Still here only resting

It slumbers.

Arglebargle

Joseph Casciaro at the increasingly sycophantic RaptorBlog makes a great suggestion ("Parting with Andrea") but writes:

As for Bargnani, those who have read any of my posts will know that I don’t think his “potential” is an issue. He has the natural talent, size and versatility to be a 25 and eight type of player, with a block per game in there too....

My opinion on Bargnani remains that if he is a power forward playing beside a true, defensive centre (like the aforementioned Chandler), then he is an NBA All Star

Sorry, the idea that Bargnani would somehow be an All Star in the right situation is ludicrous. Even ignoring his horrid on-ball defense, once his rebounding woes are factored in he struggles to keep himself above an average player (average player, not average starter) - and that's ignoring the worst part of his game, D.

Moving him to the 4, where he could show off his matadoring skills against more athletic players, would be to invite disaster.

Bargnani, for all that I'm sure he's a nice guy, is a pillow-soft Euro with some silky skills. He's the basketball equivalent of Alexandre Daigle and the Raps got stuck with him - and yet he finds defenders of his play, by the busload. Heart, determination and the willingness to work on one's game are also part and parcel of talent, and Andrea hasn't got it. I wish him well; let's please cut bait.

As for the half-hearted defence of Colangelo, yuck.

Before I go

Just before I go (before this thing pupates, anyway) I thought I should note the passing of Nate Dogg.

Sound on this isn't perfect, but who cares.

Changes imminent

There are imminent changes to Tiny Chunks of Empire. I will make a full post, redirecting you, when the hour is nigh.

The Absolute Nadir

An exploration of the truly dire today by Paul Hayward at the Guardian/Observer.

He starts off with this thumbsucker to end all thumbsuckers:

Respect for referees was always going to be a hard sell in a culture where civility has broken down, vituperation plagues the blogosphere and the streets seethe with random fury.

Then goes on to suck a little harder...

"Allow me a personal reflection. I have always felt it right to defend the referee against a lynch mob, especially when attacks became a softening-up tool for clubs to protect their interests..."

Just when you think he can't possibly suck any harder, he decides to switch tactics, and blow as loud and wet as he can:

"So far, so obvious. But over the past two weeks it has felt impossible to justify the performances of Martin Atkinson in the Chelsea-Manchester United Premier League match or Massimo Busacca in this week's Barcelona-Arsenal Champions League second leg. Atkinson's failure to send off Chelsea's David Luiz for a glaring second bookable offence and the dismissal of Arsenal's Robin van Persie for going through with a shot after the whistle had blown for offside were too grievous to dismiss with platitudes."

Indeed! "Let me tell you about my rock-ribbed principles, then watch me throw them to the winds as soon as Manchester United and Arsenal are the ones under the slightest threat!"

Craven displays of submission before power (or even fashion) are not rare in sports journalism. I understand this. But it's rare to see someone whine so hard on both sides of an issue as Hayward has done here. Remarkable.

20 shibboleths

Interesting development over at Primer, where folks are reviewing how they align with twenty "conservative" shibboleths. These are in the US context, but fun to adapt nonetheless.

1: anti-union

Pro-union. Capital combines through corporations in order to negotiate with labour; it is appropriate for labour to combine through unions to negotiate with capital. I am strongly in favor of solidarity (not just class solidarity, but class solidarity at least) and am vehemently pro-union from this point of view as well.

2: anti-immigration

This is Canada. Only fools and nuts are anti-immigration here. I am, though, what you might call a staunchly pro-Canadian multiculturalist. Although internationalist in outlook, I believe strongly in distinctly Canadian values.

3: pro-life

In my personal life, yes. As a public policy, no. I believe in a woman's right to choose, on broadly libertarian grounds (no one should be compelled to give up bodily autonomy to allow another to live - I would feel the same way about forced blood or tissue donations).

4: pro-death penalty

Although I believe that a state has no right to kill, to decide life or death, I can be persuaded of the wisdom of the death penalty in certain cases. This makes me all the more against it as a policy matter and a matter of right, because the penalty is irreversible.

5: pro-military spending

Generally in favour, at reasonable levels. I am strongly in favour of defense spending in the Canadian context.

6: anti-taxes

Meaningless. Not anti-spending, so not I suppose anti-taxes. I am strongly in favour of changing the tax mix.

7: anti-gay rights

Pro-gay rights on all fronts.

8: pro-school prayer

Not really relevant in the Canadian context, although I support the ability of students in public schools to pray (although reasonable accomodations not to disrupt school discipline should be made - no prayer meetings in the hallways during class time, etc.)

