3 wise men or 3 stooges? We find out today

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2008 (6535 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What unfolds today on the frosty tundra of Canad Inns Stadium has the potential to be more than simply a playoff game, but a referendum of sorts on the architects of the entire enterprise.

Moreover, it may determine if patience is indeed a virtue, as we’ve so often been told, or simply a fatal form of inaction.

After all, how many times this often tortured season did it cross anyone’s mind that Kevin Glenn couldn’t get it done? Or that the Bombers needed a mass infusion of leadership? Or that young Alexis Serna should be denied a passport?

Answer: What comes after a trillion?

Yet through it all, president and CEO Lyle Bauer, head coach Doug Berry and GM Brendan Taman, in their own ways, refused to make sweeping changes to a team that, at the outset of the 2008 season, was labelled as a legitimate Grey Cup contender.

Sure, they traded Charles Roberts and benched Glenn for a spell, but as we say back on the farm, that’s small potatoes given the pressure cooker that contained both Berry and Taman for much of the long summer.

Taman repeatedly said that he still believed in the team he’d built and that eventually his lads would come around, as opposed to, you know, just going in circles.

Of course, this was a gamble. Despite a Grey Cup appearance last year, Taman isn’t and wasn’t exactly bathed in job security. In fact, that infamous 0-4 start was blowing up in the face of the GM who’d been lauded for re-signing so many pending free agents during the off-season.

Taman pulled the pin on a struggling Roberts and landed a valuable asset in Joe Smith, to go along with the newly promoted Fred Reid, to secure the Bombers backfield. And don’t forget that dealing Roberts was another risk that could have backfired. But clearly it didn’t.

Still, for the most part, Taman resisted the pleas to blow the whole thing up; that the Bombers as an entity lacked the focus, leadership and cohesion to amount to anything close to the sum of their parts. Taman kept the hand he dealt.

“I’m not into the ‘sending-a-message’ thing,” Taman told Free Press football writer Ed Tait back in August. “I don’t need to cut a guy and make him a sacrificial lamb to send a message to our team. I’m just not going to do that.” Then there’s the big guy in the corner office, who didn’t bend to the mob mentality, which was to can Berry after a brutal 1-6 start.

“As an organization we need to continue to support the coaches and support our players. And maybe that will ultimately lead to my own demise but, you know what, so be it,” said Bauer, also in August. “This is a group that was one play away from winning the Grey Cup last year. They deserve more than just a very quick shuffle out the door when things get tough because we’re all there to celebrate things and be on the bandwagon when things are good. At this juncture (firing the coach or GM) is not the right move.”

But perhaps the most intriguing and bewildering example of patience has been Berry’s insistence on keeping Serna in the fold in spite of the rookie’s erratic foray into professional football.

Let’s be honest, the Bombers neophyte placekicker has been subjected to more streaks than Pink’s hair.

Yet, again, Berry has remained faithful to Serna, sometimes to the point of incredulity. Like the time Serna missed two short field goals during one mid-season game to the right. Berry’s confused response: “He never misses to the right.”

Huh?

Yet at the dawn of the 2008 playoffs, Serna finished the season hitting seven of his last eight, including the game-winner in Montreal two weeks ago and a 4-for-4 showing against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats last week.

On Wednesday, the embattled kicker was named CFL special teams player of the week. Who knew?

Today, however, we’ll find out if the faith of Bauer, Taman and Berry will be rewarded with a ticket to the East Final, which would probably keep them all safe from their occupational gallows.

Or will the Bombers season end at a hollow 8-11, thereby serving up to the second-guessers a feast of possibilities?

Tolstoy once wrote, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” (Kind of ironic, when you think about it, in that Tolstoy was always Russian. Ahem.)

But you get our point. If this afternoon’s contest with the incoming Eskimos is a referendum on the Bombers season, we’re about to find out if management’s philosophy of resisting the urge to panic will pay dividends.

Or perhaps we’ll find out, with apologies to Tolstoy, that their beliefs were wholeheartedly misplaced all along.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Randy Turner
Reporter

Randy Turner spent much of his journalistic career on the road. A lot of roads. Dirt roads, snow-packed roads, U.S. interstates and foreign highways. In other words, he got a lot of kilometres on the odometer, if you know what we mean.

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