The bickering between the National Hockey League and its players was continuing with no end in sight after days of promise that the hassle soon would be over, followed by periods of doom that the season of 2012-13 would be cancelled completely.
With that, I sat at my computer to pen yet another piece for the Mighty Eagle of Cochrane. Then, though, disaster as the two sides blew everyone away with the announcement they had reached a tentative agreement.
What a waste of a magnificent piece of hard work, I thought, having spent countless hours to come up with something entertaining for your eyes.
So it was rewrite time, and in a hurry because we only write once a week.
Not wanting to waste my efforts, however, I just changed the tenses, if that’s proper English.
Like I was talking about the losing of the 2012-13 season completely, but even now it means only a season of 2013 because they wasted the first half with obvious greediness on both sides.
It’s to the point that some, and I’m in that some, were getting sick and tired of the whole deal and were trying to get on with their lives getting the one bonus with the recent World Junior Hockey Championship in Russia. Mind you, that one ended in even more disappointment when the Canadian unit fell at the semi-final level – quite possibly because they were not as well prepared for the pressure-packed situation in that last game against the United States.
My point was to be that what we were looking for on sports television was something current, not replays of Stanley Cup games from 2008 or reruns of the great movies Slapshot and Caddy Shack. But, recently, that’s what the networks offered between 30-minute talk sessions about what was or was not happening on the lockout scene. I wondered at times how much money those networks were wasting on paying people to be in New York, or wherever the two sides got together, just to report the same garbage. Sure, they used different words. But the bottom line was nothing had really changed since this whole mess became such a mess more than 100 days and billions of dollars ago.
So I was looking ahead and said I would much rather watch replays of tennis matches from years gone by mostly because most of us would never remember who had won or lost because that’s a sport I don’t think has much of a following in our area. And if a network decided on that, I would have preferred womens’ tennis for some oddball reason.
They could also run replays of games in the National Basketball Association because I’m sure not too many southern Albertans can even give you the nicknames of six of those teams, much less the cities in which they play. In fact, I thought, they could re-run games already played this year and we’d all be surprised at the result not having watched it live. Then again, for an NBA game you only have to watch the final minute and a half to catch all the action.
I still contended that cricket would be a hockey replacement, if only because a diet of that for a year or so might help us understand what the heck is going on.
And if one network wanted to keep the sports fans they were losing during the battle of the two sides and the boring repetition of the NHL fiasco, they could access the many, many years of Stampede Wrestling and Ed “Ring-A-Ding-Dong-Dandy” Whalen. Even back then we knew who was going to win before they rang the bell. But that was certainly entertainment.
In fact I, personally, would like to watch a replay of the one Stampede Wrestling show I hosted probably 30 years ago at the request of late-promoter Stu Hart. Whalen was doing the Flames play-by-play on CFAC-TV back then and the hockey club played a rare Friday-night game on the road, forcing Hart to find a replacement. Reluctantly, I agreed at the last minute. And, I can tell you today, that it was the toughest 100 bucks I ever made in my life.
My thoughts were that we hockey fans should be considered when the networks tried to fill the space left by the almost 600 hockey games that had been lost forever due to the lockout, work stoppage, strike or whatever you want to call it.
We had been patient to that point, and didn’t think they should make us suffer any more.
Then a surprise settlement, albeit tentative, developed, making all of my previous efforts basically a waste of time.
But I saved it with the magic of the rewrite.
The NHL is coming back. But to be brutally honest, after what they’ve put us through, I think I’ll take women’s tennis, NBA from the past and present, cricket and/or Stampede Wrestling.
Today’s joke is also a golf note because it says golf balls are like eggs; white and in packages of 12, and a week later you must buy more.
