Perdita Felicien's gold-medal memoir, what the Isobel Cup tells us about the NHL, and the Elite Hate is set
As an author, Perdita Felicien was one helluva hurdler; the National Women's Hockey League offers a reminder of what the NHL is missing. Last, and certainly least, Ontario's current party in power.
Self-promotion: if you do not do it, then nobody will. Perdita Felicien, the broadcast journalist and two-time world hurdles champion, is on the latest SportsLit to discuss My Mother’s Daughter: A Memoir of Struggle and Triumph, which is being released on March 30. It is one of the most affecting memoirs that Neil Acharya and I have dived into in our 3½ years of producing a sports book podcast, and there is something terribly wrong if it does not become a top seller in Canada.
Perdita Felicien says the skillset between a hurdler and a sprinter is less physical than mental. There is a different way a hurdler can go over each of the barriers placed before them. As she told SportsLit, the hurdles are “bombs” but there are endless ways to adjust in order to clear them as a competitor learns about “making decisions at speed.”
Felicien does connect that to what she talks about in an intimate memoir. The first half scarcely mentions her hurdling career, instead focusing on how her mother, Cathy Browne, came to Canada from St. Lucia in the 1970s, initially working as a live-in maid. There was disruption in the life of Felicien’s family, which eventually led to her mother leaving an abusive relationship and the family living in the Denise House shelter in Oshawa before resettling.
“When we went to the women’s crisis shelter in Oshawa, it changed the trajectory of our lives,” Felicien says. “My mother finally had, kind of, autonomy. We were able to move to co-op unit in Pickering. She got got traction, and that was the start of her upward mobility.”
There is a universal message to a story that is very edifying about the Caribbean diaspora in Canada and the experiences of BIPOC women who have settled in Ontario.
”Sometimes there’s shame in saying ‘my family lived in a shelter, my family went to a food bank,’ ” Felicien says. “And I hope by saying, ‘we needed this place, this place rescued us, this place saved us,’ it kind of dismantles that shame around it.”
Making a podcast that is built on longish interviews means having bottomless gratitude for every guest who, one, published a book, and secondly, took time out to speak to us. But this was a special experience, perhaps since it was a year of waiting to speak to Felicien after her book’s release was pushed back a year due to the pandemic.
Over the weekend
The NWHL made a point, even though a Boston team won
The early-Saturday window meant that the Boston Pride’s victory against the Minnesota Whitecaps to capture the Isobel Cup played out concurrently with an Edmonton-Toronto NHL game. A hockey game is all about the journey and the energy it develops over three full periods and overtime if necessary. The Pride and the Whitecaps offered a 2021 female-led reboot of the hurlyburly that gets overcoached out of the NHL.
Both the NHL and NWHL games had the same 4-3 final scoreline, and a suspenseful finish. But the Whitecaps-Pride championship bout looked more like what hockey is supposed to look like, and what it looked like in the 1970s and ’80s.
There was flow. There were goals scored off the rush, including a breathtaking icebreaker by Minnesota speedster Allie Thunstrom. Other goals actually came on shots from outside the home plate zone that commentators on NHL game often mention.
On a surface level, it feels like you do not see goals scored that way in the NHL, where the size, speed and systems beaten into the players’ heads from age seven mean the ice is overcrowded, the game is overcoached, and the goalies are too damn big. That means the game has to become more deliberate and tactical, which in some ways offers a great foil to the natural offense of elite attackers on the Oilers and Maple Leafs such as Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Auston Matthews and William Nylander. They just do not have enough net or open ice to explore, since the NHL has created some evolutionary stasis by using the same rink and net dimensions that it did 100 years ago.
And, although one can be comfortable with the pretzel logic of why NHL games are officiated the way that they are, there are times when a ref’s willingness to mete out justice adds to the plot. The Isobel Cup refs awarded a penalty shot and a checking-from-behind major penalty in the final 13 minutes of regulation time, because that was what the rulebook said to call. And Taylor Wenczkowski’s eventual Isobel Cup winner with 6½ minutes left was scored while Boston was on a power play while being up a goal.
