Bruce Dowbiggin
Sports Tests Negative On Many Fronts In 2021
You have to concede this about 2021: At least it was consistent. The year started out miserable and soul destroying and continued that way till the final days of this misbegotten year. It’s a wonder any sports were played at all.
From draconian lockdowns over Covid-19 to draconian lockdowns over the Omicron variant, we never knew who was playing, where they were playing and whether anyone would be there to see them play. Some jurisdictions applied a lighter hand (Florida, Sweden) while others produced dystopian scenes of imprisonment and rejection (Australia, New Zealand).
Here is how I Don’t Like Mondays saw the year: In February our piece We Interrupt This Lecture To Bring You A Football Game noted the downbeat tenor of the knowledge class harshing everyone’s vibe with Bruce Springsteen in the starring role. “Only at the end of the Boss’ litany of Woody Guthrie dirges about the soil and churches in Kansas did we find out this paean to Woke America was for Jeep— a company owned by French and Italian interests. The guy who was Born To Run now cruises the streets of privilege.”
With the NHL resuming its regular winter slot, the monotony of modern goaltending excellence became apparent. In Ken Dryden: Mr. Bettman, Bring Down These Walls the HOFer observed: “While scoring remains near its typical levels, the art of scoring them is more luck than skill. In short, if today’s padded-up giants can see the puck they’re going to stop it. “This game, one that allows for such speed and grace, one that has so much open ice, is now utterly congested… Never in hockey’s history has a tail so wagged the dog.”
Wayne Gretzky’s celebrated father/coach Walter died in early March. We reflected on his impact in How Walter Gretzky Raised The Bar– And The Cost– Of Training Hockey Stars “With the success of Gretzky’s training model— plus the importation of European skill training— families realized that if their sons and daughters wanted to be world-class athletes they were going to have to reject the Don Cherry ”Try Harder” school and imitate the techniques Gretzky had used on his son. Within a decade, getting the proper coaching and fitness to become a star became a growth industry.”
While on the Gretzky theme we excerpted the 1979 amateur draft from our book Inexact Science: The 6 most compelling drafts in NHL history. Because Wayne Gretzky: The Great One Was A Draft Dodger
The recent debate over transgender swimmer [Will] Thomas harkens to our March column Why Trans Athletes Spells Bad News For Your Grandma’s Feminism “The current fetish for pretending trans men can menstruate or bear children— previously the sacred domain of women— is an existential challenge to the women who transported radical gender politics from higher education into the public sphere. The blurring of this line— adopted by the same liberals who once supported them in establishing feminist laws— leaves women as just one of myriad grievance groups now being accepted by government and (gasp) corporate friends.”
“CFL On Line 1? Tell Them I’m Out. Kielburgers? Put Them Right Through” was our summary of a government showering its foreign pals with money while allowing a national tradition to wither.
A Super Soccer League in Europe never got out of the starting blocks. But we observed: Super Leagues Aren’t Dead. They’re Only Resting. “As I wrote in Cap In Hand the long-term solution is to allow clubs to play at the level their market can afford— something soccer in Europe currently does. How can a fan In Edmonton or Kansas City or San Antonio pay the same prices as fans in NYC, LA, Chicago or Toronto? How can they keep their young stars when a super franchise comes calling with lucrative opportunities? Ultimately they can’t. The money will be too big.”
The whack-a-mole quarantine regimes of the leagues— with their test-and trace efforts— savaged lineups, forced cancellations and delayed Olympics. In our May column PCR Tests: Fudging The Numbers To Suit The Narrative we called it hopeless. “For much of the pandemic 40 cycles has been the standard PCR level. Using a standard of 32 cycles, as much as 60 percent of the positives announced in Canada (1.3 million at this moment) produce traces that can neither produce illness nor transmit the virus. Do the math on 60 percent of 1.3 million and you realize the daily counts vomited out on TV and social media have deliberately been used more to scare than to enlighten.”
