There goes my antihero; on Warren Zevon and how pretentiousness passes into truth
I found Warren Zevon at the same time I was losing myself and that happened to be when Napster was flourishing.
There it is. There was absolutely nothing honest-to-goodness organic about how I came to identify with the artist’s artist. It started out with something so cliché. In the mid-’90s, when Paul Shaffer was on vacation from The Late Show, David Letterman used to have Warren fill in as the bandleader. It was fascinating — at least to an 18-year-old raised by TV. Here was Dave sandbagging a talk show convention by giving a role that calls for gentle banter over to someone predisposed to pithy muttering. Why? Respect for Warren’s genius. Dave was a fan of Warren and I wanted to be Dave — I even named our family dog after him.
Web 1.0 search engines helped point up that other cult figures whose wavelength seemed fun to be on — Hunter S. Thompson, the former Expos left-hander Bill (Spaceman) Lee — were big Zevon fans. Jackson Browne and Dwight Yoakum had covered him. Warren had written for Linda Ronstadt. That was how it started. It was the late 1990s and I was an lonely post-teen who had already punted on ever being rich, understood or loved.
All that alone time led to downloading a lot of music on a dial-up connection.
Other, better, more incisive people have waxed profoundly about Warren Zevon’s lyricism, especially since the 10th anniversary of his death passed last month. There was his acidic satire of contemporary mores, whether he was targeting male privilege (Excitable Boy), feral capitalism (Mr. Bad Example, written in the early days of Reagonomics) or U.S. foreign policy (Lawyers, Guns and Money). There were songs that, maybe with better promotion or a more commercial dumbing-down, could have been anthems for the Me Decade (I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and Play It All Night Long). He was confessional, particularly in his rumination on alcoholism, Desperadoes Under The Eaves (“still wakin’ up the mornin’ with shaking hands / and I’m trying to find a girl who understands me / but except in dreams you’re never really free").
There was also a particular fascination with the timeless theme in Judeo-Christian culture that being bad is good. That came to the fore in Frank And Jesse James (“No one knows just how they came to be misunderstood / but the poor Missouri farmer knew / Frank and Jesse do the best they could”) and yes, Werewolves Of London. Considering that Warren – like John Lennon – was a right bastard in his personal life, particularly to his ex-wife and biographer Crystal Zevon, that might have been his way of working out his guilt. I happen to be the opposite. I prejudge myself. I keep people at a distance since I worry that caring will lead to me hurting them.
This melancholic current that coursed through it, but looking back, that might have been a case of a listener transferring his own fears and frailties on to the artist. Warren Zevon created music since he was great at it, artistically and technically. Yet there was always this sense I assumed that he knew on some level, he was never going to have the audience he lied about wanting.
For instance, take Gorilla, You’re A Desperado. It almost sounds like Warren’s attempt at a novelty song, something Disco Duck-esque. The narrator opens, “Big gorilla at the L.A. zoo / snatched the glasses right off my face / took the keys to my BMW / left me here to take his place,” then explains that the primate has stainless-steel cojones to inherit a set of problems one would not give to a monkey on a rock ... “I wish the ape a lot of success / I’m sorry my apartment’s a mess / most of all I’m sorry if I made you blue / I’m betting the gorilla will too.” As it goes on, though, it becomes a riff on the emptiness of late 20th-century life, almost like a flare being shot off to warn people about that having nice things could never fill an existential void. It was like a warning of what was to come in the ’80s and how that, excuse the straight-line view, would begat Bill Clinton in the ’90s and Kim Kardashian in the aughties: “Then the ape grew very depressed / went through transactional analysis / he plays racquetball and runs in the rain / still he’s shackled to a platinum chain.” That was great imagery on the downside of upward mobility. Of course, it was much too layered to ever work on a top-40 station. You almost wonder if Warren did that on purpose.
Another song I would use to try to convert someone to a Warren Zevon fan is The French Inhaler. Again, it’s first-person narrative where Warren positioning himself as a would-be male feminist and a chauvinist all at once. It’s a look at the stereotypical L.A. culture of beautiful young women who try to live off their looks by playing the ingénue, pandering to older men’s vanity (“drugs and wine and flattering light / you must try again till you get it right / Maybe you’ll end up with someone different every night”).
A verse later, there’s a dissolve to where the narrator and the titular siren are now in a relationship (“I-I-I thought you’d be a star / so I drank up all the money / yes, I drank up all the money / with these phonies in this Hollywood bar”). Then there’s another shift, a big reveal that uncovers that the middle part of the song was just W.Z. imagining how the relationship would fizzle. It turns out the temptress was leading him on, which sets up this mutually assured destruction: “Your pretty face it looked so wasted / Another pretty face devastated” — accompanied by a flourish on the piano and the punchline: “She said, ‘so long Norman.’ ” The interpretation is that the woman never even knew his name, leaving one to think he had spent the entire evening observing her, free-associating and figuring that even if they somehow got together, it would end badly.
