International incidents of epic proportion, indeed

Our own Duane Rollins has a first-person account of the "gong show" (his term) that occurred after the Toronto FC-Columbus Crew match last Saturday.

Duane makes a pretty salient point when he saw a much smarter approach to crowd control when he was covering the Grand River land dispute in Caledonia, Ont., than he did last Saturday. Think about. There's centuries-old simmering tensions present in the first instance. Toronto and Columbus have only been opponents for barely two years and it got out of control (we'll thank you to not say it was due to the bumbling of the Officer Bartlebys working security at the stadium).

"The police were everywhere, they did not appear to be communicating with each other and 'hands on' was a matter of first response rather than last resort. About all they accomplished was to further enrage the group and to put those not involved at risk – at one point two police cars took chase after a fleeing Toronto fan. Driving about 60 km/h they weaved their way through a crowded parking lot."

A couple TFC fans who happened to be off the wrong skin colour, in the cops' eyes, were also targeted. That's brutal, but not shocking if you know about who can be licensed to carry a badge and a gun in the U.S. That story about NFL running back Ryan Moats having a cop draw a gun on him when he was trying to get inside a hospital to see a dying loved one is, well, not atypical.

This is not about doing the smug Canadian routine or being a cop-basher (two in my extended family, thanks). The mind does reel when you're presented with how the U.S., in some precincts, just has a different concept of law and order, compared to its backwards neighbours in countries which astonishingly manage to not have more than one in every 100 adults in prison. That mindset is probably best expressed by the twitbag who covers the Columbus team, but thankfully not the local courts:

"The highlight from my vantage point on the concourse had to be the perp running toward the railroad tracks who eventually ran out of gas and was taken down with a perfect form tackle by one of the city's finest."

That's hilarious.

Related:
Sober second thoughts: Send in the clowns (The 24th minute)
TFC fan Tasered, others arrested after U.S. game (Lance Hornby, Sun Media)
"Like We Were Dogs": The Story of Ryan Moats (Dave Zirin)

Zen Dayley: Hank Aaron isn't here to be kicked around

Henry Aaron, as you probably heard, wants no part of being a political football.

Some of you probably saw that Aaron took a hammer to MLB commissioner Bud Selig's CYA (that doesn't stand for Cy Young Award) notion that baseball's all-time home run record should be restored to him. Aaron told Atlanta scribe Terence Moore, "I just don’t see how you really can do a thing like that and just say somebody isn’t the record holder anymore, and let’s go back to the way that it was." He added:

"It belongs to Barry (Bonds). No matter how we look at it, it's his record, and I held it for a long time. But my take on all of this has always been the same. I'm not going to say that Barry's got it because of this or because of that, because I don’t know."

Selig kind of played into the sad reality that Aaron "has been reduced to a sportswriter's cheap trope" (Tommy Craggs, Slate, July 2007) instead of being properly appreciated. It is also ties in with getting people to reject this whole notion that there is some special sanctity to baseball's record book. It's just an annual put out by The Sporting News.

All we know about Aaron is through reading about him and knowing his statistics, that he hit 755 homers yet had good enough bat control that the Milwaukee Braves actually used him as their 2-hole hitter for part of a season. Whatever feelings he has toward the years 1973-74, when he was closing in on Babe Ruth's record, are his alone. It is notable that he once said it was odd how the biggest record in baseball was the home run record until he, a black man, broke it, then it became Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.

It might very well be that being passed by Bonds gave the 75-year-old Aaron, in dollar-store psychology parlance, a chance at closure over that period in his life. That was one takeaway from a passage in Bill Rhoden's column Sunday, which evoked a years-ago interview.

"During an interview in his office in the early 1990s, I asked Aaron about his attitude toward celebrating the anniversary of breaking the record. He said that 'April 8, 1974, really led up to turning me off on baseball.'