In the Canadian context, especially Ontario, more of an issue is government funding for religious education. I am generally against this, while recognizing the constitutional right of Catholics. I would prefer a constitutional amendment that ended public funding for separate schools, but this is neither practical nor a political priority.

9: anti-welfare state

Social welfare is one of the great achievements of humankind in an otherwise bleakish 20th century. However, in our country in particular I am dismayed at the distortionary effects of the welfare state. I much prefer a guaranteed income system, while respecting the paid-in entitlements of existing systems. Anyway, pro.

10: pro guns/ anti-gun control

The debate here takes place at a different level, like the gun registry. I dislike the long gun registry as an inefficient use of resources, but ending it is a low priority. I am strongly in favour of tight regulation of handguns and semi-autos, but strongly in favour of the right of competitive shooters, strongly in favour of the rights of hunters outside areas of human population, strongly in favour of extremely tight regulation of hunters in areas of human population.

11: state's rights/ 10th amendment fetishism,/federalism

In the US context, this is largely inside baseball. The fact is that the commerce clause is designed to be of wide application.

In the Canadian context, there are similar federalism issues, like the "spending power" and so forth. There is a left/right dimension to it, with provincial rights having a sort of states' rights component, but it's not nearly as clear-cut. I am pro-"spending power" in general but not a big fan of mission creep in that field; I think from a legal point of view the Canada Health Act has problems and frankly, I think it's a political overreach as well. Provided access to medical services in all provinces remains unimpeded, I think the federal government should be satisfied.

This is really an inside baseball thing. Long story short, government is government, and these days in most places the province is no more local than the feds.

12: Thomas Jefferson worship (except for that unfortunate "wall of separation" comment which must have been taken out of context since he could not have meant that...

Pro TJ except for his farcical views on black slavery and ethnic cleansing of aboriginal peoples.

13: The US is a "Christian nation"

Is that a descriptor? It's not a very good one. (For Canada, the same applies). If it's some sort of statement of political or cultural principles, it fails worse.

I think, though, that the way this phrase is used is actually aspirational, because clearly it fails badly in any descriptive sense. Whether I like the aspiration depends entirely on whose Christ you mean; whether it's a good idea, I definitely think not, theistic states are problematic from the point of view of liberty.

14: Reagan is teh best

A scoundrel with a corrupt, stupid and venal royal court who tried to bankrupt the country while engaging their morbid and violent id. Mulroney, writ large.

Mulroney is his Canadian equivalent. I despise Mulroney.

15: Clinton was a scoundrel

The guy who actually accomplished much of what Reagan is, curiously, given credit for. I don't like him. Jean Chretien, but shiftier.

Chretien is his Canadian equivalent. I'm lukewarm on Chretien and his government from a policy point of view - they gutted the welfare state and yet failed to put intelligent checks in place to tame the monster - yet wholly admiring from the point of view of politics. Chretien is the finest politicial leader we've had in Canada in a long time.

16: Balancing the Federal budget is a moral imperative

Looked at over history, budgets are always balanced. Unless there is a default. I remain opposed to a default (although fascinated, since high school, with Solon's "shaking off of burdens" and the birth of Athenian glory), and consider no general default on federal debt to be, essentially, a moral imperative. So yes. From a practical perspective, the question is more about shifting responsibility for spending. I am generally very much against this, but it is not a moral imperative.

17: Pro- "teach the controversy" ("Intelligent Design" vs. Evolution a/k/a Reality)

I don't think this is a conservative position, it's a nut position. I think ID has a role to play in teaching about the philosophy of science, and would happily see it taught in high schools on that basis. However, it is not science and doesn't belong in science classrooms.

18: Pro-law and order

Pro-rule of law, more, which is a different thing. I am generally eager to see people's rights respected by the police, I would to a considerable extent reorient priorities if I had my druthers.

We as often get the law wrong. This is pretty shameful... the law end should be easy and the policing hard.

19: pro-business

Very much so. Not particularly pro-capital, and usually anti-managerialist, but business, sure. Unless this is unpacked, it's hard to know where to go here. I don't like handouts to business, I believe in regulation to cope with informational and market inefficiencies (safety and labeling standards, consumer protection laws, competition law, some government regulation of scarce but public goods like water, air, spectrum) but I really do believe in giving business a key seat in the table in these.

I don't like rent-seekers, monopolists, and handout specialists.

20: Anti-Government healthcare

See my comments on federalism and the Canada Health Act above. I believe strongly in public single-payer as efficient, fair and just. I believe, though, in "2-tier" care - that individuals should have the right to buy health care services in Canada. I also believe in an extremely strong and robust public system, even at high expense, but in reducing cost as much as possible through public health and efficiency measures (which we don't really do now).