It doesn’t sound upbeat, I know. I enjoyed hearing it, though, and I added Warren to my personal fantasy team of antiheroes, in between Barry Bonds, Kurt Vonnegut and Randy Moss.
You probably know most of the rest of the story. In fall 2002, it hit the news that Warren had stage-4 inoperable lung cancer. A month later, around the time I was getting ready to take my first job at a daily newspaper, The Portage la Prairie Daily Graphic, there was that instant-memory-burn one-for-the-road appearance on Letterman. Dave had no other guests that night. Warren was sanguine about being handed a death sentence, making light of his 20-year avoidance of going to doctors: “It was one of those phobias that didn't pay off.” That hit on something universal. Humans are not probability-based rational beings, even when it’s in our interest. But what are you going to do? I remember, standing there in my parents’ darkened living room, volume low since everyone else was asleep, the tears welling, chill bumps protruding on my arms and lats, knowing it was the last time he’d been seen as fully vital.
Warren, of course, faced his mortality like a champ. He used the last year of his life, before dying on Sept. 7, 2003, to record a final album, My Ride’s Here. For a few months in late 2003 and early ’04, you could hear him on mainstream radio stations. He was gone and yet not gone, and while my claiming any connection to him was a bald-faced mistruth, it was affirming. I’d needed him for an escape, and would still when in need of a reminder of once being early 20s-ish and lost.
What’s etched in memory is one of those winter afternoons that, if you grew up in a cold-weather climate, just makes your heart beat a little faster in a good way. You know what I’m speaking of: a day where it seems colder than absolute zero but the sun stands bright and high in a cloudless sky, offering a reminder winter will end eventually. It was the kind of day where Buddy from Warren's song Hit Somebody would have shovelled off the pond and spent all day tearing up an outdoor rink.
I was driving on the Trans-Canada Highway from Portage to Brandon to cover the Safeway Select, Manitoba men’s curling championship. The Brandon rock station was playing Disorder In The House, which sitting here a decade later, seems rather remarkable. This was a rock station in the yellow-dog region — i.e., where the Conservatives could run a yellow dog for office and win – playing Warren’s parting shot at the Bush-Cheney Administration.
This was happening while The Dixie Chicks were being told to “shut up and sing” and being pulled off radio stations in America’s heartland, which pretty much has the same sensibilities as Canada except with much less hockey. Yet Warren had couched his condemnation in such catchy cryptic ways (“The floodgates are open / We've let the demons loose /The big guns have spoken / And we've fallen for the ruse”) and placed it within a nihilistic, go-to-hell rocker. That’s how to do it, really, since it sidesteps giving the trolls ammunition.
He managed that while, to borrow a hockey announcer-ism, time was becoming a factor. There was no sadness that I’d never hear anything new from him again, since he had emptied the tank. The message was that we do not know what we’re doing, but we get by as people, and in the end there’s a positiveness and grace.
What began as a pretentious put-on had become part of me. A lie had morphed into my truth.
#BellLetsTalk: why I cannot go along to get along with mining mental illness for marketing
These 'Let's Talk' tweets and Facebook updates brought to you by a telecom that uses mental illness and honest-to-goodness sometimes crippling emotional challenges as part of a fucking BRANDING EXERCISE is galling.
(Note: Tumblr is being fussy, so I reposted this with new thoughts.)
I know all you mean well and have naught but goodwill in your hearts, but please think about it. I get that it raises money and awareness and might create more conservation than a simple donation. 'Maybe so, but does anyone wonder how it's received by someone who is depressed when people fire off a tweet, "[Blank]LetsTalk," without saying anything else. That does not show sensitivity or concern; that's something done out of obligation. And why is their damn corporate name at the front of it? Brilliant marketing gimmick, sure, but it implies there's profit to be mined from your pain that you have carried mostly privately for your whole adult life. Today is the only day to we have for you, you have to talk about it our schedule. Well, when do I see a residual?
The rub is that Bell already has a set amount for a donation built into its budget. This boils down to, "Shill for us or we withhold a portion of our donation." This has, not for nothing, been called charity by ransom, only it's done one nickel at a time.
So it does not bring me any peace or make my day any easier. I do not look forward to Feb. 12. I dread it worse than Feb. 14 now!
I can only speak for myself; maybe it helps others. Let us hope so.
