Finally Finally Finally

I wish I could tell you that these past two months had been spent carving out my own bit of HTML magic, building a Wordpress template from scratch that somehow made Canadian soccer history interesting to anyone outside of me, Colin Jose, and those guys at the Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame. 

Really, the last couple of months has been what John Lennon once called life—that thing that happens while you're busy making other plans.  Well, screw you John Lennon.  I am happy today to announce the "launch" of The Spirit of Forsyth.  Now, I have to remind you I am no Wordpress expert, so I'm sure there are many among you who will come back at me with daggers, or perhaps friendly suggestions to make the thing better.  I know it doesn't have a links page and some of the pages are empty-looking.  The problem is I don't care right now.  I will care when more people read it and make disparaging comments though.

That's why I think having this out there will be enough to make me want to make it better anyway I can.  And in the interest of gathering as much interest in this site over as long a period I can muster, this will be the first of several mentions, followed by a Twitter account, followed by emails to persons of interest, then a Facebook fan page, maybe a t-shirt and/or scarf down the line.  Hey, they didn't build Rome in a day.

So, there.  Welcome to The Spirit of Forsyth.  Think of this as a beta test.  If there's anything messed, let me know (but don't talk about the template.  PLEASE don't do that).  And if it looks threadbare on the content, don't worry; there is so much goodness coming down the pipe, I can't STAND it. 

A Plea for the End of Footballer Profiles on Sports Websites

Reading through my daily football feeds, I noticed the Guardian proudly included notice that several of its journos got awards from the Sports Journalists' Association.  Well, you know, congrats (what's with the sad faces in the photos?).  Yet I am a big proponent of recognizing both good and bad in any profession—hence I tend to take more interest in the Razzies than the Oscars.

Giving awards to the worst football journalists is out the purview of this simple Canadian blog, but I can offer you a sample of the sort of article designed to make me hate sports journalism.  So today we look at Jim White's story for the Telegraph, for which the headline reads, "Theo Walcott hopes trophies at Arsenal can book him World Cup place with England."

Let's start there, shall we?  I imagine Theo Walcott is a probably very pleasant young man.  Certainly that's what his dad told the foaming-at-the-mouth reporters who invaded his living room days after his son scored a hat trick for England in Zagreb those many moons ago.  But of all the beans spilled in his chat with White, this is the headline we're left with?

Now we all know journos don't often write their own headlines (a perk left to we happy few slogging away in blogger hell), but if I were White I would have insisted on either of these: "Little Girl Tottenham Fan to Theo: Lennon is Better than You", or conversely, "Walcott Blames Dad for Injury Woes" (said Walcott to White, "My shoulders come from my dad, he's to blame").  A stretch?  Definitely, but already miles better than incorrectly linking Walcott to the vague hope that Arsenal winning trophies will somehow blind a Champions League-winning Italian tactical master to the fact Walcott's not playing very well at the moment (Walcott actually said, "If I perform for Arsenal, that will get me on the plane. Simple as that," which is so dully obvious you wonder if the editor mangled the quotation in the headline to make a point about the general pointlessness of the article).


This is a puff piece, plain and simple.  De-syllable-ize some of the adjectives and this thing could go in one of those weird, comic book football mags for kids who aren't cool enough to read When Saturday Comes.  Walcott is "endlessly polite," he is "unruffled by attention," he has "instinctively...grasped the fact that a footballer of his standing becomes a role model," he is "easy, kind, thoughtful."

White lets us in on why he isn't very good at the moment— it's "karma," manifold injuries to "his shoulder, his back, his side, his ankle, almost every part of his body...enough to furnish a medical text book." "Every time he seemed to have recovered this season," White scribbles unconvincingly, "another setback came his way."  Theo is football's Job apparently, a living saint beat down by an angry god for reasons only known to the divine mind.  The hearts of the world's stricken burn with empathy. 

The problem isn't with White.  I can picture Jim at his London bureau desk, pleading for his editor to send someone else to North London as he's busy cracking the case on Leeds' shifty owners.  And later, Jim finds himself sitting at his desk, head in his hands, a few minutes to deadline, itching to write that Walcott confessed to being a chronic masturbator and to recreational LSD use while on international duty.  Jim's editor comes over to reassure him there is an audience for this sort of thing, perhaps Arsenal supporters, or the more sentimental England fans, I imagine.

