Brantt Myhres, the NFL's broken schedule format gets worse, and no one is beating Gonzaga
Some days, the form will involve some mid-morning snark prior to the main course of a listener guide to a recent SportsLit episode. I do other word-work, you know.
Mid-morning snark
The NFL reminds you, ‘hey, we’re terrible too’ by grafting another game on to its dumb scheduling format
Baseball fans have Negotiations Are At Impasse! Fever, which means enjoying this season for this season before the collective bargaining agreement expires in December. The shamateurism-industrial complex’s meal ticket has its Final Four fields set.
Feeling left out of the opprobrium from Woke Sports Twitter, the National Football League confirmed the regular season is going to 17 games. It is better if you confer a sarcasm to the wire service report.
More games, more money and more flexibility for America's most popular sport.
Potentially, more injuries for the guys on the field, too, though Commissioner Roger Goodell and other league executives cite data compiled with the NFL Players Association showing preseason games are more dangerous to health and safety than a match that matters.
Cue Homer Simpson: “I think we can trust the commissioner and the weakest union in professional sports on injury data.” The the preseason games are more of a health and safety risk since the assumed risk in football increases if you’re playing at half speed, but that should not convince anyone the juice of a 17th game is worth the squeeze.
(The players’ association’s) chance to make a strong stand against it came and went during those CBA negotiations. And the union members will see their portion of shareable revenues rise from 47% to 48.5%.
A 1.5-per-cent increase … great. One can get the late-capitalist imperative to extract more profits, and the extra week will mean that the Super Bowl will fall on a holiday weekend. Sixteen games, with an even number of away and home contests, was a well-enough-alone deal. The main beef with the regular-season format is the contrivances of four-team divisions and parity schedules.
A purist hates the needless subdividing of conferences, and Denver Broncos coach Vic Fangio has suggested simply having every team play all of its conference counterparts once, with one cross-over matchup. That could even include a home-and-away series with an archrival for that 17th game. So my Minnesota Vikings could keep a produce-or-perish scenario against the Green Bay Packers and see less of Chicago and Detroit, the NFC North’s failsons. But that makes too much sense.
Gonzaga will reduce the Final Four to Only One
Having lived in Ottawa when Dave Smart was building his Canadian university hoops Death Star at Carleton, I can offer some cheap and unsolicited advice about how CBS and TSN should cover the men’s Final Four. Honest coverage would mean doing away with any pretense that Gonzaga is not going to win the national championship. Losing would require the now 30-0 Bulldogs of Jalen Suggs and Drew Timme to have a major malfunction either in the semifinal against UCLA, or in the final against the Baylor-Houston survivor.
Why? Gonzaga’s 55.3 effective shooting percentage in their Elite Eight win against Southern California was their second-worst shooting game all season. They still won by nearly 20 points. And — Olds might like this — the Zags realize a high-percentage two-point shot has more value than a three taken for the sake of launching a three.
The scenario is hella favourable to Gonzaga. Their semifinal opponent, UCLA, went 0-2 this season against the Southern Cal side that Gonzaga just hammered. The Baylor-Houston game has the chance of being played by prison rules — what else would you expect for first all-Texas national semifinal? — and I could see the survivor being too beaten up to really go at Gonzaga.
The two most recent teams to enter the Final Four undefeated both lost in the semifinal stage. Any way, Gonzaga could be the first to run the table since Indiana in 1976, and Bobby Knight is alive to see it. You hate to see that?
Speaking of, the NCAA is having a worse morning than you
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito joining the resistance … that is a bigger upset than Villanova over Georgetown in 1985. The NCAA is before the SCOTUS today in a name-image-likeness case, and they are getting dunked on.
A little welp, or more like a lot
Your preferred political party makes mistakes, full stop. And I own my okay-ness with being a shitty Gliberal. But, so far, the most-read post here is one arguing for Ontario voters to turf the current government in the 2022 election, since the current one is playing pandemic-prolonging politics. And now this is happening …
Ontario Premier Doug Ford will do something. Right after the next commercial break on CP24.
