Too late for proper perspective

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/09/2009 (5864 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HANDS up, who’s getting tired of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ Crisis/Cir­cus- of-the-Week?

Paper napkins. Crotch of Canada. Derick Armstrong. The non-call-in show. Pacman Jones. Starting quarterback benched/pay cut/gone for the season. Emergency call to Bishop. White boards. Are we missing anything?

Oh yeah, one of the team’s longest serving and productive players wants to be traded.

Hey, I like the circus as much as anyone but, seriously, it gets to the point where there’s too many clowns jammed in the car.

And sometimes, frankly, you reach a critical mass where even a situation that has nothing to do with the team’s belea­guered management and head coach turns into a bearded lady swallowing a sword.

Take Barrin Simpson’s trade demand, for instance. A lot of reasonable folks will look at the linebacker’s protest and immediately assign blame to the usual suspects: Mike Kelly, Lyle Bauer, the media. Everybody’s pretty much divided into their camps by now.

But this puppy is pretty cut and dried: In­jured veteran is asked to grab a little bench.

Player balks and goes public that he wants to be dealt. Dany Heatley, anyone?

This creates three problems. First, you’ve got yourself Controversy No. 243 and it’s only halfway through a dismal season.

Second, you’ve got a star player who wants out, which can only create or cement rifts in the locker-room. Third, how hard would it be for the Bombers to acquiesce to Simp­son’s demand for a trade now that it’s gone network? Ask Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray how that little number plays out.

So clearly it would be unfair to hang this latest sideshow on Kelly. Regardless, how­ever, the way this season has played out in Bomberville has been a study in irony.

After all, a first-time head coach comes in with lofty expectations and almost im­mediately makes noise about "controlling the message." The end result? A subsequent train wreck in same team’s public relations, to the point of being unprecedented.

Rookie mistake. Because most head coaches in any professional sport are smart enough to know that if you vow to "control the message," the media will interpret that as an attempt to control them, and we’re an unruly mob. Better luck herding cats.

In Kelly’s case, he’s tried so hard to control the message, made it such a prior­ity — which is an odd preoccupation for a head coach of a 3-6 football team — that the result, no matter who you want to blame, has been one disaster after another. I mean, haven’t you tried so hard to do something that sometimes, if your method or approach is fundamentally flawed, you end up being your own worst enemy?

Look at the evidence. Never have I seen in more than a dozen seasons covering the Bombers, a head coach more dead-set on trying to control the message. And in those dozen years I’ve never seen the message so wildly out of control.

Even in cases like this, where the club is an innocent bystander, the result is, at least to a growing con­stituency, "Enough is enough." The circumstances become irrelevant. It’s like two life-long rivals who forget what they’re fighting about in the first place, but it’s too late. The die has been cast.

So if this latest episode is the last straw for some fans, the Bombers as an organization have to look in a mirror. Their team is 3-6 and this Sunday will play a team that beat them soundly the week before. Meanwhile, this is yet another unwelcome distrac­tion for a team that seems unable to shake them.

Sure, players will put on a brave face and tell you how such diversions have no affect on their preparations and performance. Until the end of the sea­son and you ask one of them what went wrong and they’ll say, "Dude, are you kidding me? How were we supposed to be successful in such a toxic, turbu­lent environment? Oh, and it might have helped just a smidge if we had a quarterback."

You want to know what happens when you try too hard to "control the message"? In this case, the message eventually runs away, joins a cult and shaves its head. The message is cur­rently wearing sandals and a robe and giving away pamphlets at the airport entitled: "The Apocalypse is Coming."

Perhaps if the Bombers had spent more time this season controlling the message on the field, the Barrin Simp­son incident would have been an iso­lated blip that had no blowback for the club whatsoever. Instead, even when Kelly and the club are in the right, it’s perceived at this point as just another clown getting out of the car.

That’s unfortunate. It’s also getting a little old.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca