GJH on the 'golden age of reading'

Our man Greg Hughes has a column up at insidetoronto.com on the reading habits of the young youth today:

"... it will be digital applications that will help pave the way for a new golden age of reading in the years to come.

"What do youth value most when it comes to how they consume their media? The easy answer is portability, ease of use and reliability. The hard part, however, has to be two things: what kinds of content are appealing and how best to deliver it."

This ties in with what William Wordsworth wrote 200 years ago: You have to create the taste by which you're going to be savoured. It says here that there is still a place for reading a good old-fashioned book, unplugging from the computer for a couple hours, although that is coming from someone who hasn't Grown Up Digital, to co-opt the title of a new book.

Amazon's Kindle, once it's available to outside the narrow range of Oprah Winfrey and others who are so rich and powerful that they have people give them stuff for free, sounds pretty intriguing.

Related:
Youth reading more than ever, they're just not flipping pages (Greg Hughes, insidetoronto.com)

He could be referring to either kind of football

Great article in The Guardian on Sunday that brings home the malaise of modernity that kind of hands over the world of fun and games, where the players "are richer, but not necessarily enriched."

While football has an end-of-empire feel, it will limp on gloriously, because millions are as addicted to the glamour of the Premier League as they are to the football itself. A friend who supports Manchester United hasn't been to a game in years and has no intention of doing so - but he constantly goes on about the money the club spend in the transfer market. I got the impression he was mildly disappointed they paid Spurs only £30 million for (Dimitar) Berbatov, and envious of the £32 million City could afford for Robinho.

Addicted to the glamour... doesn't that beat all.Can football get itself out of jail? (Kevin Mitchell, The Guardian)

Getting ready for a resounding gong show; or, bollocks to wannabe Sam Pollocks

Re-reading Neal Pollack's essay The Cult of the General Manager is one way to feel fortified against the NHL's quote-unquote free agent frenzy.

"If you don't care about buying, selling, and trading, the sports world has much less to offer you these days.

"... My modest GM fantasies begin and end with baseball, where numbers rule and where such obsessions were born. Every other sport has to stay relatively pure in my mind; I've struggled for years to ignore the NBA's arcane salary cap rules, and I'm not about to change now ... I want to see the final product, not hear about how it was made in Santa's workshop.

"As deathly dull as a general manager's machinations may be, there's obviously an audience for it. I think that's warped ... Really, who would you rather be, Tom Brady or the guy who signed Tom Brady to a long-term deal? This may be the age of the general manager. But the quarterback still has more fun."

Who needs any of it? As far as this country boy's concerned, all the myriad hockey insiders in the newspapers, on the Canadian sports networks and among the blogeteriat combined who would have you believe it matters where Sean Avery signs combine to be a resounding gong or a clattering cymbal. (Not all of them, mind you; Mirtle should have outstanding coverage.) There's an element there of knowing everything about hockey except how to enjoy it.

They have not love. (It's in First Corinthians, people!)

(Devil's advocate: Who says hockey is meant to be enjoyed? After all, as any good hockey parent who just plunked down $425 to send little a week at Mike Fisher's hockey school knows, if you're not as serious as a heart attack about hockey from the time you're six years old, you'll have nothing but regret when you become one of the complete and utter failures otherwise known as the 99.5% of Canadian males who don't make the pros and have only themselves to blame.)

Hockey talk is most soothing during the time of year when the game is actually in season (which is a long enough timeframe already). It's OK to talk about the business dealings of certain NHL owners (cough) or possible rules changes during the off-season.

The only interest on this end is whether Mats Sundin will sign with a team that wears blue helmets, which won't be known for a while. Seeing him with a red or black bucket after all these years with the Nordiques, Leafs and Team Sweden would be too weird.

Seriously, though, anyone whose mind is on where Marian Hossa will sign should go a fly a kite on Canada Day. That's not just an expression.