Strange concepts, I know.
How’s your Elite Hate bracket?
A week ago Monday, some great thundering nit posited that one might as well fill out a men’s March Madness bracket based on the recency and degree of the school’s crimes. How is that workin’ out?
East Region: No. 1 Michigan vs. No. 11 UCLA
Alabama was the playing-against-type pick, since it is obviously Chaotic Good with how it bends the rules. But one unbendable cardinal rule of basketball is that a team should try to make at least 50 per cent of its free throws. Any way, Michigan involves a rooting interest for me and UCLA’s bench players come off like a bunch of fratboys, so Michigan must win.
West Region: No. 1 Gonzaga vs. No. 6 Southern California
You cannot spell “Creighton” without c-r-e-t-i-n, so Gonzaga had the good karma when it dusted Creighton on Sunday. It was hella off-putting that the CBS crew signal-boosted Creighton coach Greg McDermott proclaiming we can all move on from his racist remarks made to his players since he has decided he has learned something from it. Mostly he’s learned how to say sorry before inevitably moving up to a team in a conference with a bigger media rights deal.
The ’Zags against Southern Cal involves Catholic church general corruption vs. entertainment industry-adjacent general corruption. That is the ultimate tie-up situation.
South Region: No. 1 Baylor vs. No. 3 Arkansas
Arkansas was the least squeamish pick out of this quadrant, and remains so, if only mostly by default.
Midwest Region: No. 2 Houston vs. No. 12 Oregon State
The same goes for the Houston Cougars, who are either operates mostly aboveboard or is really good at hiding it. There is always an appeal with a team exhuming bygone glories, and one salutes the Cougars for doing the work to regain relevance.
The Arizona Wildcats are your paradigm of hope
Screening out the high seeds and the low seeds who happen to be the main public research university from a state with terrible politicians whittles the rooting interest in the women’s tournament to the Arizona Wildcats. This is good, since it leads one to read up on Arizona’s two-way guard Aari McDonald, who scored 31 points in the round of 16 victory and has racked up steal totals that are equivalent to a 2,000-yard rushing season in football. Also, Arizona gave the Biden-Harris ticket their Electoral College win, so there is that, too.
So I guess I am also ABC (Anyone But Connecticut) in women’s college hoops, too.
Howard Schnellenberger’s death pointed out a dumb rule
On a college football history note, the energy of Howard Schnellenberger has returned to the earth. Schnellenberger was a turnaround artist. However, the first national title-winning coach of The U, AKA the Miami Hurricanes, and a program builder at Louisville and Florida Atlantic, Schnellenberger is not in the College Football Hall of Fame. Its selection criteria requires a .600 winning percentage for a coach, and starting at the bottom at so many turns contributed to Schnellenberger having a .514 record.
It is not as though one should stay up at night thinking about any hall of fame. Point being, if you see an arbitrary rule that is meant to eliminate doing critical thinking, you should call it out. Also, if anyone has a direct line to Spencer Hall and the Moon Crew, they should write fanfic about Schnellenberger’s ill-starred single season with the Oklahoma Sooners in the mid-1990s. It could be the sport’s answer to David Peace’s The Damned United.
Promise, not too much politics today
Sunday’s essay had Doug Ford’s name in the title and the illustration, so it is understandable if someone tried to reduce it to ‘you don’t like him’or ‘ah, everyone should get a pass’ in a wartime environment. Nevertheless: Ontario, maybe not right this minute, but over the next 14 months, needs a consensus to turf out the bad faith actors who make up the party in power.
The COVID19 pandemic is the ‘if not now, when?’ moment for showing that austerity has failed.
The spread has been worse in places with more right-wing and male-dominated leadership vs. nations with female leadership.
That ties to electoral systems. One reason why New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern had more capacity for building a voter base is that her nation has a mixed member proportion system, so she joined Parliament at age 28 after losing in a local race.
Just something to think about; smooth sailing into the week.