Thankfully, some traditions never die. Oilers, Leafs Choke: Tanks For The Memories took time to honour the gag reflex in Edmonton and Toronto during the spring playoffs.
From Jon Rahm’s DQ at The Memorial for knowing someone with Covid to to depleted lineups across sports leagues we asked: Sports Cred: Can You Believe A Shred Of What You See? “The PGA Tour is no doubt under great pressure from its sponsors and political allies to keep promoting the Casedemic deception. The message of change on PCR testing in America and Canada will have to come from where it started: with the public and private ®Health experts who’ve zealously dissembled and deceived since early 2020 to deflect their mistakes and shift blame to the naughty public.”
The failure of the NHL and specifically the Chicago Blackhawks to deal with a 2010 sexual schedule was the subject of two columns. Where Was Media On The Latest Hockey Sexual Abuse Scandal? and Cleanse The Sport: These Men Need To Be Fired. “Either NHL commissioner Gary Bettman or NHLPA executive director Don Fehr— or both— need to be shown the door. Nothing better exposes the organizational failure of these two executives than their treatment of the Kyle Beach sexual assault case that spilled out this week.”
The Tokyo Summer Olympics had great moments for Canadians. But nothing can hide The Empty Games: The Olympics On Life Support. “Put bluntly, the number of cities able to afford the back-breaking cost of staging the Summer Games has dwindled to a few major cosmopolitan cities and to nations run by dictators, sheiks and autocrats. And even those parties have realized that it’s hard to justify ten billion dollars for a swanky party for jocks and sports hangers-on.”
There was some attempt to adapt the Canadian medal count to suit political memes. In Success Of Canada’s Women Does Not Mean Men Failed. “In about half the nations in the world women are not allowed to compete at all or are severely hampered by religious doctrines or cannot get funding for the rigorous training needed to make an Olympic final. In short the talent pool that Canadian women swim in is clearly smaller by a large factor than that in which the make athletes compete. So when you’re watching an Olympic final in rowing or cycling or wrestling the odds that a Canadian woman gets on the podium increase exponentially over what can be expected for a man.”
With the introduction of vaccine passports to enter sports events we replied Civil Liberty: The Hard Is What Makes It Great. “The founders of democratic nations with liberal values understood the power of fear. The Declaration of Independence was forged in the midst of the American Revolution. Its authors would be hanged if it failed. They knew fear. That’s why they made it so damned difficult to circumvent the rights to person and privacy when people get nervous. They knew “easy” would get a lot of traction in a moment of stress.”
As the NFL started in September we did a little prognostication. NFL QBs: The More You Pay The Less They’re Worth? “Unless Tom Brady wins yet another SB, the team hoisting the trophy is most likely going to be a team with a QB on a manageable salary-cap number. Outside of Brady’s SB wins the past decade, the teams that have won the NFL’s top prize— or played in the big game— have had QBs on entry-level contracts at a fraction of what the big boys make.”
Endless MLB postseason games were one traditional feature that hasn’t disappeared. While We’re Young: Putting MLB On The Clock. “We’ve seen the PGA Tour hustle players back into timed pace and tennis officials penalize players for not serving before their 25-second clock expires. Baseball remains stubborn on using the clock. The question is, how to sell MLB stars that a ticking clock will not hurt their pre-pitch, in-between-pitch and after-pitch-rituals? Who’s going to tell Vlad Guerrero Jr. to pick up the pace or Max Scherzer to just release the damn ball?”
In our ongoing campaign to introduce real audio to sports we pleaded All Ears: Let Athletes Have Their Say. “The success of Netflix’s F1 documentary series Drive To Survive (now showing its third year) is a perfect example of the public’s demand for the inner sanctum of sport. Drive To Survive has plenty of the Nuke LaLoosh blarney from athletes and owners. But it also has enough free-wheeling about the bitchiness between drivers, the headaches of team managers and some of the greatest video from the pits to intrigue even the least serious fans.”
