Dieter Brock

Let’s talk about the Winnipeg Jets 50th anniversary…another MOP for Zach Collaros…D’oh! More Rouge Football on The Simpsons…lumbering Logan and leadership…boos in the Bronx…Troy Aikman’s ‘dresses’…simpleton scribblings…and other things I’m not going to write about…

Here’s some stuff I was going to write about this morning, but decided not to write about:

I was going to write about the original home game in Winnipeg Jets history, because somebody should.

The Jets and the World Hockey Association were, of course, an iffy bit of business from the get-go, and we wondered what kind of a buy-in there’d be for what many among the rabble considered a lark—a tier-two operation with National Hockey League hand-me-downs and minor league lifers filling rosters, and a life expectancy of about a week and a half.

The early returns weren’t encouraging, with the Jets basically skating in front of friends and family (1,000 and change) in pre-season rehearsals, which prompted this remark from old friend Vic Grant in the Winnipeg Tribune: “If there aren’t more than six thousand people in the stands Sunday then we know that Winnipeg is a penny ante sports town.”

Well, the turnstiles at the Ol’ Barn On Maroons Road on the night of Oct. 15, 1972, didn’t make anyone’s head spin, even though the going rate was a bargain basement $6 (plus 60 cents tax) for a chair in the Reds and $5 (plus 50 cents tax) up higher where noses begin to bleed. The Jets had 3,300 season ticket subscribers going in, and the walk-up crowd more than doubled that, for a final head count of 7,283 for the coming-out party.

The rabble left disappointed, with the Jets found lacking in a 5-2 loss to the Alberta Oilers, but it was the beginning of a seven-year stretch of oft-glorious WHA shinny in the Ol’ Barn.

Alas, 50 years later, the golden anniversary was ignored by local news snoops, so I’m not going to write about the Jets original home opener either. I guess it’s true what a wise man once said: Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

I was going to write about the present-day Jets, who were strutting their stuff in front of numerous unoccupied chairs at The Little Hockey House On The Prairie on Friday night.

Unsold seats always give rise to angst among owners and bean counters of any pro sports franchise, even if the Lords of True North Sports + Entertainment ought to be used to it by now. When did the Jets last put up the soldout sign? Before any of us put on a face mask and allowed medics to jab us in the arm with needles to ward off COVID.

Many still cite the pandemic as the cause of yet another non-sellout. Others point to ticket costs (a C-note to sit where noses begin to bleed), concession costs, parking costs, soaring cost of living, an uncaring and smug ownership, GM Kevin Cheveldayoff’s Summer of Nothing, and players who’d rather earn their living elsewhere.

But I’m not going to write about unsold seats, because these Jets aren’t an iffy bit of business. They’re backed by a dude, David Thomson, whose pockets are deeper than Buddhist dharma.

I was going to write about Zach Collaros, because it seems to me that he’s the heir apparent to himself.

That is to say, as sure as there shall be frost on the pumpkin when the showcase event of Rouge Football—the Grey Cup game—arrives on the Flattest of Lands in late November, Zach will be there to accept the Most Outstanding Player Award for the second successive season.

Oh, yes, I believe his bona fides are sufficient to satisfy members of the Football Reporters of Canada that there’s not been a finer performer on our Frozen Tundra, even if Nathan Rourke had eyes popping and jaws dropping through the first half of the 2022 crusade. And the fact Collaros won’t fling another football until Oct. 28 shouldn’t matter either. I mean, it’s not like Mcleod Bethel-Thompson is apt to suddenly morph into the second coming of Doug Flutie between now and closing time. He’ll have (some) better passing numbers than the Winnipeg Blue Bombers QB, but Macbeth’s play has been as spotty as a Dalmation. He looks like Ricky Ray one game, then looks like he can’t tie his own boot laces the next.

Anybody else MOP worthy? Well, I’d say Ka’Deem Carey has done boffo work lugging the leather for the Calgary Stampeders, but I wouldn’t say he’s having a Mike Pringle season, and that’s what it would take for the exalted members of the FRC to take their eyes off Collaros.

The girls and boys on the beat, you see, are smitten with quarterbacks. They fancy QBs the way Homer Simpson fancies donuts and Duff beer, and the evidence is there for all to see: They’ve dished out the MOP trinket 68 times, and the scoreboard reads: QBs 40, All Other Positions 28.

So I’d say Zach will be off to Regina, and I don’t expect he’ll be flying solo.

Guaranteed that one of the guy’s he’s been playing catch with, Dalton Shoen, will go along for the ride and collect a bauble as the Canadian Football League’s top frosh.

And, assuming I’m reading the room correctly, a second straight MOP Award puts Collaros in rather lofty company, because only four other players (Dieter Brock, Doug Flutie, Anthony Calvillo and Jackie Parker) have been anointed in consecutive seasons, and it’s shouldn’t shock anyone that they’re all QBs.

But I’m not going to write about Zach Collaros this morning, because he booked off work Saturday night and couldn’t pad his stats in a 40-32 loss vs. the B.C. Leos.

I was going to write about The Simpsons lampooning the CFL yet again, because I think Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and the entire cast of characters are a hoot. They still make me laugh out loud, even when the yuks are at the expense of three-downs football.

But I’m not going to write about The Simpsons, because I think you should watch it yourself. Here’s a spoiler alert, though: A left-handed Doug Flutie makes a cameo appearance and Homer does Homer things. D’oh!

I was going to write about shoddy journalism because of a “D’oh!” headline in the Drab Slab. To wit: “Now the West is won.” In the accompanying article, we’re told this: “With the West Division crown already placed atop their heads, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers blah, blah, blah…”

Uh, no. That simply isn’t true.

The B.C. Leos or Calgary Stampeders still have something to say about bragging rights in the West Division, because there’s the matter of the final on Nov. 13 at The Football Field In Fort Garry, and I’m guessing that the Bombers, to a man, would tell the gang at the Freep and anyone else who’d care to listen that they haven’t won squat. The large lads in blue-and-gold livery have clinched top spot in the West, but that won’t buy them a cup of java at Tims.

Finishing first is a feather in the cap. It means you’ve earned a bye to the division final, and the advantage of home turf. But you haven’t “won” anything. And, no, I’m not picking nits or splitting hairs

Any editor with passable knowledge of Rouge Football in Good Ol’ Hometown would know the West Division champion is determined in the final, and the Bombers are a recent case in point. In 2019, the Saskatchewan Flatlanders topped the regular-season tables, but it got them diddly. Winnipeg FC, which finished third, won the West, then claimed the Grey Grail.

But I’m not going to write about shoddy journalism at the Drab Slab, because people who don’t know a rouge from a rickshaw edit sports copy these days. Besides, the squawk boxes on TSN are spewing the same false narrative, and they’re just as wrong.

I was going to write about lumbering Logan Stanley starting another National Hockey League crusade with the Winnipeg Jets and Ville Heinola being banished to the farm again.

As far as I can determine, Stanley’s sole skill is being tall. Heinola, meanwhile, is notable for his skating, passing and puck smarts, but he has the (apparent) bad manners to be untall. He isn’t kiddie ride at Disneyland short, but he’d have to stand on a beer keg to look Stanley eyeball-to-eyeball. Apparently, that’s good enough reason to convince Jets intelligentsia to keep the unskilled No. 1 draft pick over the skilled No. 1 draft pick.

But I’m not going to write about Logan Stanley, because if the the geniuses haven’t figured it out by now it’s a lost cause.

I was going to write about the “new” leadership group with the Jets—Rink Rat Scheifele, Josh Morrissey and Adam Lowry.

That’s “new” like the Edsel is hot off the assembly line in Detroit.

I mean, the Rink Rat and Morrissey each wore an ‘A’ last season. Now they’ve stitched one on Lowry’s jersey. Well, big whoop-de-do.

All they’ve done is confirm that whatever virus ran though the changing room in the past started and ended with the ‘C’ that’s been ripped off Blake Wheeler’s chest, but the defrocked captain has already vowed to carry on as if nothing has changed.

So I’m not going to write about the Jets “new” leadership, because it’s same old, same old.

I was going to write about the mob at Yankee Stadium booing Aaron Judge.

That would be the same Aaron Judge who swatted 62 dingers this Major League Baseball season, the same guy who finished a couple of base knocks shy of the Triple Crown, the same guy to whom his New York Yankees playmates hitched their wagon all season. Now he’s scuffling in the playoffs and the rabble let him know about it in the seventh inning of a 4-2 loss vs. Cleveland Guardians.

“It’s the Bronx, man,” mused Pinstripes skipper Aaron Boone.

“It happens,” said the big man himself. “It’s happened many times in my career here.”

That doesn’t make it right. Nobody goes to the Vatican to heckle the Pope. Nobody went to Churchill Downs to razz Secretariat. And you don’t go to Yankee Stadium to boo Aaron Judge, not this October.

But I’m not going to write about the Yankees faithful turning on their marquee player, because there’s just no explaining the bad manners of some people.

I was going to write about Troy Aikman and ask him to join us in the 21st century, because the former NFL QB and current gab guy on Monday Night Football stuck both feet in it last week with a lazy, 20th century sexist trope.

After Chris Jones of the K.C. Chiefs had been flagged for roughing the passer vs. the Las Vegas Raiders, Aikman was quick to tsk-tsk game officials for the suspect call and observed: “My hope is the competition committee looks at this in the next set of meetings and, you know, we take the dresses off.” Sigh.

