Pinocchio

Happy Christivus: A day for gifts and the airing of grievances in the sports world!

You might think of today as Christmas Eve, kids, but it’s also Christivus, a day-before-Christmas and a day-after-Festivus celebration of all that is good in the playground and, just as important, a time for the airing of grievances. Some athletes/sports figures discover lovely gifts under the Christivus treepole, while others find a big, ol’ lump o’ coal with their name on it…

GIFT: There’s just no beating the Gimli Girls at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Kerri Einarson, Val Sweeting, Shannon Birchard and Briane Harris are three-peat belles of the ball, and you wouldn’t want to bet against them when they Go For Four two months hence at the national women’s curling championship in Kamloops. Only the Colleen Jones quartet from Nova Scotia has managed to put up a four-spot at the Scotties (2001-2004), so Kerri and her gal pals could be breathing rarified air in beautiful B.C. And, by the way, last time I checked, the Gimli Girls were ranked No. 1 among all the world’s female Pebble People, and I’d say that sounds about right.

GIFT: Juggernaut. That’s the word to describe Manitoba’s female curlers. You’ve got Einarson and her gal pals from Gimli, plus the Jennifer Jones, Kaitlyn Lawes, Abby Ackland and Cheleas Carey rinks ranked in the world top 22. All together now: Buffalo Girls rock!

GIFT: Let’s have a show of hands. Who among us believed that Mike O’Shea would one day become the winningest head coach in the lengthy and lore-filled history of the Winnipeg Football Club? Not me. Not you, either. I mean, Coach Grunge was greener than St. Paddy’s Day when they handed him the headset in 2014, and I doubt even Blue Bombers CEO Wade Miller and GM Kyle Walters figured they had an all-timer on their hands. It was as unlikely as prayer service in the Rum Hut. But now that O’Shea is locked in as sideline steward of the Bombers for another three Canadian Football League seasons, it’s a question of when, not if, he reaches the most hallowed of gridiron ground in Good Ol’ Hometown. Bud Grant, a legend in a trench coat, collected 102 regular-season Ws in his 10 crusades of mostly pushing the right buttons. O’Shea, a legend in the making in short pants, faded t-shirt/hoodie and ratty, ol’ ball cap, has 82 notches on his belt. Do the math. Sometime in the autumn of 2024, Coach Grunge should pull astride the Silver Fox, if not pass him. Who had that on their radar? Nobody.

GIFT: Zach Collaros became a two-timer, collecting the Most Outstanding Player Award in Rouge Football for the second successive season and, no, we aren’t going to talk about his dodgy performance in the Bombers 24-23 loss to the Toronto Argos in the grass-grabber for the Grey Grail in late November.

LUMP O’COAL: We will, however, discuss Marc Liegghio’s right leg. Two missed converts in the West Division final, one missed convert and a botched field goal attempt in the Grey Cup game doesn’t cut it. He has the worst limb since Long John Silver and everyone from Buzz and Boomer to Dancing Gabe knew all about it, but it somehow escaped the notice of Bombers brass and it cost them dearly. We can talk all we like about other foulups (there were plenty) in the bid for a Grey Grail three-peat, but a kicker has one job to do and Liegghio failed miserably.

LUMP O’ COAL: Yo! David Asper! I think maybe you’ve been spending too much time at the Journey to Churchill exhibit at Assiniboine Park Zoo. Either that or you’ve been having nightmares about polar bears lumbering through the pot-holed streets of Good Ol’ Hometown. I mean, the Winnipeg Sea Bears? And a polar bear logo? Seriously? That’s the best you could come up with for your newbie, summertime Canadian Elite Basketball League outfit? C’mon, man. Winnipeg is a seaside locale like a box of Crackerjack is fine dining, and there hasn’t been anything resembling a polar bear near Portage and Main since Chris Walby retired.

AN ENTIRE COAL MINE: Oh, woe is Hockey Canada, guardian of our national pastime and keeper of secrets, slush funds and trafficker of lies. We discovered that HC had stacks and stacks of coin to quietly pay off victims of sexual assault, and some board members summoned to Parliament Hill to explain themselves looked like so many Pinocchios after a big, fat fib. This was the biggest and, by far, the most disturbing sports story on Our Mostly Frozen Tundra in 2022. It rocked HC to the core.

AN ENTIRE COAL MINE: As Hockey Canada roiled in the guck and muck of egregious wrong-doing and a sex-assault scandal, since-defrocked CEO Scott Smith had the dreadful manners to surface in Denmark and strut on-ice to dispense gold medals to our Canadian women at the world championship. It was like the graduating class at a police academy receiving their badges from Tony Soprano. Smith’s appearance was callous, tacky and a rented-bowling-shoes level of odious.

GIFT: Rick Westhead of TSN was at the forefront of reporting on L’Affaire Hockey Canada and all other manner of misdeeds in the playground.

GIFT: Our national women’s team provided a ray of light in the Hockey Canada darkness, striking gold at the Winter Olympic Games and the world tournament. Brianne Jenner was our leading goal-scorer and MVP in Beijing, and Sarah Nurse set an Olympic record for most points, 18. Meantime, Jenner scored both goals in a 2-1 victory over the U.S. in the gold-medal match in Denmark, while Sarah Fillier was our leading scorer and a world tournament all-star.

LUMP O’ COAL: Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star decided that Beijing 2022 was an appropriate time to piddle on Ponytail Puck at the Olympics. “I’ll get crucified for saying so, but women’s hockey doesn’t belong in the Games,” Rosie informed her readers. “It’s a cheap medal, in no way comparable to the paramountcy that some nations historically enjoy in a specific sport—like the Norwegians and cross-country skiing or Jamaicans and sprinting. There is at least some semblance of competition—gobs of it actually—with scads of elite athletes to make a challenge.” She added: “It will doubtless come down, as ever before, to a U.S.-Canada final on Feb. 17, with the Canadians looking for revenge after their loss to the Americans in Pyeongchang. Honestly, I’m getting sick of this mythologized rivalry and everybody else an also-ran. It ain’t sportin’.” Whatever you say, Rosie. But, honestly, I’m getting sick of mainstream media pooh-poohing or ignoring females in the playground.

GIFT: Two of my favorite Dons—Baizley and Duguid—received overdue hosannas this year. Baiz, a lawyer and player agent to many of hockey’s glitterati, was inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame, while Dugie, a world curling champion and pioneer among Pebble People, became an official member of the Order of Canada. I just wish Baiz was still around to enjoy the honor, even if he was never comfortable with people fawning over him.

GIFT: There’s been a Rouge Football revival on the Wet Coast of the land thanks to B.C. Leos bankroll Amar Doman and his foot soldiers. The Leos attracted an average audience of 20,387 to B.C. Place Stadium during the past CFL season, which is a hefty bump of 7,879 customers from a year ago, and they had a league-high gathering of 34,082 for their home opener. (Does it matter now that half the audience was there for a OneRepublic concert?)

LUMP O’ COAL: They have a Grey Cup champion football team, yet the rabble in the Republic of Tranna avoid the Argos the way a letter carrier dodges a mutt baring fangs. The average head count at BMO Field was 11,875 with a low of 9,806, and it’s apparent that only a halftime show featuring Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner streaking au naturel will bring The ROT rabble out to Argos games.

LUMP O’ COAL: Good grief. Another year and still zero female news snoops in the media wing of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. By my count, the CFHF media wing has a roll call of 103 members, 100 per cent of them male, 99.9 per cent of them white, 0 per cent of them female or gay. News snoops are quick to call out sports organizations for a lack of diversity, but apparently the same rules don’t apply to their own houses. The Football Reporters of Canada need to recognize that any female news snoop who survived close encounters with Cal Murphy in the 1980s and ’90s belongs in the Hall of Fame.

LUMP O’ COAL: The staggering proliferation of betting banter on sports TV news/highlight programming is a distressing bit of business.

GIFT: There’s been considerable gum-flapping about a play-for-pay women’s futbol league on Our Mostly Frozen Tundra three years hence, and the people doing the yakkety-yakking seem to have a clue. Diana Matheson and her business partner, Thomas Gilbert, have yet to put all their ducks in a row, but they’ve got two franchises in place (Vancouver and Calgary), they’ve brought Christine Sinclair on board (it’s never a bad idea to link arms with the all-time international goal-scoring leader), and they’re playing with CIBC and Air Canada money. By the time they kick off in 2025, the League To Be Named Later will feature eight teams across the land (four west, four east), and players can expect salaries ranging from $35,000-$75,000. My question: Is there anyone in Good Ol’ Hometown anxious to pony up with a $1 million up-front fee and $8-$10 million in operating costs for women’s soccer?

LUMP O’ COAL: TSN natterbug Kara Wagland described the creation of a women’s pro futbol circuit in Canada as a “monumental development.” Ya, it’s so “monumental” that TSN slotted it as the final item on its hour-long, overnight SportsCentre news/highlights package. Cripes, man, Joey Chestnut eating perogies got more prominent play that night, and I think we can all agree that the sight of Chestnut stuffing food into his gob is right up there on the cringe-o-metre with Glen Suitor swooning over Keith Urban on TSN’s broadcast of the 2019 Grey Cup game. Beasts with cloven hooves have better table manners than Chestnut. Yet TSN determined that his stomach-turning pigout was more newsworthy than the “monumental” women’s fitba story. Sigh.

