March Madness shaming bracket, the Ostrich Party Rides Again, and the Clint Malarchuk anniversary
Way to be a buzzkill, Britta! Based on a lack of propensity for recent scandals, which college basketball-playing school deserves to go the Final Four? And we remember the Clint Malarchuk injury.
It is possible everyone else made this choice early, and I missed a meeting and thus retained my naifishness far too long into adulthood. But supporting Big Sport in the 2020s often requires being Bernie LaPlante at the end of Stephen Frears’ early-’90s comedy Hero, when he tells his son the way to get through in life is to “pick the level of bullshit you prefer.”
And with that tenuous, obscure, dank and dated reference, we are underway. (It helps if you imagine that sentence in Jim Nantz’s voice.)
The level of bullshit this newsletter aspires to is hoping to put some good in the world through an irreverent, outside-in look at the sportsgeist — and other stuff — to take you, Reader, on a #HarshRealityTour of our sports world. The gist of it that is that the luxury dollar-chasin’ late-stage capitalism party is winding down fast. The climate crisis is going to create public pressure on the leagues to adopt a less-is-more approach to scheduling and travel. The onus is on us to try to cool the spectacle if we want to still have some ball-and/or-stick team sports to watch on our screens. (There will be an explainer about this later in the week.)
In all honesty, the aim of this project is to put some good into the world by writing out the weird ideas about sports that live in my head. The timing feels right, since it is a year into Big ’Rona and a lot of the general population cannot seem to accept that sports should only live in our head and in digitized form. (Promise to do a full post about the Ontario Hockey League, the level of hockey I used to cover with care, at some point.1
As always, you do you when it comes to whether to watch a popular sports event. The men’s Division 1 championship is halfway through the second round, or round of 32. But nearly all of the 24 teams left at the dance are sponsored by a university that probably has some serious skeletons in the ol’ closet. So, going down the bracket, let’s detail the Very Bad Things each team’s university is associated with, and adjust our hating interests accordingly.
East Region
No. 1 Michigan. Well, this futile and stupid writing exercise might be might not take very long.
Michigan has never done anything wrong, except when it hired Rich Rodriguez to coach the football team. Well, not quite. The university paid out over US$20 million in 2020 to settle sexual abuse claims brought by accusers of a team doctor who died in 2008. It seemingly has not gone as viral as the sexual-abuse scandals at fellow Big Ten schools Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State, although that might be due to ‘scandal fatigue’ in the media or the principals all being dead. You cannot perp-walk a corpse.
No. 8 Louisana State. We all loved seeing their football team beat down Alabama in 2020. But a USA Today investigation that author Jessica Luther co-led established that LSU was probably just as bad as Kenneth Starr- and Art Briles-led Baylor for “ignor(ing) sexual assault complaints against students, including top athletes.”
No. 4 Florida State. Ran some pretty serious interference when Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Jameis Winston was accused of rape a few years ago.
No. 5 Colorado. There was a mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., on Monday, so no comment.
No. 11 UCLA. Their ex-men’s soccer coach is headed to the federal pen for his role in the college admissions scandal. “I made foolish decisions from a place of desperation,” he told the court at his sentencing hearing. So he was basically me at 12:55 p.m. every NFL Sunday when I played fantasy football. Oh, and all those national championship banners from the John Wooden era? They bear the mark of ‘loss of institutional control.’
No. 14 Abilene Christian. Within the last three years, Abilene tried to “ban some students’ same-sex dating relationships.” Come on, man.
No. 2 Alabama. The Saban Derangement Syndrome is strong with the internet, which means all the “alabama crimson tide + scandal” searches just turn up a laundry list of all the agreed-upon NCAA rules that ’Bama football works around, naturally compiled by a Michigan blogger. The rules are mostly dumb, so arguably Nick Saban is being Chaotic Good. At least that’s what they want you to think, and he’ll never be brought to account since his former boss at Louisiana State is the president of the NCAA.
No. 10 Maryland. Football player Jordan McNair died of heatstroke in 2018 during off-season workouts.
Galaxy brained conclusion on who deserves to go to the Final Four: Alabama, even though Michigan is taking it.
West Region
No. 1 Gonzaga. Jesuit univiersities put a lot of good into the world, but being a haven for abusive priests is really bad.
No. 8 Oklahoma. Former OU football coach Bob Stoops had feet of clay “when confronted with violence against women,” and his bad example has spread throughout the sport. That all came before #MeToo, since he retired in mid-2017. Rather unexpectedly. Just three months before the season, too.
No. 5 Creighton. Bluejays coach Doug McDermott used a “plantation” analogy in front of his whole team after a defeat just last month. Then again, the spectrum of people who have led teams of Bluejays/Blue Jays also includes a guy who made up a whole combat service record in in Vietnam, so…
Hey, Coach said he was sorry.
No. 13 Ohio. Being a state university in Ohio automatically confers unearned virtue by dint of not being The Ohio State University. Also, the Bobcats wear the same jade-y shade of green as the Ernestown Eagles, so that also keeps them on the right side of the line. And they had an economics professor emeritus who taught a class for $1 last fall to take the financial burden off the school.