And then Jim looks up at him with indignant, red eyes, sore from spinning bullshit, and cries out that these empty player profiles litter the English dailies.  From whence, Jim asks, comes this need for sports pages to remind us they're not just footballers, they're people too, and we should care about their feelings?  Why did I have to go to some elementary school in North London just so I could come back and write about what a humble and wonderful a young man Theo is? Was it to try and convince our readers what a shame it is that this nice guy who earns more money than just about everyone else on the planet won't be able to play on the English national soccer team, but will have to settle for just playing for one of the most famous, best-supported sides in the entire world instead?  Is that the deal Theo's agent struck with the Telegraph so Jim could get his notebook within three feet of the Arsenal forward?

The editor shrugs and walks away, but Jim isn't done, and yells after him, "only you have the power to stop this!"  The door to the editor's office closes and Jim is left alone with his thoughts.

Some Thoughts on the Politics of Sports Nationalism

 

A photo taken by me at a Toronto bar, seconds after Canada won 

gold in Olympic mens hockey. 

A tale of two finals.  It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.  Apologies for the brief absence yada yada yada but it took me a week to mentally process last Sunday's double header: Aston Villa putting in a drab, 2-1 non-event in the Carling Cup final, and the Canadian and US Olympic mens hockey teams putting on one of the best sporting spectacles I have seen in ages.

Let me tell you the story children, gather round.  Normally on a Sunday I'd be at my Cathedral job wailing away to an aging Anglican congregation about how bad people we all are and will continue to be (it's Lent). All in a falsetto voice, of course.  But it was one of those days you ask to have off and everyone knows why.  I watched the first final at home, 10 AM local time, missing the opening penalty and a good chunk of the first half action in search of an illegal feed.

I don't want to talk about that final.  Was it a final?  Villa played with all the passion of Burnley away at Stamford Bridge.  It came off like a preseason friendly, and United's victory dance was so perfunctory as to underline the predictability of it all.  All hail Ferguson's 34th trophy.  And thanks for playing Villa, we'll see you in ten years time ready to drop another one.

The afternoon was another matter.  The Olympic Games always go the same way for me.  Before it begins I rock the hipster cynicism, "What time does it all start again?  Oh god, everyone's going to be weeping if we don't win in the hockey."  And then it progresses, medal by medal, game by game, until I find myself in packed bar on College Street in Toronto in the dying seconds of the third period, Canada leading by a slender 2-1 margin, sweating like I'm in a war.

We all know what happened next.  Zach Parise tied it with 24 seconds left in the game after a mad scramble in front of Roberto Luongo's net.  I don't know what I felt.  I know all the things that they tell you you're supposed to feel: hockey is overhyped in this country, a silver medal in mens hockey wouldn't have taken anything away from Canada in an Olympics that had seen, up until that point, 13 gold medals—already tied for the most won in a Winter Olympics, and three more than any host previous host nation.

That anti-hockey, anti-Olympian cynicism was dying to get in there and alleviate the stress. Susan G. Cole wrote in this week's NOW magazine (a free Toronto weekly that oh-so-desperately wants to be the Village Voice) about the ugliness of all that flag-waving:

All those rabid group-think pro-Canada histrionics, far from inspiring me, fill me with dread. Where does pumped-up patriotism lead anyway? And which Canada was I supposed to be cheering for? Our brand... sorry, I mean our image was at stake here, and we came across as hyper-nationalist yahoos who like to party in the streets and toot our own horn.

This aversion to showing colours for the sake of something as ostensibly pointless as sports (it's just guys kicking a ball or swatting a puck FFS!) is similar to how many of my friends feel in the lead up to the World Cup in this city.  "Is Portugal in it?" they sheepishly ask, knowing that if the answer is yes, they can give up sleeping in their West End apartments for the month of June.  That damn flag-waving.

In these situations, I always try to guess what my brother would think.  In 2002, when Canada beat the US in the mens hockey final at the Salt Lake City Olympics to secure their first Olympic hockey win in fifty years, he recounted the hallucinatory experience of walking down a packed Yonge Street, flags hanging out of cars, attached to hockey sticks.  He felt awe mixed with dread.  But he at least understood why they were there.

