The NHL is like my baby

My baby is smart.

One of his favourite things to do is read books with us. I suppose technically he’s not reading the books — more like looking at, smacking and then chewing on them — but he pays rapt attention whenever we prop one up in front of him and start telling him the story.

I don’t know if he’s a lot smarter than your average baby — maybe the Rhodes Scholarship selection committee members and their lawyers had a point — but he amazes me with the things he learns every day. I guess that’s just how the growing mind of a baby works. It’s thrilling to watch up close.

My baby is also, or at least will be, bilingual. Somehow my wife learned how to speak French growing up in Medicine Hat, Alberta — something that seems about as likely to happen as someone learning how to hang-glide growing up in a submarine.

Nevertheless she is fluent in both English and French and speaks only French to our baby so that he will grow up knowing both languages. This arrangement made me nervous at first, envisioning linguistic confusion such as this happening throughout his life:

OPERATOR:

9-1-1, what's your emergency?

MY BABY AT SIX YEARS OLD:

C'est Mama, elle est dead!

OPER:

Mama, L.A. dead?

MBA6YO:

Oui!

OPER:

We? We who?

MBA6YO:

Mama! Elle est not moving!

OPER: 

L.A. not moving? Is there an earthquake? Are you in L.A.? This is Vancouver 9-1-1.

MBA6YO:

Yes, I sais!

OPER:

You say what?

MBA6YO:

I sais c'est Vancouver!

OPER:

You say say Vancouver? Well I say say prank calling 9-1-1 is a federal offense.

MBA6YO:

No! Elle est dying!

OPER:

L.A. is not dying. I was just there last month. There was a movie filming, I think I saw Tom Cruise getting into a golf cart with Nelson Mandela. Anyway, I've tracked your location and called the police. They're on their way to get you now.

MBA6YO:

Bon! Vite! Tell them all to give my Mama aide!

OPER:

You're sick (hangs up).

But apparently going the bilingual baby route actually gives kids more “cognitive flexibility,” according to a study by researchers from Concordia and York Universities. Très good.

Anyway, you’ll remember that this post is called the NHL is like my baby and I am writing that my baby is smart.

No, my two weeks of parental leave have not made me crazy — I am actually inferring that the NHL is smart. That’s a statement I never thought I’d make under Gary Bettman’s rule. After all, under his reign the league did bloat to an ungodly 30 teams — including ridiculous teams in places like Florida, Carolina and Tennessee — while still managing to lose teams in hockey hotbeds Winnipeg, Quebec and Minnesota. And a season was lost to a lockout. And now as Canadian cities that actually like hockey are bending backwards to get teams, it’s “Oh no, that team will never leave Phoenix. Not on my watch.” What a DB.

Anyway, someone else must be running the show these days because the NHL has had some truly inspired ideas and is suddenly as hot as wasabi eye-drops.

The first was allowing HBO to bring it’s fantastic 24/7 show to the rink, resulting in a series about the Capitals and the Penguins that is just f&#*ing incredible, to use the common parlance of the show. The series led up to this year’s Winter Classic outdoor game, another great NHL idea that is becoming such a popular New Year’s Day tradition that college football’s Cowboy Hat Bowl, Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski Bowl and Ball-peen Hammer Bowl are all considering moving to different days.

Now the NHL has come up with the idea of having captains pick teams in a fantasy draft for All-Star weekend. Brilliant, even if the idea was stolen from an old Bill Simmons column. It still took balls for the NHL to make that call, and it has raised the all-star game’s profile from flat-lining newt to frisky golden retriever recovering from surgery.

I still might not watch the game — after all, hockey all-star games are about as exciting as synchronized swimming in a fountain — but I will at least watch the draft and I am more interested in the game than I have been since I was 12 years old.

Smart work, NHL. Now can you please call the Rhodes people and tell them I was just kidding about the bomb threat. 

Photo Brian Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images

Follow me on Twitter @Sportsbaby

The Auburn Tigers are like my baby

 Please note that the Auburn Tigers football team is not like my baby in that I love it or I care about anything it does or I would be the least bit perturbed if anything were to make it sad. In fact, I don’t have much time for the whole college football scene.

What with watching the NBA, NHL, NFL, CFL, MLB, college hoops, soccer, Olympics, tennis, golf, competitive eating and darts — not to mention a few minutes each day spent raising my kid — I just don’t have time to spend a Saturday watching college football.

I have about as much time for college football as I have for dentist appointments — once a year maximum, and that much only because of the national championship game in football and because of the chance that a cute dental hygienist will brush her business against the back of my head while cleaning my teeth.

Anyway, on Monday my baby rolled over from his back to his belly and back again. It was the first time he put that sequence together. Yay.

That same night the University of Auburn football team celebrated a rollover of its own. No, not a rollover like the Los Angeles Lakers in game 6 of the 2008 NBA finals (skip to 3:15 of the video to re-live the moment NBA championship celebrations jumped the shark).

