Gamblor, NHL officiating and you; ethics of covering accused stalkers, and more
Tim Peel was cashiered since his candor got in the way of the NHL's aim to be a betting sport. Speaking of ethics, a failed journalist wants to talk about the ethics of covering mental illness.
Since (Insert Sport Here) Twitter is just one virtual Obvious Joke Here — remember, that alt-comedy club you invested in that opened on the first weekend of March 2020? — everyone could get off a joke that Tim Peel was fired for saying the quiet part loud about National Hockey League officiating. What, not even a Lethal Weapon-referencing “he had one month to go till retirement,” since Peel actually had one month to go till retirement before he was terminated?
One way in which this esoteric-sportswriting effort is information-poor design is that it is from the vantage point of a cord-cutter who also ignores the chatter of sports talk radio. Being part of the Beast of 24/7 NHL coverage is nice work if one can get it, but for serenity’s sake, and for the sake of enjoying sports on one’s own terms, I know it is better if I pay for live sports in a way that means only watching games. Pregame shows are just bloat meant to make room for selling more ad inventory, and if we don’t watch it, eventually they will get rid of it. Cutting to the chase, if I repeat something that was said on one of the 139 studio panels on the two big sports networks in Canada, you will tell me right, and hold an intervention?
Peel, as ex-pro Carlo Colaiacovo alluded to, did not really say anything that outré. The Nashville-Detroit contest that turned out to be his last NHL officiating assignment was one of 10 games in the league on 23 and 24 March. In no game was a team more than +2 in power plays received, even though the schedule included games between teams at vastly different places in the overall standings. (Tampa Bay, which is first overall, played 24th-overall Dallas; eighth-overall Minnesota played 30th-place Anaheim, and some team presumably got to play the Buffalo Sabres.)
Over the run of a season, the penalties drawn and taken are usually pretty even, regardless of how elusive and slippery a team’s primary scorers are. And, I would say, a silent majority of hockey fans are OK with that, since they are also Realists.
However, the NHL is in a bind of its own making. It is clearly wants to join the NFL, NBA and their college counterparts as a big betting sport. Major League Baseball also has the same #squadgoals; seldom a day goes by without some annoucement of a new partnership. Goldman Sachs says the online sports betting market projects to grow into a US$40-billion industry by 2033 (CNBC, 22 March 2021). That would make it as big an industry as the NHL and the other three ball and/or stick leagues combined.
Having a referee basically do the old commercial in-game brings up squishy questions about integrity.
Of course the NHL wants a piece of that action. And, of course, the sports information partners it has climbed into bed with were probably none-too-happy that a referee seemed to be on a power trip. In a great illustration of unintended consequences, the sportsbooks probably forced the NHL to make an easy call and tie the can to an unpopular referee who was headed into retirement anyway.
Put another way: the gambling industry was a better check on Refereeing To The Score than a million self-styled insiders on Twitter. Odd, that.
Like every pitched battle over a sport’s culture, there are the What Is and What Should Be camps. I am generally with the What Is camp’s belief there is a reason why the referees exert control over a hockey game by trying to mete out penalties evenly.
Simply put: hockey is too fast a sport to ever have perfect officiating in human eyes in real time. So, while imperfect, it makes a lick of sense for both teams to know the referees will generally try to avoid giving one team a string of consecutive power plays. It is also in the NHL’s interest that the games stay closer.
Hockey, at least in North America, sort of needs that control since it is such a fast, visceral sport. The impossibility of having perfect refereeing is also why — atavism alert — the pros still have the occasional fistfight on the ice.
By the by, recent SportsLit guest Brantt Myhres thin-sliced the hockey fighting debate like prosciutto when the former NHL tough guy appeared to discuss Pain Killer: A Memoir of Big League Addiction. He never had a problem with the fights that were honest outgrowths of emotion — see someone wearing different laundry take a liberty with someone in your colour of hockey costume, and you drop the gloves. As Myhres put it, it was the two sleepless nights he would have before a game where he knew there would be a staged fight against an opponent’s designated fighter. That has largely been taken out of the sport, in a win for incrementalism.
In an honest moment, maybe some people would acknowledge why the penalties always even out over time and should even out over time. Or that their ire is aimed at the low-hanging fruit of bashing the referees, who have an impossible job.
One angry-up-the-blood aspect of the NHL for me is that late comebacks, with a lead change in the endstage of the regulation game, seem to happen at a far lower rate than MLB, the NBA and NFL. And offensive activity drops markedly in the third period of a tie game as both teams try to pocket a Bettman point for the regulation tie. (You have to love a league where two-thirds of the teams finish .500 or better, eh? You should not use pro sports’ divisional alignments to teach geography, and you should definitely not use the NHL overall standings to teach math.)
Part of the lack of late lead changes is that hockey has no “two-goal shot.” Part of that is that even the league’s worst goalie is a better closer than (a) me in anything involving sales and (b) whoever will replace Kirby Yates as the Toronto Blue Jays’ ninth-inning specialist.
That might also be chalked up to the officials putting away their whistles after the five-minute mark of the third period. But the real problem is not tacit approval of playing prison rules in a one-goal or tie game. It might be that the goalies are too big and the nets are too small, as Ken Dryden noted at The Atlantic recently. People have a way of sweating the small stuff and ignoring the big stuff, eh.
J.J. Clarke coverage raises ethical questions
Growing up as a Xennial in analog-era southeastern Ontario meant your parents likely had a choice of three supper-hour newscasts. There was CJOH (now CTV Ottawa) out of our nation’s capital, local Kingston station CKWS (then a CBC-affiliated private station, now part of Global) and Global National News out of Toronto. My parents generally watched CJOH’s newscast up until about 1990, when my father built a better antenna to pull in Global’s signal and started watching Global instead.