Related:
The Cult of the General Manager; Can We Go Back To Worshipping Athletes Already (Neal Pollack, Slate, Aug. 29, 2005)

A MORE ALARMIST NAME FOR 'SOCCER COMPLEX' WOULD BE 'KNEE LIGAMENT-KILLING FIELDS'

The physical courage, not to mention the personal sacrifices that female athletes are remarkable -- in many cases it exceeds that of the men, even though the tangible rewards (i.e., huge stacks of cash) aren't as obvious.

Michael Sokolove's forthcoming book, Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports, which is excerpted in this weekend's New York Times magazine, seems well-timed. It's a tough story to boil down to a couple paragraphs ... basically, the march toward equality on the playing fields has also meant that female athletes in some sports -- soccer, basketball, volleyball -- suffer major knee injuries at a higher rate than the guys by a factor of five in some cases.

There's also potential sexism in focusing on problems in women's sports when the success stories tend to only get lip service in the media. It's wonderful that we're in an age where a super-competitive female athlete can go for it from an early age and isn't told, "well, that's a nice hobby." That was a subtext to a feature I wrote for the Ottawa Sun a few months ago about a young hockey player named Isabel Ménard, who's in the Sport-Etudes program at Louis Riel, where during this winter she would be on the ice each school day, often doing drills alongside a possible future NHL defenceman, Erik Gudbranson, the Kingston Frontenacs' top choice in last week's OHL draft.

I only mention the above example to show the progress that's been made in the past decade or so. N The thing is, when studies show that young women absorb major injuries at a much higher rate than males in the same sport, it is worrisome. By the same token, there's a defensiveness there, since there's a worry about showing weakness and giving ammunition to the arguments against things such as Title IX, the catalyst for women getting more opportunities in sports in the U.S.

Sokolove points out that in youth sports and the U.S. military, there's evidence that females have a higher tolerance for minor injuries; the guys are more likely to beg out over a minor ailment.

See? It's complicated. Please give it a read.

(While we're here, best of luck to a couple of Ottawa-area shinny stars -- Isabel Ménard and Jamie-Lee Rattray, of Kanata, have each been invited to a national under-18 program camp in Calgary later this month. Two others from the region, Wisconsin standout Jasmine Giles and UConn's Dominique Thibault, are going to the under-22 team's camp.)

Related:
The Uneven Playing Field (Michael Sokolove, The New York Times Magazine)

ZEN DAYLEY: WAYS TO EASE THE PAIN, BESIDES BOOZE

The only way to forget about that Blue Jays team that can't hit a volleyball with a two-by-four is to get more immersed in baseball. Seriously, you need to be able to laugh off a team which is hitting .100 with runners in scoring position. It's just a game. Here's some solaces:

• Keep in mind that's there still some sportsmanship left in the world.
• Marvel at Micah Owings, a pitcher, coming off the bench to hit a game-tying, pinch-hit home run for the Diamondbacks last night.
  
  (Forget his pitching. Can the Jays get Owings to start at first base against left-handers?)
  
• Read the Yahoo! Sports feature on St. Louis Cardinals reserve outfielder Brian Barton. It's timely in light of the hits that the younger generation of sportswriters have taken in the past 48 hours.
  
  Jeff Passan's piece would be great in any media. Don't miss the point, though. Web culture helps make this possible (and more accessible than if it was only in the print edition of the Kansas City Star). The typical paints-by-numbers profile that tells you everything about a famous athlete except what he/she is like and why you should give a damn about her or him isn't going to cut it for Yahoo!.
  
  Passan had more licence and latitude to profile an obscure backup outfielder who's majored in aerospace engineering, travelled the world for reasons other than to play sports and says nonjocklike stuff such as, "I like to invest in knowledge." He sounds a hell of lot more interesting than Alex Rodriguez or Sidney Crosby. The reality is that a lot of media highers-up will settle for the 1,000th feature on Crosby push a writer to bat out the first one about Bryan Barton -- assuming they've ever heard of Bryan Barton.
  
  That's something that Buzz Bissinger and Bob Costas never acknowledged during their character assassination of Will Leitch the other night. There's a bit of irony, then, that Barton plays for the Cardinals.
  
