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Friday, December 23, 2011
Bane of Canada: language
While America’s historical embarrassment is how they dealt with racism, Canada’s embarrassment is how they deal with languages. (It seems to me that every country has some us-v-them.) Just when you think USA and Canada have made huge advances, sometimes we get a wake-up call from the sports world.
The Montreal Canadiens are taking some heat for hiring a unilingual coach to replace Jacques Martin. Obviously, if you limit your pool of coaches to those that must be able to speak French, you are going to ignore really good coaches, and instead hire Mario Tremblay and a GM like Rejean Houle. No team outside of Quebec would ever hire these two guys (and they haven’t).
Lowetide notes that has the Canadiens gone on a winning streak with their new coach, this would not even be an issue (today anyway… check out the history of 1971). Language, chemistry, intangibles… all that is a non-issue if you are winning. Applies to the real-world too.
Actually, I wonder how much of this kind of an idea could be tapped as a market inefficiency in baseball (sorry - not a hockey guy). Let’s say you have two managers, all things being equal, and one of them is English/Spanish bilingual. That would be a pretty huge “get” for a team, since there are so many players in MLB who speak Spanish as a first language. It doesn’t really seem to be on the radar that often, but I would think that it would be valuable. I’m sure Ozzie Guillen would tell you it’s helped him. Just a thought.