More P.K.

With 2:00 to go in tonight's game against Carolina (Montreal looked shaky but a very satisfying win), P.K. Subban picked the puck up as Mtl were clearing the zone. Everyone on both teams went to change, and so Subban didn't just dump it out. He ragged the puck, for about 25 seconds he ragged it around his own defensive zone as the Hurricanes chased after him in ones and twos like Keystone Kops. And you could hear everyone sort of not breathing, as he turned around and around, behind the net, faking a breakout, turning back, in, out, behind the net again, and finally pinged a perfect pass to a wide open forward at the red line. And the crowd just roared, a deep and satisfied and delighted release of pent-up breath.

L'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!

Charlie Keller to Charlemagne

Charlie Keller coached for Casey Stengel with the Yankees.

Stengel played with Fred Merkle. (Brooklyn Robins, 1917)

Merkle played with Babe Ruth. (Yankees, 1925)

Ruth was portrayed by William Bendix. (The Babe Ruth Story)

Bendix was descended from Felix Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn was a friend of Goethe’s and set some of Goethe’s poetry to music. (e.g. Die erste Walpurgisnacht)

Goethe was descended on his mother’s side from Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, was a patron of Cranach.

Frederick the Wise was linked through prophecies of the Sibylline Oracles (including by Luther) with the “Last Emperor”; that he was the “Third Frederick” who would succeed to the throne of Frederick Barbarossa and reform the Holy Roman Empire and the Church before the Apocalypse.

Frederick Barbarossa was a patron and protector of the antipope Paschal III.

Paschal III canonized Charlemagne.

Good Luck, You're Gonna Need It

Buck Showalter had some red meat for the base at the Baltimore Orioles' FanFest:

"I chuckle a little when I hear a football coach say, 'We weren't ready to play this week,'" Showalter said. "My God, you play once a week and you've got an off week? Baseball is the most mentally, emotionally and physically challenging game in sports. It's 200 games a year counting spring training, seven days a week. We don't apologize checking into a guy's heart a little bit and into his makeup. Because ability only carries you so far."

Wonderful stuff.

Buck, all I can say is, best of luck this year. You might be the right guy for this franchise, but pretty much every year for the last decade, the Orioles have taken at least two whole months and sat on their behinds and had sand kicked in their faces. I suppose at least it's healthy that the manager has identified a culture of defeat within the Orioles organization. Let's see if he can successfully identify the principal reason: a lack of accountability in the front office, and a lack of talent on the field; and let's see if he can convince the people around him.

P.S. Buck, I did really enjoy it, but: spring training!?

The Sian Massey Nonsense

Much ado about nothing in English football this week as two idiot studio hosts, Richard Keys and Andy Gray, were rightly dismissed over a longstanding practice of hostile sexism in the studio. Keys and Gray are legendarily cheerful morons who don't deserve a moment's further thought (but if you're interested, Keys's hour-plus shambles of a non-apology apology on national radio is a quite brilliant example of a man unable to know when to stop digging the hole he's in).

Spare a thought, though, for the 25-year-old asssitant referee (what used to be called a lineswoman) at the heart of the latest piece of nonsense. Her name is Sian Massey, and she has done quite brilliantly to make it so high in the game so fast. It was her appearance in the Premier League Wolves-Liverpool match (only her second PL game) that led to Keys and Gray acting like dorks.

The predictable result of this has been screams from all corners about "PC GONE MAD" and so forth, and worse screams about Massey being unqualified, and boosted forward based on her sex. (Not to mention a horrific invasion of her privacy as the odious Daily Mail went and published half a dozen of her Myspace photos. Yuck.)

This harrumphing Blimpism has been coming in from all sides, but I found a comment on the blog EPL Talk that, I think, goes some way to showing how a 25-year-old woman could make it so far so fast in a highly competitive industry like football officiating.

I last refereed with Sian about 5 years ago in a “local” game, Sian and I qualified around the same time about 12-13 years ago and I don’t know of another referee out there that has committed the time or dedication that she has. Male or Female she is there because she has passed the assesments and the fitness tests that are allocated equally no matter of race or sex.

Despite what people may think about her being fasttracked because of her sex I can assure you that is nonsence, if anything Sian will have had a harder time from many in what is still an “old boy” establishment.

Sian first appeared on major TV three years ago officiating the Womans FA Cup Final and she did a fantastic job, she will go very far and I have no doubt that she will be our first female Level 1 or most probably Fifa official on the Mens List.