Aikman later performed an emergency foot-in-mouthectomy, saying: “My comments were dumb, just shouldn’t have made them. Just dumb remarks on my part.” Well, yes, they were.

But I’m not going to write about Aikman’s sexist drivel, because he isn’t a lone wolf. Male jocks think of women as lesser-thans, so that’s what they say.

I was going to write about Dustin Johnson collecting more coin for 18 rounds of golf than Tiger Woods earned through 26 years of golf. True story. DJ’s take through six of eight events on the LIV Golf Series tour is a whopping $155,758,600 in 4½ months: $125 million signing bonus, $12,758,600 prize winnings, $18 million payout for claiming the individual season championship. Poor Tiger he’s had to scrape by on a mere $120,895,206 for the past quarter century on the PGA Tour.

But I’m not going to write about Johnson and his blood-stained Saudi money, because he’s got to do what’s best for his family, and I suppose some guys can never have enough jingle in their jeans when a rainy day arrives. And, hey, his bride Paulina might need some skimpy new outfits to wear at The Masters.

I was going to write about Steve Simmons, because he’s totally lost the plot re racism in hockey.

In his alphabet fart for Postmedia last Sunday, the Toronto Sun scribe wrote: “No one wants to say this because of the politically correct police and all, but those who coached Akim Aliu must cringe every time they see him in a news report or a commercial talking about what’s wrong with hockey. Like he would know. By my count, Aliu played for 23 teams in nine different leagues in 12 professional seasons and rarely finished any season with the same team he started with. If that was colour-related, how is it that Wayne Simmonds spent just about the same 12 seasons playing in the NHL?”

To parrot a phrase from PM Trudeau the Younger in his comments about the Hockey Canada scandal, it “boggles the mind” that Simmons suggests knowledge of racism cannot be gained by someone bouncing around hockey’s outback. It’s appallingly ignorant.

What dazzling insights will Simmons share with us next, that a gay athlete can only speak to homophobia in sports if she or he has participated in X number of Pride parades?

I don’t pretend to harbor first-person experience of being a Black person, but I read. A lot. It’s something Simmons might want to try, because multiple studies show that BIPOC communities, gays and women learn about, and experience, the horrors of marginalization in their youth. Some overcome the abuse and bullying to reach the highest level. Many quit sports.

But I’m not going to write about Simmons’ simpleton scribblings, because I think Nazem Kadri of the Calgary Flames said it best: “He’s a guy who’s a little dated in his writing.”

And, finally…

Let’s talk about Patrik Laine’s adios…what the boys on the beat are saying…Grapes for GG of Canada…Bobby Hull dining on table scraps…Hammerin’ Hank…the Mets and their oinker GM…and other things on my mind

Another Sunday smorgas-bored…and this blog is officially listed as day-to-day…

First of all, Patrik Laine wasn’t a swing and a miss for Kevin Chevldayoff and his bird dogs.

When the ping pong balls bounced their way at the National Hockey League’s 2016 draft lottery, they wisely used that good fortune to claim Puck Finn with the second shoutout at the annual auction of teenage wannabes.

The kid’s a stud, and there’s been scant second-guessing the Winnipeg Jets’ choice, even if hindsight suggests a case can be made that Matthew Tkachuk might have been a better way to go.

Laine mostly delivered as the Jets had hoped, with 36-, 44-, 30- and 28-goal crusades, plus two more snipes in the opening gambit of his fifth season, which has been temporarily derailed due to an undisclosed upper-body owie of unknown origin.

Unfortunately, somewhere and somehow, the Jets-Laine union hit a very large pothole and we’re left to wonder what went wrong.

None of the usual suspects were willing to drill down to the core of the matter on Saturday after Chevy had completed his latest bit of handiwork, sending Laine to the Columbus Blue Jackets in barter for Pierre-Luc Dubois. Puck Finn spoke. General manager Chevy spoke. Potty-mouth coach Paul Maurice spoke. Captain Blake Wheeler spoke. Trouble is, it was nothing but hollow blah, blah, blah. We still don’t know why a 22-year-old stud with 140 notches on his shooting stick was expendable.

So we speculate, and here’s my guess: Coach PottyMo and Wheeler chased him out of town.

In his sole frolic this season, Laine was given 16 minutes, 20 seconds of ice. Wheeler logged 21:27. Maurice stubbornly insists that the 34-year-old captain is a better bet at right wing, and that wasn’t about to change. No matter the numbers either player put up. So Puck Finn put a bug in his agent’s ear, whispering something about the desire for a new zip code, and he’ll now be collecting his fan mail at 200 W Nationwide Blvd., Columbus, OH 43215.

And that isn’t a good optic for Chevy.

None of us knows for certain what it would have taken to make Laine happy, but we can assume that Chevy wasn’t prepared to instruct Coach PottyMo to up the big Finn’s ice time. We can also assume that the Puck Pontiff, Mark Chipman, had a sizable say in the matter, because you don’t part company with a player of Laine’s loft without the owner signing off on the deal. Which means he’s okay with the reality that he’s now had four first-round draft picks and/or their reps walk into the GM’s office and request and receive a one-way ticket out of town—Evander Kane, Jacob Trouba, Puck Finn and Jack Roslovic.

So, rather than a mantra of draft-and-develop, it’s become draft-develop-defect.

Oh, yes, I realize that a handful of the Jets young studs have locked in for the long haul, but having four walk away is at least three too many. And, in Laine’s case, it didn’t have to shake down this way.

Rather than reward Wheeler with a ridiculous five-year extension (including a No-Move Clause) in 2018 and stunt Laine’s growth, Chevy and the Puck Pontiff should have cut the captain adrift. He would have fetched a handsome return, certainly better than he would today or two years from now given the dog ears on his birth certificate.

Instead, they opted to keep the senior citizen over the young gun, which I’m sure makes no sense to most of us outside the Jets think tank.

Hey, anyone can be traded, including Patrik Laine. And the Jets will learn to live without Puck Finn. But that doesn’t mean anyone should be traded. Chevy and the Puck Pontiff bungled this one. Badly. And if they can’t convince Dubois to sign up for the long haul, they’ll really wear it.

Remember last October when Chevy brought Paul Stastny back on board? According to the pundits, it was a move designed to put a happy face on Laine. Mad Mike McIntyre of the Drab Slab, for example, wrote this: “One thing I no longer expect to see based on this week’s events is a trade involving Patrik Laine. The Jets didn’t bring Stastny and his big cap hit in just to send their Finnish sniper packing. They brought him in to play with Laine, a paring (along with Nikolaj Ehlers) that had great chemistry during the 2018 run to the Western Conference final.” Others provided backup vocals. So how’s that working out?

I always enjoy reading what the boys on the beat have to say about these big trades. Here’s a sampling:

Paul Friesen, Winnipeg Sun: “The Winnipeg Jets’ trading of Patrik Laine to the Columbus Blue Jacks is an abject organizational failure.”

Ken Wiebe, Sportsnet: “By strengthening themselves down the middle, the Jets have taken an important—and necessary—step to widening their collective window of contention. It came at a significant cost, but this blockbuster was a risk worth taking for the Jets.”

Murat Ates, The Athletic: “What does this acquisition mean for the rest of Winnipeg’s roster? The shortest, simplest read is that the Jets want to build strength down the middle and just traded a power-play star at right wing for an even-strength star at centre. It also gives Winnipeg the best player in the trade, while acknowledging that Laine’s potential for growth is as big of a wild card as he is.”

Ted Wyman, Winnipeg Sun: “Cheveldayoff has to bear responsibility for what has happened here—the trading of a very popular young star. He was unable to get Laine signed to a long-term deal before last season and the Jets salary cap situation—based on long-term deals given to other players—made it unlikely they’d be able to do so after this season. The cost, as it turns out, is the Jets traded two first-round draft picks for a player who was taken third overall. On paper, it simply looks like too much. The pressure will be immense on Dubois to make it look more even.”

Has there been a bigger swap involving local jocks than Laine-Dubois? I can think of just one—Dieter Brock to the Hamilton Tabbies for Tom Clements in 1983. Hall-of-fame quarterback for hall-of-fame quarterback. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers won the Grey Cup with Clements behind centre one year later, beating Brock and the Tabbies.

This is rich: Rebel News has started a petition to have disgraced hockey-talker Don Cherry succeed the disgraced Julie Payette as Governor General of Canada.

“He’s a loyal monarchist, perhaps the most loyal monarchist in the county!” the far-right wingnuts at the Rebel write. “And he upholds our Canadian values. Unlike Payette, he represents what it means to be Canadian. There is nobody more dignified and worthy of filling this historic and noble role for Canadians than Don Cherry.”

Hoo boy. That’s a whole lot of stupid.

When last seen and heard, Grapes was on Hockey Night in Canada, demonizing “you people that come here” (read: immigrants) because they enjoy “our milk and honey” but have the (apparent) bad manners to not wear poppies for Remembrance Day. After decades of similar rants peppered with bigotry, zenophobia, misogyny and anti-Quebec sentiments, they finally took away the Lord of Loud’s bully pulpit, yet now the Rebel would have him become Queen Liz’s official rep and take up residence in Rideau Hall. What next? Ron MacLean at 24 Sussex Drive?