  (Also worth a look-see: Yahoo!'s piece on how attendance is up even with a slowing U.S. economy.)
• A little Googling turns up a 1994 profile of Can-Am League commissioner Miles Wolff that gives us all a model of behaviour to aspire to: "In conversation he's cerebral and dispassionate; even when calling somebody a jerk, he makes it sound more like analytical precision than scorn."

On the serious side...

• John Brattain has a requiem for John Gibbons at Hardball Times. No one's who is of a rational mind has ever said jettisoning Gibbons would automatically make things any better.
  
  It just wouldn't make it any worse.
• He's McGlovin, not McRunnin: John McDonald getting picked off while pinch-running for the designated hitter (which keeps him from going in for his fielding), that was karmic.
  
  Yanking Matt Stairs in a tie game is a kind of a low-percentage play. The runner's speed doesn't determine whether he can score from second base on a two-out single or from first on a double at Fenway Park, given its quirky dimensions. It's more about how the ball's hit, where the outfielder's positioned and how quickly he can make a good throw. Just look at David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez the past two nights.
• Drunk Jays Fans tees off on J.P. Ricciardi for his "you want to win with good people" sermon on The Fan 590 last night when the Barry Bonds question came up again. It was a little paternalistic, but that's part of sustaining a Big Lie.

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

BATTER UP: TEXAS RANGERS

It's baseball season, that mystical, wonderful time of year where you commit to a team for six months, knowing full well they won't win. Here's a starting nine for the Texas Rangers.

1. I got nothin': The only Rangers-related item that rates a mention is that Mike Shropshire is due to come out with a second book about his days as a beat writer covering the team in the mid-'70s. (Link via Slate.)
   
   It's titled, The Last Real Season: A Hilarious Look Back at 1975 -- When Major Leaguers Made Peanuts, the Umpires Wore Red, and Billy Martin Terrorized Everyone.
   
   Shropshire's previous tome was called Seasons In Hell; I literally read it until my paperback copy fell apart. Imagine what Almost Famous would have been like with if it had involved jocks instead of rockstars and had Terry Gilliam as a director instead of Cameron Crowe and you pretty much have Seasons In Hell.
2. Everything to everyone is nothing to anyone: The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 points out the Rangers suffer from a lack of variety in their offensive diet. They whacked 179 homers in '07, but their team leader hit only 21. They had 100-plus strikeouts from eight of nine spots. In short, they have no table-setters, no contact hitters and no big bat.
3. The Hammer: There's not much new to saw about centrefielder Josh Hamilton, who had his inspiring comeback with the Reds last season before they opted to sell high and snooker the clueless Rangers out of pitcher Edinson Vosquez. He might be the one redeeming quality of the Rangers for the next little while.
4. Real estate: The most relevant part of Seasons In Hell is probably a scene when Shropshire related his dealings with an editor who constantly told him he lacked the dedication for the "newspaper business." Shropshire's riposte was that as a sportswriter, he wasn't involved in the newspaper business: "And you ain't either. Some heir to the Scripps-Howard fortune is down on his private island with 300 cases of champagne and Miss Teenage Sweden. He's in the newspaper business. You and I are not."
   
   That sums up what it's like to be coach, play or scout for the Rangers, although every franchise is like this to an extent nowadays. BP 2008's chapter on the team lays out how the Rangers have never been anything more than "a vehicle for big profits" for its owners. There's no point to this franchise, it's peaked as a business, but it won't be moved any time soon.
5. Mo-tive? Have the Rangers become what the L.A. Kings were to hockey in the days when they were the only Sun Belt team? It sure seems that way. Why beat your head against the wall for a team that's going nowhere? The paycheques still come in and it's 75 degrees every day, perfect golf weather. Right, Kevin Millwood?
   
6. Worth noting: Former Jays slugger John Mayberry's son, rightfielder John Mayberry Jr., is repeating at Double-A. That's not a positive sign.
7. Owning the basement: This is a last-place team. (Well, duh.)
8. Celebrity couple for 2012: Rangers catching prospect Taylor Teagarden and Friday Night Lights ingenue Aimee Teegarden. This was just an excuse to remind you that the show got renewed.
9. Need-to-know: Texas has plenty of baseball fans. Fortunately, they have plenty of options for seeing good, spirited baseball -- the college programs at Rice and the University of Texas.
   