GIFT: Sue Bird retired after 19 seasons and four WNBA championships with Seattle Storm, also five hoops gold medals at the Olympic Games…Brooke Henderson won two LPGA tournaments, including a major…Hoopster Brittney Griner found her way home to the U.S. after spending too much time in a Russian gulag…Felix Auger-Aliassime won four events on the ATP Tour and anchored Canada’s successful run at the Davis Cup…Iga Swiatek won 37 tennis matches in a row from February to July and two Grand Slam titles, the French Open and U.S. Open. Overall, she was 67-9 with eight titles…Roger Federer retired and the tennis maestro went out the same way he came in—with class…Aaron Judge swatted 62 dingers, more than any non-steroid-era player in Major League Baseball history…Nathan Rourke dazzled Rouge Football audiences until a foot owie laid him low nine games into the B.C. Lions crusade…Phil Kessel became the NHL’s iron man with a Pilsbury Dough Boy body. Go figure…Ironically, the first World Series since 1950 with zero U.S.-born Black players on either roster was won by a U.S.-born Black man, manager Dusty Baker of the Houston Astros.

GIFT: The Premier Hockey Federation remains the sole women’s shinny league in North America that actually is a league and—get this—it pays its players in salary, benefits and marketing share. In other words, it walks the walk. Now in its eighth season, there’s a $750,000 per-team player payroll that doubles to $1.5 million a year from now. Notably, that’s a 10-fold increase since 2021.

LUMP O’ COAL: The Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association. Created in May 2019, there was no league then—just a hissy fit—and there’s no league today—just the same old, tiresome hissy fit. Rather than play in the Premier Hockey Federation or unite to form a Ponytail Puck super league that the rabble might want to watch, PWHPA members prefer to hold their breath, stamp their feet and assemble for a scattering of glorified scrimmages that are mostly ignored by fans and mainstream media each winter. In the meantime, they talk, talk, talk and hope someone is listening. Oddly enough, the talking stopped at the recent all-star gala in Ottawa—PWHPA officials refused to make players available for natters with news snoops after the event. Way to sell your game, ladies.

LUMP O’ COAL: Back on Nov. 3, the puppetmasters at Postmedia informed Winnipeg Sun readers that they would be spiking the weekly TV listings and bulking up the sports section, “so you can get more from our award-winning sports reporters.” To which I responded: “Let’s hope going forward they fill the additional space with local copy, or off-beat copy, not a bunch of dreary rot from the Republic of Tranna.” Well, as advertised, Postmedia has bulked up the sports section in the Winnipeg Sun on Sundays, averaging 12 pages. But, as feared, it’s being filled with rot originating from hither and yon, with only 1-to-3 pages devoted to local sports and the majority of bylines from Republic of Tranna scribes. Don’t believe me? Well, in the four Sunday sections since Nov. 27, this is the byline tally:
Toronto writers: 25
Winnipeg writers: 10
So, yes, it reads like the Torontopeg Sun. (Or should it be the Winnironto Sun?)

LUMP O’ COAL: Why does Postmedia insist on forcing Steve Simmons’ weekly alphabet fart on the Winnipeg market? His musings and cheap shots are almost totally Republic of Tranna-centric, and he mentions the goings-on in Good Ol’ Hometown about as often as a squandron of pink elephants perform a fly-by before a Bombers game. In his most-recent offering, for example, Simmons had 17 items on athletes/teams from the The ROT and the grand total of one (1) on the Jets/Bombers/anything Winnipeg. Do the suits at Postmedia truly believe that’s what the rabble in River City want to read?

LUMP O’ COAL: Management geniuses at the Drab Slab refuse to hire a sports columnist. The guy they bill as their sports columnist, Mad Mike McIntyre, has never written a piece on the fabulous female curlers in Manitoba, which is like scribbling for National Geographic and not writing a word about Mother Nature. I mean, the jock news pecking order in Good Ol’ Hometown is Jets, Bombers and curling. So how do you snub female Pebble People when all they’ve done is win four of the past five Scotties (it’s five-for-five if you want to include homegrown Chelsea Carey in 2019)? He also mostly ignores the Bombers, who’ve been in the past three Grey Cup games, winning twice. It’s lame, negligent and unacceptable, and I’ll never understand how a big-city daily allows its sports columnist to snub two of the three major beats.

GIFT: Between Ted Wyman at the Winnipeg Sun and Jeff Hamilton at the Drab Slab, Good Ol’ Hometown receives the best print coverage of Rouge Football on Our Mostly Frozen Tundra. Teddy and Jeff lap the field every year.

LUMP O’ COAL: Carey Price put up a pro-gun post four days prior to the 33rd anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which 14 women were slaughtered. It’s okay for the Montreal Canadiens goaltender to be pro firearms, but the timing of his post was ghastly. Almost as bad was teammate Joel Edmundson, who said this about that: “None of us are really aware of what happened 30 years ago. The (Polytechnique) anniversary is fast approaching—it’s news to all of us, to be honest.” Good grief.

GIFT: To say Rick Bowness came in with a bang would be the biggest understatement since Noah said, “Geez, it smells like rain.” The Winnipeg Jets freshly minted head coach hadn’t been in town long enough to order a cup o’ java and cheese nip at the Sals when he instructed the seamstress to snip the ‘C’ off Blake Wheeler’s jersey, and I’d say it’s been win-win for both parties. Bones’ Jets are running with the National Hockey League’s big dogs, and Wheeler, until being felled by an owie, had been productive with less ice time and less face time with news snoops. That’s the bonus, of course: No more daily sourpuss sound bites from the former Captain Grumpy Pants.

GIFT: The Jets hit all the right notes when they unveiled a downtown pigeon perch to legend Dale Hawerchuk in October.

LUMP O’ COAL: Let’s be clear, Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson et al have a right to earn a living with the LIV Golf Series, even if it means they need to wash the Saudi blood off their hands every time they cash a paycheque. But does Norman have to be so bitter about it? My goodness, it’s as if every horse in the Kentucky Derby piddled on the Shark’s Corn Flakes one morning.

LUMP O’ COAL: Here’s all you need to know about the Saudi/Greg Norman LIV Golf Series: Pat Perez was handed a four-year, $10 million deal, just to stick a tee in the ground. “Look, I know I can’t beat those kids (on the PGA Tour) anymore. This was a great opportunity for me. I have nothing against the PGA Tour; they did a lot for me, but I had to earn everything I got out there.” Imagine that. Earning your wage. What a concept.

LUMP O’ COAL: TV talking heads made complete donkeys of themselves with their gushing over has-beens Tiger Woods and Serena Williams like they’re still at the top of their games. Hey, maybe Tiger will win another golf tournament (doubtful), and perhaps Williams hasn’t actually retired and she’ll return to win another tennis tourney. Until then, the boys and girls in the blurt box need to use their yakkety-yak time to talk about athletes winning today, not back in the day.

LUMP O’ COAL: Damien Cox and friends of the Toronto Star still believe they have the final say on Canada’s athlete-of-the-year. As if…Novak Djokovic is still wearing tin foil on his head…Bob Costas sat behind the play-by-play mic during MLB playoffs and he refused to shut the hell up. He talked about everything but baseball…The Arizona Coyotes play in a 4,800-seat rinky-dink rink…Danny Maciocia canned Khari Jones due to a lack of discipline and hired himself as head coach of the Montreal Larks. So what happened in the fourth quarter of their East Division final vs. the Toronto Argos? Maciocia’s Larks took four undisciplined penalties to seal their fate…TSN talking heads continually lied about head counts for CFL games. Yo! Boys! We aren’t stupid. We can see the empty seats. Glen Suitor was the worst, constantly blabbing about “packed” ballparks and telling us there was “close to 40,000” at B.C. Place Stadium for the West semifinal, even if attendance was scarcely more than 30,000. Meanwhile, Milt Stegall informed us the Bombers had “sellouts through the season.” There were, in fact, two sellouts, both in September…Kyrie Irving, just because he’s Kyrie Irving…The Boston Bruins signed bully Mitchell Miller and the Montreal Canadiens signed Logan Mailloux, a young man who likes to take pics of women engaged in sexual activity and, without their consent, share the photos with his frat boy buddies. Oinkers.

LUMP O’ COAL: Dumbest tweet of the year from Theoren Fleury, the former NHLer and current conspiracy theorist who, when last seen, was plummeting into a deep rabbit hole: “The biggest spreaders of misinformation are the ones who are spreading misinformation.”

And, finally…

Let’s talk about Coach Grunge, a hammer and a chisel……newspaper wars…no sex, they’re coaches…a reigned-in Commish Randy…caution when kicking Bo’s tires…a Mud Bowl baby…football, food and freeloaders…and other things on my mind this Grey Cup day…

Top o’ the morning to you, Mike O’Shea.

Well, Coach Grunge, you have a chance to boldly go where no Winnipeg Blue Bombers sideline steward has gone before in Rouge Football—three Grey Cup parades in three years.

I don’t know if that means we should alert the sculptor, but statues of legendary coaches Bud Grant and Cal Murphy stand outside the Ballyard In Fort Garry and they never brought the Grey Grail to Good Ol’ Hometown for a downtown celebration in back-to-back-to-back years, so maybe a hammer and chisel wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

I can see it now: A bronze likeness of you in your grunge look of faded hoodie (or t-shirt), battered ball cap, Papa Smurf chin whiskers and, of course, short pants, which were the object of much scorn before the rabble (and at least one news snoop) realized the length of a man’s pant legs has nothing to do with the execution of X’s and O’s.

But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, Coach Grunge.

Before anyone hails the sculptor, there’s the matter of your blue-and-gold-clad lads grabbing frozen grass with the Toronto Argos this afternoon at Mosaic Stadium on the Flattest of Lands. Get the job done to put a wrap on this Canadian Football League crusade and comparisons to Bud Grant will be unavoidable, since, as mentioned, the Silver Fox never managed a three-peat.

Oh, he came close, Coach Grunge. Relics like myself can recall four title shindigs in five years when trees seemed to stand taller (1958-59, 1961-62), and nice guy Mike Riley gave it a go during his brief whirl as head coach, winning in 1988 and 1990, but skipping a beat in ’89.

So you’d stand alone in Winnipeg FC annals, which date back to 1930, and it would put you in some interesting company in Rouge Football lore.