I’m sure Queen Liz has enough worries with the royal litter without having to explain Don Cherry and his wardrobe to her loyal subjects loitering outside Buckingham Palace.

Big tidings from the Toronto Blue Jays camp last week, with the addition of outfielder/slugger George Springer, late of the cheating Houston Astros. Apparently Springer leaked the news of his signing by banging on the lid of a trash can.

There’s a fabulous anecdote about Bobby Hull, his boy Brett and Kelly Chase in James Duthie’s book Beauties, whereby they let the wolf loose after a game one night in Chicago, returning to the Drake Hotel at 2 o’clock in the a.m.

“The Drake has this elderly gentleman working the elevators, all dressed up with white gloves on,” Chase says. “He recognizes Bobby right away and says, ‘Mr. Hull, pleasure to meet you.’ Bobby says, ‘Good evening, young man. Could you press floor one for me?’ And Brett goes, ‘No, dad, we’re on three.’ Bobby says, ‘Goddamnit, I said press one!’ And out he goes on the first floor.

“We go up to our room, and a few minutes later, in walks Bobby with this food tray. He’s got a quarter of a clubhouse sandwich, a piece of pizza and a couple of chicken wings. I’m like, ‘What the…?’ And Bobby says, ‘Wasteful bastards! This is how Stan Mikita and I ate in the old days. He took the even floors, I took the odd!’

“This is my idol! Then they bring the cot up, and Bobby is insisting on sleeping on the cot. Well, there is no way I am letting Bobby Hull sleep on a cot, so I take it. Bobby goes into the bathroom, comes out, whips the rug off his head, hangs it on the bedpost and gets in bed. The first time I meet my idol, and he’s eating off food trays left outside people’s doors and his hair is hanging on the bed!”

Ya, that sounds about right.

Can’t let the day slip away without mentioning Henry Aaron, because the home run champ’s death on Friday meant another chunk of my youth has been snatched away.

Hammerin’ Hank, you see, was my older brother Richard’s favorite baseball player. Mickey Mantle was my younger brother Mick’s main man. Mine was Sandy Koufax. We’d squabble the way kids do, nattering about who was the best of the three—the rakish Black man from Mobile, Ala., the brawny Okie who spent his early off-seasons working in lead and zinc mines with his dad, or the soft-speaking Jewish kid from Brooklyn.

None of us budged from our positions. Still won’t.

I do, however, concede and conclude that Aaron traveled a more challenging path to baseball immortality because, whereas both Mantle and Koufax wrestled with chronic ailments, it was death threats for Hammerin’ Hank. Not just to him, but his family.

The nearer Aaron came to reeling in Babe Ruth and laying claim to the greatest record in sports—714 career home runs—the greater the peril for the Atlanta Braves outfielder. Not all of America was prepared to accept a Black man usurping the Sultan of Swat. Not in the 1970s. Yet Aaron soldiered on, swatting dingers and chasing the larger-than-life Bambino until the night of April 8, 1974, when he sent an Al Downing pitch over the left-field fence and into the Braves bullpen. He had touched ’em all for the 715th time.

“What a marvelous moment, for baseball, what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia, what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. It’s a marvelous, wonderful, enjoyable moment here in Atlanta,” is how legendary broadcaster Vin Scully described it.

Shortly thereafter, I made my way to the Winnipeg Tribune building, anxious to lay out and design the next day’s sports section. Even though the Jets had opened a playoff series vs. Houston Aeros that night, I relegated them to the inside pages. The sports front was reserved for the great Henry Aaron. Every inch of it.

Jared Porter has been outed as an oinker of the highest rank and, thankfully, the New York Mets squandered nary a nano-second in defrocking their creepy general manager.

Mind you, it’s not like the Amazins had any choice.

I mean, Porter’s one-man crusade to bed an unidentified female reporter while overseeing the Chicago Cubs stable of scouts in 2016 was as relentless as it was disturbing. More than 60 times he hounded the woman with come-hither texts and pics, the last of which brought an erect penis into focus, and it doesn’t matter that he claims the erect-penis pic he sent wasn’t a pic of his erect penis.

“The more explicit ones are not of me,” Porter assured ESPN. “Those are like, kinda like joke-stock images.”

Oh, ya, unwelcomed graphic porn is a real knee-slapper, Jared.

Listen, most women I know appreciate a man with a healthy sense of humor, but some scuzzball visiting porn sites and playing copy-and-paste with images of boners doesn’t qualify as giggle-worthy.

It’s sad, pathetic, dangerous and no one’s idea of slapstick.

Fortunately, the Mets did every female news snoop a solid by kicking Porter to the curb, and I can’t imagine any other Major League Baseball team bringing him and his baggage on board.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown weary of Postmedia treating the Winnipeg Sun like the red-hair, freckle-face step-child of the chain. When I call up the Postmedia tabloids in the Republic of Tranna, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver, I normally find seven or more pages in the sports section. In Good Ol’ Hometown it’s usually four pages. Some days just two. Other days there’s two pages of sports near the front of the rag and two more near the back. Ridiculous.

And, finally, I don’t like to say I told you so, but I did. At least six times between February 2019 and last week, I warned you that Patrik Laine would not finish his career in Good Ol’ Hometown. Moreover, I posed this question in June 2016, days before the Jets drafted him: “Is the Flamboyant Finn and his loose lips a fit for the Winnipeg Jets or will he give them fits?” Puck Finn conceded on Saturday that “it wasn’t the right fit for me and for the team.”

Let’s talk about death threats and bomb threats in Good Ol’ Hometown…the Buddha and Brees…Jackie Robinson and the American flag…Chris Cuthbert goes over the wall…another jock journo out of work…the Winnipeg Sun’s six-pack…and Fidel Castro’s angst

At first blush, the inclination was to suggest that Khari Jones had it all wrong. That he was misremembering.

I mean, death threats? To the Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback? Naw. Can’t be.

Look, I realize the football faithful in Good Ol’ Hometown can be a demanding lot. They’ll turn on a starting QB faster than Judas on Jesus (hello Dieter Brock, Matt Nichols, etc.), and they’ll get louder and more ornery as the beer snakes grow longer and longer in the fourth quarter of a losing skirmish.

But threaten to snuff him out? That’s something you’d rather not believe.

Except as Jones told the tale the other day, his nose wasn’t growing and his pants weren’t on fire.

He delivered his revelation in a calm, matter-of-fact cadence, like he was telling us what he had for lunch or what his kids ordered the last time at a McDonald’s drive-thru. He even smiled, almost as if he recognized that some among the rabble might suggest there was a tich of far-fetchedness to the disturbing narrative of his 2002 Canadian Football League crusade.

“In Winnipeg,” Jones began, “I received death threats, you know, because my wife is a different color than me. We had police officers staying at our house, kinda patrolling our house while I was at away games. There was a series of letters, and I still have those letters.”

I don’t know about you, but those words produce chilling imagery for me:

A woman—Jones’ bride Justine—home alone with her newborn, Jaelyn, while hubby and dad is flinging footballs hundreds of miles away, unable to protect his family from a wingnut lurking in the shadows of a darkening night. The stalker might have a gun. Or a knife. Maybe both. Stealth, slow-moving cop cars appear in the haze of dimly lit lamp posts, then disappear into the same darkness that protects the unseen scoundrel, prepared to pounce. It’s positively Hitchcockian.

It was just one person, we’re told, a racist who believes black and white belong together on piano keyboards, salt-and-pepper shakers and Oreo cookies, but not in the skin hue of a married couple. He penned a dozen letters to Jones, each peppered with vulgar language and threats. He was never caught.

Eighteen years later, Jones is finally talking about it because racism is the topic du jour in North America and he recognizes that his is a story people need to hear, even if they’d prefer not to hear it.

It’s the kind of stuff that gives pause for ponder, and you try to convince yourself that such a level of hate can’t possibly exist in Good Ol’ Hometown.

I was born, raised and spent most of my working life in Winnipeg and, sure, I recognize that racists, bigots, homophobes, etc. walk among the throng, but death threats because a quarterback is black and his bride is white? Come on, man, isn’t that supposed to be a 1960s Alabama thing? If only.

Truth is, I had my own close encounter with one of the wackos back in the day.

It was late March of 1979 and, with the Parti Québécois beating the separatist drums with gusto, the political climate was a tinderbox. Anti-Québec sentiment flowed freely in Western Canada and peaked in full, ugly voice the night the Finnish National B shinny side was in town for a friendly with the Winnipeg Jets, then still the World Hockey Association’s flagship franchise but soon to be a charter member of the National Hockey League.

Because the skirmish was televised locally on the CBC’s English and French channels, public address announcements were delivered in both our official languages. That didn’t work so well.

Each time PA announcer Germain Massicotte would parlez vous, the audience of 10,113 filled the Old Barn On Maroons Road with a robust chorus of boos, which ramped up in volume with each word he uttered en francais. By the time Morris Lukowich scored in overtime, Massicotte’s voice had totally disappeared beneath the might of the anti-Québec outpouring.

“It was kind of rude,” said young Rich Gosselin, a product of nearby St. Malo and one of two francophones wearing Jets linen that night.

“I just consider the source,” muttered Bobby Guindon, the veteran forward who, a year ealier, had been anointed most valuable player in the Jets championship crusade.