For Auburn it was an actual person literally rolling over during a pivotal moment to help the Tigers claim the NCAA football national title with a 22-19 win over the University of Oregon Ducks. Here's the play.

You can see Auburn running back Michael Dyer get tackled, get back up and run for a big gain. The play set up the game-winning field goal kicked on the final play of the game. The key is that the ballcarrier’s knees never touch the ground as he rolls over his tackler. I don’t like it.

I suppose if a similar play helped my beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders defeat the Godless Edmonton Eskimos, then I’d be OK with it.

But in this case it just seems like a weird way to win a national title — and a slapshot-to-the-nuts way to lose one. I figure that if a defensive player goes to all the trouble of wrapping up a player, stopping all of his forward momentum and throwing him down, he should be rewarded with a tackle even if he has the misfortune of acting as a human landing pad (also known as a “Paris Hilton”). I know the rules say different, but aren’t rules made to be changed when enough bloggers complain about them?

I also hate those moments in sports when all of the players kind of stop, agreeing that the play is over, and then there’s that awkward instant when someone realizes that it isn’t over and starts playing by themselves.

It’s like when I’m doing my thing in my coed floor hockey league and one of the girls on the opposite teams trips over her own stick and falls down. At first my animal instinct always kicks in and my mind says, “Ha ha, sweet, two on one.” But then everyone kind of stops playing and waits to see if the girl is OK. If I keep going on the play and score one of my patented one-timer lifters from my off-wing wall, everyone will think I’m a big D-bag.

Well Auburn, I don’t blame you, but now you are that D-bag. Enjoy the two years that you’ll get with the national title before the NCAA strips it from you because, hypothetically, your Heisman-trophy winning quarterback’s father, a Pentacostal church bishop, is found to have taken a Hummer full of cash (in the name of the lord, of course) in exchange for getting his son to play at Auburn. Hypothetically.

That would make you sad, wouldn’t it Auburn.

In case you’re wondering, my son will not be displaying any of his already obvious rolling over skills on a football field. He won’t be allowed to play the sport due to the risk of suffering the equivalent of a seatbelt-less car crash several times a day during football season. Nothing so avoidable is going to scramble my baby’s brains unless it’s heading home a World Cup winning goal. For Canada. I think he’ll be safe.

Archives: The Olympics are like my unborn baby

I wrote this post about a year ago as I was mulling over the creation of this blog while also celebrating the creation of my baby. 

January, 2010

My back started to hurt today. It was weird -- I took one step out of the door of my basement suite on the way to work and midstride it felt like a piano tuner was changing my spinal cord from a low C to a high F.

I couldn't understand it. Am I so old (I'm only friggin 29!) that I can hurt myself just walking? Then it dawned on me: My back was hurting because I've been carrying my household on my shoulders for the past three months. Since my wife Sports Joanne and I found out we were going to have a baby she has turned from the healthy, happy, hard-working woman I married into a loafing, tooty, moody, whiny, sickly piece of couch furniture and now I'm doing all the work around here.

I'm not used to all this work around the house. I normally have two jobs: take care of all the garbage and do the dishes roughly half the time. I do job number one very well. Job number two takes longer so I often skip it and watch basketball instead.

The rest usually gets done by my super sweet wife. Not anymore. Smells make her sick so she doesn't go into the kitchen anymore. Cleaning products can hurt the baby so she doesn't keep our stuff clean anymore. Everything in the world makes her sick yet her immune system still allows her to watch One Tree Hill -- the swine flu of television dramas.

What's worse is she doesn't even have a hot little baby bump yet that I can play with incessantly and eat Nutella off of when I need a chocolate-hazelnut snack.

God, the sacrifices I make.

Of course, baby doll, I'm kidding. You're doing the magical work of making our beautiful baby and the two chapters of What to Expect When You're Expecting I've read say that what you're going through effing sucks big time. You're beautiful, I love you and you know I'm only kidding so don't fart on my pillow.

For the Sportses (that's us) it's all headed towards something that will be terrifying, poopy and amazing, and in this blog we're going to keep you posted on what that's like. And for those of you detectives out there who noticed our names and thought to yourself, "I wonder if these guys like sports?" and also "I wonder if Sports A is writing this at midnight while Sports J lies beside him on her back in a new, vomit-fighting sleeping position known as 'tiny baby, snoring dragon?'" The answer to both questions is yes, you Perry Mason mofo.

Sports will be a part of every one of these postings as we'll do our best to relate what's happening to our baby to what's happening to all the babies in the world of sport who make magic on the field of play, make memories that we all love and share, and make babies of their own with waitresses at Chili's.

