STACKHOUSE’S 10 THOUGHTS

1 – WHL TEAM FOR SALE – I received word late last week that a WHL team on the prairies is for sale. I’m not sure that it’s public knowledge, so I won’t say anything further. I chuckled at the thought. Who would want to buy one with the uncertainty of today unless you were getting a major, major discount? Yet, it doesn’t surprise me if the rumour is true. At the moment, I don’t see how we expect health officials in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon to agree on a uniform approach and if they did, you have the matter of crossing the border. Even within Manitoba, they are operating on two different sets of rules. In my mind the seriousness of the virus at this point is so low there is only one direction for it to go as we get into the colder weather season.

2 – HOCKEY vs HEALTH – I get the whole notion of hockey administrators deferring to the health experts as far as when a Return To Play is given a go-ahead but at some point I wonder if we will stop blindly listening to the experts and instead start believing what our eyes are seeing? When it comes to Junior ‘A’ hockey, I don’t think any of the 12 teams in the SJHL survive with a cancelled season and in some cases the hockey team is how some of these smaller centres are identified so it’s a lot more than a hockey team that is at stake. City economies could be destroyed as well, especially when some are in real peril already. I’m not sure health people see that full picture. In the WHL, many of these teams are private businesses and a lot of these owners got their riches through taking risks. I’m speculating if at some point these business people don’t do their own analysis and see that healthy people under age 70 aren’t actually under any real health threat and therefore don’t start to make some public noise. They’ve been extremely obedient for nearly six months now. It’s not cool to question health ‘experts’ but I wonder how much longer we are going to be politically correct in that area.

3 – FLEURY AGENT – On Saturday, Marc-Andre Fleury’s agent caused a stir when he posted a cartoon of the Vegas goaltender with a sword through his back and the name DeBoer (Fleury’s coach) on the weapon.  On Sunday, Fleury avoided the matter and said he asked his agent to remove the tweet and then said he didn’t want to be a distraction to the team. Yet, Fleury hasn’t said whether or not the agent’s divisive tweet came at the request or endorsement of Fleury. This smells like a bad and selfish teammate to me.

4 – MILBURY REMARKS – I shouldn’t go there, but I will anyway. Mike Milbury is gone from NHL playoff commentary after an exchange with Brian Boucher on-air. Boucher said the NHL bubble is ‘the perfect place’ for players who enjoy playing hockey and being with their teammates for long periods of time, Milbury responded there are ‘not even any women here to disrupt your concentration’. The remark has been, near universally, condemned as misogynist and I don’t think Milbury ever broadcasts a game again and has been, for all intents and purposes, cancelled. The context of the comment was a joke, but many jokes have been banned as well, so that’s no excuse. So, let’s forget that it’s a joke and pretend he was serious. Kate Upton says her spouse, Houston Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, will not have sex before a game. Former NFL player Bill Romanowski says former coach Bill Walsh would forbid sex during certain weeks of the season.  “If we were playing the Giants, it was red light. We knew we had to be on. We had to be mean and nasty, with a lot of build-up.” Anyways, it was a joke based on anecdotal stories such as these but it’s offensive so I guess get rid of him. I don’t care, I don’t know the man. I’ve actually seen some say the comment is homophobic as Milbury is assuming none of the players are having sex, when in fact it’s possible the gay ones are quite active while in the bubble.

5 – BROADCAST COMMENTS – The public, finally, has succeeded in demanding their on-air personalities have no personality at all. I remember during my final couple of years as a full-time broadcaster I made up my mind that since I got paid the same amount of money no matter how entertaining or boring I was, it was in my best interest to be boring. My co-host and I had been called into the big office one day after a show in which I talked about the television program NYPD Blue. I joked that if cops were allowed to behave like Andy Sipowicz, there would be a lot less crime because many would be too scared to commit it. Someone phoned the station and determined that statement was a subconscious code message of some sort and a public defense of a police officer for killing Dudley George at Ipperwash fifteen years prior. It was then and there I surrendered any form of independent comment while on the air. My wage stayed the same for the rest of my broadcast career and I was never called into the office ever again. I assume the audience was thrilled with the vanilla on the air every morning. It’s why I love blogs such as this.