Like Gosselin and Guindon, I was unamused, so I scribbled as essay in the Winnipeg Tribune, giving the booing, bigoted boors a stern tsk-tsking.

“Winnipeg, if this is how you’re going to act next season when you’re in the National Hockey League, then you don’t deserve to see the Montreal Canadiens,” is how I signed off.

The following morning, the ringing of my kitchen telephone stirred me from slumber. It was a man. An angry man. He didn’t appreciate the tone of my column and volunteered to provide me with one-way passage to the Great Beyond. Yup, he’d bomb my house. Blow it up, me and my family with it. Apparently, that’s what you do with a “frog lover.”

Unlike Khari Jones, I didn’t call the cops. I told the boys at work about the bomb threat and we had a giggle, although I must confess mine was a bit of a nervous chuckle and there was some skittishness to my step for a few days.

But, hey, that house on Leighton Avenue in East Kildonan is still standing, a block away from the Red River, and I’m still ticking, so I guess the guy had a bad batch of dynamite or he was a graduate of the Wile E. Coyote School of Mayhem.

I don’t know if you’ve been following Paul Friesen’s work on the Khari Jones file for the Winnipeg Sun, but it’s boffo stuff. Top drawer in every way. Makes me proud that I played a part in poaching Paul from CJOB all those many years ago, and it all began with a chance meeting in a checkout line at the Safeway on Roslyn Road in Osborne Village. So, if you like Paul’s work, kudos to him. If you don’t like it, blame me.

Really hard to believe the boys at the Drab Slab basically ignored the Jones death-threat narrative, except to run one Canadian Press piece. That’s shoddy. Or lazy. Maybe both.

Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks are supposed to be bright guys. They aren’t allowed to be the dullest knife in the drawer, although Terry Bradshaw tests that theory every time he opens his squawkbox on Fox Sports NFL coverage. So what’s Drew Brees’ excuse for being such a D’Oh Boy? I mean, seriously, he thought Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was about the American flag and not social injustice and police brutality? That’s like believing the Bible is porn. But wait. The New Orleans Saints QB experienced an awakening, as if he’d shared a bodhi tree with the Buddha, and a couple of days after dumbing down he was schooling Donald Trump, advising the Commander-in-Chaos that kneeling protests have “never” been about the Stars ‘n’ Stripes. I swear, we haven’t seen a retreat that rapid since Tiger Woods’ wife came at him with a 9-iron. Makes you wonder how Buddha Brees ever mastered the Saints playbook.

Every time I hear someone like Brees rage against Kaepernick and other National Football League kneelers, branding them as disrespectful ingrates, I am reminded of this excerpt from baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s book, I Never Had It Made: “There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only the principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.” So there.

The other night on TSN SportsCentre, anchor Jennifer Hedger said racism is an “uncomfortable” conversation. Why? And who’s uncomfortable? Before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down social gatherings, my friends and I discussed racism, bigotry, homophobia, sexism, etc. on numerous occasions, with zero discomfort.

Big shakeup in the Tower of Babble On, with Chris Cuthbert defecting from TSN football to Sportsnet and Hockey Night in Canada. Initial reaction: Geez, can he take Glen Suitor with him?

Apparently Suitor was unavailable for comment on his longtime sidekick’s departure. “He’s still in rehab after having his nose surgically removed from Keith Urban’s butt,” a TSN spokesperson familiar with the situation confirmed.

Seriously, this is an opportunity for TSN to bring a new, fresh sound to its Canadian Football League broadcasts. Surely there’s a vibrant, young voice out there who can slide behind Cuthbert’s play-by-play mic and, at the same time, they can spare us another season of groupie Glen’s gushing over Urban. If they insist on going with the old guard, I say give the job to Gord Miller, who’s solid whenever he calls Rouge Football. And, for gawd’s sake, keep Kate Beirness away from the CFL on TSN panel.

Oh, dear, the body count continues to grow in the toy department, and Ken Wiebe is among the latest casualties. The Athletic slashed salary and scribes the other day, handing out 46 pink slips, and that leaves Murat Ates to fly solo on the Jets beat. I never met Ken, but I’m told he’s one of the good guys, and we can only wonder when this carnage will end and who’ll be left standing.

The Winnipeg Sun made it through the week without anyone heading to the pogey line, but the overlords at Postmedia have decided to eliminate one day of the week—Monday. Commencing June 22, the tabloid will become a six-days-a-week print publication (Tuesday-Sunday), which means they’ll be a day late and a dollar short whenever something big breaks on the Sabbath. You know, like the Bombers winning the Grey Cup. Or—dare to dream—the Jets hoisting the Stanley Cup on a Sunday.

And, finally, news that the Sun is becoming a six-pack provided reflection on my time with the tabloid.

Now in its 40th year (the official anniversary date is Nov. 5), the Sun wasn’t supposed to have a shelf life longer than four months, never mind four decades, but a three-days-a-week sheet bulked up to a seven-day production in 1992, and they’ve been going toe-to-toe with the Goliath on Mountain Avenue every morning since.

You don’t survive that long unless you deliver something the rabble is looking for and, in the case of the tabloid, that’s meant a heavy emphasis on cops and robbers, entertainment and, of course, sports scribbling served with sizable portions of sass, irreverence and 200-point headlines.

Oops. Almost forgot Page 3 (or was it Page 2?), which once featured a damsel in her scantilly-clads and heels as high as a giraffe’s forehead.

The Sunshine Girl was just one of the oddball things we did at the Sun. I also recall management’s curious fascination for Panda bears, and there was a cheeky promo during the 1999 Pan American Games that attracted the attention of El Presidenté, Fidel Castro.

Seems ol’ Cigar Breath was so distraught over Cuban defectors prior to/during the Games that it became the focal point of his annual Revolution Day natter, with the Bearded One barking about “traps and tricks” and “schemes” and “filth.”

We ran a “guess the number of Cuban defectors” contest, offering airfare and a one-week vacation in Havana, cigars not included.

“If this is a goodwill gesture, it is a perverse one,” noted José Fernandez, president of the Cuban Olympic Committee.

I don’t recall if it was eight or 10 Cubans who went over the wall during the Pan Ams, but that was us—the perverse paper.

Let’s talk about the challenges of the Bombers and Jets…Big Buff is done as a useful member of Winnipeg HC…Doug Brown wondering if the Canadian Mafia has tapped out…when in doubt call Pinball…is Coach Grunge destined for The ROT?…a Rhapsody in Ramble On…and Ponytail Puck

A hump day smorgas-bored…and let’s hope this is the only hump in your week…

These are fretsome times on the playgrounds of Good Ol’ Hometown.

I mean, there’s still plenty of grass to grab, but many among the rabble have already stuck a fork in the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, whose 29th annual rebuilding year is beginning to resemble the first 28.

Oh, sure, our football heroes have secured a ticket to next month’s post-season frolic, but recent developments (three-game skid, flat-lining offence) indicate they’ll earn nothing more than a participation badge and, soon enough, we’ll hear much talk of backing up the truck to load and haul away Kyle Walters’ belongings. And Mike O’Shea’s. And Richie Hall’s. And Paul LaPolice’s.

That would make CEO Wade Miller the last man standing, and some of us had it figured to be that way all along.

But maybe we should let this thing play out before calling the moving company, no?

Like many of you, I don’t think Chris Streveler is a Grey Cup-quality quarterback, but I didn’t think Sean Salisbury was either, and he has a Grey Cup ring. The fact that the Bombers copped the 1988 Canadian Football League crown in spite of Salisbury, not because of him, might win you an argument in a pub, but it doesn’t mean he has to return the jewelry. A title is a title is a title.

So if Salisbury can win a Coupe de Grey, why not Tim Tebow In A Toque?

I know, I know. Streveler isn’t much for throwing the football. He tosses the rock like it’s…well, a rock. But, then, Salisbury wasn’t the second coming of Dieter Brock, either. More than half his passes landed on the ground or in the wrong hands (26 picks before being kicked off the team in 1989), but he benefited from a take-no-prisoners defensive dozen that arrived at the ball yard in a bad mood and stayed in snarl mode for three hours.

“We didn’t have what you would call a traditional quarterback in Sean Salisbury who might have looked like he couldn’t get it done, but we realized as long as he didn’t jack it up, we would still win,” rollicking linebacker James (Wild) West once told Ed Tait of bluebombers.com.

The same goes for Streveler. Just don’t “jack it up” like he did last Saturday v. the Saskatchewan Roughriders (two picks, one spilled ball) on the Flattest of Lands, and there’s hope, albeit faint.

Go ahead and accuse me of typing with rose-tinted glasses, and maybe I am, but I believe the CFL West Division remains a crap shoot and the Bombers aren’t completely out of the discussion.

All the same, it might be an idea to have the moving company keep the trucks on standby. Parked near the loading dock, of course.

Meantime, it’s about the Winnipeg Jets who, unlike the Bombers, can score, but perhaps not frequently enough once they get into the deep grind of the National Hockey League season.

The local shinny side, now 2-2 after a unexpected and admirable 4-1 victory over the Penguins on Tuesday night in Pittsburgh, features a blueline corps that has no business calling itself an NHL defence, and it doesn’t help that Dustin Byfuglien remains in limbo.