Feels like one is missing the Worst State Ever forest for the pretty trees, though.
No. 3 Kansas. The NCAA levied five “Level 1 violations” against the Jayhawks and coach Bill Self in 2019, which apparently means the hammer will fall on them as soon as they stop winning. Ninety percent of this would go away if the NCAA just allowed teams to give five players salaries and benefits and stock the bench with a rotating cast of student-athletes, and allowed athletes to profit from their likeness, but like the super-intelligent chimp said, “no, I don’t think we’ll be doing that.”
No. 6 Southern California. Callback! Over half of the parents named by the FBI in the college admissions scandal were trying to bribe their way into Southern Cal, including Aunt Becky.
(The only time I ever saw an episode of Full House came during a babysitting gig in the ’90s. And D.J. Tanner was babysitting in the episode and the brat she was looking after got his head stuck in a banister. But it was so obvious the brat’s head was not stuck in the banister. And, scene.)
No. 2 Iowa. Hopefully people have not forgotten that Iowa is facing a massive civil-rights case over allegations over racial bias in their football program.
No. 7 Oregon. It might as well be the University of Nike, since someone wrote a book by that actual title. Occasionally they wear cool uniforms.
Galaxy brained conclusion on who deserves to go to the Final Four: Ohio, although it is a longshot. Oregon’s actual coaches and players seem relatively clean, though.
South Region
No. 1 Baylor. See comment on Louisiana State. Baylor is the bar-setter for a Power Five football school failing to support sexual violence survivors.
No. 5 Villanova. ’Nova renamed its law school a half-decade ago since its administration admitted to fudging the grades of first-year law students. In their own defence — and everyone is entitled to a vigorous defence, didn’t need any law degree to know that — they admitted it and owned up to it. Honestly expected much more from a school in Philadelphia, so they get a reverse shaming.
No. 3 Arkansas. An upside of being from a small southern state is your scandals seldom become national news, and these days, they probably elicit a giant “Meh” since they pale in comparison to what is depicted in the gritty, critics’-choice streaming series that is set in your state but shot in Georgia for the tax credits. And then, at such time that it is safe to vacation again and subject of where you live comes up, you have to say, “No, it’s not as bad as it’s depicted on that show where a mommy baking group is a front for selling meth.”
Arkansas’ only failing is being by a string of charlatan coaches who talked a better game than they could coach, and walked away with millions in buyouts. It is the Football Bowl Subdivision of being cuckolded, and they deserve a win.
No. 15 Oral Roberts. Another church school engaged in some really gross gatekeeping with what believers whose biology makes them attracted to people of the same sex can do in their privacy of their own bedroom.
Galaxy brained conclusion on who deserves to go to the Final Four: Arkansas.
Midwest Region
No. 8 Loyola Chicago. Even I am not so heartless to shade Sister Jean. Pass.
No. 12 Oregon State. It does not reflect on the Beavers men’s basketball team, but three years ago the OSU baseball team went forward with having pitcher Luke Heimlich on their roster after it was revealed he was a convicted child molester.
No. 2 Houston. Their city’s baseball team cheated during the season it won the World Series. The performer who seemed to be the only redeeming element of their pro football team, Texans quarterback Deshaun Watson, is facing 11 separate sexual misconduct lawsuits. The UH football team forfeiting games for academic fraud seems mild by comparison.
No. 11 Syracuse. The private university had a rash of racist and anti-Semitic attacks against students in 2019, which ually is a giveaway that the university has fallen down on the job with reminding people that having the ability to gain admission does not free one from being ignorant and small. Having gone to university about 2½ hours north of Syracuse, N.Y., I can relate.
Galaxy brained conclusion on who deserves to go to the Final Four: Houston.
Well, that was bleak, but one always hopes institutions can change for the better.
The irony is that it’s the greasy men’s tournament is the one with the perceived upsets. The presumably more morally upstanding women’s tournament was solid chalk on Sunday with the higher seeds going 16-0. Who wants to see that? We do want to be entertained, although we can still remember how the basketball sausage gets made.
The Ostrich Party Rides Again
There are going to be politics on here, so consider yourself warned. The planet is burning, and the natural governing party’s feet should be held to the fire. Even though the news is two days old to everyone who is Extremely Online with politics, it must be emphasized that a political party whose rank-and-file members think climate science is something to opt out should not be taken seriously, and does not deserve your vote in a general election.
I am not down with the term “aggressively centrist.” That seems like something either Ricky Gervais or Matthew McConaughey coined so that dudes who hang out on 8chan buy their products. (You got to admire their ability to stay on-point and on-brand, eh.) The reason I am going to work some politics into this project is that, as a Xennial Canadian, I have only seen for-yer-own-good government austerity for most of my adult life, and we have seen how that has worked out. Yet the 20th-century legacy media keeps propping up bad ideas and bad leaders (didya know that Erin O’Toole’s favourability rating is barely higher than that of Green Party leader Annamie Paul, who does not even have a seat in Parliament?)