By my count, Coach Grunge, four men have pulled the strings for three-peat champions: Hugh Campbell, who was greedy and copped the Grey Grail five years in succession (Edmonton Elks, nee Eskimos, 1978-82), Pop Ivy (Edmonton, 1954-56), Teddy Morris shortly after the boys came marching home from WWII (Argos, 1945-47), and Billy Hughes (Queen’s University, 1922-24).

I’m sure you recognize the names Campbell and Ivy, and perhaps you’re familiar with Teddy Morris, too, since the Argos are part of your background story. But Billy Hughes? I hadn’t heard of him until his name popped up on a Google search.

Familiarity or not, Coach Grunge, a W today in Regina would lock you in with legends, and who would have thought that possible after the early returns on your Blue Bombers gig?

That was a scary bit of business. You broke from the gate 12-24. That’s when the rabble talked more about your short pants and grunge gear than your quarterbacks. And, I’ll admit, I figured you had a shorter shelf life than toilet paper during a pandemic. Then boom: 70-34, three division titles, two Grey Cup championships, with gusts up to three, and twice anointed coach-of-the-year.

I don’t know how often you think about the dark days, Coach Grunge, but I’m guessing you’re grateful that CEO Wade Miller and GM Kyle Walters didn’t jerk their knees and drop-kick you into the coaching recycle bin.

Question is: Where do you go from here?

You’re at the end of your tether contract-wise and, as much as I’d like to think the preference of Miller/Walters would be to keep the Canadian Mafia intact, you might have other ideas. Could be that you’ll eyeball opportunities in Ottawa or Montreal, which are closer to your roots. Maybe even another one of your old haunts, Hamilton, will come calling if Orlondo Steinauer decides his head set is no longer a good fit.

Oh, I know you showed Good Ol’ Hometown and Winnipeg FC loads of love during Grey Cup week, and Miller insists he’ll lock you in a room and toss away the key until next summer if that’s what it takes to prevent an escape, but let me say this about that: We all thought Bud Grant was a lifer, except it turned out he preferred the hunting and fishing back home in Minnesota, so he bolted in 1966 and transformed the Vikings into an NFL power. He also took his trusty sidekick, Johnny Michels, with him for good measure, leaving Winnipeg FC high and dry until the mid-1980s.

But, hey, your future is a natter for another day, Coach Grunge.

The Argos and history are right in front of you. Win today and you can show up on the sideline next year wearing a thong and tank top and nary a discouraging word shall be heard or written. It might throw the sculptor for a loop, but we can’t worry about artsy-fartsy types who tend to get into a tizzy over the simplest things. We’ll talk about a proper pose for the statue once the job’s done vs. the Boatmen.

The nation’s football reporters had head coaches O’Shea and Ryan Dinwiddie of the Argos on the spit last Wednesday, and absent from the media/coaches to-and-fro was the traditional question about the sexual conduct of players in advance of the large game: Were bedroom romps permitted, or not? The cheap-yuks query stirred up great giggles when first launched by legendary scribe Jim Hunt back in the 20th century, in part because Shakey was a loud and funny guy, but, over time, it became more of a groan-worthy, eyeballs-a-rolling moment. That’s no knock against Terry Jones, who took the torch from Shakey. It’s just that the sideline stewards weren’t always eager to play along and their replies were flatter than Saskatchewan. There were, mind you, moments of rich levity when Shakey and Jonesy were rewarded with quality sound bites, but its expiry date had arrived.

The Rose-Colored Glasses Award goes to Dinwiddie, who believes a W today will force folks in the Republic of Tranna to sit up and take notice of the Boatmen. “I think there will be a buzz around the city. I think if we can win on Sunday, I think it’s going to open up some eyes that the Argos can bring something to the city,” he told news snoops. Ya, and maybe Pinocchio will turn into a real boy and join Rod Smith and Glen Suitor in the TSN broadcast booth today (I shudder to think how that interview would play out). Still, full marks to Dinwiddie for his fairy-tale optimism.

There was, as usual, much blah, blah, blah and yadda, yadda, yadda in advance of today’s grass-grabber in ol’ Pile o’ Bones, but the only storyline that truly mattered was QB Zach Collaros’ availability to the Bombers. The rest of it? Filler and free food for news snoops. Trust me, I know. You arrive on Monday, start cranking out the copy and/or sound bites in earnest on Tuesday, and, by Saturday morning, you’ve exhausted all worthy story-time narratives. And you’re screaming, “Just play the damn game, already!” It’s a 10-plus-hour-a-day grind, but a fun grind that makes the pints taste better once you slap a -30- on your last piece or file your final sound bite. The rush of Grey Cup Week remains one of the few things I miss about the rag trade. (Don’t ask me about the Grey Cup Week when Terry Jones, Al Ruckaber and myself shut down at 5 in the a.m. after wetting our whistles in an Edmonton cop shop.)

Staying on that theme, one aspect of Grey Cup Week that I enjoy is newspaper wars, which are amped up when the home team is part of the fray. The boys on the Bombers beat had at it the past six days, and the Winnipeg Sun whomped the Drab Slab in volume. The tabloid team of Paul Friesen and Teddy Wyman (with contributions from other Postmedia scribes) churned out 38 articles, compared to 22 from Jeff Hamilton and young Taylor Allen (contributions from Canadian Press, newsside, arts department) over at the broadsheet. Team Sun finished with a nine-page flourish today. In terms of quality copy, let’s call it a wash, because they all did boffo work. I’m a big fan of all four and, remember, Good Ol’ Hometown is the only locale west of the Manitoba-Ontario boundary that offers that level of competition.

Wait. What’s this? CFL commish Randy Ambrosie wasn’t yakking about unicorns, the Tooth Fairy or sprinkling pixie dust during his annual chin-wag with news snoops? Well, actually he was…just not as much as is his custom. Normally, the commish comes across as giddy as a guy who just found a 50-dollar bill in his coat pocket, but this was a more reigned-in Randy. He gave his gums a rigorous, one-hour workout while saying a whole lot of nothing, but we did learn that next year’s playoff grass-grabbers shall be on Saturdays, although the skirmish for the Grey Grail remains a Sunday staple. Oh, he also informed the gathering that Rouge Football now has something called a “watchability index” and “touch points.” Meh.

Alphonso Davies’ readiness for futbol’s World Cup has been an iffy bit of business and, in a moment of galloping hyperbole, TSN’s Lindsay Hamilton told us “every single person in Canada is watching this storyline.” Nope. Not all 39 million of us. You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve been more concerned about Collaros’ owie than Alphonso’s hamstring. (I wonder if talking heads watch the tape and ask themselves, “How could I have said something so stupid?” Lindsay’s normally spot on, so stooping to ridiculous exaggeration isn’t a good look.)

Quiz me this, kids: Who would you rather have on your team, Willie Jefferson or Shawn Lemon? I agree, it’s Willie J. So how can the Bombers DE not be a Rouge Football all-star? It’s like leaving the Pope off an all-Catholic team.

Just wondering: What is it about Brandon Banks that makes him whine and squawk and stomp his little feet whenever he drops the football? He’s forever yelping at the zebras, demanding a pass interference flag and, no doubt, questioning their ancestry. Yo! Speedy B! Chill. Sometimes a play goes sideways because of good coverage, sometimes it’s the QB’s fault, and here’s something else to consider—sometimes it’s your own damn fault! Guaranteed the Argos pint-sized receiver is good for at least one XXXL-size hissy fit today.

Danny Maciocia cited a lack of discipline as one of the bugaboos behind his decision to sack Montreal Larks head coach Khari Jones four games into the 2022 Rouge Football crusade. So what happens in crunch time with the smug Maciocia wearing the head set? The Larks were penalized four times, twice to keep Argos drives alive, in the fourth quarter of their East Division final loss to the Boatmen.
9:11 (time remaining): Pass interference on 2nd and 14.
4:07: Offside on 1st and 10.
1:17: Face mask on 2nd and 11.
1:12: Offside on 1st and 10.
Atta boy, Danny. Way to keep your lads reigned in.

So, the Hamilton Tabbies have surrendered two draft picks and future goodies for the privilege of pitching woo to Bo Levi Mitchell, the Calgary Stampeders defrocked QB. But wait. Bo says he’ll lend an ear to all other suitors before agreeing to pitch his tent in The Hammer. Fine. But, wherever and whenever he lands, it’s a matter of Buyer Beware. This isn’t Cadillac Showroom Bo. It’s more like Used Car Lot Bo. Teams will have to be cautious when they kick the tires, because something might fall off.

While the Tabbies whisper sweet nothings into Mitchell’s ears, Nathan Rourke will be strutting his stuff stateside for NFL outfits. Such a shame if we lose the Victoria-born phenom after just half a season of sheer brilliance.

Egads! KUB Bakery is no more. Good Ol’ Hometown hasn’t taken this big a hit since the last bite of the last turkey clubhouse sandwich at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant. Winnipeg without KUB is like Sunday without prayer. I’ve been out here on the Left Flank for 23 years, and I’ve yet to find rye bread to match KUB rye. Can’t find corned beef to match Oscar’s, either. Oh, sure, mountain views and palm trees and benign temps in January are a nice tradeoff, but Oscar’s corned beef on KUB rye with mustard would be a boffo halftime snack today. I’ll have to settle for the Hawaiin pizza instead.

Just so you know, I’m a Grey Cup baby. Yup, I came into this world two days after the most-recent Bombers-Argos tussle for the Grey Grail, which wasn’t recent at all. It was the infamous Mud Bowl on Nov. 25, 1950, in the Republic of Tranna. Photographic evidence confirms the playing surface at Varsity Stadium was more pig pen than football field that day, with the large lads grabbing hands full of muck and guck where grass used to be. The Bombers lost 13-zip, so the doc didn’t have to smack my butt to get the squawking started after I’d poked my head out of the chute. I already had reason to bawl.