In a time of surrender Why Black NBA Stars Don’t Buy The Vax outlined a point of resistance to mandated behaviours. “Canadian NBA star Andrew Wiggins was supposed to be known as a superstar when he was drafted No. 1 overall by Cleveland in the 2014 draft. Now, after seven seasons of mixed playing results, he may instead be best known as the guy who said no to the NBA on their mandatory vaccination rules”.
In another Book Excerpt: The Price Was Right– Even Without A Cup. “NHL teams seem content to find goalies when they need them— not necessarily in the draft. Since 2000, just two first-rounders— Marc-André Fleury and Martin Brodeur— have won the Cup for the team that drafted him. Carey Price’s greatest legacy may be the absence of goalies being selected at the top of the draft.”
Frustration with strike zones coloured the World Series. Punch Out: Time To Go Virtual On Balls And Strikes “But the virtual stroke zone shows MLB can have 100 percent accuracy to a defined strike zone. Not to put @umpscorecards out of work, but with a virtual strike zone MLB has the power to remove doubt about the strike zone, end arguments and conspiracies about certain umps and make the games move faster.”
There’s not much new in broadcasting sports events. But. Manning The Broadcast Booth Proves A Winner may have shifted the NFL experience. ”Call it other revenge of the little brother. Or “pipe down, I’m watching the game:” However you characterize it, the emergence of the Manning Brothers, Peyton and Eli, on Monday Night Football has breathed life into a stale broadcast format and shown that All In The Family doesn’t always mean Archie Bunker calling Mike Stivic a Meathead”.
Finally, year-end showed voices within the sports establishment saying the draconian Covid testing and quarantine rules don’t work. Testing The Covid Narrative: Stevie Y Says Enough ”At the end of the day, I think — and now I’m getting political — but at the end of the day our players are testing positive with very little symptoms, if any symptoms at all. I don’t see it as a threat to their health at this point. I think you might take it a step further and question why are we even testing, for guys that have no symptoms,” Yzerman said on Saturday.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Breaking: Drs. Bonnie Henry and Theresa Tam have been appointed to the Order of Canada in recognition of their role in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
And so the game of covid liar’s poker has more winners. It’s like awarding the captain of the Titanic the Nobel Prize for his work on floatation. As we now know these two— and the other WHO finger puppets in Canada— made the Covid 19 episode worse, not better, with their prescription for panic, positives and punishment. Even as they knew the truth about the limits of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines they continued to spew fallacious PCR data on the extent of the sickness and who was at risk.
Put simply, to protect vulnerable seniors they said kids were also at great risk. Which was unconscionable.
In this they encouraged Justin Trudeau in his worst instincts, combining his father’s insouciant disregard for civil rights (sending in the police) with his mother’s mental stability. Propped up by Team Tam and its U.S. allies such as Anthony Fauci, this hysteria peaked with a sequestered PM crushing the Truckers Convoy’s vaccine protest with emergency measures and destruction of civil liberties.
Lest you wonder, this overreach was recognized at the time. Justice Maclean wrote at the trial of Convoy organizers, “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest”. On Feb. 16, he continued a no-honking order, again writing: “Defendants & other persons remain at liberty to engage in a peaceful, lawful & safe protest.”
The leaders of the Convoy, lynched by Canadian media’s phoney claims of right-wing American interference, are still fighting jail time on charges of nuisance. While violent criminals are routinely released on bail or absolved.
Justice Richard Mosley later concluded that while the convoy was a disruption of public order, it didn’t constitute a national emergency and invoking the act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.” But in real time Team Tam made no attempts to correct the wilder misgivings about Covid (lockdowns, mandatory vaccines). Trudeau was given a hall pass. Needless to say the purchased media made things infinitely worse regurgitating these mistakes.
In short, they knew better but hid the truth. But why pick on Henry and Tam? Under Trudeau and his wingman Jagmeet Singh this was the golden age of lies and prevarications in Canada and the U.S. No apologies were ever offered when the truth emerged.