It's debatable whether this makes it better, although I have contended as much out of emotion, for which I am truly sorry. People are smarter than that, of course. It just feels like some people who don't know better are getting taken for a bigger ride than the people who wore those Lance Armstrong yellow cheater bracelets a few years ago. Read Pink Ribbons, Inc.; perhaps this is the best worst way that the world works... extracting real pain for a PR exercise. It's like strip-mining people!
I fail to see how this one-day-a-year will have any traction that fosters any greater understanding of depression. There has been progress, sure, and perhaps I'm bitter because it did not start until well after the worst of my troubles. But this does not lead to any research into alternative therapies. Or affordable drugs which can help someone manage her/his condition. You know if you don't have a family doctor in Ottawa, you cannot go to a walk-in clinic for a mental health issue to get a referral so you can get OHIP-covered counselling? It's not on the checklist. You could look it up.
(Update, January 2014: fortunately I finally got a family doctor and I have started getting therapy for depression and social phobia.)
It sure as hell doesn't convince our politicians — over a period of several years, our great Ontario government dedicated a whole 1.5 per cent of its health-care budget to mental health, really — that they should put any more resources toward the problem.
I know a lot of people have been affected by mental illness much, much worse than I have, both personally and by association. There's no knowing what they feel about this day because I am sure the marketing mavens at said telecom never talked to them before they came up with this great idea.
I'm speaking because I can. And if you tell me I shouldn't talk about this and should just go along to get along, congrats on missing the point, fully completely.
#BellLetsTalk a marketing gimmick inflicted on those with depression
These 'Let's Talk' tweets and facebook updates brought to you by a telecom that uses mental illness and honest-to-goodness sometimes cripping emotional challenges as part of a fucking BRANDING EXERCISE is galling.
I know all you mean well and have naught but goodwill in your hearts, but please think about it. I get that it raises money and awareness and might create more conservation than a simple donatione.'Maybe so, but does anyone wonder how it's received by someone who is depressed when people fire off a tweet, "[Blank]LetsTalk," without saying anything else. That does not show sensitivity or concern; that's soemthing done out of obligation. And why is their damn corporate name at the front of it? Brilliant marketing gimmick, sure, but it implies there's profit to be mined from your pain that you have carried mostly privately for your whole adult life. Well, when do I see a residual?
So it does not bring me any peace or make my day any easier. I do not look forward to Feb. 12. I dread it worse than Feb. 14 now!
I can only speak for myself; maybe it helps others. Let us hope so.
It's doubtful that people carry on like all this alone makes it better, although I have contended as much out of emotion, for which I am truly sorry. People are smarter than that, of course. It just feels like some people who don't know better are getting taken for a bigger ride than the people who wore those Lance Armstrong yellow cheater bracelets a few years ago. Read Pink Ribbons, Inc.; perhaps this is the best worst way that the world works... extracting real pain for a PR exercise. It's like strip-mining people!
I fail to see how this one-day-a-year will have any traction that fosters any greater understanding of depression. There has been progress, sure, and perhaps I'm bitter because it did not start until well after the worst of my troubles in the early 2000s. But this does not lead to any research into alternative therapies. Or affordable drugs which can help someone manage her/his condition. You know if you don't have a family doctor in Ottawa, you cannot go to a walk-in clinic for a mental health issue to get a referral so you can get OHIP-covered counselling? It's not on the checklist. You could look it up.
It sure as hell doesn't convince our politicians — over period of several years, our great Ontario government dedicated a whole 1.5 per cent of its health-care budget to mental health, really — that they should put any more resources toward the problem.
I know a lot of people have been affected by mental illness much, much worse than I have, both personally and by association. There's no knowing what they feel about this day because I am sure the marketing mavens at said telecom never talked to them before they came up with this great idea.
I'm speaking because I can. And if you tell me I shouldn't talk about this and should just go along to get along, congrats on missing the point, fully completely.
Just because someone's there in a professional capacity, it doesn't mean they aren't also a potential customer.
In my role with Yahoo!, I go to about two-thirds of Ottawa 67's home games at Scotiabank Place. The 67's relationship with the local media is, frankly, unbelievable, both the friendliness and the conditions.
During the lockout, the 67's provided staff at Gate 3, which is used by both the media and fans. The way it's been is that once they recognize you, you can stop showing your Canadian Hockey League media pass each time. On Sunday I passed through the same little laneway that I have all season, smiled and nodded to woman with the 67's who has got to know me a little across the last three seasons and pressed the button to go up the elevator.
An Ottawa Senators employee who wasn't even monitoring that entry point comes over and grabs the sleeve of my coat.
"I need to see your pass." I produce it and he says, "I have to see your pass because it's the first time I've seen you all season."
Granted, it's not about me. The man thought he was just doing his job. Never mind that someone else recognized me as an authorized individual who was permitted to be there. What really gets me is the guy putting his hand on me. The other is the use of "all season."