I thought it was great, is all, and wanted to share it. Well-known referee Graham Poll had further good things to say about Massey (and about the TV asshats) in another article (in the Mail, heh) which is worth reading if this interests you.

P.K.

Finally, someone had the stones to stand up and say the obvious about Habs rookie (and former Hamilton Bulldogs idol) P.K. Subban. I am not referring to this interesting if sometimes troubling article from Charlie Gillis of Macleans, which rightly tells NHL players (and especially talking heads) to man up and shut up.

I am referring to a comment by "Silver24" below the article, which nails with devastating accuracy the problem that I, too, am seeing. Subban is being targeted by the media and his fellow players in a way that I cannot recall any other player having been targeted in my time following the NHL - I have seen him attacked by TV talking heads for not fighting after delivering a devastating and completely legal mid-ice hipcheck. I have seen him called every name in the book twice by Don Cherry for having the audacity to talk to other players on the ice. I have seen national reporters tell outright and blatant lies about his conduct while playing in Hamilton.

Silver24 sees the same thing. And like me, he thinks it's perfectly obvious where it comes from. The criticisms of Subban for being a rookie without "respect", for being flamboyant, for not "knowing his place" don't get echoed around the league because he is young, promising and audacious. They don't get echoed because he is passionate, aggressive but inexperienced. They get echoed around the league because Subban is flamboyant, talented and black.

Especially black.

Silver24 says it well...

At first I never bought the racism card either. There's even a great sound bite of Subban himself completely discounting that possibility. But the longer this goes the less I like the taste it leaves, and the more I think about it the harder it gets to find another decent explanation... I can't ever remember any one player being on the receiving end of this much public criticism from his fellow players.

I almost choked when I heard Mike Richards spouting off about 'respect' that night. Maybe someone should put a microphone in front of David Booth (season over - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIXcGOr4-04), David Krejci (season over - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpZLhuizPrA) or Ron Petrovicky (NHL career over -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd3gmPkVtk8) and see what they think of his brand of 'respect'...

...And by the way, I find your comparison of Subban and Avery to be pretty distasteful. The only thing Subban has ever done in the NHL is play a hard, aggressive style with a little more flair than most of the other guys in the league.

Gillis in the article is more skeptical:

you can forget the idea that Subban’s race is playing a part. Other black players, including Evander Kane and Wayne Simmonds, endure no such criticism. Those guys gladly play to type.

But the skepticism is obviously misplaced, isn't it? If you "play to type" as a modest and unassuming young man, sure, no one is going to hassle you. We've gone beyond that. Probably not until guys finally left Jarome Iginla alone after he proved he could whup any middleweight in the league and still smile his million-dollar smile afterward. But hockey is beyond that. OK, except for minor hockey. And obviously, Europe. But hockey is beyond that. Really!

Anyway, it's when a Subban plays his natural, effervescent, hard-hitting, fan-pleasing game (and Montreal fans have seen nothing yet - the Subban we had in Hamilton was an absolute folk hero to the regulars like few others have ever been, he's been playing within himself) - that is the line that I guess a black player can't cross in the NHL without being given the kibosh by his self-declared white betters.

Let me be clear. I am not talking about ribbing from the fans for being the "Pressbox King" or the like. That shit is funny, and entirely appropriate. I am not talking about Pang contrasting Mike Pietrangelo with Subban saying Pietrangeloi plays the "white way". That is an embarrassing slip of the tongue. I am talking about the whining and the veiled threats from opposition players and the hockey talking heads. I wouldn't expect opposing fans to like Subban - and many clearly don't, often for good reasons. Michael Farber's Sports Illustrated article shows a guy who is unquestionably cocky. Indeed, I would not necessarily object if you said that the kid quoted in that article is pretty douchey.

The article also says that Richards says P.K. stands for "punk kid" and that "mostly Subban harangues opponents with a playground you-can't-beat-me braggadocio, which has prompted one NHL assistant to observe, "It's almost like he's an athlete in a different sport.""

A different sport, eh? Subtle. Can I suggest 'hoopity-hoop'? Maybe 'negroball'? At least the coach had the sense to remain anonymous, or maybe Farber is taking pity on him. Clearly North American hockey, which has reacted with considerable ill grace these last two decades to the European invasion, is still finding its feet in terms of merging hockey culture with the wider culture. (Unsurprisingly, the other guys who get it in the ear on the "respect" nonsense are still, 35 years after Anders Hedberg, Europeans like Linus Omark, who was accused of "disrespect" by the pathetic Dan Ellis after he scored a wonder goal on his sorry ass to win a shootout in December).