Cole is one of those left-wing columnists who makes you kiss the ground in thanks for people like Jennifer Doyle or Rick Salutin, for whom the vagaries of nationalism and sport aren't merely fish to shoot in a bucket, but contradictions to be acknowledged and discussed.  Yes, all those billions would have been better spent on the poor.  Yes, knee-jerk nationalism can be ugly.  But quashing the Olympics will hardly usher in the end of social injustice or lessen the suffering of the impoverished.  Capitalism hasn't "won" because McDonald's played the national anthem in the hockey ad breaks.  Sporting nationalism isn't always the harbinger of fascism.  For whatever reason—the sense that it is the opium of the masses, the enormous player wages involved, corporate sponsorships and the like—sport tends to make ideologues of the left, who when the topic comes up, suddenly employ the sort of "zero sum" speak normally attributed to many on the right of the political spectrum.

Eight minutes into sudden-death overtime, a bit of rubber crossed a red line on a patch of ice somewhere in Vancouver.  Seems a silly thing to spark what happened next, at least until you think what often leads to flag-waving in many countries: declarations of war, statist crackdowns, military coups.  Canadians don't do political nationalism very well.  In between the second and third periods of the final, the camera swooshed around in search of celebrities at the game. When Michael J. Fox, Neil Young and William Shatner appeared, the bar broke out in cheers.  Then a smug Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared sitting next to Wayne Gretzky, and the place erupted into boos (and no, they weren't saying "Luuuu" for Luongo).  Nobody told anyone in this bar that Olympic success would shore up support for the anti-democratic federal Tories, who prorogued parliament so our democracy would not "distract Canadians from the Olympic games."

When Sidney Crosby scored that goal, I leapt to my feet and grabbed my wife.  I climbed on my seat and tried to take pictures of the madhouse bar, none of which came out.  I watched as patrons unfurled an enormous Canadian flag and hauled it outside to be honked at by passers-by.  A German friend of mine said she hadn't seen celebrations like those that erupted across the county when Sidney Crosby scored in overtime, winning gold for Canada, even when Germany last won the World Cup in 1990.

Over the next few days though, Canadians turned on CBC radio and heard the speech to the throne and the federal budget, and griped and pointed accusations and wrote letters to the editor.  Meanwhile, our folded-up flags were already collecting dust in the basement, waiting for next time, whenever that might be.

Sport is essentially meaningless.  At the risk of sounding pretentious (too late for this blog), it's one of Wittgenstein's self-contained language games—everyone's agreed on the rules, and within the game itself, Shankly is right: it's more than life and death.  Seen from the outside though, it's completely absurd.  Many observers have tried turning to that dreaded concept, "symbolism," to try and save sport from its own essential lack of meaning.  But those pushing the idea that sport is really "something else"—"it's war!" "it's projected sexual desire!" "it's sublimated political alienation!"—are hucksters.  It is interrelated with politics and war, psychology and nationalism, but it's not those things.  It struts about like an irate Johan Cruyff (or our own hockey version, Patrick Roy) with on its own set of rules in a world driven by more practical/political interests.   

This desire to project meaning onto sport, or to point out its absence (Susan Cole), often reminds me of those people who weep and gnash teeth looking for some way of determining what it 'means' to be Canadian (this obsession with meaning!).  I once wrote a letter to the Globe and Mail after a Tory back-bencher wrote an op-ed pushing for Canada to appoint some national symbols ("hockey!" "Tim Hortons!" "John Candy!" "Healthcare!") before the realization dawns that we don't have any and so suddenly wither away and die away as a nation.  I argued that the meaning of "being Canadian" is a simple tautology: you are a Canadian because you are Canadian.  This doesn't make it empty, or less important.  It is vital.  But it too is essentially meaningless, like most nationalisms.  It's a contradiction, or what the theologians used to call a "mystery," if you want to get flighty about it.  Ours is a little more naked than most, that's all.    