" 'My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp,' he said then. 'I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ballparks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won't go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.' "

Reading that, as a carpenter's son from cracker-ass crackerville, does not answer definitely why Aaron would have such a take, but ours is not to demand an answer. It would make one feel like they get why he's not too eager to be someone's "rhetorical bludgeon" (Craggs' term) all these years after the fact.

No word of a lie, Terence Moore's blog post went up late Friday afternoon, right when yours truly has on the radio with Kinger, touching on Alex Rodriguez, steroids in baseball and such. Selig's suggestion of installing Aaron came up, and if memory serves I spat back something about it being an "affront" to Aaron's "dignity," would that I had with a better word.

The point is Hank Aaron is 75 years old. Leave him be.

This, that and the other

• The Yankees don't like paying rent.
  
• The Roy Halladay Farewell Tour should be in full swing by mid-March, so sayeth Jeff Blair at globesports.com.
• Erik Bedard threw off a mound; this counts as news in spring training, especially since it's coming from Geoff Baker and cisblog.ca has another Concordia U grad, Jared Book, now contributing.
  
  Bedard spoke to the media afterward, which is a good sign.
  

Related:
Aaron: Bonds can keep the record (Terence Moore, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 13)
In Aaron’s View, Bonds Is Home Run King (William C. Rhoden, The New York Times)
Hammering on Hank; how the media abuse baseball's home run king (Tommy Craggs, Slate, July 20, 2007)

Snark break...

As you were changing your Facebook status to let people know you are now accepting bribes...

After sleeping on it, Chantal Petitclerc's selection as the Lou Marsh Award boils down to is ideology trumping truth.

(Duane covered this off, admirably, yesterday, just scroll down.)

Sports fans do get too wrapped up in awards and honours conferred after the fact, which goes triple for this writer. Regardless, the truth is that far too often, Canadians would rather be nice than be right. Even if you haven't listened to over-the-air radio in weeks, you can hear some See Bee See host spreading on the saccharine like Homer Simpson buttering up a muffin: Chantal Petitclerc is so inspirational.

This debacle was a setup from the word go, really. This is what happens when you create an award where people have to pretend all sports are created equal. I have 10 years' of clippings that reflect that wish, but they're not.

The hell of it is that as a Canadian, you can't say boo without getting stuck with an anti label -- oh, you don't like the pick, so you must be against the disabled. This is what happens when you have a society when people give priority to what lines up with their personal beliefs.

Canada's affluence and equal opportunity does make us a Paralympics powerhouse, which is a point of pride for all the boys and girls vested in the myth that we are a liberal lot from coast-to-coast.

It doesn't hide the facts that Canada's athlete of the year award has gone to someone whom many people have never heard of or that outside the Paralympics, there aren't too many track meets of consequence where the same athlete can win the 100 and the 1,500 metres. It doesn't. The truth has to hurt.

This isn't even really about who should have won, but Jason Bay, Justin Morneau, Christine Sinclair, Carol Huynh, Steve Nash, and so on and so, prove themselves against an athlete pool of measured in hundreds and thousands. It's a disservice to lump them all in together and you know what, it's a disservice to Ms. Petitclerc.

Feel-good stories cannot always trump giving a matter some serious consideration. At the end of the day, you can only look at life through the eyes of love. This Canadian sports nut would love it if one of our highest athletics honours actually had legitimacy (this presumes it did once).

Moving on ...

The high price of mediocrity: The San Francisco Giants are paying Aaron Rowand $8 million US next season and plan to bat him sixth. That raw-bacon bet The Tao of Stieb made is is looking good.

Remember all those foreign coaches China hired for the Olympics? Almost all of them have been fired. Nice, eh?

Can you even work a joke around Jay Leno moving up to the 10 p.m. timeslot? The best way is just to ask a rhetorical question and trail off...

NHL veteran Chris Gratton was likely waived out of the league for good yesterday. The last time the Kingston Frontenacs had a tough team, he might have been playing for them. That's how long ago it was.