For God's sake, look at the aforementioned Richards, who can't stop levelling guys with dirty head hits (see the links above from Silver24), and compare his work to Subban's preferred brand of legit, testicle-rattling destruction. Yet, after this clean hip check, noted daddy's boy Lil' Greggory Peggory Campbell does the "ooh, hold me back, you better hold me back, hold me back, I wanna get him, DUDE HOLD ME BACK" routine; and talking turnips Mike Milbury and P.J. Stock spent the rest of the game berating Subban for not fighting every Bruin on the ice. The words they used? "Respect" and "knowing your place".

NHL players ought to get their heads out of their butts on this. We see right through the "respect" nonsense. If you don't want to get embarrassed, don't embarrass yourself on the ice, and like Gillis says, keep the prissy stuff at home. Grow up and treat your fellow players like men. If you don't like him, say so. Don't pretend he has some deficit of character after he whups your butt and tells you about it. Because THAT, folks, is the real time-honored Canadian tradition.

Best Shape Watch 2

Stephen Strasburg:

Stephen Strasburg appeared during halftime of CBS College Sports Network's San Diego State basketball broadcast on Wednesday night...

"I'm definitely in the best shape of my life," Strasburg told Ted Robinson. " Once you start throwing, it's gonna be a long process just getting your strength back, but I feel great about it and I have a really good feeling that I'm gonna come back at 100 percent....The surgery's down to a science, and you've just got to do what the doctors tell you."

Best Shape Watch

"I'll be ready to go for spring training," Berken said. "My arm feels phenomenal. It's stronger than it's ever been, pain free. It feels great. I anticipate and expect to be 100 percent ready to go for spring training and 100 percent ready to go this year. I'm just looking forward to getting after it."

Interesting Record

Looks like we had a record warm year during a deep solar minimum last year. A very unusual occurrence.

Looks like we're going to get warmer.

This is the greatest column in American history

Richard Cohen, who for the last decade has been infallibly the last person to get the joke, writes the most jaw-droppingly inconceivable column in American history. I am so, so sorry I missed this at the time.

Cohen actually begins his column with what should be immortal lines...

"First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy."

As if that isn't tremendous enough, he later comments on one of the funniest lines in the history of American political comedy.

He referred to the recent staff changes at the White House, chiding the media for supposedly repeating the cliche "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" when he would have put it differently: "This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg." A mixed metaphor, and lame as can be.

I can't say enough about this column. Go read it. It's tremendous stuff.

If this is football, let it die

Scottish Premier League in bold move to win backing for 10-team league...

This awful, awful nonsense has gone from bad to worse to worst. I am officially sick and tired of all of this, and have decided that I am quite pleased to announce that I am beginning a campaign to reduce the SPL to a 10-team league.

By booting Celtic and Rangers. To save Scottish football.

Are we not tired of the nonsense? I refer not only to the uncompetitive league season after season. I refer to the ridiculous, pro-wrestling like officiating displays in any game involving the Old Firm sides. To the constant low-level (or worse) warfare against press, officials and executives unless the Old Firm are given everything their way - a condition that usually occurs on the field regardless thanks to a spineless group of officials. I refer to a neverending torrent of sectarian *garbage* from both clubs and both sets of fans.

The ills of Scottish football lie squarely in the laps of the Old Firm.

Scottish football will never regain its past glory unless the Old Firm are thrown out of Scottish football. Perhaps we should let them remain to compete for the Cup.

CELTIC OUT.

RANGERS OUT.

For God's sake. If this is football, let it die.

Best and Worst of 2010 - football

Best and Worst of 2010. Football is played on the pitch, so only football moments make both of these. The Cabinda attack, the various outbursts of racist idiocy in the stands, the farcical 2018/2022 campaigns and the farcical 2018/2022 decisions, while obviously far more horrible moments for football and the world football community than any mere match, I will omit. As I will omit the literally endless moan from Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho, Benitez, Redknapp and their ilk that makes football coverage so depressing.

Best of 2010

1. Watford 3 QPR 1 on my own TV screen. Deeeeeeeeeelightful. Tore em apart.

2. Uruguay-Ghana in the World Cup quarterfinal. Some of the best football I have ever seen at a World Cup, a match that had everything. Too bad about the penalties.

3. Blackpool 4 Wigan 0. If I hadn't been watching it I wouldn't have believed it. This was heel-on-the-throat football.

4. Matty Burrows scoring that goal in the 92nd minute of a 0-0 game for Glentoran. Holy. Frig.

5. New Zealand 1 Italy 1. I enjoyed this 100x more than I "should" have, which is why I so often tell the beautiful-gamers to go suck eggs.

Worst of 2010.