Not to be outdone, the man who would be prime minister of Alberta, Jason Kenney, is getting dragged. His Alternative Facts Fantasy Camp is trying to impose a public school curriculum that pretty much claims that a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus rode a pet dinosaur to his job on an oil rig in Lloydminster. The curriculum was clearly written by Christian Dominionists, and it has Kenney’s party scrambling like a rookie quarterback who has not learned any of the plays.
The grossest part of Alberta and Ontario governments trying to destroy public education in order to appeal to fundamentalist Christians and soften people up for a private-sector takeover is that both provinces’ strong education systems are a conservative legacy. That is maddening.
SportsLit S5E03 — Brantt Myhres, Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction (Viking, Penguin Random House Canada, February 2021)
At this writing, Brantt Myhres’ Pain Killer is the third best selling hockey biography on Amazon.
That is pretty remarkable. Myhres’ story about his long journey to sobriety after an itinerant, addiction-afflicted career as an NHL enforcer has neither a built-in immediacy nor widespread name recognition. But it is a riveting read about how Myhres, who was the NHL’s first player assistance director when he worked with the Los Angeles Kings from 2015 to ’18, managed to have a hockey career while in the grips of, in his words, “a disease that is trying to kill me.”
Some background from the interview with Myhres, which starts at 9:35 into a 52-minute episode.
9:35-14:00 Myhres explains how having a daughter, Chloe, now 13, and writing the book is a huge motivator to stay on track with his sobriety: “There’s a part in the book where I had 10 years of sobriety and I found myself thinking it was a good idea to buy a bag of cocaine for a friend … for me it was it a real reminder (that sobriety) is a daily reprieve from a disease that wants to kill me.”
14:00-22:30 Sometimes it is better to deal with the heavy stuff right away. Myhres says it was emotionally overwhelming to think over his young self’s experiences and how he got it on to the page. He also gots into why his first attempts at recovery did not take.
22:30-27:45 One catch-22 of Myhres’ pro hockey life is the NHL was willing to pay for his treatment, but then he would he return to a tough-guy role that triggered anxiety: “It was almost like there was a bigger percentage of me wanting to get caught … nobody ever made me be a fighter. That was a role I took on.” And spontaneous fights were not the problem; lying awake the night before a heavyweight tilt was: “It was the premeditation that, for me, was the killer.”
Neil Acharya mentions Myhres’ final NHL fight in 2005 with Georges Laraque, where Brantt’s orbital bone was fractured. The news recaps curated on YouTube show we were in a way different place with how hockey fights were discussed:
27:45-32:30 Myhres, who identifies as Métis, founded a hockey program for Indigenous youth when he noticed none of the 30-plus hockey academies in Alberta contained any such component. Myhres himself tapped into spirituality in order to get sober: “My god isn’t necessarily a man with a beard and a cane … it’s my belief there is a higher power that creates everything around us.”
Myhres’s uncle, Charlie Weaselhead, former grand chief of the Treaty 7 nations, is chancellor of the University of Lethbridge, which is in the heart of traditional Blackfoot territory.
32:30-36:20 “All you’d see was 24 lights, which would mean everyone was staring at their phone.” Myhres’s vintage of NHLer were more social beings, today’s are more about social media. But that can led to seclusion and isolation, especially in a pandemic season.
36:20-43:30 We go into Myhres studying the behavioural science of substance abuse at Mount Royal U. in Calgary (“I got a course on Brantt here”) and alcohol companies’ new emphasis on zero-booze products.
Darryl Sutter, who brought Myhres with the Kings, is now coaching the Calgary Flames. As it happens, Calgary does have Brian McGrattan working in a function very similar to Myhres’s job with Los Angeles.
43:30-48:00 Now that he’s a parent of a teenager, Myhres cannot imagine watching teenagers fight during an athletic contest; he is glad excessive fighting is phased out of the sport. He fought 45 times during his age-17 season in the Western Hockey League in 1991-92. No team in the Canadian Hockey League had that many fighting majors in 2019-20.
48:00-52:20 “If I don’t take my medicine … I’m going to get sick.” Myhres reminds us that no person should ever minimize a mental health or addiction challenge, since they would not do that with any other ailment or disease.