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The Streak Continues

Posted by :James Howden On : December 2, 2005
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And now it’s 85 in a row for the Ravens. Carleton beat the York University Lions tonight, and their ridiculous romp through all comers is approaching the 88 of the immortal UCLA Bruins teams of Bill Walton, Marques Johnson, Greg Lee and The Coach, John Wooden. (The caveat, which Carleton generally remembers to mention, is that they count (only) regular season and post-season games they’ve won on their way to the last three Canadian University titles. St. Francis Xavier got ‘em in a preseason tourney this year, as the University of British Columbia did last year. And they don’t count their swings against American powers, where this year they played and lost fairly respectably at the legendary Pauley Pavilion of those UCLA Bruins. Glad we got that straight.)

I used to coach at summer camps with Carleton’s head man, Dave Smart, before he embarked on his astounding and still fairly young career. It’s as easy to admire and respect the Ravens as it must be difficult to play for such an unrelenting and insistent coach. He is focused, and so are his teams.

Grey Cup Sunday: Football, Canadian Style

Posted by :James Howden On : November 24, 2005
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I’m not the CFL fan I was in the days of Garney Henley and Joe Zuger, Ben Zambiasi and Chuck Ealey. (Does anyone out there know what I’m talking about?) I’ve seen some highlights from the Canadian and National Football Leagues (interesting how the “national” league claims it plays for the “world championship”, isn’t it?), but I haven’t actually watched a game this year. I was determined to at least see the Cup. (I make the same general rule for the Super Bowl, which usually has ten times the hype and half the excitement.) Anyhow, I apparently don’t move in the right circles to wangle an invitation to a Grey Cup party with a decent television, so I ended up working my magic on the rabbit ears and the mighty CBC telecast came through fairly well. Had the living room all to myself. (Sigh.)

The first half was like a lot of Super Bowls, filled with tense athletes and careful coaches and defences preying on the timidity of both. 10-1 at half, a bit of a yawner. Halftime was one of those weird spectacles, where dancing girls and extras are brought around a stage – tiny in the midst of a football field – and the camera operators keep a tight focus so that we at home can’t see what they can: stick figures on a stage playing to a hundred people, acres of turf and half-empty stands (there are more beers and goodies to be inhaled, and incredible quantities of urine to be leaked).

So home’s the best seat in the house, which matters not a whit if you have to watch the Black Eyed Peas. This was my second BEP sighting, and I don’t get it at all. Sure, I’m a forty-something guy who had a James Taylor phase, but I can get hippity every once in a while. Eminem’s a bit toxic, but he’s a talent. I’m getting to know dear old Public Enemy a little, and I actually dig Buck Sixty-Five with a fairly large shovel. But the Peas? Please. Somebody has to explain this to me. (Unless it’s all about a blonde singer grinding with men of colour. Nah. Couldn’t be.)

Anyhow, the second half made me pay attention again: play upon play, lead change after lead change, overtime thrills, a bonehead play by a brainy quarterback. My joint was jumping and I  was the only one there. So I may not get the halftime show, if I ever did, but I still get football, Lord help me, and nothing beats the big-balled Canadian version (with its imported American stallions) when it’s at its best.

(Just one more thing: Madame Jean, nice to see you there for the presentation of your predecessor’s famous gift to Canadian football. But if the Governor General is going to honour the champs with Lord Grey’s famous mug, she shouldn’t do it while playing Vanna White — is she still alive and flipping? — to the CFL Commissioner’s Pat Sajak. I’m just saying.)

Basketball Boy Gets Out With the Ravens

Posted by :James Howden On : November 19, 2005
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We had shared pizza and ice cream and our favourite examples of good news. It was our Saturday evening antidote to fearful headlines and breathless predictions of imminent disaster, the ones that lead so smoothly, so ridiculously, into pitches for cars and entertainments. And then everybody took off early for a serious dose of music-as-medicine, so I was free to sneak off to a ballgame. Whee! I was a free man in Ottawa / I felt unfettered and alive / There was nobody callin’ me up for favours / And noone’s future to decide. (Apologies to the divine Ms. M.)