1. Canada 0 Peru 2 at BMO Field, Toronto. Gets the #1 position because I was there in person. What a nightmare. Match was a lot fun with good friends and the Voyageurs crew, so not really a terrible memory overall, but the worst footballing moment of the year by a long way.

2. Every moment of England's shambolic World Cup campaign.

3. The Netherlands, an excellent side of good players, eschewing football to kick lumps out of Spain in the World Cup Final. Gets extra demerits for the grand stage.

4. The whole of a frankly dire African Cup of Nations tournament that never fired at all. A sad retrenchment for a tournament that had been moving from strength to strength.

5. This one's for everyone who tackled with two feet this year. Note to referees - you can't do this without leaving your feet. It's impossible (try it sometime). It's therefore always, always dangerous play.

120% of Americans have an opinion about mumble mumble gurble

Nice math there, Fox News.

I Am Honoured

To have received Godd Till's "TRUE HERO OF FREEDOM AWARD".

I shall cherish it all my days.

Pat Burns 1952-2010

[Note: I wrote this for publication, elsewhere, a couple of months ago. Things fell through and got difficult, and I meant to just put it up myself and never got around to it, and then Pat passed away, today, before I could publish this. Which was indolent and stupid of me, but oh well. We beat ourselves up for these things, perhaps unnecessarily. I just wanted to say thanks, and I was too sluttish and lazy to do it before it was too late. Sigh. So it goes.]

Take me to the logical starting point...

On June 1, 1988, Pat Burns was named head coach of the Montreal Canadiens. He was 36 years old, and many fans had never heard of him at all.

Not everyone now remembers the time before the Senators returned to Ottawa. In those years, Ottawa was a hotbed of junior hockey, one of the best junior hockey cities in the country (yes, even including the West). With two major junior teams in two leagues and several thriving Tier II teams, the wintertime Citizen was packed with junior hockey talk and sometimes not much else.

This is where Pat Burns learned his trade, as coach of the Hull Olympiques in the Q, bringing along players like Lucky Luc Robitaille, Stephane Matteau, and Benoit Brunet; very nearly winning the 1986 Memorial Cup but losing the final to Guelph. And it was in those copies of the Citizen, read on March Breaks and Christmas vacations with my mom in Ottawa, that I first became aware of Pat Burns.

After leaving Hull, Burns went to Sherbrooke for a year to coach the AHL Canadiens, no doubt helped by the fact that he was basically a local (Stanstead, the town where Burns is from and Magog, where he lives today, form a tight little triangle with Sherbrooke, which is about 40 minutes up Autoroute 55 from Stanstead).

Less than a year later, he was appointed to the most uncompromising job in hockey, bar Viktor Tikhonov’s.

To call it a meteoric rise is to laughably underestimate the situation. Burns was 36 years old. Few thought he was ready. Thankfully there was a distraction.

Everyone wanted to talk about one thing. Pat Burns was a former cop.

Former cop became, immediately, one of the touchstone tropes in Canadian sportswriting. It would endure. For fifteen years. Pat Burns, former Gatineau cop. It was how he was defined. And he looked the part, and fit the part, and played the part, in both official languages. He had that cop’s spreading middle, from riding in a cop car, meals on the run, late-night paperwork. He had a cop’s direct way of talking. He had a dramatic and luxuriant cop moustache, except when he didn’t, and when he didn’t you remembered his upper lip as the place that moustache used to be. He had a cop’s incipient jowls. He had a cop’s focus on security. He had an 80s cop’s high, brushed-back hair, receding notably but not ridiculously at the temples. He had a cop’s hair-trigger temper. He had a cop’s charm-you smile. He had a cop’s Irish name, and a cop’s Irish face, like a red fist when he was chewing out a referee.

If he hadn’t shown up on La Soiree du Hockey as the head coach of the Canadiens, you’d have utterly believed him on Lance et Compte and He Shoots, He Scores as a wearied but bulldog detective investigating one of Pierre Lambert’s teammates mixed up in a gently scary drug operation with two brown-skinned, jheri-curled Colombians.

And it would have worked. Because, oddly unlike how these things work in the real world, Pat Burns really was a cop. Gatineau at the time, and today, is a suburb but also a bit of a party town - home to some rough bars and a few rough customers, but mostly a lot of teenagers coming over the river to drink. Burns’s handling of teenaged junior hockey players was probably not a lot different from his handling of teenaged weekend revelers.

In other words, he wasn’t acting. This guy was for real.