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

• Former Kingston Frontenacs captain Chris Stewart scored his first NHL goal last night. And the circle of life continues.
• Belleville Bulls forward Eric Tangradi has signed his first NHL contract. Is it a dick move to rhyme off all the players Frontenacs GM-for-life Larry Mavety drafted ahead of him three years ago. Probably, but (deep breath), here's the players Mavety took before the Bulls took Tangradi: LukePitherDarylBordenAndrewWilsonBrettPierceyDerekSzaszMattReisJustinTaylor.
• Boots Del Biaggio was a sketchy character long before he ever had a stake in any National Hockey League team. Gary Bettman could not have been expected to know. He wore a suit, he smelled nice, he had two pieces of ID.
  

(That joke up top is from last night's Stewart or Colbert, forget which.)

The U.S. of A-Rod; or, not this again, Alex

The time is past for slinging mud at Alex Rodriguez for not being unsure what country he wants to play for in the World Baseball Classic.

Granted, as pointed out by It Is About The Money, Stupid, A-Rod did the "WBC Hokey-Pokey" before the 2006 event. He's predictable as John Gibbons was for leaving a starting pitcher in too long. One larger point, as noted about two-thirds of the way down the the Gordon Edes column linked to in the lead, is that the WBC is very much a promotional tool worldwide for Major League Baseball. Bud Selig and the boys might be crossing their fingers and toes hoping that A-Rod will play for the Dominican Republic, since it's an obvious storyline.

The U.S. team between, Evan Longoria and David Wright, also has two young, telegenic, handsome in a non-threatening way third basemen whom it can use in its would make and it might be hoping A-Rod plays for the Dominican Republic, since that would open up the third base spot for a bright, marketable young star in Evan Longoria.

The other reason not to hate on A-Rod for this is that everyone is a dual citizen nowadays. This is hardly profound. The beauty of living in this day and age (emphasized because at this writing, some jagov on The History Channel is going on about how he'd love to visit 19th-century France and hang out with with Voltaire -- that's great, hope the irony of wanting to live in the past when you're appearing on a cable TV program ain't lost on ya) is that it's particularly easy, especially if the sports is the vessel for that connection with the old country.

It's also a part a defence against that worst disease in life, nationalism. For instance, when Canada is playing in the World Junior Hockey Championship and the shinny jingoism has been put up to 11, it's an easy to cop-out to joke about being "one-quarter happy" if Sweden ends up winning.

As well, for a lot of us, that desire to connect with your roots crops up very strongly in your early 30s. There's that desire to feel a sense of the past -- especially in a world that's been redrawn more in in the past 10 years than it did in the previous 20, often seems strongest for people in their early 30s. You're no longer identifying yourself as someone's daughter and son, and are

It should be no surprise that the one pro athlete who always seems trying to please someone other than himself -- Madonna, New York sportswriters, Yankees fans, Derek Jeter, Scott Boras, not necessarily in that order -- would have the same duality of man thing happening.

That's not see A-Rod is altruistic; just think of the storyline if he ended up facing the U.S. team. It is just two-faced to judge his WBC waffling.

Who knows, maybe he just wants to avoid playing for Team USA, whose three first-round games are in Toronto. Bad things tend to happen to him -- getting caught with a mystery blonde, getting plunked in the leg by Josh Towers in '07 -- when he visits the city.

Plus he doesn't want to lose to Canada again.

(Now, it's off to Sport Chek to a buy a Swedish hockey sweater with No. 13 on the back -- for Mats Sundin, not A-Rod.)

Related:
A-Rod to play for the Dominican in WBC (Gorden Edes, Yahoo! Sports; via It Is About The Money, Stupid)

Nothing but Net Geners: Black and white and misread all over

The story here in Ottawa last week about A.Y. Jackson Secondary School folding its senior boys basketball team had all sorts of man-bites-dog.