6 – HAWERCHUK – There was a point in my youth when Dale Hawerchuk was my favorite player. Hard to believe I know, but sometimes I am a contrarian so I wasn’t one of these youngsters who just automatically loved Wayne Gretzky so I would search for the next best player and cheer for him. For me, that player was Hawerchuk. As a teenager, the first hockey draft I was ever in I ended up getting both Hawerchuk and the player he was traded for, Phil Housley. Ducky would go on to play for the Flyers (my favorite team growing up) and so he was just someone I followed close his entire career. When I moved from the Maritimes to the prairies, Hawerchuk was long gone but the IHL’s Manitoba Moose held an appreciation night for him back in 2000 at the old Winnipeg Arena and I made sure I didn’t miss it. The guys I went with all watched Hawerchuk play in person and it was great to hear their recollections. I remember being very jealous to having not been able to witness him in actual game action. His moving speech and humility at centre ice that night is the only memory I have of him in person and I’m glad I made it to that game. There are only two other things I remember from the game. The hockey quality was terrible and Randy Copley played one of his 3 Moose games that evening. Copley was a talented kid from Inverness, Nova Scotia who I watched lots when I lived in Port Hawkesbury and covered their Midget AAA Irving Big Stop Screaming Eagles team.

7 – FAVORITE PLAYERS – I’ve mentioned in my columns about admiring Richard Zemlak and Brian Propp as a youth, but Hawerchuk’s passing got me to thinking about some other favorite players in various sports growing up in addition to these guys: Mario Lemieux, Ron Hextall, Luc Robitaille, Jose Canseco, Jim Rice, TIm Raines, Nolan Ryan, Joe Montana, and Jerry Rice. As a grown up, my favorite has been David Ortiz and nobody else is even close after that. 

8 – PITCHING PHILOSOPHY – Major League Baseball pitchers are the biggest wimps in sports. Gone are the days of a starter like Steve Rogers having the mindset of, ‘you are your own bullpen’. Complete games are almost extinct and even a pitcher that can throw 7 innings is an endangered species. I don’t think we are far away from 13-14 man pitching staffs where you just use whoever for an inning or two each game, just like we do in children’s baseball. It seems every pitcher is determined to throw whatever his arsenal is at maximum effort and it’s resulting in a plethora of injuries and short outings when they aren’t hurt. I wonder why the philosophy of changing speeds and pitch location aren’t pushed more. If a hitter knows you are throwing a fastball, but not sure if it’s coming at 94 or 99, I feel like you still have a chance to get him out, especially if you are more precise on the location. There’s a reason why Jamie Moyer was an effective, but not Hall of Fame pitcher, for twenty-five years and it wasn’t because of the heat he threw. 

9 – SASKATOON SCHOOL SPORTS – Authorities in charge have cancelled high school sports in Saskatoon until 2021, and likely beyond as the situation isn’t going to be any better than it is today seeing as how (as of Sunday) there are only 6 active virus cases in the entire Saskatoon region. I think it’s only fair to ask what do we need to see in order for sports and some form of viewership to happen. If it is a vaccine, then we need to be told that so that people who make a living or want to someday make one in sports can move on to something else in life because a vaccine doesn’t appear to be around the corner at this point as many health experts in Canada and the United States are preparing people for this by saying the measures in place today may have to continue for many years into the future. So if that means no sports, we need to just put an end to them immediately and allow people to look for new careers. 

10 – REASONS TO SETTLE DOWN – You won’t see these stats published anywhere because, when absorbed properly by the human brain, the amount of fear triggered becomes immediately subsided. In Saskatchewan, the chances of surviving the China-started coronavirus for people aged 60-79, is 95.3%. For those 80 and over, it’s 88%. For everybody else it’s 99.8%. This is based on the number of people who have died and the number of people who have tested positive for the virus in Saskatchewan. The news is even better in British Columbia, where the average age of death amongst Covid patients is 85. The average life expectancy of any human being in British Columbia is 82. At this point, I don’t know why anyone would ever subject themselves to a Covid test unless they were sick to the point of having to go to the hospital for treatment, and even those numbers are remarkably low at this point. As of Sunday, Saskatchewan had 5 in the hospital being treated with Covid. Manitoba, who many would like you to believe are dealing with carnage right now, has 7. Not all hospitals are equal, but Saskatchewan has over 70 hospitals in the province with which to treat people if need be.

(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @Stack1975)