And, finally…

Let’s talk about Randy Carlyle and Body by Pillsbury…liars, liars pants on fire…what say you, Jeff Hecht?…E-Town trumps Pegtown…the CFL’s best newspaper market…men overboard at Sportsnet…and the WJM newsroom

Another Sunday smorgas-bored…and this post was written without the benefit of performance-enhancing nouns, verbs, adjectives or metaphors, but there are trace amounts of sarcasm, irreverence and flippancy…

Back in April 1989, when drug cheat Ben Johnson still had our attention after his fall from grace at the Seoul Olympics, word drifted out of Stockholm that Randy Carlyle had failed a drug test.

I laughed.

Anyone who’d ever met or seen Randy Carlyle probably laughed.

I mean, you didn’t get Carlyle’s body with daily visits to the gym, augmented by human growth hormone milk shakes. We’re talking Body by Pillsbury. Whatever muscle the Winnipeg Jets defender had was well concealed by a pleasantly soft exterior, most likely the product of jam-filled pop tarts or crescent rolls stuffed with cheese and bacon. His soft under belly really was his soft underbelly.

Thus, after Carlyle had piddled in a bottle at the World Hockey Championship and women/men wearing lab coats didn’t like the color of his pee—they discovered traces of the banned substance mesterolone—there were many giggles, even though he had officially joined Johnson on the Drug Cheat Hall of Shame roll call.

“When we first heard the words ‘steroids’ and ‘Randy’ in the same sentence, everyone in the room laughed,” Dave Ellett, a teammate of Carlyle’s in Sweden and with the Jets, once recalled in a natter with Lance Hornby of the Toronto Sun. “John Ferguson Sr. had the best line: ‘If that’s what steroids does for your body, a lot of people will want their money back.’ Then we realized how serious it was.”

As it happened, Carlyle’s ‘B’ sample came back cleaner than a saint’s soul, so neither he nor Team Canada was disqualified from the tournament.

“I’ve been through hell,” the Pillsbury D-Boy told news snoops at the scene of the non-crime. “I was in total shock. How do you live with yourself when they say you’ve taken this and you know you haven’t? I lost a few pounds with sweaty palms.”

So, sure, squints make mistakes, and many among the rabble believe the lab rats did a dirty to Andrew Harris, who won’t join his Winnipeg Blue Bombers teammates in their annual Labor Day Weekend frolic v. the Saskatchewan Roughriders today on the Flattest of Lands. He’s also been told to find something else to do when the large lads assemble for the rematch in Good Ol’ Hometown on Sept. 7.

The Canadian Football League’s now-suspended leading rusher vows he didn’t knowingly take the illegal drug they say he took, but, for every local who believes Harris got a raw deal and shouldn’t be twiddling his thumbs this afternoon, there are probably 10 beyond the boundaries of Manitoba who’ll tell us that his pants are on fire. You’d have better luck convincing them that O.J. is honest-to-gosh looking for the real killers.

And that’s for good reason: When caught with their hands in the juice jar—or, in the case of Pete Rose, cozying up to friendly neighborhood bookie—most high-profile cheats in sports immediately take a trip to Planet Pinocchio. Examples…

Lance Armstrong: “If you consider my situation, a guy who comes back from arguably, you know, a death sentence (cancer), why would I then enter in a sport and dope myself up and risk my life again? That’s crazy. I would never do that. No. No way.”

Mark McGwire (appearing before U.S. Congress): “I’m not here to talk about the past.”

Rafael Palmeiro: “I have never used steroids. Period.”

Sammy Sosa: Pretended he couldn’t understand English when asked about his steroid use.

Roger Clemens: “I’ve been accused of something I’m not guilty of…I’ve never taken steroids or HGH.”

Justin Gatlin: “I am not using and have not used PEDs.”

Marion Jones: “I am against performance enhancing drugs. I have never taken them and I never will take them.”

Ben Johnson: “When I was a kid, I never took drugs. People who know me in Jamaica and people who know me here know I would never take drugs. I have never, ever knowingly taken illegal drugs, and I would never embarrass my family, my friends, and my country, and the kids who love me. For now, there’s nothing more I can tell you, because I just don’t know.”

Floyd Landis: “I declare convincingly and categorically that my winning the Tour de France has been exclusively due to many years of training and my complete devotion to cycling, to the sacrifice of an entire life to carry out my dream, a dream of thousands of kilometres that I have completed through an absolute respect to the cleanness of the sport.”

Alex Rodriguez: “I have been clear that I did not use performance enhancing substances as alleged.”

Pete Rose (gambling): “I’m not going to admit to something that didn’t happen. Never bet as a player. That’s a fact.”

Martina Hingis (cocaine 2007 Wimbledon): “I am frustrated and angry. I believe that I am absolutely 100 per cent innocent.” Notably, she promptly retired rather than fight lab findings and a two-year ban.

Manny Ramirez: “Recently I saw a physician for a personal health issue. He gave me a medication, not a steroid.” After taking another medication that wasn’t a steroid, Ramirez failed another drug test and retired rather than be banished for 100 games.

Ryan Braun: “I truly believe in my heart, and would bet my life that this substance never entered my body at any point. I am the victim of a process that completely broke down and failed the way it was applied to me in this case.”

Vladimir Putin: “State-sponsored doping system has never been created in Russia, it is simply not possible, and we will do everything we can to make sure such state-sponsored system of doping support never exists.”

That, kids, is the reason people are hesitant, or flat-out refuse, to believe Harris. They’ve heard all the nose-growing excuses before.

And, unlike Randy Carlyle, his isn’t Body by Pillsbury.

So, when Louis-Phillipe Bourassa was banished for being a drug cheat, Bombers safety Jeff Hecht pounced, calling out the Bytown RedBlacks long snapper on Twitter with this post: “Sometimes you just have to work hard instead of being lazy and buying an edge.” It followed, therefore, that he’d deliver the same public tsk-tsking to Harris. But no. “To think that I would treat my teammate the same as I would somebody else, I think, is kind of naive from some people, because I’m a team-first guy,” he said in a chin-wag with Ted Wyman of the Winnipeg Sun. He then told Teddy Football that “I think lying is the tool of the coward, so I’m not going to hide my stance on anything.” Except, of course, he’ll hide his stance on Andrew Harris, thank you very much. Hypocrisy, thy name is Jeff Hecht.

The Bombers are without Matt Nichols, Andrew Harris and Chris Matthews today on the Flattest of Lands, so why do I think they have a snowball’s chance of beating Gang Green? Because they aren’t without Willie Jefferson and the D.

I like most of what young Jeff Hamilton does in the Drab Slab. Grade A reporter. Good writer. On top of the beat. Alas, young Jeff is off the mark when he suggests Saskatchewan and River City are the “two best markets in the CFL.” That’s only half accurate. The main measuring stick for any CFL market is the box office and, yes, Gang Green has developed a most rabid fan base. But Winnipeg? Not so much. Edmonton has been, and is, a better market. Even with this year’s sharp downturn in bodies at Commonwealth Stadium, the Eskimos are attracting 3,335 more than the Bombers per game. More to the point, if the Eskimos don’t nudge their head count up a couple thousand, this will be the first time—the only time!—this century that their average attendance falls below 30,000. Winnipeg FC has averaged 30,000 once. Repeat: Once. That was in 2013, the year Football Follies Field in Fort Garry opened for business and became a destination for curiosity seekers. So, sorry to say, Jeff, Good Ol’ Hometown is a better market than E-Town like Bob Dylan is a better singer than Sinatra.

There are, of course, other methods of measuring a CFL market, one of them being media coverage. That, of course, is subjective. But I submit that no one in our vast land does it better than the girls and boys on the Bombers beat in Pegtown, and I can already hear the squawks of protest from news snoops in E-Town and on the Flattest of Lands. Well, let ’em squawk. They’re wrong.

River City is the only true two-newspaper town in Western Canada, thus Winnipeg FC gets double the print coverage from competing rags. The operative word is “competing.” Standard cookie-cutter, scrum-collected quotes aside, what you read in the Drab Slab won’t be what you read in the Sun, and the Andrew Harris situation is an excellent example of the difference. Paul Friesen’s take in the Sun had a harsh, but fair, tone, while Hamilton delivered a more personal, reined-in essay. Both pieces worked for me in their own way. And that’s something you don’t get in points west, because Postmedia eliminated newspaper competition in other Prairie provinces. In terms of CFL coverage, the E-Town Sun is the E-Town Journal; the Calgary Sun is the Calgary Herald; the Vancity Sun is the Vancity Province; and you’ll read the same Riders copy in both the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. They’re kin. Kissing cousins, if you will. That’s not the way it should be, but that’s what you get when Postmedia is still pinching pennies long after our copper coin went out of circulation.

So, Sportsnet (thankfully) has pulled the plug on resident meathead Nick Kypreos, and we can only hope he’s replaced by someone who isn’t stuck in the 1970s, when clubbing an opponent over the head with a piece of lumber was an oft-used gambit in winning hockey games. Kypreos spent two decades using his Sportsnet pulpit to deliver a “to hell with turning the other cheek” sermon, promoting back-alley bullying to the point of advising skilled players like Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews to adopt rat-like stickwork and fisticuffs as tactics in dealing with the National Hockey League weasel element. That dinosaur logic is now left to blowhard Donald S. Cherry and the bellicose Brian Burke, although Burkie often delivers juicy insight when he isn’t talking about truculence.

I hope the last person to leave Sportsnet’s stable of shinny voices remembers to turn out the lights. Gone are Kypreos, Doug MacLean and John Shannon, which leaves who to natter with Jeff Marek on Hockey Central At Noon? Muppet head Colby Armstrong and Gord Stellick (meh)? Anthony Stewart and Mike Zigomanis (spare us)? The return of Damien Cox (shudder)? I’m not a Shannon fan, because there’s more than a whiff of arrogance to his delivery and he can be annoyingly interruptive, but he certainly knows where a lot of bodies are buried. I suspect he won’t be in the unemployment queue for long.