   The Rangers also have some talent on their Double-A team, the Frisco Roughriders, who as one wag put it, "unlike the Rangers, openly admit that they are fielding a minor-league team!"

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

REQUIESCAT EN PACE, J.I. ALBRECHT

Being hip-deep in hoops coverage means being late to acknowledge the death of J.I. Albrecht, the legendary CFL personnel man.

He gave Marv Levy a chance to coach a pro team with the original Alouettes in the '70s, he gave Pinball Clemons the chance to be the first black head coach in the CFL and he almost brought a team to Halifax.

The one, the only Earl McRae was not only the first writer who took the time to visit with Albrecht when it was clear his time was running out, but he was probably the only one to whom Albrecht revealed his real name. That column from June 2, 2007 is now up for an Ontario Newspaper Award; re-reading it still brings chill bumps.

Related:
This isn't how a legend should end (Earl McRae, Ottawa Sun, June 2, 2007)
CFL legend J.I. Albrecht passes away (Dave Gross, Canwest News Service)

TAKING SPORTS SERIOUSLY DRIVES YOU TO DRINK

The feature on Gregg Zaun at ESPN.com kind of touches on some personal and professional frustrations.

For starters, it was the second time in about a week a U.S. publication had a profile on a Jay that you're probably unlikely to read in a Canadian newspaper any time soon. Please don't take that as a slam. Yours truly is guiltier than most of failing to change that across the past decade. Bear in mind, though, there's the layers of senior editors and publishers who care more about catering to functioning illiterates* than chewing on the old Dan Jenkins adage, "The dumber the world gets, the more the words matter."

Most importantly, there's what people are willing to share. Americans, since they're so big on celebrity and redemption, are very much into the whole idea of a public confessional, while Canadians favour stiff-upper-lip stoicism and not wanting anyone to know your business, since we all know each other, right?

Not only that, but the sports writing culture in Canada has always been geared toward being shallow. Taking sports seriously, putting it in a larger context, is just too, too American. So the horizon becomes the doors of a hockey arena. It's as if you couldn't expect a Canadian to write about sports the way the best U.S. writers do, unless their name is Stephen Brunt -- and he's just as rooted in the Brit all-things-considered approach, besides.

That's why, as previously noted, there is no Canadian equivalent to Will Leitch. It never changes. A fellow writer who went to journalism school in the late '70s telling this story. Around that time, The Globe and Mail wanted a young sports columnist since dour dispatches of who won and who scored had become passe (although, three decades on, you can still pick up a the sports section of a daily in a small city -- the Brantford Expositor, to give a random example -- and find the same old tired story).

What did they do? Instead of trying to find out if there was a Canadian version of Rick Telander, they got an American, Allen Abel. It never changes.

Anyway, there is a levelling effect that comes with reading about Zaunie's time in a bottle. In 2004, when he'd just been released by the Expos, Zaunie was not much different from a certain sports editor at a small-town daily who was also "wasted way too many nights at the bar."

Now one of those guys is making more than $3 million a year. Perhaps there is hope yet.

Related:
The Steroid Era begets the Skepticism Era (Jeff Pearlman, ESPN.com; via The Tao of Stieb)

CIS CORNER: "BETTER RED" FOR THE RAVENS

Notes on our players and teams of interest from The 613...

HOOPS

• Final 8: There's plenty at The CIS Blog (and the cishoops.ca crew outdid themselves) on how the weekend in basketball went down.
  
  Carleton will face Alberta (the last school other than the Ravens to win the national title) in the late quarter-final Friday, but you knew that already.
• Gee-Gees: If it hasn't been said enough, Ottawa coach Dave DeAveiro did a job this winter with a Gee-Gees team which could sometimes go madly off in all directions. The Toronto win in the OUA East semi-final, plus going down to the final shot against Carleton without Josh Gibson-Bascombe, that was something else.
  
  Brock, which won the OUA play-in game 68-58 over the Gee-Gees to grab the next-to-last Final 8 berth, was just a little deeper and a little older. Any team which can hold Dax Dessureault to 4-for-17 from the field was meant to win.
  