It was a hard-news story where each side merited an equal say. One of the players I interviewed, Ashish Darji, has left a comment at ottawacitizen.com. His words lend themselves to questions about who is is more out of touch with Net Geners -- the news media, or the education system.

Here is Mr. Darji's comment:

"I thought administration was supposed to resolve problems and help us to succeed, however from the principals and the head of athletics at our school, we've got nothing but put-downs. Today we asked if we could play for the baseball team, and she said 'yes, for sure'. But then why are we allowed to play for the baseball team, if we are skipping, yet not for the basketball team? Today at the protest, teachers were threatening students that if they did not get back to class they would fail the students or not let them play on any sports teams. Students were standing up and fighting for something that they feel is unfair and the administration were even taking away that right from the students. I thought this was canada."

In one shot, Darji hit on what many Baby Boomers in the media and education system get wrong about kids. It is in keeping with what Wikinomics author Don Tapscott digs into in his latest book, Grown Up Digital, but first, there is the issue of race and culture has to be explored.

The A.Y. Jackson story, like it or not you have to mention this, involved school admins from the Baby Boomer generation coming down on Net Geners. The latter, including those at two other schools in Ottawa which are not offering senior boys basketball this winter, include teens with surnames such as Afzal, Baino, Chopra, Darji, Deria, Hamed, Ibrahim, Indawala, Kabamba and Zurmati.

More than one A.Y. Jackson student said it was treated as an unexcused absence when Muslim students missed a morning practice because they had to go to mosque for prayers on Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. In fairness, one of the players noted the coach was considerate and "didn't run us too hard at practice" when players were fasting during the holy month.

More than one person who was at a meeting about the team's status on Oct. 27 said that the school principal -- a Boomer, with 28 years in education, told the young men and some of their parents, "Why don't you join the ski club?"

Quick, name the last black or brown person on Canada's downhill team. In fairness, one can only assume it was the kind of comment we've all spit out in a tense situation. In fact, the principal's previous school has a very well-run nordic skiing team. (I wrote a feature about the program last June.)

Ultimately, it was a sports story that had to be told in 600 words, by a carpenter's son from cracker-ass crackerville. It would have been unethical to risk exacerbating a tense situation, but it could not be ignored. It would not have gone uncommented upon in the U.S., where as King Kaufman once wrote, there is no such thing as a conversation that isn't about race.

The other daily covering the story did ignore it, initially going along with the school's aim to teach a lesson. Their silence speaks volumes. (As an aside, check out the mugshots of its columnists and search for anyone who is a visible minority or appears to be under age 35.)

The young men were taken aback by the "ski club" comment. However, they saw more in terms of fairness and consistency: We can't play basketball due to poor behaviour, but can play baseball or ski for the school?

The Paper of Record in Ottawa had two reporters working on the story and a follow-up by its ace sports columnist the following day, Oct. 30. There was an editorial the following day. (For the sake of the dumb guy, explain why what happens "every day on hockey rinks where the out-of-date philosophy of beating them in the alley still rules" has anything to do with 17-year-old boys whose sports heroes are more likely NBA demigods Chris Bosh and Chris Paul, rather than Senators cheap-shot artist Chris Neil, even though he plies his dubious craft just a few miles away in Kanata.)

When 300 students from a number of high schools demonstrated Oct. 30 in support of the basketball players, it was given short shrift and called a "brief morning walkout." The turnout was reported as 70, with no mention of students from other schools joining in (behold the power of Facebook).

Four days after the fact, though, the Citizen's Kelly Egan, bless his heart, called shenanigans on the school for framing "this as a case of academics taking precedence over sport -- you know, Big Important Life Lessons at stake here, doing the right thing even if hugely unpopular, not backing down to yappy parents, blah, blah, blah.

" ... The way to properly frame the problem, it seems to me, is to ask whether there is a judicious way to discipline members of a group without imploding the entire structure, thus losing a grand opportunity."