He commanded authority, instead of demanding it

Pat Burns’s stereotypical cop body has been obliterated by cancer. Liver cancer. Bowel cancer. Now, lung cancer. Last week, I saw a recent press photo at the opening of the Pat Burns Arena in Stanstead. It showed Fuck-You-Come-Here-And-Say-That Pat Burns with the face of a bird - with a bird’s narrow, suspicious head and a bird’s infinitely sad round eyes.

Fuck, Pat, what has happened to you?

I am not going to talk about his courage, not going to talk about his indomitability, not going to talk about fight and pain tolerance and hockey and toughness and fight. I am not keen to address the issue of mortality at all. Pat Burns became the head coach of the Montreal Canadiens at 36. Today, I am 37. Soon, no doubt sooner than I imagine, I will be 38.

This makes me feel bad. Because Pat Burns, we all know, is dying. And I don’t want to die.


What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about hockey

I knew Pat Burns was a former cop when he was appointed, because it came up all the time when he coached the Olympiques as well (in addition to the always-insisted-on fact of his impeccable bilingualism). What I didn’t appreciate, but would come to understand very soon, was that there was a strict implication from that.

It meant that Pat Burns was working-class.

Middle class people, I already had a sense, did not become cops. They don’t. They didn’t, they don’t, they probably won’t, although what “middle class” will mean in 20 years, Lord only knows. Cop work - with its danger, its boredom, its hours and its spirit-sapping bath in the spleen of the underclass - is inherently upwardly mobile. It feeds aspirations. It is one of the bridges (once plentiful in Canada, now painfully few) for the sons and daughters of the working class to reach the middle.

We love to talk about hockey in Canada. We hate talking about class. That, no doubt, is part of what many have identified in Canada as our “middle class standard”, what has proved so successful at creating our comfortable, genteel, pleasurable society. Middle class people don’t talk about class, so we as a people don’t talk about it much. But hockey is one of those areas that pervades Canadian culture from side to side and top to bottom, and so you can use it like a lens to see class in our culture, clear as day.

And Pat Burns was a working-class coach.

So now, because we don’t talk about it, I have to talk about class and hockey. What’s a working-class coach? Roughly speaking, she or he believes in three things.

You build everything from the bottom up, from your goalmouth out. A team, a roster, a game, a plan, a set of skills.

Everybody has to pull their own weight.

You don’t faff around trying to make a moose into a swan. Let swans be swans.

None of this gets into technique, tactics, or even much into strategy. It doesn’t get into the details of hockey. On those, every coach is different, and everything we once knew seems to be wrong anyway. A working-class approach is predicated on two principles - the deck is always stacked against you, and there is (literally) no time to lose.

Working class means not having meaningful second chances. It means having to produce now, because you don't have a fallback. It means playing junior a thousand miles from home and trying to get enough high school in just to stay eligible. It means playing a whole camp and asking for just a Red Wings jacket because it doesn't occur to you that you might be worth more. And then not even getting the jacket.

Working class hockey was long the backbone of the country's hockey greatness. It meant names like Esposito, Mikita, Gretzky, Lafleur, Richard, Morenz. Names that, no matter how famous, would always bear the stamp of hyphenated Canadians. Working class doesn't just mean lunch bucket players although it means lunch bucket moms and dads. But it does mean being grateful for what you have and coming to the rink early and being willing to fight like hell for whatever you got from the game. It's Gzowski's description of Gretzky alone on a rink until the caretaker gives the third final warning and the lights turn off. It's Dryden's description of Lafleur flipping the same lights on himself and skating circles in the unsteady gloaming of warming floods, the concrete walls blasting back the puckthud against unsprung boards.

Of course, it means something else too. It means Stan Jonathan, Rejean Houle, George Armstrong, Wendel Clark. Heart and soul guy. Energy guy. Tough nosed guy. Pat Burns guy.

We like to tell ourselves a bit of a lie about success in our lives, that success comes from hard work, responsibility, teamwork, grit. And we tell ourselves that the successful people in our lives, the middle classes, those who enjoy the fruits of prosperity, exemplify those values.

Of course they don't, or don't always. What they share is opportunities; sometimes one that has been grabbed onto greedily and clung to desperately, like a sixth defenseman spot or a job on the force; more often the endless stream of opportunities that come to the connected, the educated, the well-spoken, those of fortunate birth or circumstsance.

In hockey, though, those public virtues are much closer to the mark of success. Not always, but surprisingly often. They are the Pat Burns virtues, those that a hockey team with just enough talent but enough collective will can grab for themselves, as a way out of the competitive hurly-burly. Hard work, responsibility, teamwork, grit. Call them, for want of a better word, the Doug Gilmour values. And it is no surprise that Doug Gilmour went from being a very good hockey player to being a national symbol of public virtue, while playing hockey for Pat Burns.

