MSM vs. MMA

How often has a Canadian athlete been involved in an event that is being billed as the best of all time in his or her sport? Outside of hockey?

Ben Johnson, maybe, but that's about it. Until tomorrow that is. UFC 94 goes in Las Vegas. It's headlined by Montreal's Georges St. Pierre and B.J. Penn. Both men are champions, St. Pierre the welterweight holder and Penn the lightweight champion. UFC president Dana White has suggested that this is a fight in line with any of the great boxing matches in history. Yet, coverage in Canadian mainstream media has been, well, lacking.

What's that about?

The anti-MMA crowd has had its opinion well documented by now. They say the sport is too brutal to deserve equal treatment with more enlightened activities like hockey, which allows bare fisted brawling, or boxing, which has been around forever so it must be OK.

Fans of the sport continue to gravitate away from the mainstream to seek out information that they desire. The average fan misses out. Here we have a Canadian that is at the very top of one of the world's most popular sports and yet, outside of the hardcore, he's virtually unknown.

As I've stated in this space before, I'm not much of a MMA fan. I find it a bit dull (too much ground work that I just don't appreciate). However, I can appreciate the athleticism involved and I will argue that St. Pierre deserves our respect. He's a great athlete, period.

In spite of the critics claims, MMA isn't going anywhere. The fan base is too involved, too passionate. So, it's time we got over it and start to treat it the same way as every other sport. And that goes double for the mainstream sports media in this country. If St. Pierre's fight isn't the lead story on every broadcast and above the fold in every newspaper in the country Sunday...someone is missing the point.

Related: Dana White talks to the FAN 590.

Snark break ...

Sure, your car can go 1,000 miles per hour, but does it have Yosemite Sam mudflaps?

Daunte Culpepper will not be a Kansas City Chief, apparently. The Chiefs handed him a contract to sign it, but he fumbled it.

Remember Saturday, when the only debacle in the World Series was Taylor Swift's rendition of The Star Spangled Banner?

It is stunning that the Atlanta Thrashers could be having attendance problems. Gary Bettman, you put franchises in places where ice is only seen in mint juleps. What's the worst that could have happened?

The National Post's Eric Koreen gets a hand for his line on the Oklahoma City Carpetbaggers Thunder: "(Kevin) Durant grows; will anybody watch or care?"

Eva Avila has a new album. Finally, a solution to the local shortage of drink coasters!

More great headlines that cannot be written ... "Charles Dubin: Dead at 87, forever associated with '88."

Stephen Colbert on the U.S. election: "John McCain has Barack Obama right where he wants him -- 15 to 20 points ahead with a huge African-American turnout." Colbert also noted that when McCain said Sunday that he was going to win, he was in a place called Waterloo.

The Ottawa Citizen has a look at the four pillars of the community who want to bring back the CFL.

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting:

• Yes, you should buy a copy of Rolling Stone to get the full version of, "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace."
  
• Crazy Luke Schenn fact: He was the 20th overall pick in the Western Hockey League bantam draft three years ago, which seems like a pretty good argument against drafting boys into juniors at 15 years old.
• That post about OOLF's big soul-search for a NCAA football team will probably be completed about the same time Chinese Democracy is in stores ... nevertheless, it has been noticed that UConn Huskies really like their Canadians. Jesse Joseph, a D-lineman from Montreal's Vanier College, committed to UConn over the weekend. The coach who recruited him, Mike Foley, also had a lot to do with tight end John Delahunt, of Kanata, ending up in the Nutmeg State.
• Jeremy Franklin, of Bath (west of Kingston), is apparently going to play college hockey at Mercyhurst, according to Chris Heisenberg.
• Larry Mavety never has many new ideas: Forward George Lovatsis told the Whig-Standard that the Kingston Fronteancs permanent interim coach basically told the players "play or get outta here" on Sunday.
  
  One player who did get outta there, Jason Guy, was just named OHL goalie of the week with the London Knights. Taylor Hall, of Kingston, was player of the week.
• The Ottawa Senators provincial women's hockey league team has five players skating for Team Ontario Red at the national under-18 championship in Napanee next week: goalie Cassie Séguin, defenders Bryanna Farris and Stefanie McKeough and forwards Isabel Ménard and Jamie Lee Rattray. Good for them.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

Charles Dubin: 1921-2008

It's sad that we are in a time when the death of a judge becomes a time to reflect on sports, but it is what it is.

Ontario Chief Justice Charles Dubin, the man who lead the Dubin Inquiry after Ben Johnson's positive test in '88, died this morning.

That work is widely known the world over. It hasn't led to less drugs in sport-it's unclear that anything can--but it's likely that the Dubin Inquiry has created a world where the consumers of sport are more aware of the presence of nasty stuff that makes you faster and stronger.

The battle to get drugs out of sport is far from over. Our society has yet to really decide that we don't want it there. But, when the history of the issue is written Charles Dubin, a Canadian, will be a major player. So, it's worthwhile to give him a second of pause today before we continue to handicap this weekend's football games.

After all these years we finally have a name!

It's been 20-years, yes, but that there is finally a name being put to the mystery man who allegedly sabotaged Ben Johnson's pee is probably worth a post of its own.

And, somehow it's fitting that it isn't a Canadian source that's reporting it. Actually, the Times Online article might be the most conspiracy theory sympathetic article ever written.

"...Neverthless, it is curious that a friend of the athlete who had the most to gain in financial and prestige terms from Johnson being found positive should have been sitting with the Canadian as he was drinking liquid in an attempt to provide the urine specimen, the result of which would be the biggest sports story of our time."

The name of our would-be Cigarette Smoking Man?

André Jackson. An American. Who was friends with Carl Lewis.

I Want To Believe*


*but it should be noted that Ben has a book coming out and he might want to leak stories to British newspapers to make a few extra pounds.

The gun went off. But the race has never been over.

God, can Stephen Brunt write.

The Globe has been running a series of articles that mark the twentieth anniversary of Ben Johnson (telling is that there is no need to expand that thought. Ben Johnson is all any Canadian, anyone period, needs to see to understand what is being discussed). Canada's best sportswriter (it's not a close race) weighs in today.

More of the worthwhile series can be read here, here and here.

They were all dirty. Every last one of them. Yet Ben, poor, dumb Ben was the only one that went down for it. As Brunt tellingly points out, he remains the only big name to go down during an Olympics. Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery are really the only other big sprinting names to get nailed, and even then it was only because of the work of Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.

And poor, dumb Canada was the only country to twist itself in a knot over the fallout. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that Johnson was selected as the scapegoat because patsy Canada was the only country that would take it.

Yes, the days that followed Johnson's positive test were hard. Our biggest hero--the guy that took down the arrogant Carl Lewis--was exposed as a cheat. We didn't want to believe it. We wanted his name to be cleared (something else that Brunt correctly nails in the linked article--he gives a back slap to every hack that has written about Canadians allegedly turning the Great Canadian Hero into a disgraced Jamaican sprinter in the days that followed the positive test--*cough Rosie Dimanno *cough*. It didn't happen. Quite the opposite, actually).

Again, they were all dirty. Every last one of them, including Lewis who had a positive stimulant test kept quiet by American authorities in the lead up to Seoul.

Every last one of them.

Ben did what he said he was going to do that day. When the gun go off, the race be over. Except we've never let the race end. It continues to live on in our collective, misguided Canadian guilt.

Ben was dirty. There is no doubt. But he was also the fastest man alive on that day and he ran a race that was as good as any ever run up to this past summer in China. The 20 years that have followed the race have not been memorable for Johnson. But, those 9.79 seconds...

Man, they were great, weren't they?