Murray, Lou, Mary, Ted, Sue Ann, Georgette, Rhoda and Phyllis in the WJM newsroom.

And, finally, Mary is gone, Ted is gone, Georgette is gone, and now Rhoda is gone. Thank goodness for reruns so I can still watch The Mary Tyler Moore show every afternoon and keep them and the WJM newsroom in my life. Love that show. Love the characters. I actually have a framed pic of Mary Tyler Moore beside my flatscreen TV, a gift from dear friends Jeff and Paul, who know I still want to be Mary Richards when I grow up and have a friend like Rhoda Morgenstern.

About TSN’s Cult of Johnny and the glorification of an NFL washout…did someone’s dog die?…teeny-boppers in the broadcast booth…scary numbers and ignoring domestic violence…good stuff from the Freep’s Jeff Hamilton and Andrew Harris…jocks and journos telling fibs…swimming with the fishes…paying Bogo but not Trouba…getting paid to eat popcorn…and Oscar Madison

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

TSN no longer has football broadcast teams. It has a cult. The Cult of Johnny.

Or perhaps it’s a church. The Church of Latter Day Frat Boys. Johnny Manziel being the Saint in Residence.

Whatever the case, all the natterbugs on TSN football want to talk about is Johnny Manziel. So let’s talk about Johnny Manziel.

He beat up a woman and threatened to kill her. Full stop.

At least it should be a full stop, because once you’ve said a man has beaten up a woman and threatened to kill her, you’ve told me everything I need to know about that man. I don’t need to hear about Manziel’s frat-boy partying, the drugs, the booze and the skirt chasing. He beat up a woman and threatened to snuff out her life. And his life. ‘Nuff said.

The shame is, the Canadian Football League ignores it. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats ignored it. The Montreal Alouettes are ignoring it. Ditto TSN and most mainstream sports media. The folks who repeatedly chanted “We want Johnny! We want Johnny!” at Percival Molson Stadium in Montreal on Thursday night ignore it.

It’s as if Colleen Crawley doesn’t exist. Like she’s a fictional character in an Agatha Christie or John Grisham crime novel.

But Crawley is very real. She’s the woman Manziel beat up and threatened to kill. No one in the CFL ivory tower has ever spoken to her about her night of terror, as Manziel raged and roughed her up. Nor has anyone at TSN. They don’t care about Colleen Crawley.

All they care about is whether or not the Montreal Alouettes quarterback can throw a tight spiral.

Johnny Frat Boy has yet to fling a football in a three-down game that matters, but that hasn’t prevented TSN and others from unabashedly glorifying him. If anything, it’s encouraged them to chatter more about the National Football League washout.

In the leadup to the Als-Edmonton Eskimos match on Thursday, the main TSN web page featured six Johnny Manziel videos on Tuesday morning. There were another four on Wednesday. Five more on game day. In the TSN pre-match nattering, ever-beaming host Kate Beirness and the panel—Henry Burris, newby Jim Barker and Milt Stegall—spent the better part of 25 minutes gasbagging about Manziel before even mentioning the Eskimos, who, oh by the way, rag-dolled les Alouettes, 44-23.

By the end of the night, after Larks head coach Mike Sherman had displayed the good sense to keep Manziel confined to the sidelines, Beirness had wiped away her smile like faulty makeup. She was in distress, if not PO’d.

“Even though Mike Sherman told us we would see Johnny Manziel on Thursday night, we did not,” she pouted, her face as long as Johnny Frat Boy’s litany of trespasses. “He did not take a single snap. We have not seen Johnny Football in a regular-season pro football game since December 2015, and we will have to wait just a little bit longer.”

It was as if her dog had died. I swear, I could hear a Merle Haggard hurtin’ song playing in the background.

Good grief.

Rod Smith, Jim Barker, Matt Dunigan, Milt Stegall

If TSN’s shameful fawning and obsessing with Manziel on Thursday didn’t turn enough stomachs, the boys were at it again the following night. Rod Smith and the three chatterboxes sitting to his left—Davis Sanchez, Matt Dunigan and Stegall—mentioned Johnny Rotten four times in the first two minutes (and five times total) during their chin-wag prior to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers-Tranna Argonauts joust. Color commentator Glen Suitor, meanwhile, felt obliged to talk about him toward the end of the match. Well, let’s file that under WTF. I mean, Manziel was 1,800 kilometres and two provinces to the east of Pegtown, most likely cruising Crescent Street in Montreal. So why was he part of the conversation? The TSN boys are acting like 1970s teeny-boppers waiting for a David Cassidy concert. Get a grip, for gawd’s sake.

Manziel enablers and apologists might be interested in some disturbing, scary facts from the Canadian Women’s Foundation: Approximately every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner; in 2014, 80 per cent of the victims of police-reported intimate partner homicides were women; 80 per cent of dating victims are women. And one study, conducted between 2011 and 2014, found that domestic violence calls in Calgary were 15 per cent higher when the Stampeders played the Eskimos and increased to 40 per cent when the Stamps were in the Grey Cup game. But, hey, let’s ignore the facts and root, root, root for a guy who beat up a woman.

Johnny Manziel and his guard dog June Jones.

Most asinine comment I heard or read about Manziel last week was delivered by Marc Dumont of The Athletic Montreal. He wrote: “Canadians can indeed be a forgiving people, finding empathy for those dealing with issues like substance abuse, but we rarely ignore incredibly serious issues like domestic violence.” Rarely ignore? I call total BS on that. TSN has been unrelenting and unapologetic in its campaign to get Johnny Rotten on the football field, completely disregarding the reality that he terrorized and beat up a woman. At Manziel’s intro presser after he signed with the Tiger-Cats, head coach June Jones shut down any conversation about domestic violence. And the Canadian sports media gave convicted woman-beater Floyd Mayweather a complete pass when he surfaced in the Republic of Tranna to tub-thump his farce of a fist-fight with Conor McGregor last year.

It’s not often that I lend an ear to podcasts, but Jeff Hamilton’s recent chit-chat with Winnipeg Blue Bombers running back Andrew Harris was definitely worth a listen.

Hamilton, one of the CFL beat boys at the Winnipeg Free Press, asked Harris to weigh in on the Jacob Trouba saga, which resulted in the young Winnipeg Jets defenceman receiving a $5.5 million salary award from a National Hockey League arbitrator after contract negotiations ground to a halt.

“Most players have an inflated vision of what they’re worth, and, in a sense, you should,” said Harris, who defected from the B.C. Lions to join Winnipeg FC in 2016. “You realize how much you put out there, how much work you put in, and all the things you go throughout a season and through a career. Ultimately, you want to get compensated for that.

“You’re gonna get paid this amount of money for a short period of time, maybe 10 per cent, or 15 per cent, or 20 per cent of your whole life will be playing professional sports, so you’ve gotta maximize that to the full potential. But I think a lot of guys ruin a good thing after asking for too much money or going for places because they’re getting paid a certain amount when it’s not a good fit for them. A good fit within their system, within the community, within the lockerroom…it definitely can ruin a lot of careers just wanting more money or going where the grass is greener.

“Honestly, deep down inside I wanted a change. And I wanted to go to free agency. It really didn’t matter what (B.C.) offered me initially, I knew it was going to be a low-ball offer. It wasn’t horrible, but I made it seem like it was because I wanted to ultimately try to press as much and try to squeeze it for all the juice, but it ended causing more friction and made the last half of the season more negative than it probably should have been.”

Honest stuff.

Hamilton’s boss at the Drab Slab, sports editor Steve Lyons, and columnist Paul Wiecek went off on Trouba and liars in sports in their Say What?! feature last week, with Wiecek delivering this snicker-inducing remark: “I don’t tolerate (lies) in my personal life and I won’t tolerate it in my professional life.” Ya, right. What’s Wiecek going to do to stop athletes/coaches/managers/owners from lying to him. Tell them to go stand in a corner? Send them to bed with no dessert? Ground them like a teenager who broke curfew? As if. Lyons served as a voice of reason, writing: “If you are expecting the absolute truth to come out of the mouths of folks in pro sports, you are setting yourself to feel betrayed down the road. Don’t take it personally.”

Wiecek, who simply cannot get out of his own way when it comes to Trouba, says he’d “respect” Trouba if he went public and admitted he wants out of Winnipeg. Ya, like earning a news snoop’s “respect” is high on any pro athlete’s to-do list. There’s a basic reason why the jock-journo relationship is often adversarial—they don’t trust each other. And they don’t trust each other because they lie to each other. All…the…time. Yes, sports scribes also live on Planet Pinocchio. They don’t fib as often as jocks, but they bend, stretch and twist the truth like a blob of silly putty in a White House press secretary’s hands.

The athlete-media dynamic was another of the topics Hamilton and Harris discussed during their The Handoff podcast. “I’ve definitely been misquoted,” said Harris. “I’ve been misquoted for sure. There’s a guy in Vancouver—he doesn’t work in the business anymore…he’s swimming with the fishes now.” He was joking. I think.

Would anyone out there in Jets Nation welcome a Jacob Trouba-for-Zach Bogosian swap even-up? Didn’t think so. I doubt Puck Pontiff Mark Chipman and general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff would either. Yet they agreed to give an underperforming Bogosian a seven-year contract with a $5.1-million cap hit in 2013, then placed a value of $4 million on Trouba nine days ago. That simply doesn’t add up. I mean, if they believed Bogosian was worth $5.1 million to them five years ago, they have to believe Trouba is worth a whole lot more in 2018. Naturally, we don’t know what numbers les Jets presented the Trouba camp prior to their recent arbitration hearing, but anything less than $5.1 million would have been highly objectionable and insulting. And people think Trouba’s the bad guy?

