Thu Dec 30/04
Three Thursday topics

They forgot one
The sports media guys have their "best and worst of" lists out, and Don Cherry features prominently in them, as one would expect. The Star's Chris Zelkovich, who has taken some cheap shots at Cherry in the past, declined to do so in his year-end piece. William Houston also doesn't bash Cherry as much as I would have expected, but he does say this:

In January, Don Cherry aired clips on Coach's Corner of high-sticking incidents. As they ran, he said, "Take a look at how most of them are done, and you check it, most of them had visors on that do it… Most of the guys that wear [visors] are European or French guys."

For the record, here's what lies between the ellipsis points:

DON    …There's no respect at all. And I remember, when I played in a thing, I played when the helmets were just coming in, and I remember a guy named Bobby Barlow, he played ten years, he put on the helmet, and I couldn't believe it, he'd come to me and said "I've been hit in the head more, crashed more since I put on the helmet." Not because you're…

RON    Don, it's true. What you say is one hundred percent true. What's the difference…?

DON    There is no cure. It's gonna be, and bless your little hearts… wait a minute! Wait a minute! All you sportswriters and all that and you "oh I can't understand them!" No you don't understand them, because you don't understand! It will be made mandatory. So bless your little hearts, that you're all writing and everything, you can go to bed at night, and the stupid hockey players, it will be made mandatory, there's no doubt about it. But I'm gonna tell you something. When you make it manda… 'cause you're right, as you said to me one time, if you're gonna have it, you can't have…

That's 192 words omitted in an attempt to package the comments in the worst possible way. I'm just saying, is all: the smear job perpetrated on Cherry by self-styled high-minded sportswriters is a childish, mean-spirited embarrassment. Whatever you think of Cherry, how can any "worst of 2004" list not include Bruce Dowbiggin's disgusting attack in May 12th's Calgary Herald?

In his guise as Everyman in a funny suit, Don utters something outrageous. The predictable parties recoil in disgust. The media go into overdrive, quoting the hurt parties and Cherry's disbelieving response. Everyone tunes in the next Saturday for more fireworks. Instead, a damp-eyed Cherry sends out a greeting to a small boy with an incurable disease back in Blunderbuss, Saskatchewan. See, he's really a softy, folks.

No one with a job as cushy as Zelkovich's or Houston's — essentially they are paid to point their fingers at other people's work — should be excluding print media from his purview simply because he wants to show his face at the bar that night. Claims of superiority over Don Cherry have for far too long stood in for actual reform in Canadian sports journalism business — you know, actually researching articles, not making trade rumours up, things like that.

It's not just the oil
The mayor of Mount Pearl, NF, one Steve Kent, is the wrongest man in all of Newfoundland and Labrador. Taking down the Canadian flag," he says, "is not about being anti-Canadian." Actually, Steve, that's the only thing it can possibly be about. But perhaps it's incorrect to write off this issue as a bunch of yokels in an oil-induced tizzy. Says Andy Wells, mayor of St John's: "it's part of a larger problem we have with our whole relationship with Canada." Oh, really? Cards on the table, Newfies: fly the flag, first of all, and then either apologize or attempt to renegotiate your extraordinarily cushy "relationship with Canada."

Too close to call
Here's Elizabeth Nickson, on her website, with regards to material she will henceforth be posting: "I swear it'll be all me." Now look, as I've said before, I have nothing personal against Nickson; I think she simply has a problem with Word's copy-and-paste function. Still, I couldn't help but go through some of her recent postings to see if anything jumped out at me. Something did: in her November 24, 2004 article, she calls the UN's oil-for-food fiasco "a Vesuvius of Graft, a carnival of corruption." Claudia Rosett's March 21, 2004 article in the National Review was entitled "Turtle Bay's Carnival of Corruption," and one of her subheadings was "a Vesuvius of graft." Especially as regards "Vesuvius of graft," I think that's very specific wording — certainly not in common usage; certainly worthy of citation.

This is, emphatically, not that big a deal. Once more, I'm sure it wasn't a conscious decision — likely she read the article, internalized the title/subheadings and repeated them months later — but perhaps this is indicative of what she's up against going forward. A photographic memory is a dangerous thing if you tend to forget that what you know came from photographs. If she does end up back in the pages of mass-produced media, hacks far more bitter than myself are going to be searching desperately for any scrap of non-original material they can find. This is too minor a phenomenon to be called by the p-word, but for someone in Nickson's situation it's far too close for comfort.

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