Your favourite political party makes mistakes. Any party that has formed government in the last 20 years shares varying degrees of blame for any gaps in Canada’s coronavirus response. But these days I would, pardon the abbrev., be an LLAABC (Leans Liberal, Adamantly Anybody But Conservative) voter.
We need to re-centre competency and compromise to restore the art of the possible. There is not a lot of that coming out of the official opposition in Canada, or any of their provincial counterparts who hold power west of the Maritimes. The kicker is that the country does need a political party that speaks up for the interests of those pockets of the country that are at risk of falling another generation behind the pace.
There is a place for that progressive conservative party that can help, for lack of a less loaded term, Old Stock Canadians adapt to the realities of the 2020s. Right now that it absent.
SportsLit Segue — 22 March
It was on this date in 1989 that goalie Clint Malarchuk nearly died during a National Hockey League game. Most hockey likers above a certain age have internalized the details, so it seems wasteful to rehash details. Malarchuk and Dan Robson collaborated on a very good hockey autobiography, The Crazy Game: How I Survived in the Crease and Beyond (HarperCollins Canada, 2014).
Revisiting major sports stories through a 2021 lens should not mean automatically looking at it in a Now We Know Better way. It is OK to speculatively retcon with contemporary understanding and tools, while understanding why people talked, thought and acted the way they did back in the day. It’s called mitigating.
A major reason Malarchuk lived — and was even laughing about it within two news cycles — is due to the reactions of two people inside the old Aud arena in Buffalo: Clint Malarchuk and the late Jim Pizzutelli, the trainer for the Buffalo Sabres. Pizzutelli had been a U.S. Army medic in the Vietnam War, so he had seen some catastrophic injuries, and he was unfazed. Malarchuk, by every account, stayed calm.
A morbid interest is how Malarchuk’s injury contrasts with two other grisly injuries that involved severe cuts and massive blood loss, both within a degree or two of separation from Buffalo.
About 2½ years earlier, the Toronto Maple Leafs hall of fame defenceman Börje Salming was cut for more than 250 stitches by the skate of Gerard Gallant in a third-period goalmouth scramble during a Leafs-Detroit Red Wings game.
Rick Vaive, who graced SportsLit as a guest in late 2020, is the only player who was a teammate of both Malarchuk in ’89 and Salming in ’86. As Vaive and Scott Morrison detailed in their collab, Catch 22: My Battles, In Hockey and Life (Random House Canada, 2020), Toronto did not have a trainer who saw some shit in ’Nam.
The Leafs trainer, the late Guy (Gunner) Kinnear, got the job since he was the boat mechanic for then-Leafs chairperson Harold Ballard up in Ontario cottage country. As Vaive and Morrison detailed, Kinnear fainted when the bleeding Salming got to Toronto’s bench door.
Run that back: an NHL team had a trainer who fainted at the sight of blood. It seems important to phrase it that way, since Kinnear is also dead and did not hire himself for the job: Ballard hired him.
In December 2019, in a game in St. Catharines, Ont., Tucker Tynan of the Niagara IceDogs suffered a life-threatening thigh laceration caused by the skate of an opponent who crashed into the 17-year-old goaltender at full speed. Again, click over on YouTube if you need the context. What stands out about it, beyond the life-saving trained reactions of the first responders, is that there was a sensitivity to the trauma for all who had an emotional tie.
The rest of Niagara’s game was called off and the team postponed their upcoming road games. A week later, there was a pregame ceremony to recognize the helpers who worked to save Tynan’s life.
If there is a point, it is that this affirms society has not gotten ‘soft’ since we prioritize safety. We have become more ‘sensitive,’ maybe to a fault, but is that really for the worse? The Niagara pregame ceremony intoned, “We don’t want to imagine what might have happened,” but imagining the worst-case scenarios somehow helps us take the physical risks of collision sports seriously.
Hopefully that is in the area of a cogent point. Short of that, yeah, it was a good thing the rich folks who ran the Buffalo Sabres in 1989 and the Niagara OHL team in 2019 knew that there is not a lot of crossover skillset between fixing a leaking outboard motor and fixing a leaking hockeyman.
That does prove one point: there is no statute of limitations on a good Harold Ballard dragging, as any Schlasser fanboy knows.
Hey, I do not make the rules here. Oh, wait — I do.
Smooth sailing into the first full week of spring, fam.
Believing OHL fans will see a championship won after a 24-game regular season as gimmicky probably overestimating the intelligence of a typical fanbase in (Insert City of your Favourite OHL Team’s Rival Here). My hot take is very straightforward: it is not worth playing until there'is sufficient vaccination levels that teams can play a full schedule, in front of 3,000-ish spectators per game, with a minimal risk of being a superspreader. It also seems reasonable that domestic Canadian sports products such as the Canadian Hockey League and Canadian Football League commit to changes in their business model that leave more for a rainy day before they receive any government bailout.
Another great column but how can you pick Houston over everyone’s favourite college basketball-supporting centenarian?