Or does Big Buff’s absence really matter, other than his wage impacting the salary cap?

Don’t run off with the notion that Byfuglien will provide a quick fix on the blueline if and when he returns from his personal Tour de Navel. Big Buff does his best work when the puck is on his stick, not when the guys on the other side have it and he’s scrambling to make up for his latest gaffe.

That’s not to say the second coming of Buff wouldn’t provide some benefit, but, given that he can’t possibly be in game trim (as if anything about Buff is ever trim), he might add nothing more than comic relief.

There is, of course, a school of thought that Puck Pontiff Mark Chipman and general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff should declare a state of urgency and instruct Byfuglien to fish or cut bait. That is, if he’s going to retire, fine. Sign the papers and they can free up $7.6 million in cap space. If he’s going to return, get his big butt back on the blueline. Pronto.

What’s the point of that, though? You want a guy who’s not physically/mentally NHL-ready in your lineup? There are enough of them already.

Reality is, retire or return, Byfuglien has excused himself from the Jets’ future. I mean, if he lacks the jam to join them for this crusade, I can’t imagine he’ll feel any differently a year from now. Let’s face it, he’s done as a useful member of Winnipeg HC. Even if he chooses to return a week or a month from now, they should trade him at that point and get on with it. Look, the Jets would be iffy to qualify for Beard Season with Buff in harness, so it’s not like he’s the difference between a Stanley Cup parade or just another day in late June.

The Canadian Mafia: Mike O’Shea, Wade Miller, Kyle Walters.

Interesting take on the Bombers from Doug Brown in the Drab Slab. Noting management’s failure to land a seasoned QB to prop up Streveler for the final playoff push, the former D-lineman wondered if Miller, Walters and O’Shea had waved the surrender cloth. “So with Matt Nichols done for the year, and a guaranteed playoff game, has this management team that has always attacked issues and problems at a fever pitch, decided this is as good as it gets at the most critical position on the field?” he wrote earlier this week of Winnipeg FC going all-in with Streveler. He then suggested remaining status quo “makes you think the team is ok with using the Matt Nichols injury as the reason the season went off the rails.” As much as I applaud Doug’s calling out the Canadian Mafia, numerous reports indicated Winnipeg FC had, in fact, pitched woo only to find no takers in a QB hunt that didn’t end until they took brittle Zach Collaros hostage from the Tranna Argonauts, at the 11th hour on trade deadline Wednesday. But, trust me, even had they lured Kevin Glenn off his couch, he was never going to be the answer, and I have my doubts about Collaros and his squishy grey matter. The Bombers didn’t tap out, but they brought in an insurance policy that will last no longer than the first blindside hit. Sad to say, Collaros is Buck Pierce II.

When there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call? Pinball Clemons, naturally. That at least seems to be the reflex move in the Republic of Tranna whenever the Bottomless Boatmen go glub, glub, glub, which they’ve done this CFL season with a 2-12 record. Pinball (his mama named him Michael) has been a player, the head coach (twice), the team president, the CEO, the vice-chair and, as of Tuesday morning, the little man with the mega-watt smile and glistening teeth is occupant of the GM’s office vacated by Jim Popp. There’s no official record of it, but he’s probably washed socks and jocks and cooked some pre-game pasta, too. So I suppose if any GM hiring can put seats in the stands at BMO Field in The ROT, it would be the wildly popular Pinball, but I fail to see how his extreme likability will translate into Ws on the field when he has zero experience. It’ll help, of course, that the Pinster has longtime CFL skills sleuth John Murphy at his beck and call to turn over stones in search of talent, and I suspect Corey Chamblin is in his finals days as head coach of the Argos. Still, Pinball’s appointment comes across as a bowl of comfort food more than something that’ll stick to your ribs long term.

Here’s a thought: If the Bombers’ season continues to go south and they back up the trucks at Winnipeg FC headquarters in Fort Garry next month, the hiring of Clemons might provide O’Shea with a soft place to land. Coach Grunge played with and for Pinball in The ROT, and they won Grey Cups together, so I’d have to think he’d be a candidate for the head coaching gig once Chamblin is obliged to leave. But would he take LaPolice along as his O-coordinator?

A couple of questions about Don Cherry and his rambling sermons on Hockey Night in Canada: 1) Does anybody really listen—I mean really listen—to what the fossil has to say? 2) Never mind that he treats the language like a pit bull on a pork chop, why hasn’t anyone in the ivory tower at Rogers noticed that he long ago became borderline incoherent? Here’s a sample of his Rhapsody in Ramble On from this past Saturday:

“Ya know, the Leafs, ya know, the Leafs…highly skilled team. I will say highly skilled team, but they’re regular-season game. You cannot win unless you’re tough in the, in the (closes eyes, shakes head)…the playoffs have proven by St. Louis. Sixteen Canadians, Canadian coach, Canadian GM, tough. Look what they did to San Jose, they put…now I know a lot of guys, we know a lot of guys that don’t like this…they put out Hertl, Pavelski and Karlsson. They put out…and, uh…I like what Berube said. Berube said, ‘Don’t worry about the penalties.’ SIXTEEN CANADIANS! You CANNOT WIN unless you’re tough.”

Translation: The Tranna Maple Leafs aren’t tough enough to win the Stanley Cup.

In case you didn’t notice (which probably means most of you), Dani Rylan’s National Women’s Hockey League dropped the puck on its fifth season last weekend, while boycotting members of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association took their hissy fit to New Hampshire and staged glorified scrimmages for the benefit of friends and family. None of which furthered the cause of Ponytail Puck. “When the boycott happened, it refragmented the market,” NWHL commissioner Rylan said recently. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to quantify the opportunity lost this offseason, and how maybe the game has slowed because of the boycott.” I agree with Rylan. The boycotters’ main goal is to put her NWHL out of business in the belief that Gary Bettman and the NHL will swoop in to pick up the pieces, forming a WNHL that offers $50,000 to $100,000 wages. Talk about unicorns and fairy dust.

Members of the boycotting PWHPA, by the way, played a young men’s team from André-Laurendeau College in Quebec last month and were beaten 4-3 in OT. Not sure how the best female players in the world losing to a band of fuzzy-cheeked lads advances their quest for the “living wage” salaries they believe they “deserve.”

Every time I see Clayton Kershaw cough up a hairball in the Major League Playoffs or World Series, I can’t believe some people still compare him favorably to Los Angeles Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax. They’re both lefties and their last names begin with the letter K, but that’s where the comparisons end for me.

And, finally, I gave ponder to watching the federal leaders election debate the other night, but I heard enough lies and double talk during 30 years in jock journalism to last what’s left of my lifetime, thus I gave it a pass. I’m told, however, that Justin Trudeau showed up without shoe polish on his face, which was thoughtful of him, and Andrew Scheer is still an anti-abortion American who prefers to wade into the name-calling swamp rather than debate issues and platforms. Some choice.

About Mike O’ Shea throwing TSN’s CFL journalists (not!) under the bus…Brooke Henderson’s smile…a tiger in our tanks at the “filling station”…and other CFL stuff

Two soft-boiled eggs and more weekend leftovers for a Tuesday morning breakfast…

Mike O’Shea has totally lost the plot.

Never mind the botched fake punts, phantom 63-yard field goals, ill-conceived gambles, curious quarterback deployment, or any of the goofball decisions he’s made as sideline jockey with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Those were merely “d’oh” moments. Brain farts, if you will.

But get this: O’Shea actually thinks Milt Stegall is a journalist. Ditto Matt Dunigan. And—good grief—Davis Sanchez.

That’s cow-jumped-over-the-moon stuff.

I mean, Stegall is a hall of fame receiver with a hall of fame mouth that landed him a gig as a gum-flapper on TSN’s Canadian Football League coverage. He knows a fake punt from a fair catch. But he’s a journalist like Sarah Huckabee Sanders is Honest Abe Lincoln.

If you missed it, Stegall went off on Matt Nichols on Saturday afternoon, accusing the Winnipeg FC quarterback of hurling his receivers under the bus scant seconds after the Bombers had limped off the McMahon Stadium gridiron in Calgary, losers for the second successive week, this time a 39-26 face plant vs. the Stampeders.

“They just do their jobs very well,” Nichols said of the Stamps defensive dozen while he and CJOB’s Bob (Knuckles) Irving sifted through the rubble of the Bombers’ fifth L against five Ws this crusade. “When they’re in zone I’m going through four and five reads and finding no one open…they’re doing a good job.”

Nichols had other things to say, including some self-indictment, but all Stegall heard was “finding no one open.”

“Just throw me under the bus,” the old receiver griped angrily, his forehead in full frown and his eyebrows knitted together. “I’m gonna roll up on Matt Nichols if I’m Darvin Adams or one of those receivers and say, ‘Did you really say that? Is this what you feel about us? Are we calling each other out? So if I’m wide open and you miss me should I go to the media and say we need a quarterback who’s gonna throw it to me when I’m open?’ What is this? He needs to come out there and play and keep his mouth shut.”

So now we have O’Shea entering the verbal fray during a chin-wag with Knuckles Irving, play-by-play voice of Winnipeg FC on ‘OB since Dieter Brock was as wet behind the ears as Michael Phelps.