  Donnie Gibson, the Ernestown grad, had a breakout season with 11.8 points on 46% shooting, including 38% on threes, during the regular season. He was at the forefront of the late charge they made on Sunday.
• Ravens: A good companion to Andrew Duffy's feature in Sunday's Citizen on Ravens coach Dave Smart is the profile Chuck Klosterman did on Steve Nash in 2005. Smart's Ravens, in their own way, also boil basketball down to its purest form -- "consciously creat(ing) short-term sacrifice if that loss yields long-term social benefit to players ... From each his ability, to each his needs."
  
  The feeling on this end with how Dave Smart coaches has always been, Why wouldn't you coach that way? His Carleton Ravens players seem to come in with their eyes wide open; they know what they're getting into.
  
  It's important, as Nash pointed out in that article, not to "glorify the idea of playing basketball." That said, one analogy for what Carleton has done is that Smart takes young men who might be predisposed to becoming cutthroat capitalists, but who are open, even eager, to be share-the-ball, sprawl-on-the-floor socialists for four or five years. They also rebound really, really well.
  
  (Much obliged to Andy Grabia from The Battle of Alberta for the link -- and sorry about the U of A Pandas hockey team. Laurier's got big hawks.)

HOCKEY

• It would be remiss not to point out that a Kingston girl, Kaley Powers, scored the first goal last night to help point Laurier toward ending Alberta's two-year run as national champions with a 4-2 win in Ottawa.
  
  All the Golden Hawks have to do to bring the national title back to the OUA is take down McGill, who's won their first two games via shutout. It's only just, since year after year the OUA only gets to send one team to nationals despite being the deepest league in the country for women's hockey.

Related:
The mind of Smart (Ottawa Citizen, via cishoops.ca)

THE MAKING OF TRAVIS SNIDER

Blue Jays uber-hitting prospect Travis Snider has been through more than most 20-year-olds can handle. It's not often you see adjectives such as "self-actualized" in a sports story -- and come away believing it.

The quotes from GM J.P. Ricciardi reflect how the Jays have treated Snider's burdens as fully part of what makes him a special young ballplayer. It's not a distraction or something he has deal with -- it's who he is.

That says a lot about the way the approach teams take with their young assets has changed, even when a lot of people still believe everyone in sports is as sensitive as a goddamn toilet seat. Who knows how many players this change in thinking has come oo late for, eh?

(On a smaller note, funny how Ricciardi, notorious for dodging the writers in Toronto, goes on the record with a reporter in another city about a touchy subject. Then again, sportswriters in Canada, present company included, generally wouldn't go there. It doesn't take Earl McRae to know people open up when you get away from the standard sports patter.)

Related:

Mill Creek's Travis Snider grows up fast in life and baseball (Larry Stone, Seattle Times, Feb. 27)

NOTHING TO DECLARE, EXCEPT GREEDINESS

Dave Zirin's latest on major-league baseball's recalcitrance at setting up what amounts to a transfer agreement with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is worth reading just for this stunner:

"Lou Meléndez, MLB's vice president for international operations, was more than miffed to receive documents that called for instituting employee and player protections and requiring teams to pay out 10 per cent of players’ signing bonuses to the government. Chávez wants to tax MLB for what they take from the country.

" 'We don’t pay federations money for signing players anywhere in the world, and we don't expect to do so. It’s certainly not a way to conduct business,' huffed Meléndez."

Go tell that to the NHL, the English Premiership and every other major domestic soccer league in the world, Lou. Try not to act too hurt if their smiles seem a little condescending.

Yes, to us North Americans, Chávez pretty much is a crazy leftie. He's got a point on this matter.

Related:
Can't Knock the Hassle: Chávez Challenges Baseball (Dave Zirin, The Edge of Sports)

SHOW, DON'T TELL

Scott Burnside from ESPN.com has a feature about how Sheldon Souray's NHL success helped his father turn his life around, and reunite with family he hadn't seen since childhood. Shouldn't say much more than that.

