About Olympians who are not also-rans…passing on Johnny Manziel…shitholes and Presidents…writing in bits and pieces…angry lesbian tennis legends…and Tonya is still a thug

I cannot survive in a 140- or 280-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…

Well, okay, the names aren’t sexy.

There’s no glitz and glam.

They’re more lunch pail and brown bag than champagne and caviar.

A gloomy Gus is apt to suggest that they’re scrubs on skates. That the men’s hockey tournament next month in PyeongChang, South Korea, will be the Spengler Cup dressed up as the Winter Olympic Games.

Wojtek Wolski

To that I say “no.” They’re Olympians. Our Olympians. The 25 lads selected to wear the Maple Leaf—from Rene Bourque to Wojtek Wolski—got there the hard way. They earned it, playing hither and yon in remote outposts as far removed from the National Hockey League as Minsk is from Manhattan. And I harbor zero doubt that they’ll deliver good, Canadian pluck and backbone in abundance. That might earn them a gold, silver or bronze trinket. It might not be enough. Doesn’t matter. They’re our guys. Hop on board the bandwagon. There’s plenty of room.

Pierre LeBrun gets it. Steve Simmons…(as usual) not a freaking clue.

Here’s LeBrun of The Athletic Toronto and TSN on men’s shinny rosters at the Winter Games: “We all agree the Olympics without NHL players stinks. But let’s have respect for the players selected in their place. They’re proud Canadians living out their Olympic dream.”

Here’s Postmedia’s Simmons after the U.S. declared its roster: Those named to the team are “also rans.” Read: Bottom feeders. Which means he also believes the Canadians are bottom feeders.

Brian Gionta

Rather than insult the American Olympians, the rude Simmons might have done some research. He’d have discovered that at least 18 of Uncle Sam’s reps are champions at the NHL, NCAA, American Hockey League, Major Junior or European professional level. Which disqualifies them as “also rans.” (Sourpuss Steve might want to invest in a dictionary.)

Check it out:

Mark Arcobello: Champion with SC Bern of Swiss National League and champion with Yale University in 2009;
Chad Billins: Calder Cup (AHL) champion with Grand Rapids Griffins; Johnathon Blum: Western Hockey League and Memorial Cup champion with Vancouver Giants;
Will Borgen: NCHC champion with St. Cloud State University;
Chris Bourque: Three-time Calder Cup champion and Deutschland Cup champion;
Bobby Butler: Calder Cup champion;
Matt Gilroy: NCAA champion with Boston University;
Brian Gionta: Stanley Cup champion with New Jersey Devils and NCAA champion with Boston College;
Ryan Gunderson: Swedish Hockey League champion with Brynas IF;
Chad Kolarik: Two-time CCHA champion with University of Michigan; David Leggio: ECAC champion with Clarkson University and SM-Liiga champion with TPS;
Broc Little: ECAC champion with Yale;
John McCarthy: NCAA champion with Boston University;
Brian O’Neill: ECAC champion with Yale;
Bobby Sanguinetti: Swiss Cup champion with EHC Kloten;
Ryan Stoa: WCHA champion with University of Minnesota;
Troy Terry: NCAA champion with University of Denver;
Noah Welch: SHL champion with Vaxjo Lakers HC; two-time ECAC champion with Harvard.

Johnny Manziel

Good reads: 1) Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star on Nigerian born and raised Masai Ujiri, general manager of the Tranna Raptors; 2) Cathal Kelly of the Globe and Mail on a ticking time bomb named Johnny Manziel. No one in Canadian sports writing gets to the heart of a social issue quite like Arthur, while Kelly’s crystal ball has him convinced that Manziel is destined to become a Grade A pain in the ass to whichever Canadian Football League outfit is foolish enough to recruit him.

Donnovan Bennett has a go at Manziel on the Sportsnet website, listing five reasons why the Hamilton Tiger-Cats should pawn off the former Heisman Trophy winner. He makes a compelling case. Unfortunately, Bennett doesn’t list the main reason why Johnny Football ought to be persona non grata in the Hammer or any other CFL port o’ call—he beats up women. That’s where any discussion of Manziel should begin and end.

Best lip service this week: Ujiri was, understandably, unamused when U.S. President Donald Trump referenced immigrants who arrive in America from Africa’s “shithole countries.” Said the Raptors GM: “If I grew up in a shithole, I am proud of my shithole.”

Lias Andersson

It’s about that Swedish kid who hucked his world teenage hockey tournament silver medal into the stands after the title match in Buffalo: So Lias Andersson didn’t want to take his trinket home and stuff the thing in a box. His choice. Get off the kid’s case. I mean, why did Andersson take such a fierce paddywhacking on social media? It’s not like he’s the first athlete to get rid of a trinket. New York Islanders/Pittsburgh Penguins legend Bryan Trottier sold two of his Stanley Cup rings. Hall of Fame goaltender Rogie Vachon sold a Stanley Cup ring. The noblest of them all, Jean Beliveau, peddled a Stanley Cup ring. So, in Andersson’s case, there’s really nothing to see there.

