Photo: Watching the Leafs Turn

That was a hell of a thing Toronto had going for a few days there, wasn't it? Back in that heady age when the Maple Leafs had qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs, but before they did what the Maple Leafs do and screwed up in the last minutes, there was an energy in the city, an electricity. Working next door to the Air Canada Centre, I couldn't help but get caught up in it somewhat. In this photo, the crowd has gathered in Maple Leaf Square to watch Game 3 unfold. Let them have their celebration; it took another week after this shot was taken for the Leafs to blow their chance for the forty-fifth year running.

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Photo: From Kite to Waves

There's not much that I can say about this one that isn't immediately apparent. I don't have any real experience with water sports or kitesurfing or anything like that. So instead, here's a shot I took of a kitesurfer taking advantage of a good wind over Semiahmoo Bay just off White Rock, on the sort of blue sky day that brings everyone down to the beach.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).

The Business of the Five Rings

There's no denying it - the Olympics are big business. Every two years, billions of dollars change hands over that international spectacle of sport, from logos that resemble Lisa Simpson giving head to sponsorship agreements that cover entire cities; just ignore the fact that much of the money comes from the tax coffers of already strained governments, governments that hardly seem to hesitate at the prospect of building mountains of money when day-to-day services go unfunded. Don't think about that - look over there! Haven't you heard that the world is going to be watching?

I can remember, back in 2000, my irritation at the fact that Beijing won the 2008 Summer Olympic Games over Toronto, because dammit, I wanted the world to be watching - that, and perhaps it would have motivated the city government to start work on a desperately-needed transit expansion that is even more desperately needed twelve years later. Nevertheless, in retrospect I'm pretty sure that the IOC did T.O. a favor - even though people can get pretty worked up about the supposed "prestige" of their city hosting the Olympics. Here, let me repost this video I shot in Daley Plaza in 2009 when Chicago was defeated in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.


For the past little while news of London's preparations for the 2012 Games have been filtering onto the internet, news like dedicated VIP lanes for Olympic officials or the widening of London's panopticon with face- and plate-recognizing CCTVs or a 5,000-volt electric fence separating the Olympic zone from the rest of London. It's practically an extended commercial for the high-tech security industry. For me, though, it was the news of the SAMs that did it. That's surface-to-air missiles, for the shooting-down of enemy - in this case, read "terrorist" - aircraft, and in order to ensure the security of the Games, surface-to-air missile batteries are being installed on top of apartment complexes surrounding the Olympics site.

Protecting the Olympics is, of course, not a new thing. I'm told the Canadian Forces had units around Vancouver in case someone tried to attack the Games back in 2010, and in London the centerpiece of the defensive efforts is going to take the form of an aircraft carrier positioned in the River Thames. It's just that for me at least, the whole "install missile batteries on top of residential buildings" factor pushed it into farce for me. Well, maybe not farce. It forces me to the conclusion, though, that there's something dreadfully wrong with how we conduct the Olympics today.

It's not about the sports anymore, if indeed it ever was. The Olympics are all about advertising. Sponsors advertising their products for the people in the stands and the ones watching at home. Security companies advertising their solutions to keeping vast public events safe. Cities advertising that they are safe. The sports are just window dressing, the stuff that gets the people in the door so that the money can change hands.

Can we break this cycle? Right now, it seems, there are a great deal of people who have a vested interest in the Olympics, and no shortage of cities falling over each other to beggar themselves by hosting a Games. What sort of solutions are there? A specially-designated Olympic Island, say, to which the games return time after time? A circuit of predetermined cities across the continents that pass off Games from one to the other? I don't know. It is, after all, big business - and big business doesn't change until it has to.

"The Law is Not for Me, But Thee"

With what looked to be the possibility of the Vancouver Canucks making a clear skate to the Stanley Cup now in question after the Boston Bruins' furious comeback in the last two games, people are wanting to know why. How did the Canucks go from the victories they pulled off in Vancouver to getting drubbed by seven goals in Game 3 and four in Game 4? Is the Stanley Cup going to be paraded through Stanley Park in 2011 after all, or will defeated and dispirited Canucks fans just burn Granville Street to the ground?

That I don't particularly follow hockey is an understatement - for perspective, I only found out this year that the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas eighteen years ago. So it may be that I'm out of touch with the cultural norms of the sport and what people will tolerate from its players. Nevertheless, my question is more along the lines of "how is it that Aaron Rome can give a man a severe concussion and get away with just a four-game suspension?"

This wasn't just a tap. Nathan Horton had to be carried off the ice on a stretcher and straight into an ambulance. If this same thing had happened in, say, Boston Common instead of TD Garden, do you think Rome would have gotten off so easily? Considering that the General Laws of Massachussets define the punishment for assault or assault and battery as "imprisonment for not more than 2 1/2 years in a house of correction or by a fine of not more than $1,000," I somehow doubt it.

Granted, there are circumstances where some laws of that sort are in abeyance - the battlefield, for instance. But no matter how much some of its fans may want to see it that way, hockey isn't war. These are PLAYERS. They were playing a game, separated from the activities of children in the backyard only in size and scope. But no one seems to care. "That's just how the game is played." "That's what they get paid the big bucks for."

Personally, I dislike the notion of people being put above the law, even if only in context and implication.