SUPER, THANKS FOR ASKING

A Super Bowl-related post, a couple days late and a couple dollars short (he typed, enveloped in self-loathing):

• A new word has to be coined to describe the experience, as a Minnesota Vikings fan, of watching Brett Favre blow it big-time: Schadenfreulicious.
  
  It was easily the biggest flop in a conference championship game by a heavily favoured home team (non-Bill Cowher division) since the 1998 Vikings. It's a pain that never ends.
  
  Hey, it was said here, after Week 1, that Green Bay "has enough D to get to (the) 10 or 11 wins it will take to win this division before Favre throws it away in the playoffs." Even with the typo, there's proof if you put it vaguely enough, eventually you'll look like a prophet.
  
  Basically, that meant a long season of being Coach Kilmer from Varsity Blues to Favre's Jonathan Moxon: "Keep it up, a--hole." Obviously, there's more to it than Favre (Mike McCarthy forgot to put running plays in the game plan, the Packers couldn't complete any of those crossing routes like they had all year and it was really too cold to play).
  
  Still, who knew it would all come together? Favre and the Packers lose to a team that the Vikes destroyed in the regular season. OK, so it means the Giants are playing in their second Super Bowl since 41-doughnut, but Vikings fans can handle the irony, especially since Randy Moss should surpass his numbers from the 2000 NFC title game (two catches, 18 yards) on the Patriots first drive.
  
• The irony of spending much of yesterday pointing out the errors and omissions of one Ottawa media outlet was that it pushed back pointing out the errors and omissions of another Ottawa media outlet by a day.
  
  CTV Ottawa did a fine job with the simulcast of the conference championship games, so long as you didn't expect to be able to see every play of a game or the New England Patriots locker room celebration after becoming the first NFL team to be 18-0 during a season.
  
  This actually happened: The clowns tried to jam in a newsbreak when CBS went to a commercial after the third Patriots touchdown. That meant viewers got to see a bunch of workers flooding the Rideau Canal instead of the ensuing kickoff, which for all we knew, could have been returned for a touchdown. When they returned to the game, the Chargers offence was already at the line of scrimmage for the next play.
  
  After the Pats won, CTV immediately cut away from CBS -- without showing the trophy presentation or getting any post-game reaction -- to go to Fox's pre-game for the Packers-Giants NFC game.
  
  You'll remember, of course, that at the two-minute warning the Giants had the ball and were trying to get in range to kick the winning field goal. CTV Ottawa came back late from the commercial break -- just had in a promo for one of those 250 spin-offs of CSI or Law & Order that had already been shown 63 times that day -- and missed a 14-yard pass play that got the Giants closer to field-goal range.
  
  It might be moot since the drive ended with a Tynes miss. Still, it's infuriating that year after year that something so simple gets screwed up by the Canadian rights-holders for the NFL, who reap huge profits from simulcasting the games while creating nothing of value.
  
  On a related tangent, Greg Layson of the Guelph Mercury points this out: What are Canada's three sports networks airing on Saturday night, when Carleton and the U of O will be playing in front of perhaps the largest crowd ever to watch a university basketball game in this country?
  
  Poker and UFC on Sportsnet, some X games-like thingy on TSN and a NBA game on The Score.
  
  That said, you can't blame 'em for being small-town-cheap. Canadians tend to look down on watching our own compete against each other, with the exception of the NHL, CFL and curling.
  

• Nice of Fox anchor Curt Menefee to diss the CFL when discussing Giants hero Lawrence Tynes, saying, "he went to the CFL, then he went to NFL Europe." Not only was it incorrect (Tynes played in NFL Europe before joining the Ottawa Renegades), but implied the CFL is a poorer brand of football than the since-discontinued developmental league.
  
• No word of a lie: Eli Manning's quarterback rating in the regular season was exactly the same as Rex Grossman's in 2006. Try not act too surprised if he regresses badly next season.
• You can't make this up: Brett Favre's wife's maiden name? Tynes.

(How's this for synchronicity? On Sunday, Favre messes up the playoff game, which is great to watch as a Vikings fan. Monday, Rob Neyer from ESPN.com links to a post here. Tuesday, upon finally getting around to writing a post about it, a Google search reveals an article where Neyer, a baseball guy, professes that he too is a Vikings fan, even though he didn't grow up in Minnesota.)