The Paper of Record can apparently be counted on to do the right thing ... eventually. A real lesson -- if you accept the idea that working journalists ever bother to learn anything, a dodgy concept -- is that we are way past the traditonal model of we-talk, you-listen and santimonious speechifying about rights and responsiblities. It is out, gone. As Tapscott wrote in his book:

"As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors ... these empowered young people are beginning to transform every institution of modern life ... they are replacing a culture of control with a culture of enablement.

"... They prize freedom and freedom of choice. They want to customize things, to make them their own. They're natural collaborators, who enjoy a conversation, not a lecture. They'll scrutinize you and your organization. They want to have fun, even at work and school." (Emphasis mine.)

It sounds easy enough to understand. The other lesson has brought the point home that educators and the media must be ahead of the curve in terms of tolerance and understanding of people with widely varying backgrounds and social conventions. It is an occupational requirement.

That did not happen here. Instead, one school clung to the old ways, the culture of control. They gloried in a team triumphant, but did not take all of them. And rather than comfort the afflicted, one news outlet repeated the self-serving talk about "building character," as if our education system in Canada had a 140-year track record of turning out people of impeccable character.

Small wonder, then, that it leaves a young man saying, "I thought this was Canada."

Snark break ... Freud said it best: Ah, to be Jung again!

More great headlines that cannot be written: "If you liked Oliver Twist, you'll enjoy seeing Dick squirm."**

Apparently a big early-season plotline on Friday Night Lights is a quarterback controversy. Did the show's writers bring in Argonauts president Keith Pelley as a script doctor?

(It's not a spoiler. In the words of Russell Peters, "Greetings, you filthy downloaders!")

Hey, Coming Down The Pipe!, the bad headline is our not-that-funny trope. "Dalyn Flette Takes One in the Jung-k!", indeed!

(Dalyn Flette is the goalie for the WHL's Edmonton Oil Kings. He has not been getting the job done, apparently, so they traded for Torrie Jung. That's the joke.)

There are 383 Leave Sarah Palin Alone videos on YouTube.

Now, that was written before seeing the interview with Brian Williams on NBC ... you know the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where Jennifer Grey is in the cop shop, and as soon as the camera pans to Charlie Sheen, you start laughing? That was exactly what it was like the first time John McCain appeared on screen during that interview.

("If that's not qualified, what is qualified" : 2008 :: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" : was to 2005.)

The late Tim Russert might be controlling the Buffalo Bills' fortunes from the great beyond. Hey, it's long been suspected that Mackenzie King runs the Toronto Maple Leafs from the spirit world.

This post is worth nothing, but this worth noting

• Poz on J.P. Ricciardi's, uh, enigmatic approach to the Blue Jays roster management: "To be fair, the Jays did end up winning 86 games, thanks to a league-leading 3.49 ERA. But man, I just do not get what they're trying to do up there."
  
  This came hours before Ricciardi had a commitment ceremony for Marco Scutaro as potential starting shortstop in 2009. Scutaro does not hit enough to justify his glove. The subtext is that Rogers has shut off the spigot and the Jays will not up payroll, especially with a dropping Canadian dollar.
  
  Really, though, it has the air of George Costanza trying to gift-wrap a scholarship for an short, stocky, slow-witted underachieved who also wanted to pretend he was an architect. "With a little guidance, Marco Scutaro is going to be everything I claim to be, for real."
  
  It is times like that where you forget that Ricciardi is a moderately compotent GM.
• Cox Bloc is not happy that Kelvington, Saskatchewan, has not honoured Wendel Clark, the greatest hockey player's hockey player of all time. (Well, actually, that would be another Saskatchewan boy, some guy named Howe.)

**By the way, Mr. Pound? That CYB quote you gave, "It just means that they were societies that to Europeans were in the wilderness ... It's not derogatory." How can it not be derogatory when those societies were devastated by a genocide perpetrated by those very Europeans? Just saying.