Best tweet about a twit this week is courtesy of veteran broadcaster Dave Hodge: “Less than a month til the Winter Olympics, or as the U-S (sic) President calls them—games involving athletes from non-shithole countries.” That made me laugh out loud and reminded me of the type of banter I used to hear in the press boxes of North America. It’s all adult humor and quite profane, of course, but press boxes were funny, funny places back in the day. I’d like to think they still are, although the humor doesn’t show up in much of the sports writing I read.

Red Smith

A while back Paul Wiecek of the Winnipeg Free Press reviewed his least-read columns from 2017 and, among other things, he said “a bits column is just lazy. Pick a topic—and then write about (it) in an interesting way. It’s not that hard.”

Two things here:

1) Herb Caen wrote a “bits” column in San Francisco for 60 years. That’s a whole lot of lazy. It’s so much lazy that the Pulitzer Prize people awarded him a special honor. It’s so much lazy that there’s a walkway in Frisco named after him. The aforementioned Simmons does a weekly dibs column. Lazy. Ed Willes of Postmedia Vancouver writes a weekly bits column. Lazy. Doug Smith and Kevin McGran write regular bits columns for the Toronto Star. Lazy. Legendary Winnipeg Tribune scribe Jack Matheson penned a weekly dibs column. Lazy. Frankly, if done well, bits and dibs columns can be more enjoyable reads than a lengthy essay on a boring topic. It isn’t lazy.

2) There’s nothing easy about producing a daily sports column. It’s bloody hard. Here’s what notable New York scribe Red Smith had to say when asked if churning out a column was a chore: “Why no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins and bleed.” Smith’s take on writing is a lot closer to the truth than Wiecek’s.

Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King

Noted lesbians Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova insist that they’d boycott the Australian Open if required to perform in the Margaret Court Arena.  When anti-gay preacher Court compared gays to Hitler and communism, then submitted that same-sex marriage would bring an end to Christmas and Easter in the Land of Oz, she lost considerable, if not all, cred as a voice of reason and her verbal attack on the LGBT community was repugnant for its rancor. While it’s easy for the long-retired tennis greats to say they’d boycott the AO because of Court’s hurtful words, neither King nor Navratilova has ever been a shrinking Violet, so I believe them when they say they’d skip the event. I just wish some of today’s players would do it.

By most accounts, former fancy skater Tonya Harding remains every ounce the charmless thug who spent the past 24 years as the queen of denial re her role in the mindless and chilling plot to assault fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m in no hurry to watch the movie I, Tonya, which apparently portrays Harding as a victim of life. Hey, I feel bad for anyone who’s been physically abused. Especially kids. It’s horrible and I can relate. I felt the sting of my dad’s belt buckle on my backside and the back of his hand to my head more than once. And he once put the boots put to me (literally) so hard that I piddled in my pants. But it never occurred to me to take a club to his or anyone else’s kneecaps. So let there be no pity party for Harding.

Rio Olympics: The Media Squawk-O-Meter was on high alert

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

Now that the Five-Ring Circus has pulled out of Rio de Janeiro and environs, we can take a final reading of the Media Squawk-O-Meter as the boys and girls of the Fourth Estate navigate their way home.

Squawking, you realize, is a large part of every Olympic Games. It is, in fact, the sworn duty of news scavengers to alert readers back home to their special brand of misery. It’s not that we care about their hardships. We don’t. And they know we don’t care. But they cannot resist the urge to whinge about their food, traffic delays, lodgings, creature comforts, toilet paper, air quality, insects, blah, blah, blah. Apparently, it’s part of an unwritten code: When assigned to cover the Olympics, one must find something about the locals or the locale to squawk about and insert said inconvenience into one’s copy, otherwise no one will believe you actually have gone hither. Or yon.

It is permissible for the media to squawk about shattered glass in a bus window as the result of gunfire.

There exists at least one other clause in the unwritten code by which the sports scribe is governed: Mention the number of Olympics you have attended as early and as often as possible, in the likely event that it failed to register with the reader the first dozen times.

Games covered, of course, impresses exactly zero people. I mean, a tree with 1,500 rings? That’s impressive. A jock journo with 15 Five-Ring Circuses on his or her resume? That just tells me he or she can count without using all fingers and toes and has discovered more to bitch about than most.

The point is, sportswriter squawking is as germane to the Olympics as Usain Bolt’s lickety-split, Michael Phelps’s wing span, or a boxing judge with one eye on the fight and the other on his take. And, with 28,000 accredited media for the Rio Olympics, that’s one serious group gripe.