The Sens' first home game is Monday. Yesterday was the 22nd home game for the 67's and about the 15th I've attended. This hero — how are you only working the door at hockey games and not part of the prime minister's security detail, dude? — took the "Hockey Is Back" a little too literally.
I cover junior hockey as a journalist, but I'm a sports consumer too. Good for the Senators for providing some free parking, handing out free tickets and giving out beer vouchers for the home opener as damage control for what the NHL has done to itself. Hey, I watched NHL instead of OHL on Saturday. But that experience — I have been showing up since September, when the NHL was supposed to — makes it unlikely they will get my business any time soon. That extends to the concession stands during 67's games and any concerts at SBP.
Et tu, Sags? Yours truly has noshed at Eastside Mario's more times than one should admit, but this seemed like palate-related pathos.
"[Name redacted] and I went to dinner at The Keg ... My faith in the food industry was restored. Fantastic, quality food and incredible service. A five-star evening."
This is the end result of my worst anxiety attack since March 2011. Not that you or the people causing my stress care. Thank goodness for insurance companies, I guess.
Confessions of a former 330-pound Queen's cheerleader; or, why watching a 22-point fourth-quarter lead get away wasn't tough to take
The Queen’s Golden Gaels had what I suppose people would call an epic playoff collapse, but I still have my health.
Long story short, the two actually go hand in hand. Normally using that transition – long story short – means one is not going to write a honker of a self-indulgent blog filled with obscure university sports references. (Wait, this is Canada – isn’t “obscure university sports reference” a redundancy?)
So on Saturday, my beloveds had the tables turned on them by the Guelph Gryphons in the Ontario University Athletics football semifinal, with Guelph winning 42-39 in overtime after being down by 22 points with six minutes remaining. (Incidentally, I got locked out of Twitter right after Queen’s widened its lead to 36-14.) It was a perfect storm that is only possible in three-down football; the uniqueness of the Canadian game means a team can be pinned near its own goal line almost interminably. Get string of two-outs and turnovers while the wind is at the offence’s back, a familiar friend instead of a forbidding foe. Suddenly one’s heart leaps in the mouth and gets projected on to those guys down on the field. Like baseball, Canadian football is one of the best team games because a huge deficit can be surmounted just like that.
Fans in front of my press box seat had walked out, sportingly telling three Kingston people, “Your quarterback was very good today” in reference to Billy McPhee, who ended up with a 22-of-33 passing day on a wind-whipped field, although people will only remember the three interceptions, although only one was bad pass and it didn’t led to points against Queen’s.
Perfect storm
Then came the perfect storm. Guelph needed points and fast. It put on the punt block, there was that double thunk-thunk of the ball coming off the kicker’s feet and right into the body of a self-sacrificing special teamer. Guelph’s Jake Reinhart scooped it up for the touchdown. That planted the seeds of another comeback by Guelph, which scored 30 unanswered points to beat Queen’s in their regular-season game. Still, most of the time, a 15-point lead with four minutes left is safe, even though the Guelph sideline was alive while, from across the field, Queen’s resembled a library before finals, everyone furtive on edge. Guelph hadn’t sustained a drive all day, but it got another quick score when Jazz Lindsey stiff-armed a defender on a quarterback keeper and went past the Queen’s bench for an 80-yard score. Following a pinball interception where Justin Chapdelaine attempted a diving catch but the ball went off him, off a defender and into the hands of another, Guelph got a last-minute touchdown and a tying two-point conversion where its receiver Carl Trivieri juggled the ball before the defenders could rip it out.
On to overtime then, fall air full of foreboding. Going on offence first means everyone is tight and one bad play likely means having to kick a field goal. Queen’s ran two plays, gained three yards and rookie Dillon Wamsley delivered with a great pressure kick. Two plays later, Guelph’s Michael Fortino made the leaping catch a heartbeat before senior defensive back Josh Sultana could close to bat the pass away. He went in to score as his teammates sprinted off the sideline with a primal roar while gutted Gaels in gold from head to toe sank to the turf.
Naturally, acquaintances figured I’d be more knotted up than a string of cheap Christmas lights after seeing witnessing the ol’ alma mater cough up a three-touchdown lead in fewer than five minutes in a playoff game. The Twitter direct messages came in. Need a hug? Mutual acquaintances tweeting at each other that I had presumably got my Greg Louganis on and done a reverse 2½ off the top of the press box instead of going down to the field. There were a few sorry-mans. In another time, another place, I would have rolled around in that pity like a kid in a pile of leaves.
Not now, not anymore. Don’t you people even know me? All right, so my reputation as a Queen’s Golden Gaels diehard precedes me in myriad media and social circles.