Zen Dayley: Vlady the (gasp) inhaler, and the concept of "Cub it up"

(Yes, it's OK to root for a Milwaukee-Tampa Bay World Series, just for the mental picture of Fox Sports executives doing a 2 1/2 tuck off the catwalk at Tropicana Field.)

Red Sox 4 Angels 1 (Boston leads 1-0): Vladimir Guerrero doing his best Bengie Molina on the basepaths is as good a jumping-off point for a belated wrapup of Day 1 of the MLB Playoffs.

A commenter over at Yahoo! Sports' Big League Stew commented that it's a damn shame almost no one saw Guerrero play in Montreal, back when he could run. It's not a shock that he got thrown out going first-to-third on a hit, since Baseball Prospectus 2008 noted that "his baserunning speed is all but gone." Still, there's reading something in a book marketed to statheads and then there's seeing it unfold in an October game.

Meantime, Trail, B.C.'s Jason Bay (hey! he began his career in the Expos organization until the franchise got Seliged) hit the game-deciding homer for the Red Sox. We're all proud of him, liberal guilt over how he was used to make Manny Ramirez look bad notwithstanding.

(As for the other Canadians: Russell Martin also homered, but Ryan Dempster got jocked.)

The upside for the Sox is they might be able to win this series without Josh Beckett at his best. For Game 2, it depends on what you put more stock in -- Daisuke Matsuzaka getting hit hard in his only start against the Angels during the regular season, but he's also pretty much untouchable on the road (2.37 ERA, .178 opponents' average.

"Regular season" is the operative word. The Angels are fast becoming the Ottawa Senators in double-knit unfirms. There are the great regular seasons followed by playoff linen-soilings, plus the lameness. David Eckstein has changed teams four times since the Rally Monkey was broken out, and it painfully unhip then.

Dodgers 7 Cubs 2 (L.A. leads 1-0): The phrase "Cub it up" (terrorist fist jab to Terp's Take) could move into wider circulation if Carlos Zambrano and Co. can't deliver a W in Game 2.

(Martin and Andre Ethier, L.A.'s two best hitters who actually played a full season in the NL, are 8-for-13 and 6-for-13 respectively vs. Zambrano. Expect to hear this a 1,000 times in the next 12 hours.)

Dodgers righty Chad Billingsley could handcuff the Cubbies on Thursday night. A Roy Halladay comparison seems a bit glib at first blush, but he had 201 strikeouts and gets more groundballs than he did in his first full season in 2007, and he's only 24 years old.

The opener pointed up the big matzo ball the Cubs have hanging out there: No left-handed power. They really probably should at least think about benching Kosuke Fukudome and his .379 slugging percentage. Their most reasonable facsimile of a lefty power bat is either Mike Fontenot or Jim Edmonds. One weighs 160 lbs., and the other is 38 years old.

Random thought: What kind of odds could you have got two years ago betting there would be a playoff game where Ryan Dempster threw the first pitch and Greg Maddux threw the last one?

No what happens, this series is really all about the Yankees.

Phillies 3 Brewers 0 (Philadelphia leads 1-0): There's not much point in going too deep into this game, since it was over by the dinner hour. There's a strong case that the Phillies, between the Brewers' bobbles and Brad Lidge's nervous ninth, got kind of lucky.

CC Sabathia, who will start a pretty much do-or-die Game 2, has actually got better pitching on three days' rest. The Brewers, between CC Sabathia and Prince Fielder, are the husky gentleman's pride and joy (what else would you expect from a team from Wisconsin?) Truth be known, their batters could be going cold again. Did everyone forget what got Ned Yost fired in September?

White Sox vs. Rays: Tampa Bay in four seems like a pretty good form pick; Baseball Digest Daily is calling a sweep.

