‘Crybaby’ crack not cool

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/10/2009 (5835 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was one of those locker-room eruptions that had heads spinning to find the source spewing venom.

After all, when Doug Brown holds court it’s hard not to be swallowed up by a 6-foot-8, 300-pound man teeing off with so much anger his face turns red and the major arteries in his neck and forehead jump out like the roots of a big, ol’ tree.

And in the process Sunday’s Winnipeg Blue Bomber-B.C. Lions tilt has suddenly just become a whole lot juicier.

First, a little background…

It was just prior to the Bombers-B.C. game in Vancouver in August when 15 or so Lions turned to the Winnipeg sideline and delivered a wrestling move in which they raised their arms and chopped down at their groin areas. The gesture was, for the most part, missed by the TV cameras and those in the press box but Brown brought attention to it in his weekly Free Press column a few days later.

The CFL subsequently checked into the matter and the Lions organization, led by GM and head coach Wally Buono, apologized to the Bombers while the B.C. players levied a fine against themselves.

The issue seemed dead and buried until the last couple of days when Lions defensive end Ricky Foley suggested to the Vancouver Sun that Brown was a “crybaby” for using his column as a platform to bring attention to the gesture.

Told of that on Friday, Brown went off…

“I got past it, but if they want to start chirping about it in B.C. we can bring it up again, man,” he said. “You come out and you have some premeditated, juvenile, high school antics that you’re going to do from wrestling that happened 10 years ago? I mean, you just don’t… You don’t come out and disrespect a team potentially on national television, whether the cameras pick it up or not. You don’t face our sideline and do that.

“If they have a problem with how I responded to that… action-equals-reaction, idiots. That’s how it works. For someone to defend their actions? Wow. I’m at a loss for words.”

In short, even though football is a highly-volatile emotional game rife with trash-talking and insults, the Bombers feel the Lions’ gesture crossed a line because it was premeditated and not delivered in a heat-of-the-moment-type situation.

“There’s just certain things you don’t do to a player,” said Bomber linebacker Ike Charlton. “You can pump your fist at him, you can talk trash at him.

But that’s just something you don’t do.

“It’s disrespectful. It’s ‘I don’t care about you. You’re no good. I’m better than you. I’m your superior.’ That’s how I looked at it and it’s just something you don’t do. You can taunt a player… everybody taunts a player. I do it.

“Excuse my language, but that’s a ‘F-You.’ That’s what that was. ‘F-You. You don’t belong here, we’re B.C., you’re Winnipeg, you’re no good.’ We took that as a slap in the face and then went out and showed them (in a 37-10 victory).”

Bomber head coach Mike Kelly said in his daily media scrum the incident surprised him when he first witnessed it, but considered it forgotten because of Buono’s adept handling of the matter.

But Foley’s comment this week was akin to dumping gasoline on burning embers and the story became all the buzz — again — in the Bomber locker-room after practice on Friday.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” continued Brown. “It was an embarrassment to their organization, to our organization and to the CFL as well. So, if they’re defending those antics and they think my reaction of writing a column and bringing it to attention was unreasonable, well, you know what, man, you get what you pay for. You don’t poke a dog behind a fence with a stick.

“If they want to keep talking about it then we can carry it over. It’s too bad Foley plays defensive end if he’s got something to say about this.”

Sunday’s revised forecast, then, calls for a high of 13 with a mix of sun and cloud and the occasional hot flash of anger.

ed.tait@freepress.mb.ca

today’s bomber report D3