A parental decision to move on from CJOH sort of left this sense of ‘back in the day’ connection to that station and its public-facing talent. In the corded days not so long ago, maybe I would flip past the newscast and say to myself, Self, I cannot believe these people are still on the TV! Related to that, the cognitive and commensurate legal problems of Ron Rowat, who was the station’s longtime weatherman under the name J.J. Clarke, hit close to home.
The coverage of Rowat/Clarke brings up questions of who deserves the more empathetic treatment from the media. The three complainants in the seven counts of criminal harassment have an entitlement of privacy, but they almost seem forgotten in the detailing of their alleged stalker’s downfall. (Rowat/Clarke, as Postmedia’s Ottawa verticals1 detailed, has stage 4 cirrhosis of the liver, and is unhoused and presumably unemployable.) There is a responsibility for the media to remind people that as saddening as this fellow’s fall from grace is, and as much as it might be very clicky for those reasons, he is not the victim. The people — presumably women — who felt scared for their lives should get your sympathy. They were frightened to the point they had to involve the police, who took it sufficiently seriously that they confiscated all of Rowat’s hunting rifles.
Ethically, proper editorial balance involves giving more space to the advocates for people who have been criminally harassed and stalked. Sure, that might be less juicy, but it is basic accountability.
None of this is said to dispute the storytelling choices of the media professionals at the Postmedia Ottawa vertical. They are all more successful media pros than I at this stage of the game. But putting Richard Rowat on a pedestal seems to get into some mud where toxic masculinity is given a free pass ’cause we know the guy from the TV.
More by the by …
This might all be a quarter-century in the life of a TV station. But CTV Ottawa has a story arc that is dark. We have covered off the person formerly known as J.J. Clarke. But there have been some hardships on others who worked there.
Sportscaster Brian Smith was shot to death by a man with schizophrenia as he left the station on Aug. 1, 1995.
In 2010, right around the time Canada botched the lighting of the Olympic torch, CTV’s newsroom in Nepean, Ont., burned down.
Carol Anne Meehan, longtime news anchor, lost her spouse Greg Etue in early 2012. Oddly enough, if you put either of their names and a certain seven-letter word starting with S and ending in i-d-e into a search engine, plenty of media references to it come up, but few of the articles contain said seven-letter word.
Meehan has had a good second act, getting elected to Ottawa city council in 2018. I have beef with ‘friendly faces’ from local TV news going into politics, since they have an unearned advantage among low-info voters due to name recognition. Not this time, though. Go, Coun. Meehan.Leigh Chapple, the late-night news anchor, died in her sleep in 2013 when she was only 58 and a year into retirement. It seemed very cruel that someone who made social sacrifices that come with evening and weekend work did not get to enjoy her retirement, and I say that as someone who knows he will never get to retire.
Lead news anchor Max Keeping had a rough final few years before dying from cancer in 2015. Right before the end, I was at my neighbourhood grocery store and crossed paths with Keeping, who was moving very slowly as as a helper assisted him with shopping. There was some flicker in his eyes where he knew he’d been recognized, and of course, since my depression brain goes that way, I felt terrible since I imagined that last thing Keeping wanted at that stage was to be recognized.
It feels ghoulish to mention all that, so we better finish on an up note.
Belleville!
This newsletter probably needs a Kyle Woolven link more than he needs a link from it. However, at some point some Canadian media company is going to put some money into his Venmo (I’d say back up the Brinks truck, but we are in Canada, so the analogy needs to be to scale) and get this on a network. It is a lot funnier than Season 9 of Letterkenny.
New on SportsLit
Seven-time Canadian jockey of the year Eurico Rosa da Silva was on late last week to discuss Riding for Freedom, his self-published book about his effort to find happiness and gain control over risky behaviours that stemmed from early childhood trauma. It was a riveting read.
Did you really think I would get through an introduction of an episode with an athlete from horse racing without a BoJack Horseman reference? I hope you got it.
That is more than enough for today. Stay safe and have smooth sailing toward the weekend. And yes, I still owe the readers an explainer post that answers questions such as, “Who are you?” and “Why do you think anyone will read this?”
I see no sense in calling print media outlets by their masthead names in 2021. The Ottawa Citizen and Ottawa Sun have had their editorial staff under the same roof for years. So it will be parent company, city, since that is truer to the reality. For instance, the Hamilton Spectator on a newstand in my corner star is really Torstar’s Hamilton vertical, and the actual Hamilton Spectator is more of a bygone public institution.
As someone who grew up in Ottawa when the CJOH News announcers were all local celebrities, I also remember the whispers and leering chuckles about Max Keeping's sexuality and the ugly stories, almost certainly all fabricated, that would circulate. To his credit, he never took the bait and continued to be a presence at almost every charity event that existed at the time. The man deserves to have more of his legacy preserved.
Speaking of local media, your writing about CJOH brought me back to my childhood of listening to CFRA every morning because I loved Ken "The General" Grant and Ernie Calcutt, who was also the radio voice of my beloved Rough Riders. I remember my Dad waking me up one winter morning in grade 8 to tell me that Ernie had died the day before. The rest of the morning show staff were grief stricken and yet still went on the air to share that grief. I think it was the first time in my young life I understood the potential power of sharing your grief instead of keeping it private.
Thankfully. both of them have been well honoured around the city with various parks, institutions, wings and press facilities named after them.
Gold, nate, absolute gold !!!