Harvard wonk choreographs Flames’ ‘quantum shift’

Allan Maki, Globe and Mail, Oct. 03, 2011


He’s the Harvard-educated, Henry David Thoreau-reading, Stanley Cup winner who comes with a reputation for drafting big centres, his biggest being Dwight Howard.

Yes, that Dwight Howard, of NBA fame. Drafting Howard was John Weisbrod’s handiwork during his time as CEO and general manager of the Orlando Magic. Now it’s Weisbrod’s duty to secure top talent, including a front-line centre, for a Calgary Flames organization in the throes of what team president Ken King calls “a quantum shift.”

Under former GM Darryl Sutter, the Flames were essentially a one-man operation with a narrow view on hockey matters and scouting. Western juniors got top priority; Russians were ignored. Under new GM Jay Feaster, all options and opinions are encouraged, which is why Weisbrod agreed to leave a scouting position with the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins for a team that missed the playoffs last season.

“The [Flames] organization was like Boston’s six years ago,” Weisbrod said. “The Bruins were 28th in the league and had a lot of bad contracts. I enjoyed the way we broke it down and redefined what we wanted a Boston Bruin to be. That’s what Jay’s doing here.”

Depth and diversity have sophisticated the way the Flames are going about their business. They not only hired Weisbrod, whose sporting background knows no equal in hockey; they enlarged their scouting staff, expanded their front office and put more emphasis on analytical software programs such as PUCKS and Decision Lens.

The idea, Feaster insisted, is to examine all the data possible and use them in decision making, be it for which players to draft or determine how best the Flames can defend against certain rivals.

“We’re trying to be more scientific in what we do as opposed to analytical,” Feaster said. “Decision Lens allows us to prioritize players we scout by whatever criteria we want. We pick the category – maybe it’s by skating – and the program gives us its top-20 selections. PUCKS breaks down a game with percentage groups – where goals are scored from, league averages and it’s attached to video. If we’re contemplating a trade with Phoenix for Lee Stempniak, we can watch video of all his shifts against Western Conference teams.

“We’re not pioneers, but I think more and more you’re going to see [analysis work] done in hockey.”

Feaster has cleared out some bad contracts (Ales Kotalik, Daymond Langkow) and has $3.6-million (U.S.) in cap space to upgrade the roster. His grand vision of what he wants a Flames player to be is simple yet valued: “We want smart, high-character hockey players who, despite it sounding cliché, play for the crest on the front of the jersey not for the self-aggrandizement of the name on the back.”

Helping determine who those players are is a major part of Weisbrod’s job as assistant GM of player personnel. A Harvard University English grad with a fondness for the classics, Weisbrod played hockey, but a shoulder injury ended his minor pro career. He found administrative work in the IHL, where he ran the Orlando Solar Bears. The Bears owner, Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, liked Weisbrod so much he named him president of the NBA’s Orlando Magic.

Unfortunately for Weisbrod, he got off to a bad start with Magic fans. Instead of drafting Emeka Okafor, he went for Dwight Howard fresh out of high school. The result was garbage bags filled with hate mail, a sampling of the hostility that followed when Weisbrod traded Tracy McGrady to the Houston Rockets. For that, Weisbrod received hand-delivered death threats at his home.

“[McGrady] was one of the most talented players in the league, very popular, but I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the internal fortitude to win a championship,” Weisbrod said. “I went to the ownership and said, ‘He can be Robin, not Batman.’ The FBI moved me out of my house to a hotel under an alias [because of the public’s anger].”

Weisbrod resigned in 2005, returned to the NHL and later joined the Bruins, where he was hired as a scout by former Harvard teammate Peter Chiarelli. Impressed by Weisbrod’s résumé, Feaster got permission from the Bruins to talk to him. That was before the 2011 playoffs began. Once the Stanley Cup was secured, Weisbrod listened to Feaster and saw another chance to redefine a franchise.

“The Flames have been one of the worst drafting teams in the last 10 years. We have to change that,” Weisbrod said, referring to the fact Calgary has developed only one first-round draft pick for its 2011-12 roster (centre Mikael Backlund). “We have to have open-mindedness about where guys come from and we have to find them. You certainly need talent to fill the skill sets, but we’re going to be focused on the intangibles in what people are bringing.”

For Feaster, that means believing in the process and the people he’s brought in.

“I run a participatory democracy,” Feaster said. “Of course, the ultimate decision rests on my desk. But I don’t want to cut off opinions. I want to hear that.”

Hockey’s in Manitoba's blood

ROY MacGREGOR, Globe and Mail, Oct. 03, 2011


Prove ’em wrong.

That, not gloriosus et liber – glorious and free – should be the motto of Manitoba.

The history of this area is a history of overcoming the seemingly impossible, right from the aboriginals who mastered this unkind climate to the Selkirk Settlers who came here in 1813 – sailing through the north and wintering on Hudson Bay before trekking here with their supplies – and even the forcing of provincial status itself in 1870.