Carleton Ravens basketball is a great sports story, grinding toward a fourth straight national championship and building on their crazy run of success. Tonight, against the Waterloo Warriors, their undefeated streak hit EIGHTY-TWO. They’ve lost a couple of early-season exhibitions over the last few years, but in league and playoff matches they haven’t lost in 82 straight contests. They have no dominant post players. (Haven’t had during the whole run.) They are outsized nearly every night, yet they almost never get outrebounded. This year they don’t have a true point guard, and there’s nobody you’d call a scoring machine or a magical passer. And it doesn’t seem to matter a bit. They defend maniacally, they shoot fearlessly, they play together.

And I can get into this stuff, lived it for a long time as a high school coach, but tonight I watched the game as if it was played in an aquarium and I was outside it. I remembered clearly what the fishbowl was like, and what part of it I had once inhabited. I easily recognized all the species swimming inside it, but the experience felt distant. (Or I did.) Hmm. So this is basketball. Right. They take it so seriously. Coach Dave Smart is a drama, all expectation and insistence and disbelief at his players’ failings, even as they dismantle an opponent. The relentless quest for the meaning of performance. It all looks so fun and familiar, but I felt so far away.

Wish You’d Won With the ‘Spos, Larry

Posted by :James Howden On : October 26, 2005
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I wanted to write about Larry Walker. Lest we forget — Canucks and any fans who like their baseball smart and skilled, a little folksy and funny — Walker preceded Steve Nash as The Lad from HockeyLand who made good in American sport.

Walker made it best in American sport, winning the National League MVP in 1997. In my idealistic universe, of course, he’d have done it as the right fielder for the Montreal Expos (long may their goofy caps reign) rather than the Colorado Rockies. The view of sportswriters I respect is that he’ll never make the Hall of Fame – too many injuries, too late a start in the bigs – but that won’t bother Walker too much, I don’t think. It’s hard to tell how badly he felt, after his MVP year, when he wasn’t even named Canada’s top athlete. (Jacques Villeneuve was; as Walker cracked, “I got beat by a car.”)

I wish I’d seen him play more. He had a sensational gun from the outfield, ran the bases brilliantly, and had that gorgeous left-handed swing. Not bad for a failed goaltender. Too bad that he got on the wrong side of the Red Sox exorcism last year, and fell just sort of the Series again this fall. He went with a laugh and that usual hoser straight-talk. He was the best ballplayer we’ve ever had come out of Canada, and I’m sad to see him go.

Boys Will Be Boys at McGill

Posted by :James Howden On : October 19, 2005
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In the football community in Canada, this was a small bombshell—they shut it down. Administrators at McGill shut down the entire football season over a hazing incident, apparently a long-standing tradition, that went public this year because one kid refused to take it lying down. (Or on all fours, more accurately.) And the ol’ jock wishes he knew more about it, because mixed feelings are jabbing at me rather unkindly, a sort of mental “Dr. Broom” (I presume).

Cynics might say, “McGill football, big deal, they get killed most weeks anyway” which is, as cynicism usually is, about as far from the point as it could be. It matters to young men; to some of them, the freshman that went home is a coward and a villain and thank-god-he’s-not-on-our-team (if they still had a team, that is). Initiation rituals are a bonding thing for a team. They are also a frequent outlet for sadism and interpersonal tyranny, so who knows which was pre-eminent at McGill? The school’s leadership decided that the former wasn’t a good enough reason to risk the latter, not to mention immorality and stains on the ivy-and-dignity image of the university.

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to love football. Sometimes I’m a little sheepish about understanding, at least a little, about what such a primitive ritual might mean to that particular crew. I remember ninth-grade initiation, when such things were still possible, and the perverse thrill of going through the “Ghost Walk”, a slide down a basement corridor a foot deep in rotting vegetables and other unidentifiable ooze. Being pelted by the football players with special glee tickled me, because they knew who I was. I felt good to have endured, to have come out with the smile on my face that said “Hey, that wasn’t so bad!”

So I get it. But I also get why a young man would refuse to “get it”, and know that it would have taken another kind of courage to say NO to getting probed by “Doctor Broom”. I wonder if he’ll ever play football again — the kid, not the Broom. I wonder if McGill will.