Marko Dano has signed with the Jets for $800,000. Nice gig. Sit in the press box, watch 82 hockey games, eat popcorn, collect 800 large. That’s almost as much as a beat writer at the Free Press makes. The least Dano could do for that kind of coin is file a game story and sidebar. On deadline. Also gain about 40 pounds and wear wrinkled clothes that don’t fit. Then he’d feel right at home with the rest of the boys on press row.

Hey, I’m not saying news snoops are slobs and shlubs. Some of them actually own neckties. They just don’t know how to tie them. If you ever watched Jack Klugman or Walter Mathau as Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple you’ll catch my drift. (Am I showing my age when I use the term catch my drift?) The only news snoop I ever knew who belonged on the cover of GQ was George (Shakey) Johnson.

And, finally, nice exchange between Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea and news snoops following Winnipeg FC’s 40-14 romp over the Argonauts on Friday night at Football Follies Field in Fort Garry…

Reporter: “Do you have any plans for your bye week coming up?”

O’Shea: “I do…you’re not included in them.”

About brutal brain farts by a Globe and Mail funny guy…clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right in the NHL media…quick takeaways from a tear-jerker of an NHL awards show…getting it wrong on retired numbers…a ballsy move by Barry Trotz…stay home, Darian…the mouth that roars…Milt Stegall’s d’oh moment…and TSN’s Thursday Night Football goes vaudeville

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

There’s something you all should know about Dave Shoalts. He’s a funny guy. Has a standup comedy gig on the side when he isn’t scribbling essays for the Globe and Mail or writing books. Did I mention he also has brain farts? Yup. Big, bold, brutal brain farts.

I mean, voting Taylor Hall as the best centre-ice man in the National Hockey League this past season? And the best left winger? There you have it, kids. A big, bold, brutal brain fart.

Like, what part of C and LW do you not understand, Shoaltsy?

If only Shoalts’s stinker was a one-off in NHL awards voting by the Professional Hockey Writers Association. But no. It was among many.

I direct your attention to Jim Thomas of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Yo! Jimbo! What did you do, pull a Rip Van Winkle and sleep from October through April? I mean, are you really trying to tell us that Clayton Keller and Alex DeBrincat had better freshman years than Mathew Barzal? That’s like saying Messi is having a better World Cup than Ronaldo.

And what’s your excuse, Gann Matsuda? Was the shinny season nap time for you, too? Seriously. Yanni Gourde is your idea of the top rookie in the NHL? Yanni freaking Gourde?

And here I thought Yanni was that Greek guy who makes the music we listen to while stretched out in a dentist’s chair.

It’s not as if the rabble needed another reason to think of jock journalists as free-loading, poorly dressed, overweight, overpaid, know-nothing nincompoops, but Shoalts, Thomas, Matsuda, John Dietz, Roy MacGregor and a few others surely have given it to them with their bizarro-world NHL awards balloting.

The boys and girls in the PHWA had one simple job to do this past NHL season: Stay awake and pay attention. It’s not like anyone was asking them to solve the mystery of the Caramilk chocolate bar. Or to make sense of Donald Trump. Their assignment: Watch hockey games for approximately seventh months; take note of special performers and their numbers; when one of them (Barzal as an e.g.) operates in a higher orbit than his peers, vote for him when you receive your year-end awards ballot.

In the case of Barzal, his 85 points for the New York Islanders, when stacked against the tally of any other frosh, look like Zdeno Chara standing beside Brad Marchand. Thus, voting for him as rookie-of-the-year was your basic no-brainer. Unless your name is Jim Thomas, Gann Matsuda (Frozen Royalty), John Dietz (Arlington Daily Herald) or Roy MacGregor (Globe and Mail).

Those four saw it another way. Somehow, they were of the belief that Barzal’s season was like the tree falling in the forest. It didn’t really happen.

Well, okay, they all had Barzal’s name on their Calder Trophy ballots. I’ll give them that much. But they must have thought his 85 points paled in comparison to Keller’s 65. Or Yanni’s 64. Or Brock Boeser’s 55. Or DeBrincat’s 52.

Yo! Kids! A lower number is good in golf, Hearts and at your bail hearing, but not so much for hockey players whose job it is to score.

Let’s try and stay awake next season, mooks.

Back in the early 1970s, Stealers Wheel had a great hit, Stuck in the Middle with You, which included the lyrics, “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.” Hmmmm. Sounds like some of the PHWA membership. Sure, the majority of them got it right in voting for the season-end awards, but the Bozo quotient is too high when 43 news snoops—forty-freaking-three!—think someone other than Connor McDavid is the premier centre-ice man in the NHL. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but did McDavid’s peers not award him the Ted Lindsay trinket (for the second time) as the premier player on the planet last Wednesday? Yup, they sure did. Yet a sizable chunk of PHWA voters believe they know more than NHL players. Forty-three of them did not—repeat, did not—vote for the league scoring champion as the all-star centre. Worse, seven of them, including the aforementioned Dave Shoalts and the regrettable Gann Matsuda, failed to include the Edmonton Oilers captain on their all-star ballot. That’s like leaving the Pope off an all-Catholic list. It’s like leaving Pinocchio and Sarah Huckabee Sanders off an all-fibbers list. Once again—mooks!

Sports scribes are quick to call out athletes/coaches/managers/owners and even fans for the slightest misstep, peppering their targets with insults and catty condemnation. They’ll dismiss bloggers as talent-challenged oafs, with stereotypical references to mom’s basement. But…they seldom call each other out. They won’t eat their own. Thus, we shouldn’t expect to hear a print hit man like Steve Simmons of Postmedia Tranna hurling nasties at his good friend and former roomie Shoalts for his blundering in PHWA voting. Fortunately, we have bloggers and the social media mob to carry out public floggings, and Shoalts has taken a deserved paddywhacking.

Quick takeaways from the NHL awards gala at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Glitter Gulch on Wednesday: That was easily a two-dozen-Kleenex show, and I’m quite uncertain how Christina Haugan got through her speech without weeping, because she had me bawling like a baby. Christina is the wife of Darcy Haugan, the Humboldt Broncos head coach who perished along with 15 others in April’s bus tragedy. Standing on stage in front of 10 of the crash survivors, Christina accepted the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award on behalf of her husband, and her words and message were beautiful…The tributes to victims, survivors and first responders of the Parkland, Fla., and Las Vegas shootings were also moving and tear-inducing moments, as was Masterton Award-winner Brian Boyle’s speech. All tastefully done…

Was it just me, or did anyone else think Boyle looked like a 1970s lounge lizard with his slicked-back hair, mustache and shiny suit? Or maybe he looked like a bad TV game show host. I can’t decide…Are those two doofuses who introduced P.K. Subban as cover boy of NHL 19 supposed to be funny? Apparently known as On the Bench and something of a hit on YouTube, if they’re hockey’s version of the McKenzie Brothers it doesn’t work for me…Nice touch to trot out Scott Foster, accountant by day and emergency goaltender by night. He played seven minutes for the Chicago Black Hawks one evening in Chitown last season and shut out the Winnipeg Jets…Hockey Hall of Famer Eric Lindros hasn’t missed many meals in retirement. He’s a big boy. Same can be said for Jim Belushi, presenter and teller of bad jokes…Kind of strange watching Pekka Rinne accept the Vezina Trophy as top goaltender, given how he struggled in the playoffs…Illusionist Darcy Oake was hit and miss. His Lady Byng Trophy card trick flopped, but his knife-throwing card trick was boffo.

So, this is what passes for a big trade in the NHL these days: A 19-goal forward for a nine-goal forward. Be still, my beating heart. I don’t know if the Montreal Canadiens or Arizona Coyotes got the better of the deal that has Max Domi swapping a zip code for a postal code and Alex Galchenyuk doing the reverse, but I wonder if les Canadiens have a clue. Shouldn’t they be adding size to their roster, not garden gnomes?

This from Steve Simmons of Postmedia Tranna: “When he was a kid, Max Domi wore the number 13 in minor hockey in honour of Mats Sundin. Then, after being diagnosed with diabetes, he changed to number 16, as a tribute to Bobby Clarke. Now that he’s in Montreal, he couldn’t wear 16 because it’s retired for Henri Richard and Dickie Moore.” Wrong. Once again Simmons displays a lack of knowledge of 1950s and ’60s-era hockey. Dickie Moore wore No. 12, not 16, for les Canadiens. No. 16 is retired in honor of Pocket Rocket Richard and Elmer Lach, not Moore. Like his buddy Shoaltsy, I suppose Simmons will write off his gaffe as just another brain fart.

Mike Hoffman called Ottawa, San Jose and Sunrise home in less than 24 hours last week, with the Senators shipping the toxic forward across the continent to the Sharks and the Sharks flipping him back across the continent to the Florida Panthers, but here’s what I want to know: Is there any truth to the rumor that Hoffman’s fiancé, Monika Caryk, has a no-movement clause and must stay in Ottawa?

Barry Trotz walking away from his Stanley Cup-winning gig in Washington was a ballsy move. I mean, people said the former Capitals coach would land a job before Alex Ovechkin stopped partying, but it’s not like the NHL is Motel 6 when it comes to vacancies behind the bench. There was exactly one job opening for a head man. Had Lou Lamoriello of the New York Islanders not reached out to rope him in with a four-year contract, Trotz would have been SOL. His next coaching gig might have been a year from now, or he might have appeared on our flatscreens next autumn. So, like I said, ballsy move by the Dauphin native.

Apparently, Egypt scored its first World Cup goal since 1990 on Tuesday. Not to be outdone, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers have discovered their first quarterback since 1990. Yes, for the second successive start, rookie Chris Streveler did boffo business behind centre in Winnipeg FC’s 56-10 rag dolling of the Montreal Alouettes on Friday night. So, memo to Darian Durant: Stay home, keep the money. The Bombers are doing just fine without you, thanks.