I am almost 36 years old and started supporting the Gaels around 1988 or ’89. That means that for two-thirds of my life, Saturdays in September and October and November in a flush football season mean being preoccupied with their progress. You could be sitting next to me in a church before a wedding ceremony and I will make small talk, but really I’m wondering when the hell Greg Hughes or another good friend will text a scoring update, provided it’s a game that is expected to be close. If anything, modern technology isn’t being an enabler in that instance, but a saviour. In 1998 when most people didn’t have cells, I skipped a cousin’s wedding since it coincided with the Kill McGill game and I had the assignment to write the game story for the campus paper.
There was also the time I screamed “that’s a terrible call!” from the press box during the 2009 Vanier Cup in Ste-Foy, Que., after a pass interference call bailed out the Calgary Dinos after a botched field-goal try and moved the ball to Queen’s 1-yard line. There was no feigning journalistic impartiality at that moment. Some of my best media friendships have started with e-mails I wrote to someone upbraiding them for something they had written about university football.
Carrying on that way well into your 30s means getting a rep. I cannot blame on it on Canadians thinking only Americans get like this over football games. On Saturday, it did not. There valid football reasons for it. All the loss meant in the most likely scenario is that the season ended a week earlier, since McMaster is No. 1 and looks invincible, at least within the OUA. Queen’s could not correct its season-long turnover issues, giving the ball up six times on fumbles and interceptions. It also, above all, the Gryphons’ day. It’s not about us all the time.
Ultimately, it all comes back to getting the confidence to cease being the 330-pound lummox I was in 2009 and ’10. Saturday was the first time in a couple seasons that I got to speak face-to-face with Queen’s coach Pat Sheahan. The coach whose team’s season had ended about 10 minutes earlier gave me a nice compliment on the weight loss. Only in Canada, or perhaps Division III in the NCAA, could that happen. In the States, the coach and sports information director would not be standing on the field talking to two reporters after losing a big game. He’d be in a media centre, with 50 to 100 reporters all hoping they can spark a tirade that will be on Deadspin within the hour.
There is still pressure to win in CIS – just look at how Laurier let classy Gary Jeffries go with a season left on his contract – but there’s more room to be interpersonal.
I got into the Gaels while I was between the age of 11 and 15, the same time it dawned that I was half-decent at reading and writing but fully engulfed by sports. Somehow a kid from outside Bath, Ont., started to identify with Mordecai Richler and how, in his words, “I have elected myself to get it right” about the St. Urbain Street of his boyhood in Montreal. (Just as there is likely no money in being the CIS answer to Nick Hornby, there is likely even less in being the white-bread rural Eastern Ontario version of Mordecai Richler.) The football craving meant tracking down Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough and the late Peter Gent’s North Dallas Forty and yearning to have their gifts to write with humour, but have a point to it. So it was settled that I was going to write about sports.
Coming in during a lull
There was just some point in which my self-worth got melded with the results of a Canadian university football team. Personally, it never seemed unusual. There had to be someone else who related to this exactly the same way. Granted, there are only 26 football teams in CIS spread between Antigonish, Nova Scotia and Vancouver. A crowd of 3,000 to 4,000 can seem relatively large and raucous. It is obscure. To hazard a guess, the confusion really became full-blown toward the end of my student days at Queen’s. The late 1990s were not especially rah-rah in Canada, particularly in the country’s sportgeist and even more so in the small world of university football. That was the day of a 70-cent dollar and the country eliciting a collective phewwwwww after the 1995 Quebec referendum was barely defeated. There just this feeling of a country that was coasting.
Two NHL teams moved to the U.S. and the Montreal Expos were a dead franchise walking. The Blue Jays had been sold to foreign ownership that didn’t know its assets from second base. Every CFL team seemed to have an ownership crisis every year, plus its attempt to make inroads into the U.S. failed spectacularly. Football at the university level seemed to be under attack , too. The University of Toronto deemphasized their program. Carleton University in Ottawa folded its team.
With respect to watching the Gaels, the comfort from having an illusion of permanency – that is to say, tradition! – was wavering. Richardson Stadium is probably the closest thing university football has to Fenway Park. It’s really old, is totally insufficient for the needs of today’s athletes and Queen’s fans want a new stadium but are damned if someone from the outside slags it. It’s one of the few remaining natural-grass surfaces in CIS. When it rains, you still see players with mud caked on their uniforms and have that contrast of green grass near the sidelines and a chewed-up greeny-brown wasteland between the hashmarks. Now everyone from peewee on up plays on FieldTurf. Queen’s will have it one day, too. It’s easier to maintain and it keeps the uniforms from being sullied by wet earth and interfering with our branding, don’t you know.