In many ways, I think this open, ever-changing sense of who we are in this country leaves me optimistic about the chances of Canada embracing her other "national sport."  Next week I'll be unveiling (finally!) my new site on Canadian soccer history. It's dedicated to David Forsyth, Canada's first and greatest innovator of the game.  While Forsyth, who once made a soccer fan out of Prime Minister Mackenzie King, spoke to the importance of the sport in "bringing up young men," he primarily adored soccer because he believed it simply to be among the greatest sports ever played.  He was as great a Canadian as you can find in the political realm; he was an education innovator, working with the government on ways to improve high school education in Ontrario.  But he was dedicated to Canadian soccer, its development, its care.  Forsyth, who lived and worked when Canada was but a young man in an old mans world, was a living example of the Canadian tautology.  I hope there'll be many more like him to come.

Fake Sigi: Paranoider Than I Thought

Fake Sigi has a new post detailing his own theories about why Canadians want MLS' single-entity to be loosened.  For a guy (or gal) who writes fairly frequently about paranoid conspiracy theories, Sig's post sounded...a little paranoid.

First of all, Fake Sigi points out the USA has a bigger talent pool (in part from a markedly better development scheme, but also in part because of a 10-1 difference in population):

The reality is that the USA has developed a deep enough talent pool to be able to stock a rapidly expanding MLS even when a number of high quality players are plying their trade overseas. Canada has the players, but its resident teams must expend much more capital to bring them back into the fold. Their domestic development model has resulted in too few players of varying quality mostly being dispatched to Europe, while being somewhat incompatible with the larger, stable development model and top level soccer structure of the United States. Like we've seen with Toronto FC, the Canadian MLS teams will get stocked with Americans and other internationals, and without sound management, will struggle to be successful on the field.

This paragraph doesn't make much sense.  Currently, TFC enjoys an exception to the international rule to make up for a lack of top flight-ready Canadian talent. Sigi quotes the exception and says it's a form of subsidization.  But "international" really means "American."  We are allotted 13 international slots as opposed to the rest of MLS which gets 8.  Yet five of those have to be American, so we're stuck with the same 8 "internationals" as well.

"But you get five Americans!  You don't have to rely on Canadian players!  It's not fair!"  Welcome to the world of Canadian professional sports. Just like we don't force the Americans to fill their NHL teams with domestic players, the MLB doesn't force the Blue Jays to buy Canadians.  It's been that way for some time. 

It comes down to money.  TFC pays the same amount for players as any other MLS club, we live under the same cap, we get the same allocations and DPs.  We used a DP for Rosario and De Guzman, but that was up to Mo Johnston.  There were less expensive options to fill the five Canadian slots, but he got a two-time MLS MVP and a former Deportivo La Coruna player instead.    

In any case, FS' conspiratorial view—that Canadian bloggers want the single-entity rules changed and the cap loosened is so we can buy back expensive Canadian footballers in Europe to fill the domestic rosters—is one I've never heard before. If the other clubs get the domestic roster exception, the total number of Canadian players required to fill three Canadian MLS rosters is twenty-one.  Is the only way for Canadian MLS teams to compete with their twenty-one Canadians in MLS and not "struggle for success on the field" is if we buy one of these guys?  Is that really why Duane wants single-entity to change?  I somehow doubt it.

TFC might have sucked, but RSL finished one point ahead of TFC in the league standings this year and won the MLS Cup, so I'm not really sure where this "struggling to be successful" comes in.  In any case, MLS can only be good for Canadian soccer in that it will encourage us to develop better players to fill the domestic rosters.  But league parity in MLS is such that it's not the case that we have to break the bank on Canadians playing in Europe to compete.  And the sort of changes Duane is advocating would take some of that competitive parity away.

Honestly, Sig, Dan, Bill, whoever: the reason I suspect many prominent Canadian soccer fans want changes to the MLS single-entity is because they think the quality of play could be better if the league spent more.  Why are they so obsessed with getting better players in MLS?  Probably because while MLS was born, became the status quo, and slowly and carefully grew, Canadians were watching international club soccer on basic cable for the last fifteen years and kind of got used to the standard.  Perhaps they suspect lots more people would watch soccer if it were a whole lot better.

Maybe they're naive.  Maybe Kenn Tomasch is right, and the sort of money we'd need to spend to see a qualitative difference in play would bankrupt the league.  I don't know.  But I know it's not because we want our European soccer-playing Canadians back.  If anything we want them to stay there so our national team might beat Honduras one of these days.   