“Completely irresponsible,” is the damning term the Bombers head coach used Monday night to catalog the bleatings of Stegall. “The journalism was irresponsible. You know, Bob, you asked the question about Calgary’s defence and it was nothing about our receiving corps and their ability. They took a small snippet of Matt’s answer and tried to run with it. Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing for them, I’m sure. How Matt answered the question I thought was a perfectly good answer.

“One of the things is these guys have to create news obviously and create a story and create excitement on the panel…I don’t know. It doesn’t sit well with us because it’s so far from what was said, it’s so taken out of context it’s just not fair really. They need to make a show, and it’s too bad. I believe they made a mistake and I do think it’s irresponsible, you know, they sort of ran with it. I guess that’s…like I said they need to make a show.”

O’Shea later added this: “When you take a fragment of a quote, or a fragment of an interview and use it as you will, haphazardly, it’s a dangerous business. It’s not fair. It’s not good journalism.”

That’s because Stegall isn’t a journalist.

He’s a retired receiver who’s afraid of thunder and lightning and often finds axes to grind as the angriest member of the TSN panel. He shows up on our flatscreens wearing fancy threads twice a week, and he provides Xs-and-Os insight and bitches about whatever’s up his nose that day/night. Which is great. As misguided as he sometimes is, I don’t want Stegall to zip his lips.

Just don’t confuse what he does with journalism, Mikey.

A smiling Brittany Henderson and a grinning Brooke Henderson on the 18th fairway.

Moving on to actual journalists, apparently Bob Weeks of TSN and Cathal Kelly of the Globe and Mail watched a different Brooke Henderson during her victory march at the CP Canadian Open women’s golf championship on Sunday.

Here’s Kelly on Henderson: “It’s hard to think of any golf pro who looks like they’re having less fun out there. Ms. Henderson lives so deeply in the moment that she is functionally underground. On the walk up the 18th fairway on Sunday—victory assured, the crowd hooting her name—she still did not allow herself the freedom of a grin.”

Here’s Weeks on Henderson: “She normally will smile a little bit, she’ll kind of interact with the fans. There was none of that today. The first time I saw her smile was after she was walking up to the 18th green.”

I’m uncertain where Kelly had plunked himself to observe Henderson’s final round of the Open (or if he even watched it), but I know Weeks’s feet were on the ground at the Wascana Country Club in Regina. He saw Henderson smile on the 18th fairway. So did I. And most other reports indicated that Henderson did, indeed, interact with patrons during the first three rounds of her successful crusade. She was not “functionally underground.”

Kelly went on to write of Henderson: “She is already pulling away from Masters champion Mike Weir as Canada’s greatest golfer of modern times.”

Wrong. Henderson, with seven titles on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, has yet to catch Weir, let alone pull away from him. Weir won eight times on the Professional Golf Association circuit.

Those of us of a certain vintage will be saddened by the passing of Murray Westgate at the age of 100 on Monday. Westgate was the Esso pitchman who put a tiger in our tanks during Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts during the 1950s and ’60s, and most of us kids actually believed he pumped gas, checked the oil and wiped windshields for a living. I always hoped we’d pull into a “filling station” one day and see his smiling face approach our car. But no. He was an actor who made $75 a gig in the beginning at a couple grand per night by the time Esso pulled the plug on its sponsorship.

Here are this week’s CFL power rankings…

1. Calgary (8-1): Back on track after a slight misstep.
2. Edmonton (6-4): Stumbled in Hamilton.
3. Saskatchewan (5-4): Tough to win in B.C. but they got the job done.
4. Ottawa (6-3): Status quo.
5. Winnipeg (5-5): That was ugly in Cowtown.
6. Hamilton (4-5): Might have turned it around.
7. B.C. (3-6): Done like dinner.
8. Toronto (3-6): Duron Carter can’t help them yet.
9. Montreal (2-8): What’s not to like about Antonio Pipkin.

Last week in CFL quarterbacking (starters only)…

About Winnipeg Blue Bombers Coach D’oh!…an odd final round at Royal Birkdale…gay female athletes dating…pretty on the tennis court…and why don’t some guys just shut up?

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

I’m not sure what happens to Mike O’Shea when he gets to B.C. Place Stadium.

Maybe it’s the drinking water. Ya, that’s it. Someone is spiking his H2O with mind-altering drugs, because it’s become evident that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers head coach is seeing things that aren’t there. I mean, the rest of us see an impossible 61-yard field goal attempt, but O’Shea sees a ho-hum chip shot. We see Justin Medlock as a punter/place-kicker, but O’Shea sees him as Dieter Brock or Kenny Ploen.

He’s delusional like the Nevada Parole Board.

Mind you, nobody can accuse the Bombers sideline steward of being a one-trick pony.

He did, after all, give us two displays of hocus-pocus for the price of one on Friday night in Vancouver. Trouble is, an argument can be made that O’Shea’s smoke and mirrors is the main reason the Bombers were found wanting in their Canadian Football League skirmish with the B.C. Lions.

Yes, I’m aware that a fake field goal was executed to perfection and resulted in seven points. Kudos for venturesome and creative football. Alas, we were also reminded that there’s a time and place for sleight of hand, and midway through the fourth quarter—on third-and-15 with the ball nestled on your own 26-yard stripe!—is neither the time nor the place for Justin Medlock to be passing instead of punting.

Unless, of course, you’re Coach D’oh and you’re hallucinating.

O’Shea’s fourth-quarter brain cramp also resulted in points. Eight of them. For the Lions, who were less into gimmickry and more into gutting it out while turning a 15-point deficit into a 45-42 success.

Go ahead and give O’Shea full marks for his daring if you like. It can be get-out-of-your-seat exciting. But it’s folly for a head coach to double dog dare himself into making dumb decisions, which seems to now be the rule rather than the exception for the Bombers puppet master on the Wet Coast.

It’s all about picking your spots, and when O’Shea allowed Medlock to pass rather than punt while nursing an eight-point lead on Friday he picked the wrong spot.

“We don’t think of them as trick plays,” he advised news snoops after the fact. “They’re well designed and well thought out and well executed by the players that buy into that.”

Well, okay. Except receiver Derek Jones must have missed the memo, because he had his back turned to Medlock’s wonky pass on the “called play.”

It was just dumb, dumb, dumb.

So, was the faux punt really a “called play” as O’Shea insists or was it a Medlock ad lib? “I’ll take the blame for it,” Medlock said post-gaffe. “Whatever comes if it, I’m not going to sit here and point fingers.” And I’ll take that to mean someone else screwed up. In either case, it still comes down to coaching. Football is very much a situational game, and an alert coach doesn’t permit his punter to fiddle fart around when it’s third-and-15 at the 26-yard stripe while nursing an eight-point lead with slightly more than eight minutes to play.

A few words about the final round of the Open golf championship Sunday at the Royal Birkdale in Southport, England: Brutal and brilliant. Ragged and remarkable. Seriously. Champion golfer of the year Jordan Spieth was all over the British Isles through the first four holes, carding three bogeys, and his tee shot on 13 hole was so far off the mark that the ball almost landed in Ireland. It took him half an hour to complete the hole. Then he goes birdie-eagle-birdie-birdie in less time than it takes to whip up a full English breakfast. Incredible. What I like most about Spieth, who now has a collection of three Grand Slam titles, is his manner: He seems like a lovely, young man.

Attention Politically Correct Police: If sports scribes choose to describe ascending tennis star Garbine Muguruza as pretty or sexy, spare us your squawking because they have her blessing. “I see a lot of criticism sometimes when a sportswoman wants to feel pretty on the court,” the reigning Wimbledon and 2016 French Open ladies’ champion says. “I want to feel pretty out there, I’m going to feel more comfortable and confident if I have a beautiful dress on. It doesn’t go against being an athlete.” So there. Don’t scream sexism when a jock journo writes about her appearance.

Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird, at 36 the oldest player in the Women’s National Basketball Association, tells ESPNW magazine that she’s a lesbian and, except for the fact she’s dating American soccer star Megan Rapinoe, it’s a ho-hum revelation. There’s a reason for that: Gay female athletes at the highest echelons are commonplace, whereas their male counterparts are about half a century behind when it comes to acceptance and inclusiveness. Both Bird and Rapinoe, by the way, are Olympic gold medallists, further evidence that having gays on a team roster is not an impediment to success.

The quote machine has gone into overdrive the past couple of weeks, and much of it has been painful to hear and read. For example…

Boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. said this about Conor McGregor, his opponent in an Aug. 26 bout: “He totally disrespected black women. He called black people monkeys. Then he spoke disrespectfully to my daughter’s mother and he spoke disrespectfully to my daughter.” Yo! Floyd! You’re a serial woman-beater. You’ve gone to jail for beating up women. Don’t talk to us about disrespecting women.
Former National Football League quarterback Michael Vick had these words of advice for blackballed QB Colin Kaepernick: “(The) first thing we got to get Colin to do is cut his hair. I’m not here trying to be politcially correct, but, even if he puts cornrows in there, I don’t think he should represent himself in that way. The most important thing he needs to do is just try and be presentable. He may need a life coach.” Yo! Mikey! You used to torture and kill dogs in a dog-fighting operation. You went to jail for torturing and killing dogs. Don’t talk to us about life coaches.
Unconvicted killer and convicted armed robber O.J. Simpson said this while sweet-talking four members of the Nevada Parole Board into granting him his freedom after almost nine years behind bars: “I basically spent a conflict-free life,” and “No one ever accused me of pulling a weapon on them.” Yo! Juice! You beat your ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson so severely one night that she was taken to hospital, you hacked her and friend Ron Goldman to death, you robbed people at gunpoint. Don’t talk to us about non-conflict and deadly weapons.