At Richardson Stadium it’s easy to sit there and hear the Queen’s Bands assassinate the same three songs and see the Gaels run out in those all-gold uniforms and forget what year it is. It could be 2012 or 1972. This is how it is and how it will always be. The Gaels score a touchdown and the east-side student section launches into the Oil Thigh. Even within the CIS fanbase, not everyone gets it. A friend says a colleague of his who attended the University of Western Ontario once referred to it as “that dumb dance you all do.” Other teams refer to the all-gold uniform as "bananas in pyjamas." Do they mock Auburn for the "War Eagle!" chant when their nickname is Tigers?
By the time I got to cover the team for The Queen’s Journal and CFRC with Neil Acharya in 1999 and 2000, the uniforms weren’t even all-gold. Queen’s was wearing blue tops at home. They also were winning very little, five losing seasons in eight years between 1993 and ’00. I would be up in the press box, they would be giving it their all and finding out it was not enough. And I would get mad.
In 1999, the year I was The Journal’s sports and fitness editor, the Gaels lost their first five games. I’d walk into the newsroom after a loss and the 1999 Greg Hughes would start chanting, “0-and-8! 0-and-8!”
So yeah, you could see how I became defensive about the Gaels and obligated to explain them, which is not the same as defend them. It was borne from an obvious character weakness. A better person would have said something passive-aggressive like, “I missed the part where I was playing,” and moved on.
Of course, that period was also part of a transformation that was lost on the then student journalist. (I was not completely lacking in prescience then. The year before, right after Dave Smart was hired as Carleton’s head coach, I told another Journal sports scribe that Smart would win a national championship within five seasons. I was wrong. The Ravens won it all four seasons later.) Pat Sheahan was hired in February 2000. (I got off the phone with him in The Journal office and told Greg, “They’re going to start winning again.”)
Queen’s also got its shift away from the old O-QIFC and Laval, whose program turned nearly every game into fishing with dynamite, back to the OUA. Childish attachment to a hometown team and now they’re playing in a southern Ontario-dominated league full of people from London, Kitchener, Hamilton and Toronto who think my city is at the end of the earth? Where do I sign?
Jinx?!
The 2002 season was pure id. Queen’s won nearly every week and did so in the armchair athlete-approved fashion, throwing on nearly every down as Tom Denison became the first university quarterback to pass for 3,000 yards in an eight-game season. It was a beautiful ride until Jesse Lumsden, Jeff Robertshaw and McMaster reaffirmed the relevance of power running and the pass rush in the Yates Cup.
That was also the year I might have been party to jinxing Queen’s to not win. Not really, of course. There are no curses. In Week 8, though, the Gaels and Western Mustangs were tied for second place. Point differential would decide home-field advantage for a potential semifinal, since they had not played. Queen’s winning margin over Windsor, a weak team, had to be 14 points greater than Western’s margin of victory over the University of Ottawa, a strong squad.
That encouraged Queen’s to keep Tom Denison in and run up the score. He set the provincial and national single-season marks before halftime, but had to keep passing. By imperial edict and by the limits 2002 communications devices (I don’t recall seeing many laptops in the press box and had never heard the term “wifi”), the Western-Ottawa score was hushed up. Doug Jeffries, the Richardson Stadium P.A. announcer (yes, that Doug Jeffries) omitted that game from out-of-town scoring updates.
A couple minutes remained, the issue long decided with Queen’s up 46-0. The main CFRC commentators, Dan Vertlieb and Jaime Stein, asked me to get an update on Denison’s season total. Going down to the stat booth meant passing by the Queen’s spotters’ booth. I dutifully got an update from Neil Scilley, the statiscian and son of Claude Scilley, the oracle of Kingston sports and the best sports reporter I have ever met. On the way back, the defensive coordinator Pat Tracey espied the slip of paper I’d written on it and asked, “Is that the Western score?”
“No, it’s Tommy’s passing yardage.”
“What’s he at?”
“Twenty-nine, ninety-one.” Or 2,991.
As I moved on, the coaches were telling the sideline that Denison needed only 10 more yards to hit 3,000. Windsor stalled and punted. Normally, the backup quarterback would have come in to mop up. Denison completed an out route to Sean McKinnon for about 10 yards. The unwritten rule called for a clock-chewing inside handoff, but when were they going to be there again? He had 3,001 and didn’t throw another pass that day.
I do not expect anyone to believe, since I do not believe it myself, that focusing on a personal statistic doomed the Gaels to be denied the team success. But jinxes are supposed to last seven years. The next seven had their dizzying highs and terrifying lows.
It felt like '03 ...