BILL MASTERTON, REMEMBERED

Reading Mike Heika's retrospective on Bill Masterton, it really does seem quite astounding that it wasn't until a decade after his death that the NHL made helmets mandatory.

The AHL made visors mandatory within months in 2006 after Jordan Smith, who nows plays in the CIS at Lakehead, lost the vision in his left eye after being struck by a deflected shot.

Masterton suffered his fatal injury in a Minnesota North Stars-Oakland Seals game 40 years ago today Jan. 13, 1968, and died two days later. Much obliged to Heika for pulling Masterton out of the cracks of history. It's not a chapter the NHL would be especially eager to relive, since Masterton had worn a helmet in college as a member of the U.S. national team and took it off since that de rigeur at the time.

(The 50th anniversary of Willie O'Ree becoming the first black player in the NHL is also this week.)

There are a couple coincidences between Masterton and Steve Moore. Both were old to be a rookie. Both were educated men who took an odd route to the NHL (Moore from Harvard, and Masterton, who had a master's degree, was one of the first college players to make the NHL).

(Speaking of Jan. 13, a happy birthday goes out to Greg Hughes today. It's one of those milestone birthdays.)

Related:
Bill Masterton's death changed hockey forever; Masterton's memory resonates within sport 40 years later (Mike Heika, Dallas Morning News)
NHL trail blazer O'Ree to be celebrated (Eric Gilmore, Contra Costa Times)

THERE WAS NO 'I' IN MILT

Dave Perkins has the definitive obit on Milt Dunnell, the best Canadian sportswriter who ever was.

One lasting lesson from Dunnell, as Stephen Brunt noted in the Globe & Mail on the occasiona of his 100th birthday in 2005, was that the laziest way to start any piece of writing was with the the word "I." It's been taken to heart.

Related:
Milt Dunnell, 102: Sports journalist (Dave Perkins, Toronto Star)
Uncle Milt was always looking out for us (George Gross, Sun Media)

UP AT 6.... YOU'VE MADE A FALSE IDOL OF THIS REX GROSSMAN

• To any Chicago Bears fans who saw their season go up in smoke last night, remember, you were warned.
• Something that should be kept in mind with regard to the New England Patriots: How much has playing three straight games in Prime Time (two Sunday nighters before this week's Monday nighter) tired them out? NFL teams are conditioned for 1 p.m. on Sunday and in many cases, being home and R&Ring by 6 or 7 that night. That hasn't happened.
• Must be hell being the oldest: Anthony Parker is the Raptors starting shooting guard and his sister Candace might be the best women's basketball player in the world. Their brother Marcus is merely going to be a doctor.

Much obliged to pal Trevor Stewart for the shout-out in his Sudbury Star blog yesterday -- not that N. Sager knows anything about blogging for the MSM.

(Expect light blogging this weekend... someone felt that a trip west would do him good, see some old friends, good for the soul.)

TO BE BLUNT, IT MEANS MORE WHEN IT COMES FROM BRUNT

Steve Brunt's take on the Baseball Hall of Fame snubbing players' union boss Marvin Miller is worth a read.

Related:
Miller's exclusion a sin (Stephen Brunt, globesports.com)

UNDER THE GUN TO JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS ABOUT A DEAD BLACK ATHLETE

Dan Le Betard's column on the coverage of slain NFL safety Sean Taylor is worth a read today, if you have the time...

"I can't imagine how terrible it must be for Taylor's broken family to watch the television and see their late son/brother/boyfriend turned into a talk topic and one-dimensional stick figure because we, the media, didn't and couldn't have a complete picture of their beloved and didn't have the time to wait for one to develop ... too much of Taylor's televised eulogy became noise and speculation and gossip-cloaked-in-journalism about his troubled past.

"A DUI and a gun-waving incident aren't irrelevant, but they weren't all Taylor was, either. Brett Favre, rest assured, won't be eulogized with excessive emphasis on his pain-killer addiction, especially not if he were to die this horrifically. How do you think your grieving family would like to see you defined on television by your one or two worst public moments?"

