hockey fans for peace: support your team, not the war

Many thanks to Kimball Cariou of Hockey Fans for Peace for this excellent piece in The Straight. As a baseball-loving leftist, I relate on many levels!

It's been an interesting few days since Hockey Fans For Peace hit the media radar. As cofounder, I've watched the small membership of our Facebook group suddenly triple, and I've done some major radio sports-talk-show interviews.

This whole thing was largely sparked by Cherry's ugly rant at the inauguration of the new city council in Toronto. Cherry supporters argue that he simply "supports the troops".

That claim was demolished over Christmas in Kandahar, where Cherry fired off artillery, autographed bombs, and bragged about "chasing the Taliban".

But many hockey fans across Canada have been disturbed by a larger trend—the strategy of the Harper Conservatives to turn athletes and the Canadian Armed Forces into props for their war-making agenda.

It's difficult these days to find a major sports event which does not incorporate reference to "our brave troops in Kandahar". For me, the most gut-wrenching was at the Oct. 31 Saskatchewan Roughriders vs. B.C. Lions game at Empire Stadium in Vancouver.

The psychological aim of this strategy is to sow divisions among Canadians, particularly among the solid majority who want an early return home for the troops in Afghanistan. "Real" hockey fans and "real" Canadians, we are urged to believe, all "support the troops" and therefore back the alleged aims of the military mission.

Anyone who questions this reasoning is immediately under suspicion. Such individuals are somehow not considered true fans or "patriotic" Canadians.

Supposedly we "spit in the faces" of the troops. We are even accused of being "Taliban recruiters". (A Toronto Sun writer hurled this absurd slander at me on Jan. 7 during a call-in on 640 AM's "Opie Show"!).

Read it here, and join Hockey Fans for Peace here.

Read More

jack todd: don cherry is nothing but a phoney

Jack Todd, a sports columnist in Montreal whose book I wrote about here, has some thoughts on Don Cherry.

When Cherry dives in to right-wing politics with both feet firmly in his mouth, he is over the line - the line that separates commentary on hockey from such complex issues as public transit, health care and the war in Afghanistan.

Shameless to the core, Cherry has even devoted one entire segment of Coach's Corner to his own self-aggrandizement as Canada's self-appointed No. 1 soldier. But Cherry the soldier is as phoney as Cherry the bluecollar guy. I know someone who has held the same bluecollar job for at least the past 15 years. Cherry has walked past this person on a regular basis for all those years - and never once said hello.

Still, Cherry wants us to believe that he is blue-collar, while guys like me are the elite, bicycle-riding columnists.

You want a tough, blue-collar guy, Don? A real one, not a phoney? Well, I grew up with one. A father who was a combat veteran of the First World War. An ex-boxer with his hands all smashed up, his nose broken, his brain addled after 70 pro fights as a light-heavyweight and more amateur bouts than he could count. A guy who would drive a spike with his bare fist, then lick the blood off his knuckles.

My father had just about every fault in the book, but he was real. He voted solid Democrat. He stood up for the working man and the little guy. When he had almost nothing, he would give part of what he did have to a family that had nothing at all.

And he would have spotted a phoney like Cherry a mile off.

Read his great column here.

In case you missed it, Cherry recently finagled some media attention by doing his shtick at Toronto City Hall. Toronto was not impressed.

Thanks to The Galloping Beaver.

Read More