As we’ve noted before, Trudeau cried with a teddy bear carefully positioned over 751 alleged unmarked graves in a known Catholic cemetery that the local Cowessess band abandoned. The Liberal government knew the claim of 215 “children’s graves” was false, and still ran with it to get Trudeau his photo-op. Naturally the CBC Media Party played (and still plays) accomplice in this farce as the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for six months and Trudeau ratted out Canada at the UN as a genocidal state.
There were more, plenty more Trudeau scandals that media endorsed and then stood by even as the truth was revealed. SNC Lavalin. We Charity. Arrive Can app. Firing indigenous justice minister. Chinese drug infiltration/ money laundering. Nazi Celebrated in Parliament. Welcome To Canada immigration. Nova Scotia massacre. McKinsey Consultation. Blackface. And so on.
And were there apologies when it came time to make the Trudeau Liberals accountable? No, they staged a media circus over Donald Trump’s assertion of 51st state. All the fake news and deliberate lies went poof, allowing Mark Carney to seamlessly assume the PM job.
Lest We Forget Pt. 2 it was not exclusive to Canada. As we are now learning: Barack Obama and Joe Biden sat in an August 3, 2016 Situation Room briefing and said, yeah, let the highest officials in our administration fabricate evidence to frame the opposing party candidate Donald Trump. Obama. Biden. Comey. McCabe. Strzok. Page. Rice. Etc.
Knowingly using the faked Clinton campaign ‘Steele Dossier’ hoax, they launched a federal investigation into the Trump presidential campaign that lasted three years after Trump was sworn in as the nation’s 45th President. Arresting and jailing his partners and colleagues. Inventing fake stories for their media enablers. Let’s repeat that. Saint Obama knew there was criminal activity in the process but let his henchmen try to fix an election.
And when the ruse was uncovered no one apologized. No one in authority was fired or jailed. The Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the NT Times and Washington Post for disseminating the DEMs scandal were not rescinded. Nor were they given back by the lying newspapers.
The concerted frauds of the same U.S. DOJ, FBI and State Departments were fed by media and accepted by gullible publics in Canada and America. The fantastical 2020 election results were likewise drummed into the public irrespective of the sudden “appearance” of 27 million new votes during a pandemic.
It was all a fitting preamble to the 2020-2024 Biden senility scandal with Democrats running a man they knew was in full dementia. In the 2020 election Biden was hidden from public view, the better to let media attack Trump for spurious charges launched by partisan DNC attorneys in Georgia, New York and DC. Even then it took the suppression of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop just prior to the election to get his father elected.
The dance of denial continued in Biden’s term as he physically and mentally deteriorated before the American public. But inquiries about who was running the government if not Biden were harshly suppressed. Media lackeys noted he was sharp as a tack mentally and in tip-top physical condition when he wasn’t falling down stairs.
It took the stunning 2024 debate debacle with Trump to strip away the lies about Biden’s health, now said to be advanced prostate cancer and Parkinson’s. The media, caught in their own lies about Biden’s condition, offered no apologies and tried to blame Biden’s stutter for the performance.. Right.
These were the two greatest U.S. hoaxes from people who’d cried hoax incessantly. They were hardly the only abuse of public trust. Some of the perpetrators are said to now be under investigation— even as they hand out awards to each other. The media’s credibility is shattered and yet they still blame others. Jaded voters are taking a “we’ll see” approach. But expectations of any change in DC or Ottawa are limited.
As Stephen Taylor posted on X: “Turns out for Liberals, ‘elbows up’ just means ‘noses up’ like it always has.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
This past week has seen (some) Canadians celebrating their heritage— now that Mike Myers has officially reinterpreted Canadian culture as a hockey sweater and Mr. Dressup. This quick-change was so popular that Canadian voters even forgot an entire decade of Justin Trudeau.
In the United States, the people who elected Donald Trump– and not Andrew Coyne– to run their nation celebrated Independence Day with stirring renditions off The Star Spangled Banner, although few could surpass the brilliant performance of the song by the late Whitney Houston at the 1991 Super Bowl.
