple of hours, so I lined up early for standing room seats. However, the “Need One” sign that I’d artfully duct-taped to my sleeve got me pretty close to my usual seat, and next to an Ottawa U co-ed who’d hoped for a more interesting date, I’m sure. We were right behind the Ravens’ bench, where I can watch Coach Dave Smart’s perpetual agony at the imperfections of his players (and of the officials, who had a tough game).

It’s great to see that kind of feverish local demand for what the Murricans call “college basketball”, in a game to decide who’d go to the Last Dance, the Canuck version of March Madness. (Mind you, ticket scarcity comes easier when the Ravens’ Nest seats fewer than 2000 people.) Ottawa U finally beat the Ravens in the Smart Era for the first time last year, and this season won both games in tight struggles, the first one before a CIS record crowd of nearly 10,000 at Scotiabank Place. (And yes, I know, the Carolina Tar Heels get more than that for their first open practice of the season. That’s a different world down there.) But the brutally efficient Ravens had still managed first place by being more consistent than the mercurial Gee-Gees; for them, beating Carleton is everything.

It looked like Carleton was going to run off and hide early, but two tight block/charge calls on successive possessions both went against Ravens star Aaron Doornekamp, leaving him with a pair of fouls and causing a potential five-point swing. From there, the Gee-Gees went on an absurd run to take a three-point halftime lead. It was wild, and it got wilder. Neither team shot well, and there were incredible sequences of defensive intensity and offensive nervousness that resulted in almost comically bad misses. The players know each other so well that Doornekamp and Osvaldo Jeanty, Canada’s reigning Player of the Year, were both in check. Similarly, the Gee-Gees silky sophomore, Josh Gibson-Bascombe, had to work very hard for his shots, though he hit several big-time threes.

The biggest shot of the game broke the second half 46-46 tie that had seemed to go on forever, and it came from an unexpected source. With the shot clock running down, substitute defensive stopper Rob Saunders nailed a tough jumper off the dribble, and the Ravens never trailed again. (Saunders is an electrical engineering student, another thing you don’t see among the NCAA Division 1 heavyweights.) The man he replaced, Stu Turnbull, looks more like a light-heavyweight boxer than a basketball player, but muscled his way to 17 points to lead the four-time champion Ravens to the win. And now Carleton goes for its fifth consecutive national title in the Final 8 at Halifax, one of the great (and under-reported) stories in Canadian sport.

Consider these ridiculous facts about the Ravens’ captain, Jeanty: he told his coach as a freshman that his goal was to win five CIS championships – only one remains; his regular season and playoff record in those four-plus years is now 130-8, a winning ratio over 95% (!); he has been the championship game MVP in all four that he has played. Meanwhile, NOT SO SMART! the Gee-Gees fans chanted, but Coach Dave has put together, at a university with no outstanding tradition of basketball excellence, one of the most powerful and unlikely dynasties we’ve ever seen.

I have such admiration for what they do, but I can’t get into the yelling and chanting. (And it was LOUD.) I’m too busy pretending to coach. I’m breaking down Turnbull’s jumpshot during the pre-game. I mutter about Gibson-Bascombe’s decision-making, and tip my hat to his smooth and confident game (and wonder how Ottawa U pried him out of Toronto, and away from a U.S. full-ride scholarship, which must have been available to him). Finish strong, I plead with Doornekamp, who apparently doesn’t hear me. What’s worse, these tired old bones couldn’t sleep afterwards because this fevered old brain is in full game-analysis mode, and planning practices for a non-existent team. Drives me nuts. Love this time of year.

Blaming the Yanks: Our National Sport?

Posted by :James Howden On : February 23, 2007
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There are lots of arguments made to justify the continued existence of nearly consequence-free fighting in the NHL and its Canadian junior hockey feeder system. The first, and most prominently used, is the “safety valve” defence, which says that hockey is a fast and violent sport and that the occasional furious dust-up is an essential way to blow off steam. (Meanwhile, of course, the ferocious collisions and trench warfare of American football have never led the NFL or any league to permit fighting. Curious.)

The second rationalization is a bit more slippery and more difficult to refute, at least in Canada. It’s also dishonest. Fans of Our Game have long indulged in a national pastime to explain why hockey, alone among major sports (more on this “major” business later), allows players who scrap to serve a brief term in the “sin bin” – usually at no competitive disadvantage to their teams – and then return to the fray. The explanation runs as follows. Canadians are sophisticated fans who’ve played the game and understand its nuances, skills and graces. Heck, they can even follow the movement of the puck on TV without any technical trickery. (Friggin’ Americans and their glowing puck! What a joke, we snort merrily and pat each other on the back.) Fighting? Well, we can take it or leave it, but the NHL needs to keep it, eh, because that’s all the Americans want to see and we gotta market the game to people who don’t really get it. Get it?