The Rays get more runners on base, field better than the White Sox and their bullpen isn't followed around by men in fire-retardant suits. To use a hockey analogy, offensively, they are last season's Pittsburgh Penguins -- the team who didn't have their top guns together all the time. Despite that, they won 97 games, and have home field advantage straight through the World Series.

Basically, this is a contrast between one team that puts a lot of runners on but doesn't bring them around as well it could, and one team that doesn't get enough on, but brings them in. The White Sox hit those 235 homers, but one pet theory is a team that ranks higher in home runs (first) than it did in runs scored (fifth) is doomed in the playoffs, when teams can shorten their rotations and bunch up the relief appearances among a few guys.

It's cute how the White Sox still play 1990s-style baseball, right down to the black uniform tops and superannuated Ken Griffey Jr. in centrefield. Come to think of it, Junior actually won't be that far from Ponce de Leon's mythical Fountain in Youth down there on the Gulf Coast. Yes, Griffey threw a runner out at the plate in the San Diego County Credit Union AL Central Tie-Breaker, but he didn't hit much after the trade.

(Among all the contradictions in our life, one is having sleeping problems tend to flare up right around the time of the baseball post-season. I'll try to be more timely tomorrow.)

Snark break... You had us at 'Canadian pig vomit'

OK, so you can count John Ralston Saul out for the big road trip to Ottawa next month...

• The Josh Howard controversy didn't seem worth getting into last night. A multimillionaire celebrity saying some ill-conceived and inconsiderate? It's not worth calling Reuters over, even with Skype.
  
  However, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban defended his employee the best way possible late last night, by simply, wait for it, reprinting the ugly, hate-filled anti-Howard e-mails, complete with names and e-mail addresses. The balls it took to do that are not sold in any sporting goods store.
  
  Who knows what NBA commish David Stern is going to think.
  
  You'll love the one who refers to Steve Nash as "the anti-American Canadian pig vomit," and just to get the point across, types in ALL CAPS. Really, you made your point with the Canadian pig vomit.
  
  Seriously, when NBA players are standing for the anthem (or anthems, if they're playing the Raptors), the War of 1812 is about the farthest thing from their minds. Meantime, Josh Howard could make nice by shooting all of his three-pointers from the right wing.
  
• This is going to be heard all over the place in a couple weeks, so get started early on building up a tolerance to Eddie Vedder's Cubs song.
  
  
  
  It's no surprise coming from Vedder. Pearl Jam was pretty much to grunge's Rolling Stones to Nirvana's Beatles -- they never apologized for not being first, or for selling more albums. Nor should have they. You play for the fans, not the bleedin' critics.
  
  There's an obvious joke that you never would have seen Kurt Cobain, had he lived, writing an anthem about the 2008 Seattle Mariners. After all, their season's been too depressing to contemplate, even for him. Erik Bedard is probably out for about half of 2009, by the way.
• As for the Vikings' QB switch, Tarvaris Jackson was betrayed, but his team isn't going to win with him in the No. 1 job.
  
  The gut feeling, and it's more than that is that the Vikings' stadium push gets about as far as a run up the middle on third-and-8. They'll play at the U of Minnesota while the Metrodome gets gutted and renovated.
• Ex-NHL pest Matthew Barnaby is reportedly headed for a gig at ESPN. Good for him.
• The Legend of Cecilio Guante visited Ottawa and found it much more to its liking than a certain husband of a former governor-general did.
• There's a video of Shaquille O'Neal being lifted by Wee Man from Jackass. Kobe Bryant probably say that and said, "Big deal, I carried him to three championships with the Lakers."

Did everyone see that the Carleton Ravens got a mention in a Sports Illustrated column? Also, three weeks later, people in Kansas still haven't got over Aaron Doornekamp's dad.

No country for Cindy Klassen, either

How soon we forget, eh?