Update:  Upon completing this, I read this comment from a familiar twitter pal on FS's post.  It bears re-posting here:

Brad
I want soccer to be a success in North America for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to become successful in the business of the game as a coach (civic pride, love of the forgotten game, pent up anger that I was never identified as a soccer head in my youth, are others), however, I see a big problem looming. The greatness of the biggest leagues in the world, which, to me, is always going to be the biggest source of domestic (North American) fandom is in the order of things. A multiple layered system of leagues which rewards consistency and demotes indifference will eventually cause MLS to crack on some level. The very insistence of commentators to stay on top of the USL, NASL saga is the boldest example of this desire. The people mentioned in this article are far more informed than I about these subjects and so I apologize for "sheep"ishly coming here to comment, but, I can say this MLS is not the answer, nor are seperate US and Canadian leagues, nor is just selling out the franchise owners who've brought soccer this far since 94.

Maybe instead of goonishly bitching back and forth at one another (Hi Duane!, Hi Soucie!) it would be of benefit to admit that it is far more important to continue to attract new soccer heads to the plight of the game in North America and hope that someone out there, with the gumption, can rise above all of the bullshit to truly lead us forward despite all of the roadblocks, pitfalls of our systems, geographical near-impossibilites, and cultural rants we insist on allowing to defer progress at this most basic level. Blind Love of the Game.

  

Stupid Questions Part 7: On Free Agency

Not going to add to the pile, except to (very earnestly) ask this: when people talk about players wanting "free agency" in the new CBA, do they mean the straight Wikipedia version: "a player whose contract with a team has expired and who is thus eligible to sign with another club or franchise"?  Or "something else", whatever that might be?  And does anyone have an idea if MLS offered them something similar, but not quite "free agency"? 

Some Brief Words on the Hockey and the Football

I've written before that football seems to be the one sport in which match analysts, newspaper reporters, bloggers and fans all begin to sound like film critics.  "There wasn't much quality in the first half," "Not a classic by any means," "There was a great tempo to the match" and so on and so on.  It's not enough for a team to win, it has to be formally and aesthetically pleasing.

That seems unique to the sport.  You don't, for example, hear it often said in my neck of the woods that, "that was a really, bland, cynical display of conservative baseball out there today."  And while there is certainly a qualitative difference in the quality of play witnessed in Canada v. Russia and Finland v. the Czech Republic last night, aesthetic concerns about the quality of play are not usually on the minds of most hockey fans.

The reasons why become obvious the more you watch the sport.  A four goal lead in the last ten minutes of the third period often doesn't mean a damn thing.  Two consecutive power plays can change the course of a game in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds.  There is little to say about the formal symmetry of attacking formations in a sport that involves back-checking, fore-checking, tying up the slot and, as players like to say, "putting the puck on the net and hoping for a good bounce."  Hockey might not always be pretty, yes, but it's usually relentless.  It is constant pace, turnovers, skating skating skating, shots from the point, rebounds and two on ones, three on twos.  Watching it, heart pounding, face hot and mouth dry, you sometimes begin to feel like Dave Bowman disappearing into the monolith.  I often refer to hockey as a cleanse from the slow, exacting nature of football.

Last night Canada beat Russia 7-3 in the mens hockey quarterfinals in the Olympics.  To say Canada has a special relationship with Russia in hockey is a gross understatement.  While Americans have their "Miracle on Ice," beating the Russians Soviet Union in the 1980 winter games, hockey was not and never will be the American national sport.  That victory was meaningful for the Americans in the same way it would be meaningful if the US beat England this summer.  A "miracle" in international sport for the US usually involves beating other countries at a sport Americans don't even really like.

In Canada, ten year-olds could expound on the importance of the Canada-Soviet 1972 Summit Series and Paul Henderson's final, series-clinching goal.  Common folklore has it that the Americans had the ICBMs and Senator McCarthy in the Cold War; we had Phil Esposito.  But even though our battles raged on hard ice, by grappling in a sport mutually adored by two winter nations, Canada and Russia bonded in a way the US can't understand.  We hated the Russians because they loved our national sport, and that's why we loved them.  You can still find Canadians rocking the CCCP with more than a little sense of nostalgia.

