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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Canada
Will Leitch did a nice tribute to Canada. For whatever reason, he also had to resort to a takedown. Not a good takedown, which is fine. But, the cliched takedown. He references Ben Johnson, which is accurate and probably the single event that glorifies the impact of steroids in the sports world, but ignores Donovan Bailey and the Canadian relay team that took on the Americans. (For whatever reason, the American media like to say that the US lost rather than the Canadians won. Even in the current Olympics, they always frame it as if it was America’s game to lose.) We remember Bailey and we try to forget about Ben Johnson. If that’s all he said, fine. Ben Johnson was a huge blight. And taking on the political system is Canada is fair game. Canadians are not politically-passionate the way Americans are (whether that is good or bad, who knows), and we have our political issues. Canadians can get their hands slapped there. For his otherwise fine tribute, I can give him a pass if he stopped there.
But, he resorted to the oldest sports cliche of them all: “Hardly anyone watches the NHL anymore”. How many times do we have to put up with this b.s.? Will, did you know that the NHL revenues are half that of MLB? If MLB is a fantastic success, what do you call a league that is at 50% of fantastic success? I’d call that pretty good. No worse than fine. But, “hardly anyone watches”? Total attendance last year, in the regular season, was 21.3 million fans in 1230 games. The NBA, in the exact same number of games, had 21.4 million fans. Does anyone talk about the NBA as an also-ran league?
And Canadians love to watch hockey on TV, as does the regional areas in the north of the US that has hockey teams, as does parts of Europe. If all that means “hardly anyone”, then ok, Will has a point. Otherwise, Will fell into the same cliched trap that those who don’t follow hockey fall into: if Will doesn’t watch hockey, that must mean no one else is either.
Good man, that Will. He pleaded mea cupla in an email.