I have become convinced that only three things are forever open: Heaven, hell and Duron Carter’s mouth. My goodness, the man never gives his gums a rest. They flap more than goose wings in migration season. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but if I have a notebook or a microphone and I’m on the football beat in Saskatchewan, I’m sticking close to the Roughriders receiver/cornerback.

Milt Stegall, TSN talking head, on Carter moving from receiver to cornerback against the Ottawa RedBlacks on Thursday night: “I would be very surprised if Duron Carter is beaten by some big plays. I’d be more surprised if he doesn’t make any big plays.” D’oh! Diontae Spencer scorched Carter for a 56-yard touchdown, and his pass interference and illegal contact penalties led to another Ottawa TD. On the plus side, Carter had a pick six.

Kate Beirness and her big hair made their debut as host of Thursday Night Football on TSN, with resident natterbugs Hank Burris, Matt Dunigan and Stegall providing the backup vocals, and I’m not sure if it’s still a football show or bad vaudeville. I mean, the pre-game shtick included Brodie Lawson doing grunt work in the gym; the same Brodie Lawson as a wannabe lumberjack wielding a chain saw; Beirness and Kate McKenna dancing and discussing naked men on the football field; and a silly feature on the President of Touchdowns, Naaman Roosevelt. At halftime, Beirness was shaking her bones on the dance floor again (this time with the boys), and an unremarkable band sang two unremarkable songs. I was left to wonder why Hank, Matty and Milt were there. Hey, I’m all for fun and off-beat stuff, but this was simply lame.

About a Barracuda on the judge’s bench…those surprising Winnipeg Jets…same old, same old from Grapes…a pot calling a kettle white…kid stuff in Vegas…Box Car Willie Belichick…grappling with the idea of a new football league…women’s tennis…Roger Federer’s arms…and other things on my mind

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

I can’t help but weep when I hear the many victims/survivors of diabolical Larry Nassar tell their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of the predator doctor when they were sweet, innocent little girls with dreams of Olympic Games gymnastics glory.

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, the Barracuda.

So it’s damn straight that I gave a fist pump and let loose a mighty “hell ya!” when Judge Rosemarie Aquilina booted Nassar’s sorry ass back to a jail cell on Wednesday, saying, “I just signed your death warrant” as she tacked 40-175 years onto the 60-year sentence the defrocked doctor is already serving on a child pornography conviction.

The lady judge rocks. Assistant Attorney General Angela Povilaitis rocks. Investigative journalists Marisa Kwiatowski, Tim Evans and Mark Alesia at the Indianapolis Star rock. The 156 women who appeared in a Michigan courtroom to confront Nassar with victim-impact statements rock.

And now Nassar can pound rocks. Or whatever it is that sexual predators pound behind bars.

Watching Judge Aquilina sentence former U.S. Olympic gymnastics/Michigan State University doctor Nassar, I couldn’t help but think the outcomes of the original O.J. Simpson (Judge Ito) and Oscar Pistorius (Judge Thokozile Masipa) murder trials would have been different had she been on the bench. It’s little wonder Judge Aquilina’s nickname while serving in the Michigan Army National Guard was Barricuda. She’s a nasty bit of business, in a good way.

Quick question for those who insist that we keep sports and the real world separate: How is that possible when the real world refuses to stay out of sports? Nassar was the top medic for USA Gymnastics and the MSU women’s gymnastics teams. He sexually abused the girls. Sports, meet real world.

I woke up to a tsunami warning (true story) in the small hours of Tuesday morning, after a 7.9 shaker rocked and rolled offshore of Alaska, and I had visions of my high-and-dry, eighth-floor home in downtown Victoria being swamped and swallowed by the Pacific Ocean. Turns out the ‘quake had all the bite of a Jimmy Fallon monologue. Yup, that tame. There’s more oomph in American beer. So, after review, the tsunami warning was overturned due to goaltender interference. Just like every goal scored in the National Hockey League this week.

Moving on to more pleasant matters, it seems that most times I look up the Winnipeg Jets are winning another game. Who saw that coming? I mean, okay, at the commencement of their current crusade I figured Team Draft & Develop for a wild-card playoff spot. At best. But first place? In the NHL’s toughest division? There was a better chance of the Paid Pinocchio in the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dissing her boss Donald Trump for his take on immigration.

Here’s what I wrote re the Jets on Sept. 14: “It appears that the Western Conference road to the Stanley Cup is likely to go through Northern Alberta. If not, it’ll be Southern Alberta, where the Calgary Flames are shaping up to be a force, even as ownership squabbles with politicos and beats the drums about relocation should the city refuse to pony up substantial coin for a new shinny palace. The trouble with the Jets—aside from the people behind the bench—is geography. Until they prove otherwise, they’re still the third best outfit on the Canadian prairies.” D’oh! D’oh! D’oh!

I note that two members of the San Jose Sharks—Tomas Hertl and Justin Braun—have issued an apology for calling Winnipeg a “dark and cold” locale with no smart phones, WiFi or any other 21st-century gadgetry. Apparently, the mea culpa should arrive by Pony Express, carrier pigeon or Western Union telegraph in time for the NHL playoffs.

This just in—Don Cherry doesn’t like Europeans. Who knew? In related news, dogs don’t like cats, Donald Trump doesn’t like the FBI, and Taylor Swift isn’t fond of Kim, Kanye or Katy. Seriously. Grapes needs a new script writer. Once again he’s dredged up his antiquated Cold War-era lament about Euros taking jobs away from homebrews, in this case on the rosters of Major Junior outfits across our vast land. “What happens is, if you look at it, there’s a Canadian kid not playing,” says the resident curmudgeon/blowhard on the Hockey Night in Canada intermission feature Coachless Corner. “You’re asking me, ‘Do I believe in Europeans playing in (the) Canadian Hockey League?’ No. I don’t.” Fine, Grapes, and while we’re at it let’s keep all those French kids in Quebec.

Paul Wiecek offers some interesting thoughts on the NHL misreading the climate of the day by hiring Kid Rock as the intermission act for its all-star frolic this afternoon in Tampa.

The way the Winnipeg Free Press sports columnist has it figured, the two of them deserve each other because the NHL is whiter than a virgin bride’s wedding gown and Kid Rock’s neck is redder than a rooster’s wattles.

“If the Confederacy had won the U.S. Civil War, America today would look a whole lot like an NHL hockey game,” Wiecek writes. “The NHL is not only the whitest professional sports league in North America—by a mile—it also has the whitest fans of any of this continent’s four major pro sports. Again, by a mile. If you’re anything other than white and heterosexual, you’re every bit as much of a minority sitting in the stands at an NHL game as Dustin Byfuglien is skating out on the ice. Hockey is played by white people, for white people.”

Canada’s newspaper sports writers are white, white, white.

This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle white. I mean, has Wiecek taken a look at press row in Canada (newspaper sports division)? Nothing but white, heterosexual, mostly male faces.

Full marks to the Freep scribe for calling out the NHL on the Kid Rock hire, because the guy has a fondness for the Confederate flag and a history of anti-gay/anti-transgender spewings. But Wiecek’s own business has all the diversity of…well, the white NHL.

Ask Wiecek to name all the black sports writers with whom he’s worked. Ask him to name all the openly gay sports scribes. None and none. Ask him to name all the women. Two. I worked at five different dailies. I recall one non-Caucasian colleague. Just one. In 30 years. I worked with only four females scribes. In 30 years. I worked with zero openly gay sports scribes. In 30 years.

At least the NHL has some African-American players. But blacks and gays can’t even be called a minority in Canadian newspaper sports writing, because they simply don’t exist.

So, signature scrawl is now restricted to kids in Sin City. That’s right, only kids 14 and under are allowed access to Vegas Golden Knights players for autographs at the NHL club’s practice facility, City National Arena. Adults need not apply. Seems it’s a safety measure, because grown-ups were “pushing kids out of the way” and kids were “running into the street.” My question: Why would a grown man want another grown man’s autograph? Except, of course, to profit. In which case, he should get a life.

Yes, kids, you can grow up to look like Box Car Willie after spending a night sleeping on a slow-moving freight train and still become a five-time (do I hear six?) Super Bowl-winning head coach. Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots remains the ultimate example of a man not letting success go to his clothes, so the next time a cynic takes a cheap shot at Winnipeg Blue Bombers sideline steward Mike O’Shea for his “goofy shorts,” show him this pic of Belichick, taken scant seconds after his Patriots had won their eighth American Football Conference title on his watch.

Grappling guru Vince McMahon made it official last week, advising us that his aborted and gimmicky XFL from 2001 will reboot in 2020, sans the WWE-scripted shtick and the up-the-skirt cheerleader cams. Vince is going legit—from sleazy to squeaky clean—and he vows to hire only boy scouts (“Even if you have a DUI, you will not play in the XFL.”). He’ll order players to stand during the national anthem. He wants games to be completed in two hours or less. He wants us to “reimagine” football. Okay, I reimagine football in 2020 without Vince McMahon.

McMahon’s no-bad boys statute seemingly rules out Johnny Manziel, the former Cleveland Browns quarterback who likes to brawl in bars when he isn’t beating up women. So let’s see…the National Football League has washed its hands of Manziel and the not-ready-for-prime-time XFL wants no part of him, yet the Canadian Football League is eager to welcome him with open arms. What part of embarrassing does CFL commish Randy Ambrosie not understand? (For the record, if Manziel shows serious interest in the XFL, bet the mortgage money that McMahon will turn a blind eye to his rap sheet.)

For those who insist that there’s no depth in women’s tennis, the past five Grand Slam events have produced five different champions—Serena Williams (Australian Open), Jelena Ostapenko (French Open), Garbine Muguruza (Wimbledon), Sloane Stephens (U.S. Open) and Caroline Wozniacki (Aussie Open). Five events, 13 months, five different champions. The men, meanwhile, have produced two different champions in that time frame—Roger Federer (three titles) and Rafael Nadal (two). I suppose an argument can be made that the universe would have unfolded differently for the women had mama Serena not been away having a baby, but that isn’t necessarily so. After all, she won just one Slam in 2016. Might have been the same last year. The point is, there’s intrigue on the women’s side.