As someone who's typically tits-deep in white liberal guilt, it's a struggle to understand the thought process that led a Winnipeg newspaper to completely leave our women athletes out of a list of 10 reasons for Canadian sports fans to wave the flag. Hey, it's not as if Winnipeg being the hometown of both Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes, gold medallists, role models, and Right to Play ambassadors, should have jogged anybody's memory. (Hey, maybe if they were tennis players who fell within the Maxim guidelines of beauty ...)

Women athletes only accounted for 16 of Canada's 24 medals in Turin back in February 2006. On our nation's birthday, we should take this as a sign of our nation's commitment to equality in an age where there are still many places in the world where females are years from being able to take athletic participation for granted. It's also made Canada an ass-kicker in the Winter Olympics, where a nation "with one-tenth of the population of the United States" (to use the article's exact wording) won just one less medal than the Americans did in Turin -- and more than Russia (142 million people) or France (65 million).

Bear in mind, it's a tendency of all sports-loving males to make this error of commission and omission every so often. Who knows, we might have trouble divesting ourselves of the whole "you got beat by a girl!" phenomenon back in childhood, although it was easier to get rid of when your house-league hockey teams that occasionally played Kingston girls teams which had future Olympian Jayna Hefford, who skated circles around most guys her age.

Point being, it can't be that hard to remember the athletic accomplishments originating from that 53% of the population which supposedly doesn't read the sports section (there's a lot of folks in the other 47% who can relate). An article that had space to aggrandize Ron MacLean and cringe-worthily comment on Bricia Weir being a "dark-skinned brunette" -- as if she and golfer Mike Weir ended up getting together because of pigmentation -- surely could have paid some attention.

(Digression: MacLean being in there is the reason for saying "tits-deep" instead of the less salty "hip deep" or "neck deep" in a post about the subjugation of women athletes. It's a pun that Ron MacLean could never say on TV in a million years, get it?)

Let's leave the FJM-style Fiskings to some other man or woman with more spleen to vent and less to lose professionally. It's just funny, that's all. Sixteen medals from our women, eight from our men and barely two years later and it's not as important to the hometown paper of a couple Olympic heroines as the hair and skin tone of Mike Weir's wife. This actually happened.

Our women athletes won twice as many medals as the men and aren't even as thought of as being half as good. Brutal.

NASCAR discrimination suit should burst your bubble

We've all snickered from the safety of our little middle-class bubble whenever the bosses send around a memo about the latest company policy on harassment.

You know what, though? Making light of that is just so hypocritical. The $225-million US racial/sexual discrimation lawsuit that NASCAR is facing from former employee Mauricia Grant, an African-American woman, is an extreme case, but it's good jumping-off point for realizing how some of us struggle to understand what it's like to be in a vulnerable situation. Or like Sports on My Mind put it: "It is about human beings and our basic loathing and therefore failure to possess the wherewithal to accept and respect someone different than us."

Yes, society is way too damn serious and tight-assed politically correct. Reading over what Grant says she was subjected to should give pause to laughing about this the next time, since many of us have no idea what it's like. And it reaches all the way to Canada (although it's probably one of the milder items in a 140-count statement of claim)!

"128. Approximately later that week of August 4, 2007, while working at Circuit Gilles in Montreal, Defendant NASCAR's Director of Truck Series Wayne Auton observed White Official Jay Altheizer refuse to cooperate when Plaintiff MAURICIA GRANT was attempting to fix the data log, intentionally delay their work, and yell at Plaintiff when she tried to get him to help: 'Stop acting like a fucking bitch! You're not the boss of me!' ... Altheizer later admitted to Officials Brian Bishop and Shannon Bednarek that he had intentionally started an argument with Plaintiff MAURICIA GRANT because he knew he could get plaintiff in trouble."

There's a scene in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby when a character played by Greg Germann talks about a deal where "we could end up owning half the teams in NASCAR."

That might a good start for redressing what Grant endured.

Related:
Mauricia Grant and the disdainful sound of one hand clapping (Sports on My Mind)