The absolute pits of the Taylor coverage on this side of the border was last night on Sportsnet Connected. A very blond pseudo-journalist who shall remain nameless as a public service asked Jamie Dukes of the NFL Network, "What can the commissioner (of the NFL) do about these unruly players?"

Is that an ignorant question, or a racist question? Way to blame the victim. That's right up there with, "she shouldn't have worn that dress."

Related:
Media has failed with Taylor coverage (Miami Herald)
Taylor's death a grim reminder for us all (Jason Whitlock, FOXsports.com)

(It doesn't really matter if the VBPJ in question was Martine Gaillard, Evanka Osmak or Sean McCormick ... everyone asked that question. Everyone should have thought better of how to frame it; Whitlock provides another side to the story.)

IT'S A WHOLE NEW FOOTBALL GAME...

Jason Whitlock, writing for FOXSports.com, would be the one to nail down the difference between coaching in the NFL and coaching college football, in his column on the spectacular failure Charlie Weis has been at Notre Dame:

"You have to teach kids to tackle. You have to teach them to be tough. You have to wear them out in practice and then ask them to think, make plays and be physical when they're exhausted. You do it in the spring. You do it in fall camp. And you do it to a lesser degree on Tuesdays and Wednesdays during the season. When you take over a program and you're trying to instill your philosophy, the same week you're preparing for Michigan, you have to prepare a 30-play Tuesday scrimmage for your freshmen and sophomores not on the two-deep."

"... A great college coach can recognize the high-school linebacker who might be a nose tackle, defensive end or center in college. He can see the step-too-slow running back who would be a hard-hitting strong safety. An effective college coach knows what mental buttons to push on a pampered high school superstar to turn him into player who won't negatively impact team chemistry. A good college coach might look at a 6-foot-3, 205-pound, high-motor kid from a poor family and see a 250-pound pass rusher once he's been exposed to weight training, three square meals and a stable environment."

Compare that to Bill Simmons at ESPN.com, whose idea of tackling the NFL vs. college argument could be summed up by something he once wrote, which off the top my head, went like, "How hard can coaching college football be if Pete Carroll is good at it?" It just goes to show what value it has to have people writing about sports who do get into the nuts and bolts of the game. It's better than everyone trying to win an argument in two sentences or less. Hell, there doesn't even need to be an argument all the time.

Not that Whitlock can't do snappy... one irony is that The Big Lead called attention to his column was one of the all-time great similes: "Notre Dame is not the place to learn how to be a college head coach ... As fun as it might sound, you don’t want to lose your virginity to Jenna Jameson."

Charlie Weis with Jenna Jameson... thanks for the visual.

Related:
Weis' NFL experience not helping him now (Whitlock, FOXsports.com)
The Worst Football Coach in the Universe (Jonathan Chait, Slate, Oct. 25)

INSIDE THE MIND OF SCOTT BORAS

Those of you who are interested in how baseball is really played should give Ben McGrath's profile of super-agent Scott Boras in the latest New Yorker a read.

It's lengthy as magazine treatments go, but it goes beyond the usual media portrayal of Boras as the "avenging agent" or as some real-life version of Homer Simpson's friendly-but-also-supervillainous boss Hank Scorpio taking a flamethrower to all the old-time baseball traditionalists hold near and dear. At the same time, it doesn't beatify the man or what he does, and there's a window into what's going to happen with Alex Rodriguez and his Yankees contract.

How do you feel about Boras? He's helped grow major-league baseball into a $6-billion industry, but some of us who are Blue Jays fans were a lot happier when it was a $1-billion industry and the team actually stood more than an outside chance of playing October baseball.

Hopefully reading this demonstrates why diehard Jays fans bristle when the Toronto media always reduce everything to the team not having made the playoffs in 1993. It's clear that Boras' influence has practically given rise to an entirely different sport within the past two decades.

A couple of ex-Jays from the 1980s, reliever Bill Caudill and lefty pitcher Jeff Musselman, are now in Boras' employ. What they do is probably pretty fascinating in itself.

Much obliged to Greg Hughes for the tip.