Well, last night’s game between the Ottawa Senators and the Buffalo Sabres turned into a Rodney Dangerfield joke: Hey, I went to the Gardens to watch some boxing last night…and a HOCKEY game broke out! A thundering (and legal) bodycheck injured a Sabre, so the Sabres sent in the clowns. When all the gloves and sticks had been picked up, three players had been kicked out (unusual in hockey) including the Senators’ star goalkeeper. Today’s Ottawa sports conversation is dominated by gushing admiration for “Sugar” Ray Emery, a goalie who loves to fight, and the snobbery of Argument the Second is punctured. It’s US that digs the fisticuffs, not the U.S.

This game — no, not the game, the low-skill boxing — was the number one story in Ottawa today, and likely superseded, in every Canucklehead hockey conversation, the lengthy roster of important late-season games played last night . And boy, it’s gonna be a doozy tomorrow night when the Sabres come back to our barn! They’ll dress McGrattan for sure! (Brian McGrattan is a minor-league hockey player with big-league fists, and is Ottawa’s official “enforcer”. Though he rarely dresses, and plays little when he does, he is among the most popular players. He gets advertising gigs for car dealers, while the Sens captain Daniel Alfredsson, a highly skilled Swede, doesn’t.) I heard the replays of the radio call, and gleeful giddiness just oozes from the commentators. Ray Emery has been a surprise with his fine play this year, when he was expected to be Ottawa’s number two keeper, but he is now officially a Legend in this city. The fawning comments of the callers-in, and the extent to which this story shelved all others – that is, totally – were telling indicators. We can’t blame the Yanks for the existence of fighting in hockey.

In fact, American kids with competitive aspirations play in a school-based system in which fighting is not allowed; drop ‘em and you’re out of the game and suspended further, just as in the European developmental hotbeds for most of hockey’s best playmakers. I don’t doubt that there are young American fans who get their motors running for the toe-to-toe stuff. It’s a pretty wild rush of adrenaline, and I dug it as a kid, too. But in the wider context of the American sports universe, the continued existence of fighting in hockey lumps the NHL in with roller derby or ultimate fighting (or “slamball”, the made-for-TV, full-contact combination of basketball and aggravated assault). It’s just not a sport to be taken entirely seriously, Canadian goonery and machismo notwithstanding.

A Good Name

Posted by :James Howden On : February 19, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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Do you remember what your favourite team’s home arena/stadium is called this week? If you live in Boston, you might not; according to the World Watch Institute – “independent research for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society” – the former Boston Garden has, since ’93, been renamed for a fee 34 times. (Mind you, some of it was for fun and maybe even charity: somewhere in there, it was briefly called the “Yankees Suck Centre”.)

If you’re under 30, you might not remember a time when the boards in an NHL rink were white, when you didn’t read an ad for doughnuts or dick-stiffeners every time there was a scuffle in the corner. And is it just me, or has NASCAR reached the point of parody? Check out the blizzard of sponsor names on every car and every set of coveralls. I laugh every time I see a picture of a driver. (Which, mercifully, isn’t often.) Anyway, thanks to the thousands of shiny new graduates every year with a higher education in Marketing — the Apocalypse is surely upon us — there are ever fewer places to bask in the absence of advertising.

World Watch just posted a few facts about stadium naming rights, which you may view here. A sample: Coca-Cola pays $6 mil annually to call Houston’s stadium Minute Maid Park; the current naming rights deals in the U.S. are estimated to be worth $4.3 billion a year. Presumably, the Big Corps have proven to themselves that this kind of outlay helps us all to spend as we are instructed to do.

The Institute ends with an ironic citation from Shakespeare, in which “a good name” refers to a person’s character and (deservedly) good reputation, and the speaker laments that such a thing cannot be bought. In our time, many smart people seem to believe that it can, though it requires a really short public memory. (Not much of a problem, it would seem.) Minute Maid Park began its life as Enron Field, for goodness’ sake. Kenneth Lay threw out the ceremonial first pitch on opening day. Lay and Enron: now there are some good names for you.

Thanks for Coming Out, John

Posted by :James Howden On : February 16, 2007
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Category: All About Sports

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Sigh. I hadn’t intended to join the gossipy legion by writing about one of the few pro athletes — and the first basketball player — to have publicly declared himself a homosexual. Former NBA forward John Amaechi, during his career, stood out more for his speech – he’s a British black man, unusually articulate for a pro athlete, quite apart from his distinctive accent – than for anything remarkable about his game (he was a blue collar banger) or, mercy me, for his sexual preferences. Apparently, he didn’t bring his gayness, as one current player put it, onto his teammates on several teams.