Right now we're two weeks away from the start of the Olympic Games here in Vancouver and there's no snow on the mountain where freestyle skiing and snowboarding will be held. I'm sure the organizers are worried that maybe they shouldn't have put winter sports into a city that gets snow approximately 18 hours out of every year. I'm sure the organizers are thinking that there's too much at stake, that they can't F this thing up. I'm sure they're a little terrified, praying that Mother Nature takes pity on them and makes everything OK. As a soon-to-be first-time dad with a baby the size of a prune swimming two feet away from me, I think I know how they feel. 

The Philadelphia Eagles are like my baby

During the Christmas break my wife and I drove with our four-month-old son from Vancouver to several points across the prairies, subjecting him to long days strapped in the car seat, constantly changing routines and the possibility of sliding off a mountain cliff and plummeting to an early death alongside his dumbass parents in the name of family visiting.

I came away from the trip thinking three things:

1.     I’m not going to subject my child to 3,500 kilometres of icy-death highway again for at least 10 months.

2.     Valemount, B.C., is the redneck snowmobiler capital of the world. It’s like a NASCAR infield on ice. Redneck is not quite right though – can we call them whitenecks? Whatever they’re called, never miss a chance to share a continental breakfast with them at the Valemount Super 8 to hear the authentic chainsaw rasp of voices carved by years of cigarettes, exhaust fumes and shouts of ‘Git ‘er done!’

3.     The Philadelphia Eagles are like my baby.

For most of our holiday my baby was a champion traveler. Often he’d nod off to sleep soon after departure (cars really are God’s gift to parents—they’re like a triple shot of Nyquil). When he wasn’t sleeping he would giggle and play with Mama in the back or just watch out the back window as the mountain scenery rolled by.

The problems only came at the very end of long trips. As our trips rolled past six or seven hours and our final destinations neared, our baby eventually would lose it. It happened around the town of Brooks on one long trip from Revelstoke to Medicine Hat and around Chilliwack on another long haul from Valemount to Vancouver. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Brooks and Chilliwack both smell like the inside of a cow.

The Philadelphia Eagles lost to the Green Bay Packers 21-16 in a first round playoff game Sunday, ending a season in which they were one of the most explosive teams in the NFL and seemed to be a good bet to reach the Super Bowl. Despite their impressive regular season showing, the loss wasn’t a surprise to Eagles fans. Like the Phoenix Suns, the Buffalo Bills of the 1990s, the San Jose Sharks of the past decade or this bridge, the Eagles are doomed to collapse when the going gets really tough.

My advice to these teams, gleaned from my own experiences on the road to glory with temperamental would-be-champions about to crack, is to calm the situation down with a couple of nice boobs to latch on to.

Hey, it worked for Spain.  

Welcome -- Sports are like my baby.

My four-month-old baby isn’t allowed to watch TV until he is two. His Mama says it’ll give him ADD.

I don’t want him growing up selling weed or hosting Entertainment Tonight or anything horrible like that so obviously I’ve stopped watching sports when he is in the room.

Just kidding, I still watch sports all the time, a little something practically everyday. Sometimes a lot of something, like triple-header football Sundays.

My baby does everything in his power to see the screen. He’ll be sitting on my lap facing the complete opposite direction and if I look away for an instant he’ll spin his head around Linda Blair style to catch a few glimpses of the baby-brain scrambling awesomeness.

How do I solve this problem? Start growing dope in hopes that we can go into business together in a few years?

No. I plop him down right in front of the TV. Then I hang a blanket off his little play centre to block his view. Problem solved.

You see, science tells us the concern is with babies watching TV, not hearing TV. Our little guy hears a lot of TV. Apparently that's not as bad as watching a lot of TV.

So he’s learning English from Daddy, French from Mama, pick-and-roll defence from Charles Barkley and yelling from Gus Johnson. (“Time to fill this diaper, can he do it?! The clock is running out. Here comes Mom! She’s going for the change. Can he let it go?! OHHHHH!! Deuces are wild! You gotta love it! HA Haaaaaa!)

I think it’s fitting that one of the main introductions to language for my kid comes from sports. Sport for many people, myself included, is itself a language shared and understood in all kinds of social situations.

Now that my entire life consists of staying within 20 feet of my baby at all times to make sure that he does not die, sports is one of the main things that helps me feel connected to friends I don’t see any more and fun stuff I don’t do anymore.

Fantasy sports leagues give me a chance to connect with my friends, cheering for pretend teams and taunting each other for drafting quarterbacks who do things like this.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders unite my entire family, bringing us joy by winning three championships every 100 years in an eight-team league (it may be a form of child abuse but my baby will be a Rider fan too).

I’ve just started a six-month parental leave from my job as a sports reporter for the North Shore News and this blog is a way for me to keep people updated on the progresses of my baby, pass on parenting tips and make fun a Brett Favre and his recently-retired (hopefully) wang, all through the language of sport. Each post will compare something in the sports world to something in my baby’s world.

There will be a lot of joy and also a lot of poop. Hope you enjoy.