Frankly, while wooing the Nevada parole commissioners, I’m surprised the dreadful Simpson didn’t tell them that he absolutely had to get out of jail to resume his bogus search “for the real killers” of his ex-wife and friend. No doubt he’ll resume his search on the first tee of some swanky golf course in Florida. What a disingenuous, deplorable cad.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been scribbling mostly about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she’s old and probably should think about getting a life.

Bob Irving: As great as the voice of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers is as a play-by-play man, he’s even a better person

I’ve often wondered how, and why, Bob Irving has kept trucking along.

I mean, the man we know affectionately as Knuckles has been the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ main storyteller since 1974. It’s easy to do the math. That’s 43 years ago. Numbers, however, don’t provide perspective on his time describing the goings-on of the Canadian Football League outfit.

For perspective, try this: The year Knuckles began blah, blah, blahing about the Bombers on CJOB…

Mike Riley’s pop, Bud, was head coach and Dieter Brock was a rookie backup quarterback we knew as Ralph.
The Winnipeg Tribune was a vibrant alternative to the Winnipeg Free Press.
Richard Milhouse Nixon was still in the White House, although RMH left the building in August and our American friends said hello to President Gerald Ford.
Trudeau the 1st was Prime Minister of Canada, Ed Schreyer was Premier of Manitoba, and Steve Juba was Mayor of all the people in Winnipeg.
One-time teenage heartthrob Paul Anka released the regrettable (You’re) Having My Baby, but the top song in Canada was Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks.
The top-selling album worldwide was Band on the Run by breakaway Beatle Paul McCartney and Wings.
Archie Bunker was the No. 1 bigot on TV, with he, Edith, Gloria and Meathead ruling the ratings on All in the Family.
Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union.
Muhammad Ali played Rope-a-Dope, then KO’d George Foreman to reclaim the heavyweight boxing championship in the Rumble In The Jungle.
The RCMP swore in its first female police officers.
A Big Mac cost .65, a loaf of bread .28, a car $3,500, and minimum wage in Manitoba was $2.15.

So, ya, Knuckles has been around some. Squints use carbon dating to determine his age. But that doesn’t mean he’s passed his best-before date. His voice is still as smooth as Tennessee whiskey, his delivery as descriptive as a Steinbeck novel, his integrity unassailable.

That will be absent from the ‘OB broadcast on Friday night in Vancouver, when the Bombers pay a visit to B.C. Place for a skirmish with the Lions. Knuckles has retreated to the repair shop to permit medics to tinker with his ticker and, while there’s little doubt the capable Kelly Moore will perform admirably in his stead, Knuckles is one of those guys you fill in for but cannot replace.

If there is a Vin Scully of the CFL, it’s Knuckles Irving, who’s actually a nicer guy than he is a play-by-play broadcaster.

The sports media, on both the print and electronic side, can be an open range for galloping egos and a misguided sense of significance, but it is largely the province of genuinely good, honest women and men who recognize they’re working in the toy department and, thus, acknowledge that they’ve got a great gig.

I don’t think Knuckles has ever lost sight of that. He’s a humble, earthy man with a killer wit that often keeps the sidelines at Bombers practices at full guffaw. He takes his job seriously but not himself. His passion for his work, the Bombers and the CFL is unparalleled, and I suppose that’s what keeps him trucking after all these years.

No telling how long Knuckles will continue to blah, blah, blah about the Bombers, but his career is kind of like his forehead—it never seems to end.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been scribbling mostly about Winnipeg sports for 47 years, which means she’s old and probably should think about getting a life.

About Evander Kane…Winnipeg Jets coach Pa Ingalls…sugar-coating a loss…intimidating the media…Cubs win, Cubs win…and other things on my mind

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Okay, what’s the over/under on Evander Kane? One month? Two months? Or can he go the distance and keep his nose clean for the next six months, thus escaping the long arm of the law?

I you missed it, old friend Evander fought the law and won this week in upstate New York, where it seems that men physically assailing women—i.e. grabbing a fistful of their hair, grabbing them by the throat, grabbing them by the wrist—is such a common occurrence on the Buffalo bar scene that prosecutors react with all the scorn of a parent scolding a child for failing to wash behind his ears.

“This type of activity in bars occurs every weekend,” Erie county District Attorney Michael Flaherty said quite ho-humishly when explaining how it was that Kane walked on charges of misdemeanor trespass and non-criminal violations of harassment and disorderly conduct on Monday.

It didn’t matter that surveillance evidence from the Bottoms Up bar security cameras showed images of Kane “in contact with other patrons, grabbing a girl by her hair, grabbing another girl by her wrist and then scuffling with some bouncers as they try to escort him.” According to Flaherty (he apparently overlooked or ignored the part of the security film that showed Kane wrapping his hands around a woman’s throat), this behaviour “could be described as arrogant, surly and boorish, but at the end of the day what he did did not rise to the level of criminal offence.”

(Yes, I suppose that begs this question: What the hell does pass for a criminal offence in Buffalo?)

Whatever, Kane, the former oft-injured, underachieving, controversial Winnipeg Jets winger and now an oft-injured, underachieving, controversial Buffalo Sabres winger, received a get-out-of-jail-free card. There was, mind you, a caveat: He must straighten up and fly right between now and March 30, otherwise some big-bellied sheriff will stir from his boys-will-be-boys posture and revisit Kane’s improprieties on that late June night at Bottoms Up.

Assuming Kane keeps his hands to himself and eats all his vegetables for the next six months, Lady Justice will turn a blind eye to his misdeeds and pretend they never happened. You know, sort of like what the National Hockey League is already doing.

Well, good luck with that.

I mean, keeping one’s name off a police blotter for half a year wouldn’t be a burden for 99.99999 per cent of 25-year-old men in North America, but we’re talking Evander Kane here. Party boy. Loads of loot. Doesn’t much give a damn what you or I or someone wearing a tin badge think or say about him. If he wants to jaywalk, he’ll jaywalk. If he wants to spit on a city sidewalk, he’ll unload a loogie. And if he wants to grab a woman’s hair in a bar, he’ll have a mitt full of splint ends.

But, hey, he promises to eat all his veggies for the next six months, which apparently is good enough for the Buffalo legal system, the Sabres and the NHL.

Alexander Burmistrov, aka Paul Maurice's adopted son. — Alexander Burmistrov, aka Paul Maurice’s adopted son.

I have a few questions for Jets head coach Paul Maurice: It’s about Alexander Burmistrov…why, Paul? Why? Did you pull a Madonna and legally adopt the wandering waif when you were coaching in Russia? I mean, this isn’t Little House on the Prairie, where Ma and Pa Ingalls continually brought strays and orphans home to their wee shack on the flatland. The guy’s a bust. Let’s move on.

Speaking of coach Pa Ingalls, he delivered a rather harsh indictment of the linesman who ticketed the Jets for a too-many-men violation in the bonus period of their 4-3 overtime loss to Team Ovechkin in Washington on Thursday night. “Horse shit,” is how Maurice described the call. Well, I’ll see his “horse shit” and raise him a “horse’s ass” for his interpretation of the play and rule. Captain Blake Wheeler was in a different time zone when his replacement, Patrik Laine, hopped over the boards as the Capitals dashed forward on a two-on-one. Forty feet from the players’ bench is a penalty. At any time.

Dumbest headline of the week was delivered by the Winnipeg Sun after the local hockey heroes’ defeat in Donald Trump’s kind of town: “Jets winners even in loss.” The accompanying article by Ted Wyman was just as lame. I swear, there was more sugar coating on his game story than on a dozen glazed Timbits. I got a toothache just reading the thing. Spare us the pom-pom waving, boys. Moral victories are for the forlorn and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Coach Paul Maurice: Is this the look that intimidates the Winnipeg media?

Here’s more on Maurice. Interesting chin-wag between the two Grumpets in the Winnipeg Free Press toy department, sports editor Steve Lyons and columnist Paul Wiecek, who discuss the likelihood that news snoops in River City walk on egg shells around the Jets bench boss. I cannot imagine that coach Pa Ingalls is a more intimidating man than John Bowie Ferguson back in the day. Seldom did we see Fergy when there wasn’t smoke seeping from his mouth, nose and ears. And that was before he lit his cigar. I don’t recall news scavengers running scared, though. Yo! Journos! Any man who harbors hope for Alexander Burmistrov and his rudderless game is never the smartest man in the room. Next time Maurice goes into intimidation mode, remind him of his NHL coaching record: 18 seasons, 11 seasons out of playoffs, two times fired mid-season, won-lost percentage .500, give or take a shootout.

I note that the Freep Grumpets allowed the induction of Doug Brown to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Roll of Honour to pass without mention. I find that interesting because Lyons and Wiecek pooh-poohed a similar salute to quarterbacking legend Dieter Brock. “He never won anything,” is what Lyons said of Diet the Treat, twice anointed the Most Outstanding Player in the Canadian Football League. Well, okay, Brock failed to bring the Grey Cup to River City. And D-lineman Brown did it how many times? Once? Twice. Thrice? Nope. Try zero. Zilch. Zip. He never won anything. But hey. Brown delivers once-a-week alphabet soup to the Freep sports pages, and we can’t have the Grumpets eating their own, now can we.

