Calgary writer’s piffle undeserving of our ire

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/08/2009 (6202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the first things you are warned about as a player on a pro football team is to minimize the number of headlines you generate that the opposition can stew about and smoulder over leading up to a game.

It is practically a commandment that ‘thou shall not provide the opposition with additional motivation to beat you down’ because professional football games are hard enough to win as it is without stacking the deck against yourself.

It is one thing for a player to climb up on the proverbial soapbox and belittle his upcoming opponent knowing full well he will have to face them in a contact environment.

It is quite another for an outside observer to do it — a person who in no way, shape or form will ever be forced to face up to their words and will never come out from behind the shade of his newspaper.

Last weekend, as you most likely know, we travelled to Calgary for the back end of our two-game series with the defending Grey Cup champions. In a city where we have not won for eight years now, and after a terrible start, we made a game of it in the fourth quarter, with several opportunities to pull even and possibly push the game into overtime. While there is never a silver lining for losing, this was at least a football game, which most of my experiences in Calgary since 2002 were not.

We beat the spread of 141/2 points, and for a moment in the fourth quarter, had the defending champs on the ropes and seriously entertaining the idea of losing both their games — the first 42-30 — to the suddenly offensively endowed Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

But alas, the day of the game, which was a pivotal contest for both teams, all travelling members of the Blue Bombers who happened to read the local rag while eating breakfast were subjected to the defamatory grousing of one Eric Francis of the Calgary Sun. “This one will be a cakewalk,” he ascertained. “A massive blowout,” is what his football intuition told him and what he penned in his column. In fact, he surmised, “there’s no logical reason to explain how the Stamps could lose tonight at McMahon or somehow fall short of eclipsing the 14.5-point spread.”

Well Captain Spock, logical reasoning aside, this was bulletin-board material to be sure, except for the absence of one critical factor — who is Eric Francis and what makes us care about the musings of an obvious Stampeders homer?

You see, if these remarks had come from someone actually employed or affiliated with the Stampeders — other than a superfan reporter — like a player, coach, president, or even a sales manager, we might have taken Eric’s advice and “…cut this column from the paper and post it in their locker-room before tonight’s game.” But they didn’t. They came from a blowhard who could not beat Winnipeg’s most inept player in the 79-year history of the franchise with a piano tied to his leg.

And that is why the players didn’t post his column in our locker-room, because try as we might, we have a hard time being motivated to find that elusive fifth gear by the words of a man we will never play against, who will never step onto the field he knows so much about, who we will never even see or meet, because he sure as sugar doesn’t have the stones to come into our locker-room, and whose words don’t carry near as much weight as the muted ramblings of Buzz and Boomer, our team mascots.

When you have been as erratic as we have been this early in the season, it is par for the course to expect and accept criticisms from those who are paid to watch, evaluate and translate the game, and if you are going to revel in their praise you had better be able to suffer the condemnations.

But there is a fine line between expressing a demonstrative opinion about a team that has been struggling and transitioning and making sensationalistic statements based more on fanaticism than fact.

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.