Saturday’s loss to Guelph was eerily similar to what happened to the 2003 Gaels. They also lost a lead – 10 points with fewer than three minutes to go against the Laurier Golden Hawks – and lost by three points in overtime after a young quarterback, Ryan Pyear that time, completed a 35-yard touchdown pass.
That was Tom Denison’s last game in Tricolour. You couldn’t make this up. Saturday, when the circumstances were somewhat similar, was the first time Tom had ever attended a game as a fan. (In between, he was offensive coordinator with the York Lions. During his tenure, they lost a game to Queen’s in overtime.)
This loss on Saturday has already been forgotten, if not by the people who played and coached. The ’03 semi was The Game We’ll Never Forget. Tied 24-24, Queen’s blocked a Laurier field goal, but the Golden Hawks retained possession when the holder flipped the ball to the kicker Brian Devlin, who ran for the first down. Laurier scored on the next play to go up 30-24. It had been a wet fall in Kingston and the field by that point was porridge, so Devlin hooked his convert attempt. On came the Queen’s offence, 35 yards and a convert away from getting another shot at powerful McMaster in the Yates Cup. Denison obliged with a TD pass on third-and-goal. But Chris Napoli missed his convert that would have meant a rematch with Mac in the Yates Cup. The game continued, but when that happens and it’s out of your hands, you feel like it’s already over and project that on to the players. Those Queen’s guys tend to be smart. Maybe they pick up on it.
I was watching that game from my living room in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, where I was writing sports for The Daily Graphic. Tears were shed that day.
By 2006, I was in Ottawa, working on the desk at the Sun, able to keep closer tabs on the Gaels. It amounted to getting in on the ground floor with a team whose bandwagon had emptied out after successive losing seasons. I wasn’t happy with where I was professionally – I was 29, so it was a quarter-life crisis – so the diversion was needed. Most of my pride was being secreted through having a blog instead of my paying work.
One thing led to another – helping James Mirtle start The CIS Blog, making some key connections with people who are younger, more with-it and much more talented than I such as Andrew Bucholtz, Tyler King and Rob Pettapiece, along with bitter Gen-Xers such as Greg and Duane Rollins. For a couple years, I had my full-time job and a lot of sweat equity tied up in The CIS Blog and Out Of Left Field. Both probably didn’t look like much to someone who thought blogs were dedicated to cruelty, but some talented people either appreciated the work or offered to contribute.
Unsound body
Of course, I was letting my emotional and physical health go to hell, ballooning up into the 330 to 335 range. The evening and weekend shifts of a copy editor – get home at 12:30 a.m., eat late at night, sleep in very late, wake up too late to eat a proper breakfast – are bad for the waistline. Neil Acharya would say, “Join a gym” ad nauseam and I tuned him out.
The irony is that the gym I train at with Janet Alexander is walking distance from my old newspaper office. It would have been so simple. By 2008, Queen’s fans dared to speak of the Vanier Cup. Danny Brannagan had come into his own quarterback, the offensive and defensive lines had each matured into a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude, and they were deep at the skill positions. Denis Piché, the Ottawa coach, said they were better than Laval, and we believed it.
They locked up first place and home-field advantage through to the Vanier Cup with a week to spare in the regular season. Sheahan and the coaching staff, with a chance to finish 8-0 for the first time in school history, played most of the starters in the final game at Waterloo. Mike Giffin, the all-everything tailback, injured his knee within the first few minutes. Brannagan sustained a concussion that would keep him from practising for the entire two weeks before the OUA semifinal.
For the semifinal, they drew Ottawa, who was no ordinary 4-4, fifth-place team. The Gee-Gees had lost to lowly Windsor and barely beat futility-thy-name-is U of T by nine points to qualify for the post-season, but they had a plethora of injuries. They were getting healthy.
So no Giffin, a struggling passer and then Queen’s lost Thaine Carter, the national defensive player of they year, on one of the first series. Ottawa’s own big back, Davie Mason, went out with an injury, but the Gee-Gees’ Craig Bearss stepped in admirably and had a career day. Ottawa shortened the game by running a ball-control scheme, stopping Queen’s by keeping its offence on the sidelines. It was so frustrating to be screaming at the unfolding events in a football game that I could not actually see – I was in Ottawa due to work and was listening the radio broadcast online – that at one point I took a plate and shattered it against the floor.
The change
Ottawa won 23-13 to end the season of a team that had seemed awesomely good. The anger on my end was almost scary. Something changed. I vowed that was the end of getting emotional when it didn’t work out in a sports event. From now on, it would be take as it comes, roll with it, enjoy it all.
And that happened. Who knows if the pledge would have stuck without that season.