It reminds me, in some ways, of what's still going on in Toronto, where fallout from the G20 nearly a year ago continues to settle. Report after report of police brutality during that harsh weekend surfaced in the weeks and months after, but in cases such as the alleged police beating of Dorian Barton - no relation, as far as I know - multiple investigations by the SIU, the watchdog organization of Ontario's police forces, were foiled because of non-cooperation. From the police.

In some respects, it's understandable - police officers have difficult, dangerous jobs that civilians can't easily relate to. It's easy to see why police officers support each other so strongly. But when it comes down to a situation where a suspect officer can't be positively identified by any one of eleven police witnesses, including that officer's roommate, things go a bit beyond. What if the shoe was on the other foot? If my roommate beat the shit out of a cop, and the police knew I was his roommate, and yet I was unable to identify him, what do you think might happen to me?

Justice can be a tricky thing. When people outside of very particular contexts start treating it as unequal, it doesn't get any easier to balance.

Who Supports the Sports?

I've never been that into sports. Sure, I collected baseball cards as a kid and cheered on the Jays' World Series wins in 1992 and 1993, but it was less out of a deep, abiding interest and more because I was a socially awkward ten-year-old, and an interest in baseball is right on the contract for being a ten-year-old boy. It's not something I follow at all anymore - hell, it was only within the last month that I discovered the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas eighteen years ago. Though I will admit that I was sorely tempted to brave the crowds at Wrigley Field the first time I was in Chicago. It's not something that's important to me, but I recognize its broad and long-standing appeal in the population at large. Sports speak to something primal: they've been with us from the beginning.

Modern-day organized sports, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

Yesterday the Globe and Mail ran an article from John Allemang asking a simple question: "if arts and culture are publicly funded, why not sports arenas?" I know enough about sports to know that this is a third rail, and it's a complicated issue besides. It stems from recent noises that have emanated from Ottawa recently, suggesting that the federal government may assist in the financing of a new hockey arena in Quebec City - part of their cunning plan to lure the Nordiques back home from Colorado. Government involvement in cultural affairs is not new; there are many such venues that get some government support, from arthouses to science fiction magazines.

As sports do occupy a major place in modern culture, it's easily arguable that sports facilities should only be entitled to a share of that same funding. I can see that point... but for me, there's only one fly in the ointment.

How many sports venues are currently owned by for-profit corporations, explicitly as profit-making endeavors?

Chase Field, a publicly-owned sports venue in Phoenix, Arizona

As a member of the Torontonian diaspora, the example of SkyDome still stings. Back in the late 1980s, what was then one of the most technologically advanced stadiums in North America - just look at that dome! - cost $570 million to build, with the cost split between the governments of Metro Toronto, Ontario, and Canada, as well as twenty-eight Canadian corporations - corporations that, incidentally, paid $5 million in 1980s dollars for stadium exclusivity, and so you could be sure you wouldn't get any Pepsi products at the dome. The big problem is that there were extensive cost overruns, enough so that the Dome wasn't making enough money to pay them off - so, ultimately, its debts were paid off by the provincial government in 1994, from provincial revenues, and sold into private ownership for the bargain basement price of $151 million. When Rogers bought it in 2004, it paid the princely sum of $25 million.

Ontario's tax dollars at work.

Given that experience... there are limited circumstances where I'd be okay with tax revenue going to support a sports venue. If it's done in conjunction with private partners, and it's the for-profit private partners that are on the hook in case of cost overruns - as was the case with Chase Field in Phoenix - and if a share of the revenues go back into the public purse, I could conceivably be for it.

What I'm not for is the subsidization of profit-seeking corporations with tax dollars. Taxes should be used for delivering public services - water supply, electricity, space exploration (at least until private corporations find a profit motive out there), infrastructure, public transit, and so on - and even then, we have to remember to keep our priorities in order. Look at the example of Arlington, Texas - at 380,000 people it is the forty-ninth largest city in the United States, and it does not have a public transit system. Why? Perhaps part of it has to do with the fact that the requisite share of Arlington's sales tax revenue, which appears to be one of the only real options for funding mass transit in Texas, is instead going towards paying off the debt for building Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and Cowboys Stadium.

Governments shouldn't be the ones left holding the bags for these places unless they're the only ones that get the money when times are good.

PDP #110: From Here, From Wrigley

Wrigley Field is one of the temples of baseball, and its occupants, the Chicago Cubs, are the Maple Leafs of the baseball world - they haven't won a World Series since 1908, but their fans love them with a rabid passion regardless. Yesterday, during my exploratory wanderings, I took the 'L' to Addison and ended up circumnavigating Wrigley. From the ballhawks standing around with well-worn mits at the corner of Kenmore and Waveland, to every second building advertising skyboxes or with actual rows of bleachers installed on the roof, and the number of scalpers loudly selling tickets, Wrigley is a hub of energy that completely beats out anything you can find in Toronto.

What really struck me, though, was this line of CTA buses on West Addison, almost half a dozen articulated and a couple of them not, waiting for the Cubs to finish being drubbed by the Diamondbacks (the score, if you're interested, was ultimately 12-3 for the Diamondbacks) and for tens of thousands of worked-up Cubs fans to come streaming out the exits to wherever they're off to.

All of Chicago has that energy, that ever-present dull roar of activity. I think it'll be some time before Toronto can really equal that. Chicago's been a metropolis, relatively speaking, for a hundred and fifty years; until the mid-70s, Toronto was essentially the Indianapolis of the north. If it wasn't for the 500, would anyone care about Indianapolis? I don't know, and that's exactly the thing.

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