Is there anything more cruel in sports than what Simona Halep and Marin Cilic were forced to endure after losing their respective Aussie Open singles championship matches this weekend? She battled Wozniacki for three hours less 11 minutes, he 20-time Grand Slam champion Federer for three hours and three minutes. Then, after being vanquished, they likely just wanted to crawl into a hole and cry. Alas, they were required to loiter on court for the parting-gifts ceremony and boring speeches that seemingly droned on longer than the matches…then make a speech and smile…then listen to the victor’s speech and smile…then pose for photos and smile. Half an hour later, they were permitted to depart and lick their wounds (which, in Halep’s case, meant a retreat to the hospital for IV treatment). Like I said, cruel.

This week’s notable quotable: Before meeting his Waterloo vs. Marin Cilic, Rafael Nadal was rocking the sleeveless look at the Aussie Open. The guy’s got guns. Serious guns. Which did not escape the notice of commentator Jim Courier, who, during a courtside gab session about Rafa’s fashion statement, asked Swiss maestro Federer if he’d be following Nadal’s lead and show us his pipes. “That’s not gonna happen,” a laughing Federer said, glancing quickly at his chicken arms. “You know why? My arms are not like his arms. It’s pretty simple.”

This week’s Stevie-ism from Steve Simmons of Postmedia Tranna, taking a cheap shot at the XFL: “Did anybody out there ask for another football league? Anyone?” I have a better question, Stevie: Does anybody in the Republic of Tranna know they have a professional football team? Anyone?

Bottom Feeders ‘R’ Us…hope in Edmonton…media whining about the zebras…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…

chipman and chevy — Is this how it works with Mark Chipman and Kevin Cheveldayoff?

Winnipeg Jets, last place in the National Hockey League. Manitoba Moose, last place in the American Hockey League. So, how’s that draft-and-develop thing working out for you so far, Mark Chipman?

Look at it on the chipper side, though, Mark. This rare daily double of yours provides True North Sports & Entertainment with a catchy slogan for next season’s marketing campaign—Bottom Feeders ‘R’ Us. That ought to lure prime NHL free agent beef to River City come summertime.

Cheap shots aside, accusing fingers are being pointed in the direction of Kevin Cheveldayoff, general manager of the Jets (at least on paper) who’s bound to be the fall guy for an NHL crusade that has gone horribly wrong and has two principles, captain Andrew Ladd and backliner Dustin Byfuglien, skating in shinny limbo.

I cannot, however, let go of the notion that Chevy is merely playing Pinocchio to owner Chipman’s Geppetto.

Saint Mark already has advised a national television audience that he sticks his thin, pointy beak into Chevy’s business, which is to say the co-bankroll imposes his whims and wishes on trade and contract negotiations. To what degree, we are uncertain. So, what exactly do we have here? Humpty Harold Ballard without the bluster?

Chipman’s involvement/interference, to me, is the X factor in the Jets’ operation and, should we discover that he’s hamstrung his paper GM, then we must refrain from flinging poison arrows in Cheveldayoff’s direction and aim them toward meddling Mark.

Here’s the difference between the Jets and Edmonton Oilers: In Winnipeg, they’re hoping; in Edmonton, they have hope. Hope is named Connor McDavid and, if you bore witness to his return from sick bay against the Columbus Blue Jackets this week, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Oilers management, of course, have been the poster boys for faceplants since 2006, but it appears that a decade of pratfalls is finally about to pay dividends.

Here’s what should be unsettling, if not frightening, for the faithful in Jets Nation: The Winnipegs aren’t pretending to be this bad in order to land the next whiz kid, Auston Matthews, in the 2016 NHL entry draft. They are this bad.

This from Tim Campbell of the Winnipeg Free Press in his gamer on the Jets-Carolina Hurricanes joust Friday night at the Little Hockey House on the Prairie: “The Jets continue to have a hard time getting away from their reputation for taking penalties. In the first 40 minutes, the tally was Winnipeg, four infractions; Hurricanes, benefit of the doubt every time.” Oh, please. Would you like some cheese with that whine, Tim? It’s one thing for fans to infer the zebras are out to screw the Jets, but it’s lame when a member of the mainstream media does it. Campbell goes on to say, “The calls and non-calls had no bearing on the outcome (a 5-3 ‘Canes win).” So why even mention it?

So this is how it works in the new world of Postmedia, which does not believe in competition between newspapers: Terry Jones of the Edmonton Joursun goes to Las Vegas to cover curling; Ed Willes of the Vancouver Provsun is dispatched to Charlotte, N.C., to file copy on the National Football Conference championship match; Toronto-based scribes Michael Traikos and Mike Zeisberger are sent to Nashville for the John Scott Testimonial, otherwise known as NHL all-star hijinks; Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sunprov and Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun are lodged in San Francisco for Super Bowl 50, and Paul Friesen of the Winnipeg Sun is…well, he’s told to stay home and write an advancer for the men’s provincial curling event next week. I realize that Paul is a ginger-haired lad, but does Postmedia really have to treat him like the ginger-haired cousin who doesn’t fit in with the rest of the kids?

First Jets rookie Nikolaj Ehlers is $2,000 out of pocket for flopping all over the ice, and now the NHL has dipped into prodigal son Alexander Burmistrov’s pay envelope to the tune of $2,000, also for bad acting. The Jets aren’t very good at hockey, but they’re assembling a crack synchronized diving outfit for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.

I note that Winnipeg Blue Bombers GM Kyle Walters plans to be an active participant in this year’s livestock auction of Canadian Football League free agents. “Overall, organizationally, we just need better players,” he says. “Simple as that.” Geez, what was your first clue, Sherlock? Last season’s 5-13 record or a quarter of a century without a Grey Cup championship? And shouldn’t you have recognized that two years ago?

If there is a worse website than that which the Winnipeg Free Press delivers, it is that which the NHL offers. What a tire fire. Someone in the NHL has turned a silk purse into a sow’s ear.

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 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 in 2015.

Dis the Disney Ducks? Winnipeg Jets Nation doesn’t want to go there yet

So, it’s the Winnipeg Jets vs. the Disney Ducks in an opening-round skirmish of the Stanley Cup tournament. Puck drops on Thursday evening

Gotta get a hate-on. Gotta dis the other guy. Trouble is, there’s nothing to hate. Nothing to dis.

First of all, you don’t trash talk the Disney dudes. You don’t trash talk anything connected with Disneyland. Not even the Disney Ducks of Anaheim.

Yes, Ducks is a stupid name for a National Hockey League team, but none more so than Penguins or Flyers. And, let’s face it, the name Jets isn’t exactly dripping with dynamics or creativity, is it. Cripes, man, it isn’t even original. It’s a recycled ripoff from bygone days when Winnipeg was a member of the Western Canada Hockey League before becoming a force in the World Hockey Association and, later, a NHL outfit that did nothing other than break your heart every spring and stick a dagger into it in 1996.

But we aren’t prepared to reopen the name debate and mention how Jets’ co-bankroll Mark Chipman was bullied into regurgitating it, are we?

Second, Walt Disney’s head isn’t stored in a beer cooler. That’s myth. Faux lore, not folklore. Despite what you might have read, Walt’s noggin is not a skull-cicle. Even if it were, one block of ice hardly compares to the 750,000-plus frozen heads that trudge around Winnipeg from November to March every year.

So, no, you don’t trash talk the man who gave us Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi, who now plays for the Jets and wears No. 55.

Just like Walt’s head, dissing Disney ain’t cool.

You also leave Mickey and Minnie alone. I’m a big fan of the mice.

If you’re a member of Jets Nation, you can’t even trash talk the city of Anaheim. I mean, it’s in Orange County. That’s in Southern California. You know, sun, sand and surf, 365/24/7. Orange County sounds refreshing. Fruity. Citrusy. It conjures images of orange groves. Not at all like Winnipeg on the Frozen Tundra, whose images are snow drifts and snow plows. Sounds harsh. Cruel. C-c-c-c-c-old.

More to the point, how can anyone in River City trash talk a town that has never lost the NHL franchise it was awarded? The Ducks were hatched in 1993. They’ve survived in SoCal longer than the original Jets NHL franchise lasted in Pegtown. Anaheim has only required one kick at the cat. Winnipeg is working on its second. So here’s the scorecard on lost franchises: Winnipeg 1, Anaheim 0.

And, let’s not forget, Anaheim has won the Stanley Cup. For those of you keeping score at home, Winnipeg/Arizona is the sole survivor of the WHA which has yet to lay claim to hockey’s holy grail.

Peggers, and Canadians in general, like to look down their noses at U.S. Sun Belt cities that are home to NHL outfits. We pooh-pooh their very being. We see the empty pews in their ice palaces and we snicker. Rudely. To us, ice is for skating. To them, ice is something you put in your cocktail. Yet, an outfit from the Great White North has not brought the Stanley Cup home since 1993. In the ensuing years, the big, silver chalice has been housed in Anaheim, Los Angeles (twice), Tampa and Dallas.

Good grief, we mock the Sun Belters, yet we’re giddy because five Canadian-based outfits qualified for this spring’s Stanley Cup tournament, which commences Wednesday night, and two of them are guaranteed to advance to the second round. Oh joy.

The point is, Jets Nation can’t trash talk Anaheim or the Ducks because because they don’t have any ammunition. Anaheim and the Ducks have it all.

I have no doubt that the Jets and Ducks will strap on a good bit of nasty before their best-of-seven Stanley Cup playoff joust is history, but dis the Disney dudes before the puck is dropped? Sorry, can’t go there. Not until the first elbow is raised in anger, and I have a hunch Ryan Getzlaf will have something to do with it. Now there’s a Disney Duck we can dis.

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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