It was evident three weeks into the season those ’09 Gaels were in a dare-to-be-great situation and had turned hurt into hunger. Oddly enough, the moment when I really felt they were a team of destiny was after their only loss. Sheahan and the coaches faced the same scenario in Week 8 against Laurier: undefeated with home-field advantage secured. Meantime, Danny Brannagan and Western’s Michael Faulds were each neck-and-neck in a race to become CIS’ first 10,000-yard passer. Queen’s was resting, as Sheahan later put it, “anyone who had more than a hangnail” against a good team. Faulds and Western were up against also-ran Toronto.
Brannagan did hold the national mark for a few minutes. Faulds, though, kept passing. By the time he came out in the fourth quarter, he had 550 yards and had not only claimed the career mark, but had finished with 3,033, eclipsing Tom Denison from 2002.
Talking by phone that day, Mike Grobe, then Queen’s sports information director, and I were obviously disappointed Brannagan was denied the record. It also essentially decided the race for OUA MVP; Faulds later won the coaches’ vote 5-4 after York coach Mike McLean (career record: 0-16) cast his ballot for Dillon Heap, Laurier’s slotback and punt returner.
Strangely enough, though, it conveyed that Queen’s had its priorities correct. The team success trumped anything individual. Western coach Greg Marshall was not in the wrong to give his fifth-year quarterback a chance to stay in during a blowout and have a shot at OUA and CIS history. Funny how it worked out. After seven years' bad luck, the jinx was lifted. Or not.
The next four playoff games didn’t come easily for Queen's, as it's been thoroughly documented. But going in, there was a vibe they had finally figured out the dynamics of winning a Vanier Cup. They did it and my worldview was validated vicariously by one of my favourite teams, just like Bill Simmons from February 2002 until February 2008.
Their triumph in November 2009 foreshadowed my own. That was when, thanks to recommendations from Will Leitch and Greg Wyshynski, that the change to blog on the 2010 Vancouver Olympics for Yahoo! Sports presented itself.
And now you know the rest of the story
Finding greater professional success made me realize my depression couldn’t be pinned on work frustrations. My physical self was the problem. It took a while to commit to it, but once I was in, I was ll in. It just made too much sense not make such an investment. There’s nothing as good for what’s wrong on the inside as going out for a scamper. It’s given me a second life athletically, maybe creatively.
It might have gone that way regardless of whether I had ever put on those Tricoloured glasses. Seeing sports and life its ownself through that lens was part of a process, though one shudders to glorify a so-called sportswriting career with those words.
The dynamic between the Big Yellow Guys and I changed. The chips on both shoulders were surgically removed. Throughout the aughties, I needed them to having winning Saturdays. Like Paul Ashworth, the fictionalized Hornby in the original Fever Pitch film adaptation, once they did it, there was a sensation of being lifted on to the shoulders of the team, carried away to get separation. Now I try to keep a respectful and safe distance, lest I regress to being That Guy. Whenever someone suggests that I move back to Kingston since my gig with Yahoo! means I can work from anywhere that has a major junior hockey franchise, I always say no. There's a mental image of me becoming such a pest at Queen’s practices that athletic director Leslie Dal Cin will eventually have to issue my photo to campus security with instructions to shoot first and ask questions later.)
Being a fanboy and fount of Golden Gaels marginalia was worth it. And university football, as Saturday affirmed, can often be a big ball of crazy. It makes no sense that Guelph is 8-1, but they made plays after Queen's failed to put them away. Meantime, this is a strata of sport that even in 2012, still exists largely in fable and the odd random YouTube clip. It might be not turn the crank of the average sports media consumer, but what is grand is necessarily obscure. That's what keeps me hooked. It is so embedded that I apparently need to write 3,000-plus words to explain I'm Not That Guy. It didn't knock me on my ass. Besides, it was less a total collapse than a combo of circumstances that Guelph seized on like they had the serendipity of 47 Ferris Buellers in helmets and pads. Football is a fickle game, people.
A friend told me on Saturday night that he never thought he would see the day when Queen's would blow a 22-point lead in a playoff game and I would be in a good mood a few hours later. Chalk that up to unconditional love and having been around long enough to recall the last generation of Gaels who squandered a 22-point lead in a playoff game in southern Ontario got along respectably the following season. That's what happens with absolutes: sooner or later, they get torn asunder. Know this much: supporting the Gaels isn't life or death for me, it's just part of living.
The violations started small. I was 12, fairly tall with brand new boobs. My mother wouldn’t let me buy “real bras” for a long time. It didn’t occur to me that was weird until boys in my class started advising me to “stop wearing sports bras” because I was looking a little “saggy.”
Today's song that got stuck in my head while jogging. Last Saskatchewan Pirate ... because I was writing about the Prince Albert Raiders, who have a pirate crest?
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