ESPN, though, has had wall-to-wall coverage of this sporting “breakthrough” because its book division has published Amaechi’s closet-busting memoir Man in the Middle. I’d heard about a few other player reactions – calm and dignified from the likes of Grant Hill (no surprise), nervous or incredulous or even mildly indignant comments from others – but it wasn’t until a former NBA All-Star left it all out on the floor during a radio interview that I decided to write about this. Until then, I agreed with the on-line NBA beat writer Tony Meija : a pro player coming out after his retirement has a high titillation rating, but it’s not a big hoops splash.

Having spent enormous amounts of time teaching, coaching and parenting teen-aged boys-to-men, the wariness of the players about homosexuality in a pro sports locker room is not surprising. Ignorance is not bliss for young men; I never quite get used to how frightened (and therefore often hateful) young men are about gays. (I remember showering with other guys after grade nine gym class being awkward for a day or two, and then it was just what you did. By the 1990s, it was hard to convince even 18-year-olds to shower after a workout. Spooky.) As for the Association players who are being quoted, most of them are under 25. These are tall and powerful kids who have lived in a protective jock bubble of privilege (and of encouraged ignorance) for much of their young lives. They wear expensive suits to the games, but many of them spend their off-court hours playing X-Box by the hour or trying – MUCH more successfully than the average high-schooler – to get laid. (Sex comes to them, like free shoes and team buffets.) Suddenly, microphones are under the noses of these (mostly) physically astonishing and intellectually sheltered youngsters, asking them to comment on difficult societal issues. Sometimes I feel sorry for them. Why do we expect them to know better?

Tim Hardaway, now, has stepped forward as the Bad Guy, the retired star who felt as free to publish his homophobia – “I hate gay people” – as Amaechi was to air his sexual preference. The NBA has duly banned him from its All-Star festivities in Las Vegas. (I’m relieved that the Association has maintained its moral purity.) Apart from everything else, Hardaway made a startling breech of the Athlete Interview Code, for which he has since apologized. (The AIC is re-enforced by public relations flacks and interview coaches, which Hardaway apparently doesn’t have access to anymore. We got to play hard or I know he’s got my back might not have the right connations in this case, but surely this was a perfect You know, it is what it is opportunity.) His regrets might be better late than never, but it sounds more like the classic non-apology I’m sorry if I offended anyone with my remarks than a self-examining I can’t believe I came out with such a bigoted statement; being a black man, I should surely know better than to judge people by externals, and I will work to educate myself…

As for Amaechi, he seems an honourable guy and I don’t doubt that this required some soul-searching on his part. However, the tendency of talking or writing heads to counter hateful attitudes by exalting his courage, his heroic leadership, strikes me as misplaced, too. He is, after all, selling a pile of books, and among his circle of friends and friendly colleagues that he cares about, I guess that his homosexuality is not news.

This story is so big because it’s tabloid fodder, gossipy tickling of the private life of someone who was somewhat famous for awhile. Sex is is pretty important and all, but how did it get to be the centre of our public conversations? It’s as if the frequency and geography (and the ratings!) of our private pleasures are what defines us, whereas any healthy adult knows that it makes for a small (if sweet) proportion of a human life. (My favourite experimental proof that sexuality is a tiny, private business was in high school classrooms. Even the gentlest suggestion that an adolescent’s parents are sexual beings elicits howls of protest and revulsion. Exactly my point. Their business, not ours. Touché!)

And in the Toronto Sun, of all places (speaking of tabloids and titillation, though the sports section is pretty good) appeared this thoughtful dismissal of “tolerance” and call for genuine respect from Toronto Raptors coach Sam Mitchell. Like Hardaway, he speaks his mind, but it is a more broad and interesting one, as much as one can tell from an upstairs bedroom office in Ottawa. Asked about Amaechi and the players’ reactions to the thought of a gay teammate, Mitchell hoped that a man would be judged by his character and his actions, not by private preferences over which he may not feel much choice. He added, “It shouldn’t be about tolerance. It should be about respect. People should treat people as human beings….Are people supposed to tolerate me because I’m black? Or are they supposed to treat me with respect because I’m a human being?”

Thanks for speaking out, Sam.  As for Mr. Amaechi, I hope this means more to him than money. I hope it’s true that his openness gives solace and encouragement to the alienated, but I’m with Pierre Trudeau: The State has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. Neither do we, except for our own.