The CDN equivalent is some flavour of the month changing the words to O Canada at the Grey Cup game. Canada’s national anthem has always been open to interpretation by people who may or may not have Canada in their hearts. At the 2023 NBA All Star Game Canadian chanteuse Jully Black became the latest singer to attempt a manicure to the English lyrics of O Canada, penned for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony ( Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The English lyrics have “evolved” over the years, just like the dress code for the CDN PM..)
Black amended the first line from “our home and native land” to our home ON native land”. Because something-something. But this creative license is nothing new. Unlike Chris Stapleton, Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston with the Star Spangled Banner, interpreters of O Canada have seen fit to amend the lyrics to their sensibilities. Roger Doucet, famed anthem singer of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970-80s, tried to add the words “we stand on guard for truth and liberty” in place of the first “we stand on guard for thee”.
In 1990, having nothing better to do, Toronto City Council voted 12 to 7 in favour of recommending that the phrase “our home and native land” be changed to “our home and cherished land” and that “in all thy sons command” be partly reverted to “in all of us command”. (The latter was officially adapted.)
While those attempts had mixed outcomes it appears it’s just a matter of time till Ms. Black’s class-conscious culling of the words is accepted. Being generous we here at IDLM thought we’d short-circuit piecemeal attempts to create a throughly Woke version of the anthem that would last till the latest fad come along. Herewith our 2023 definitive O Canada that even— maybe only— Justin Trudeau could love:
“O Canada” (Ignores the French fact in our culture) Change to “Eau Canada”
“Our home on native land” (ignores indigenous land claims) Change to “Get off our land, settlers”
“True patriot love in all of us commands” (Only true patriot love? There were officially 78 kinds of relationships in Trudeaupia. And commanding love?) Change to “Love the one you’re with”.
“With glowing hearts we see thee rise” (rise suggests triumph of white triumphalist dogma) Change to “Non judgementally we oppose the crushing impacts of Euro-based autocracy”
“The true north strong and free” (How can anyone be strong or free when we support America’s killing fields?) Change to “Heteronormative thinking must be stamped out at our borders. If we even have borders anymore.”
“From far and wide” (Body shaming) Change to “Obesity is a disease that is not helped by putting it in the national anthem.”
“O Canada” (biased against A, B, AB blood types) change to “Science Must Be Believed”
“We stand on guard for thee” (Spreads hate against the non ableist community) Change to “Please remain seated.”
“God keep our land” (God? God? What is this, the Reformation) “Change to “It’s your thing”
”Glorious and free” (Glorious harkens to the bourgeois subjugation of Indigenous thought processes by white Christian priests) Change to “A genocidal state if there ever was one”.
“O Canada we stand on guard for thee/
O Canada we stand on guard for thee” The denial of trans rights is used twice here to emphasize the intolerable burdens faced by people of the LGBTQ2R community as they seek respect and compensation for the evils of the founding oppressors.) Change to “Eau Canada, after 6.5 hours of intensive lectures on the gender, race and dissociative application of class war on your citizens you may someday come to understand that this song is a manifestation of your bigotry and exploitation of minorities— and why rhyming lines like “thee and free” is the work of the devil or J.K. Rowling, whomever comes to mind first.”
There. That wasn’t so tough, was it? Flows trippingly off the tongue like Mark Carney refusing a special inquiry into China buying the electoral process. Or perhaps we should simply accept a literal translation of the original French lyrics:
“O Canada!
Land of our ancestors
Glorious deeds circle your brow
For your arm knows how to wield the sword
Your arm knows how to carry the cross;
Your history is an epic
Of brilliant deeds
And your valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights.”
Yikes. That’s downright fascistic. But it’s Quebec, and we have to allow them their peccadilloes. So circle your brow with glorious deeds, grab a cross and a sword and valour steeped in faith. And remember we must be adaptable in the new era.
Unless it’s Alberta using the adapting to fuel its CO2-belching machines. In which case it’s man the battlements and follow Mike Myers into the fight.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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