We don't necessarily share those values, we don't even necessarily privilege them. But we do celebrate them. And if you are working-class, they are a way out.


What he did

Pat Burns took a good hockey team and made them instantly into a great hockey team. He did it with conscious eyes on those public virtues that lift a team, and so leveraged a superstar goaltender. I don't think I want to say any more than that. He stood up for personal responsibility, and protected his men. And he was smarter than the guys he stood next to.

Montreal's distant hockey past rings loud with the upper-class, middle-class, amateur spirit, but the Canadiens specifically are the working man's team. Mental toughness and professionalism. That line again, of working-class heroes. Morenz. Richard. Lafleur. That is Burns's line. It was also Scotty Bowman's, another working class Quebecker. That line, hard work and the indomitable desire to presevere, made flesh, becomes the will to survive. The will to push through. The will to keep the puck from going in your net.

Pat Burns took that first Canadiens team by the scruff of the neck and led them to 115 points. Except for Tom Johnson in Espo’s 76-goal season, no one had done that before as a rookie coach. Only Todd McLellan - wind-aided through “overtime loss” inflation - has done it since. They lost an epic Stanley Cup final to a brilliant Calgary Flames team. And, bizarrely, management began to slowly pick the team apart.


The end is only the beginning, except when the story stays the same

Burns’s tenure in Montreal, shot through with success but not Cups, didn’t end in triumph. The Canadiens took a shellacking in the press for their second-round playoff exit in 1992 after gritting their way to 93 points and an Adams Division championship. Many of the young players on a shockingly young team, including John Leclair and Mathieu Schneider, had been cruelly exposed in a whitewash by the Bruins.

On May 31, 1992, Pat Burns resigned as head coach of the Montreal Canadiens. A combative press conference followed in which members of the local media levelled the accusation that Burns’s resignation had been forced. Pat Burns fired back “prove it”. He remained, to the end, his own man, and damned sure he wanted you to know it. He was 40 years old, and in what many saw as a betrayal he was headed to Toronto to take over as the head coach of the Leafs, a town with an even more ambivalent relationship to working-class hockey but a team that was crying out for the discipline and good sense that Burns would bring to them.

Jacques Demers would take the Habs players that Burns had so painstakingly built from youths and win the Stanley Cup with them, improbably and rather wonderfully, the next year. Having flown that team to the sun, he would then sink it under the waves, laden with hubris, wax and feathers.

It is Burns’s place, sandwiched between two other francophone coaches with Stanley Cups on their resumes, in the long, cold shadow of Scotty Bowman, that denies him some part of the recognition that he is due as the last coach to preside over a Canadiens team of enduring quality. The style may also be a factor; a Burns team never was dull to watch (not even in New Jersey, amazingly) but Burns’s Habs were in no way the firewagon teams of Scotty Bowman, or even of Bob Berry, or the pint-sized sprites of Demers.

I’ll let others talk about what Burns went on to do elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, until cancer started to eat him from the inside six years ago, Pat Burns’s reputation in Montreal and in Quebec slumbered.


”I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Another comfortable lie we tell ourselves is that cancer is no respecter of class or race or creed. This isn't quite right; our whole society swings into action against cancer for you if you have the right speech, birth and income. And of course the dirty cancerous jobs, the dirty cancerous neighborhoods, and the dirty cancerous lifestyles follow the working class around like a malignant web of unsloughable tissue. But one thing remains, in the final analysis, both universal and unshakeably true. Cancer kills you dead, no matter how lucky you have otherwise been. Dead, indeed, is fucking dead.

Pat Burns and I don't share much except a love of the frenzied tussle of a 2-1 hockey game. But I respect the man as a hockey coach, and I feel close to him because he led my favorite team when my passion was at its height, my first years in Montreal, lining up to pay $10 and stand in a cloud of Craven 'A' in the concourse of the old Forum. Let's just say we breathed some of the same smoke, moments I am grateful for.

So yeah, I grew up (hockeywise) with the man, and to see him like this and say Fuck, Pat, what has happened to you? gives me chills. It makes me sad, but mostly it's an intimation of mortality I could do without. I don't want him not to die because I love the guy; I don't want him to die because I still want to pretend that I share something with him. And if he gets cancer and dies, the fear makes me want to cut the tie loose.

Pat Burns says he hopes that some promising young player can take his first steps to greatness in the new arena that bears his name, in that working-class, hanging-on border-country town, Stanstead. I hope so too. As a country, we need those towns. We need those rinks. We need those players. And we still need Pat Burns.