And that's why this morning, watching Russian hockey fans with heads bowed into their beers and Ovechkin shirts pulled over their heads, hearing from the Russian press that a gold in hockey would have make up for their disappointing tally in the 2010 games, makes you more proud to be Canadian than any shots of jumping, Maple Leaf-clad Vancouverites. Not because of the schadenfreude, but because of the lingering power of a fifty year, nation-defining struggle with a worthy and familiar foe.  Everyone spoke about how last night was going to be about Ovechkin and Crosby, but in the end it was about Canada v. Russia.  As it has always been.

This Sunday sees two finals, the Olympic Gold medal game in mens hockey, and Aston Villa v. Manchester United in the Carling Cup.  Two finals, two different sports.  While Canada still needs to beat Slovakia on Friday, chances are good they will be there on Sunday.  I can't recall the last time two teams I care about have faced off in a medal round on the same day.  While football is still my wife in the sporting realm, hockey will always be my mistress.  Here's to not having a heart attack.

The Internet is a Psycho Hose Beast: MLS Edition

Since everyone seems to be jumping on the Free Agency Timeline bandwagon, I thought I'd hop on too I and look at how the MLS bloggers have sneezed blood over the weekend, all from some coordinated player remarks on free agency made on Friday, and MLS president Mark Abbott's subsequent response.

Friday, February 19th, 2010 (Player Tweets, Facebook, Ives, Snowden, Carlisle)

• Ives: "Key among the issues being fought over are player free agency and team autonomy in player transactions."
• Snowden: "But say what you will about Wal-Mart - their employees at least have much more freedom than MLS players do when it comes to movement."

Saturday, February 20th, 2010 (Player Propaganda, Question for Mark Abbott, Old Soviet Union)

•  Davis:  "As for Snowden and his latest salvo at Soccer365, it loses some of its thunder in light of his past efforts."
• Goff: "But what is the harm in a player declaring his intent to remain in MLS but wanting to play for a different club?"  
• Tomasch: "If you don’t want a player, why shouldn’t he be free to seek employment elsewhere (like any other worker in any other field in America)?"
• Goff on Twitter: "Source close to players, about #mls cba talks: "It's like the old Soviet Union--everyone knows the system stinks and is holding things back."

Sunday, February 21st, 2010 (Will Players Strike Over Free Agency?)

• Rollins: "However, what is clear is that this could get messy this week."
• Archer: "So what the players have done, after the smoke clears, is given every writer, blogger, journalist and Ontario-based fantasist a question that they can now ask every single player, every chance they get: 'Will you strike?'"
• Clive: "Fans taking a stand on free agency doesn’t make much sense given that most people don’t understand the underlying economics of the league’s long term strategy."
• Tomasch: "If you want the player, pay the player. If you don’t want the player, don’t hold the player hostage."

Monday, February 22nd, 2010 (The Internet Goes Crazy)

• Goff: "Dear Mr. Anschutz Thank you for your time, sir. Can I call you Phil? No? Okay, no worries."
• Loney: "Dear Mr. Goff, Thank you for your letter, Steve. Can I call you Steve? Let me answer that for you."
• Ives: "How exactly would free agency within MLS hurt the league as long as the league has a salary cap? It really can’t, not from the standpoint where skyrocketing salaries would be a concern."
• Sirk: "And that's what happens with internal free agency in MLS. It dilutes the purchasing power of any salary budget, regardless of dollar amount, and simultaneously places inflationary pressure on that salary budget. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
• Clive: "Allowing free agency would be a nail in the single entity coffin, which explains the league’s reluctance to entertain the idea."
• Fake Sigi:  "My original thought on the single entity thing was that the more teams acted like they were competing with each other, the less a court would be able to consider MLS a single entity."
• Davis: "What you have seen from Mark Abbott is "free agency wouldn't be good for the league" and similar quotes. That's it, no official league explanation. Now, plenty of people have made up explanations."
• Rollins: "Nothing is getting sourced right now. If you want to share information you receive about the actual negotiation, you have to go anonymous because it ain't getting out otherwise."