They all do it. It’s just that some are louder than others, that’s all. There are also those, like Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star, who can pull it off with humor or wit or satire, rather than a sledge hammer. And, in fairness, I should also like to emphasize that it isn’t always about minor inconveniences. I rather think that were I riding a media bus en route to a sporting venue and bullets shattered the window beside me, that would qualify as more than a petty annoyance.

At any rate, the Media Squawk-O-Meter was operating at a dizzying rate in Rio. Here are some of the gripes…

One of the flowers of Canadian jock journalism (and a personal favorite), Cam Cole of Postmedia, struck first with a tweet about there being just “one ATM to service a population of several thousand in Main Press Centre. Good job, good effort.” He then followed with “worst organization of a Games in my 16, hands down.” This was a brilliant bit of bitching. It showed veteran savvy and moxie. Only a seasoned scribe could have trashed the organizers and established his career Five-Ring Circus count before the Games began. Pure genius.

Steve Politi of NJ.com was also quick off the starting blocks, with an essay about polluted Guanabara Bay. “When I put down the camera and finally look down at the water, I see the trash. It isn’t the piles of it you may have seen in photographs that have moved from here in recent weeks, but it is all around the boat. Plastic bags. Restaurant cups. Soda bottles. A sanitary napkin. The water is covered with a noticeable film, in all directions, making it look like a thick, green stew. But the biggest concern is what I cannot see. The bacteria. The viruses. The human excrement.” And you’re telling us what, Nick? That there’s no garbage in New Jersey?

Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star didn’t bitch so much about the peculiarities of Rio as she did a nervy media back home who, from their sofas, had the bad manners to critique the work of news scavengers in Brazil. At the same time, Ramblin’ Rosie dumped a load of hooey on ill-mannered scribes and/or talking heads on site: “A bewildered shout-down also to media mooks in Rio loudly rooting for their country’s athletes along press tribune row. One simple rule: No cheering in the pressbox.” Yo! Rosie! The Chinese, Japanese, Turks, Brits, South Africans, Dutch, Brazilians or whomever you’re bitching about don’t have to play by your rules. Perhaps cheering in the pressbox is acceptable behaviour where they pin their press badges.

News scavengers’ preoccupation with food is fascinating. Doug Smith of the Toronto Star lamented the absence of golden arches at the journos’ feeding trough. “One thing missing: McDonald’s in the media centre. It’s a staple, an old friend waiting to greet you at the end of a long day and the decision to pull out of Rio might have made sense from a business sense but it’s screwing up tons of media types who miss it dearly.” Smith also bemoaned hanky-panky with pricing at an eatery near his hotel: “The nice menu that was printed in English was quite helpful the first two nights but it was somewhat of a surprise to me when I got there last night to see the prices scratched out by marker and raised a couple of Reals or so for each item. Yeah, a 20R fish dinner became a 22R fish dinner, the 4R appetizer is 6R now and the folks who run it sure know how to make a buck. Still gonna go because it’s so handy but we’ll be looking for somewhere else now more often, a place where the owners aren’t quite as blatant in their gouging.” Geez, Doug, you’re on expenses. Live a little.

They lined up for their Big Macs and Quarter Pounders in Rio, but not at the Media Centre.

King of the complainers had to be Steve Simmons of Postmedia, though. If there was anything about Rio he enjoyed, other than the competition (excluding dressage which, apparently, should be axed), I missed it. Some of his gems: “Green water. Polluted ocean. Wonky buses. Athletes held at gunpoint. So many robberies. I don’t need a second week.” Let’s see…he never had to dive into the green water, he never had to take a dip in the ocean, nobody put a gun to his head, and he wasn’t robbed. Only disruption in transportation impacted on his work. Yet he still wanted to bail. Hmmm. Oh, yes, there was also the weather: “No matter where you’re at it’s either too hot or too cold. A lot of us looking for just right.” Then there were the lineups: “These are the lineup Olympics. Lineup for food. Lineup for drinks. Lineup to pay. Lineup to get in to venue. Lineup to leave venue. Lineup to go to washroom. Lineup for just about everything.” Even when there weren’t lineups, he whinged: “This isn’t complaining. This is just how it is. You pay for a cold drink at concessions. You don’t get a drink. You get a receipt. You then move down the line. Even if there is no line. The four people behind the counter, near the drinks, do nothing until you get to the end of the counter. Then one of them may ask you what you want, or ignore you. Depends on the moment, and this is without a lineup.” Some advice for the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, Stevo—stay home.

Smith of the Star wrote it best about media squawking re the numerous glitches during the Rio Olympics: “These weren’t the best Games I’ve been at—Barcelona and London and Sydney still top the list—but they weren’t the worst, either. That’s still Atlanta by a mile and it always will be. But enough of that, really; it’s tiring.” Amen to that, Doug. Amen.

Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 45 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.