I don’t want to be accused of ageism, but it’s about the B.C. Lions. Seriously? Paul McCallum? If you missed it, the Leos have hauled McCallum out of moth balls and he’ll be doing the short-range place-kicking in the Leos’ final regular-season game and the CFL playoffs. My initial thought: Can Joe Kapp be far behind? Upon further review, however, McCallum’s 46-year-old right leg can’t be any worse than Richie Leone’s 24-year-old right limb. Leone has been about as dependable as a leaky condom. He’s had more misses than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. So, based on coach/GM Wally Buono’s track record, this will probably work.

My takes on the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series: 1) Finally, Steve Bartman can leave his house; 2) Love the Budweiser commercial featuring a Harry Caray voiceover, it’s pure genius; 3) Game 7 of the Cubs-Cleveland Indians series was the reason I love baseball more than any other sport.

Steve Simmons, whose work often appears in the Winnipeg Sun, has been voted favorite sports writer by readers of the Toronto Sun. He calls it “humbling.” Not so humbling, apparently, that he couldn’t resist the urge to advise his Twitter followers that “it’s 21 times now” that he’s felt so humbled.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 46 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.

About more flag football…beers and boozing with Matt Dunigan…the two Freep Grumpets dissing Dieter Brock…and Shaq’s laugh track

I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Quiz me this, kids: What’s the most common comment heard around the Canadian Football League these days? Nope. You’re wrong. It isn’t “When did Chris Jones morph into Homer Simpson?”

That’s running a close second, although it might be No. 1 with a bullet among plow jockeys and people who wear water melons on their heads. I mean, if you park your pickup truck anywhere between Fertile and Lloydminster, chances are you’re convinced the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ chief cook and bottle washer is to coaching what Homer is to good parenting.

For evidence, they will point to Jones’s curious call on third down late in Gang Green’s skirmish with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers on Saturday afternoon at the Facility Formerly Known as Football Follies Field in Fort Garry. Without going into the gory details, suffice to say Rider loyalists will suggest that the play was brought to you by the letters WTF.

Still, while Jones becoming a d’oh boy might be the topic du jour among Green People, the main CFL catch-phrase right about now is: “…there’s a flag on the play…”

There’s always a flag on the play in the CFL. Red flags. Yellow flags. Flags for bumping, grinding, grabbing grass, growling, bad breath, bad hair, bad attitude and, as excitable TSN gab guy Matt Dunigan put it at one point, “checking naughty parts.”

I swear, if the two play-by-play voices, Chris Cuthbert and Rod (Friggin’) Black, said “there’s a flag on the play” once, they said it 52 times during Saturday’s doubleheader on TSN. And that was just for the penalties, phantom or legitimate. The coaches can’t resist the urge to get in on the act and hurl their yellow hankies, too. Trouble is, I’m convinced they now sometimes do it because they can, not because they should.

Matt Dunigan...let's have some beer and go to Hooters. — Matt Dunigan…let’s have some beer and go to Hooters.

Actually, I don’t know what’s worse, the coach’s challenge or pass interference/contact.

Hands up anybody who can explain pass interference. How about illegal contact? Didn’t think so. The insufferable TSN talking head Glen Suitor is forever prattling on about PI/contact, attempting to educate us mere mortals, but he should save his breath. He doesn’t have any more of a clue than we do. Or the game officials.

Seriously. A receiver deliberately runs into a defender, yet the defender is flagged?

I say we ditch the coach’s challenge, ditch the five-yard contact rule and get back to playing football.

I am perhaps in the minority, but I get a kick out of Matt Dunigan’s color commentary. The guy is as geeked up as the players, and it’s always interesting and entertaining when there’s no filter between the brain and the lips. Everything Get ‘er Done Dunigan does is wrong. Like, he talks about beer and boozing (not to forget Hooters) as much he does football. And he talks over Rod Black too often (which is probably a good thing even if it’s wrong). But he works for me, as long as I get him in small doses.

In the weekly segment of Say What?, an in-print gab session between the two resident Grumpets in the Winnipeg Free Press toy department, editor Steve Lyons (Viscount) and columnist Paul Wiecek (Gort) pooh-pooh the induction of quarterbacking legend Dieter Brock to the Blue Bombers Roll of Honour because “he never won anything.” Interesting. Neither did Milt Stegall. Why no whinging from the Grumpets when loser Milty got the call? Viscount and Gort also had to mention Brock and the zoo. Let it go, boys.

If you want to read a terrific piece on Brock, check out Ed Tait’s article on the Birmingham Rifle at bluebombers.com. It offers wonderful anecdotal insight, including a tale about the day he tossed a football 93 yards. Or, as Rod Black put it while chin-wagging with Brock in the booth during the Blue Bombers-Riders joust, “93 friggin yards.”

At the back end of May this year, when the natterbugs were already wagging their chins about the World Cup of Cash Grabs, I wrote: “Is it unCanadian of me if I really don’t care to talk about the World Cup of Hockey again until September? I don’t believe so. If, on the other hand, I still don’t wish to talk about it once the frost is on the pumpkin, feel free to take away my maple syrup, my back bacon and my Don Cherry voodoo doll.” Well, it’s September and I still can’t arouse any passion for the gimmicky WCOH.

Watched Shaquille O’Neal’s Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech. Too funny. And Shaq hasn’t missed many meals in retirement. He’s bigger than some third-world countries, at least five of the United States and one Canadian province. He’s also one of the funniest and most engaging, charismatic athletes ever.

Matt Nichols: The answer at quarterback or a lamb being led to slaughter with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers?

Take comfort, Bombers Nation. Rest easy. The cavalry has been summoned and, no doubt, Matt Nichols arrived in River City with a pocket full of miracles, a satchel full of high hopes and a truckload of good-luck charms.

The mere fact he’s in town, of course, must be recognized as a favorable development, in that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers latest quarterbacking lamb didn’t have a change of heart and retire from football while en route from Edmonton.

I mean, playing QB for the Winnipegs is not exactly a plum assignment. It ain’t what it used to be. You know, back when Ken Ploen and Don Jonas and Dieter Brock and Matt Dunigan and Khari Jones were flinging the football behind offensive linemen who performed as big as they ate. Now it’s more of a bug-and-windshield thing, and you ain’t the windshield, baby. But, hey, you get danger pay.

So, sure, come on down, Matt. Hit us with your best shot.

Naturally, there are those among you who pooh-pooh the acquisition of Nichols as yet another swan dive into yet another Canadian Football League’s dumpster by Kyle Walters, the club’s general manager who is often seen wearing the look of a very perplexed man. (This, of course, is what happens when your original starting QB, Drew Willy, is in sick bay, your current starter, Robert Marve, is also in sick bay, and your third option, Brian Brohm, is quite healthy but unfortunately has a birth defect known as his throwing arm.)

But come now, ye negative natterbugs. You ought to know by now that this is the Bomber way. They dare not wander out into the vast football forest and discover their own quarterback, sign him and groom him into star starter. They wouldn’t recognize a quality quarterback if Bo Levi Mitchell and Zach Collaros were playing catch in Walters’ back yard. Doing it in-house is old school. That kind of thinking went out with Dieter Brock.

Thus, we have Matt Nichols, plucked from the back alley bin of the Edmonton Eskimos for a token finder’s fee of a seventh-round draft choice. A conditional choice, at that. Cripes, man, that’s like giving a kid a participation prize in Pop Warner.

So, I shall not be joining the chorus of harrumphs that arose once word of the Nichols-for-nil transaction arrived. What, I ask, was Walters supposed to do? Bring Danny McManus out of moth balls?

Besides, I have it on good authority that Nichols is of substantive stock. That authority would be none other than the head coach, Mike O’Shea, who stared at a gathering of interrogators on Wednesday afternoon and announced that he had “seen enough film on him” to confirm his new QB’s bona fides. It is always a good thing to hear the coach say he has “seen film” on a player or a game, because it means he doesn’t respond to every question like he’s been asked to explain Donald Trump’s take on Hispanics.

The coach also advised news scavengers that they, and fans, are to ignore Nichols’ numbers while he was adorned in the green-and-gold linen of the Eskimos. Except one—the No. 5, as in the number of Ws he racked up as the Edmonton starter this season.

“The No. 1 job for any quarterback,” stressed O’Shea, “is winning. The first test is winning and he’s passed that.”

Apparently the tall foreheads on the Eskimos’ sideline don’t share that sentiment, because they busted Nichols down to backup and handed the starting job to a CFL neophyte, James Franklin. And, with Mike Reilly soon to rejoin the fray, his best-before date had expired.

Unfortunately, we’re told we shouldn’t expect to see what Nichols has to offer on the Sabbath when the Bombers are in Regina for their annual day-before-Labor Day skirmish with the winless Roughriders. Apparently, three days isn’t a sufficient amount of time to absorb the Winnipeg playbook.

Geez, I would have thought reading football’s version of Dick and Jane wouldn’t take more than, oh, 10 minutes.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for more than 40 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented to her in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour.

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