It could also be the mantra of hockey in Manitoba: forever up against the doubters, forever having to prove ’em wrong.

If they need it in Latin, perhaps the provincial motto could be sibi fidens – trusting in oneself.

It is the story of the 1896 Stanley Cup champion Winnipeg Victorias and the 1920 Olympic champion Winnipeg Falcons, all lovingly recounted in Richard Brignall’s Forgotten Heroes: Winnipeg’s Hockey Heritage.

Given that we are less than a week from the reborn Winnipeg Jets’ NHL home opener against the Montreal Canadiens, it might be useful to remind outsiders of Winnipeg hockey’s experience with Eastern arrogance.

Hockey came later to this part of the country – there are accounts of shinny being played on the Red River in the winter of 1886-87 – but it caught on so fast that in 1892-93 a team of Manitoba all-stars was dispatched east to see what might be learned from the Eastern inventors and masters of what would become the national game.

“The idea,” the Montreal Gazette noted, “of Winnipeg hockey men playing in Montreal with anything like a chance of winning is so far out of the way that it is hardly worthy of consideration.”

Montreal teams were used to paying expenses for teams coming from Ontario – yet refused the same courtesy to Manitobans. “This is all very well for Ontario,” rationalized the clubs, “but in Montreal there is no reason why we should guarantee expenses … we don’t think we can learn anything from Winnipeg.”

Ha! Lesson No. 1: Never, ever tell people from Manitoba it’s useless.

Fired up, the all-stars went first to Toronto and whipped Osgoode Hall 11-5, then beat Queen’s University in Kingston. They lost in Ottawa and Montreal, but finished with a record of eight wins in 11 games and outscored their opponents 70-37.

By 1896, these upstarts thought they could challenge for the Stanley Cup. The Victorias headed off to Montreal and, in a two-game series, Montreal couldn’t even threaten, losing 1-0 and 2-0. Fans gathered in hotels to listen to reports coming over the telegraph and erupted in a frenzy when it was over.

Travel on more than a century and the same show-’em ethos is found throughout Back In The Bigs: How Winnipeg won, lost and regained its place in the NHL, by the Winnipeg Free Press’s award-winning Randy Turner.

One small chapter in this colourful and beautifully written book tells the story of Craig Heisinger, who seems to embody the notion of can-do Prairie resilience.

The little man they call “Zinger” began his hockey life as a 22-year-old heading off in his pickup truck – brand-new sewing machine in the back – to become equipment manager for the junior hockey Brandon Wheat Kings.

He lived in a trailer park and taught himself first aid through books. He never stopped believing he could have a life in hockey, even from such humble beginnings. He was good enough that he was taken on as a trainer for the 1988 world junior championship, then hired to work in for the Jets’ minor-league team in Moncton. They brought him up to work with the NHL team and he was there, vacuuming the dressing room in tears, after the Jets played their final game in 1996 and left for Phoenix.

Zinger could have gone, too, but he refused, preferring to stick it out in Winnipeg with the steadfast belief that, one day, the NHL would have to come back to where hockey truly matters.

He worked for the Manitoba Moose – the minor-league team that replaced the Jets – and was soon assistant general manager, then full GM of the franchise considered “the gold standard” of the AHL. When the Jets finally returned, 15 years after they left, he was offered the GM position but declined, preferring to stay closer to the players and dressing room as director of hockey operations.

He got to introduce the new general manager, Kevin Cheveldayoff, whom he had first spotted when Cheveldayoff tried out for the Wheat Kings and Zinger was the guy cleaning the jerseys. When they stick together out here, they stick fast.

The reborn Jets may turn out to be more stubborn than skilled, but it will be a profoundly different team than the team that went unnoticed and nowhere in Atlanta.

Simply by dint of location.

Rangers to place Sean Avery on waivers

David Shoalts, Globe and Mail, October 4, 2011


The NHL career of a player whose time in the spotlight was never commensurate with his ability may be over.

Sean Avery, 31, will go on waivers Tuesday as New York Rangers head coach John Tortorella decided the team’s last forward spot will go to centre Erik Christensen, who is four years younger. Avery’s agent, Pat Morris, told ESPN.com his client is looking at all his options, including playing in Europe, and indicated Avery would report to the Rangers’ American Hockey League farm team if necessary.

In order to collect the $4-million remaining on the last year of his contract, Avery would have to play in the AHL unless he and the Rangers work out an arrangement with a European team. The Rangers are only charged $1.93-million against the salary cap for Avery because they claimed him on re-entry waivers from the Dallas Stars in 2008. The Stars are responsible for the other $1.93-million of Avery’s total cap hit because they put him on waivers.

The whole Stars episode sums up Avery’s career in the NHL – he was signed away from the Rangers as a free agent in hopes he would add some grit to the forward ranks but all he brought was unwanted media attention for tasteless remarks about another player’s girlfriend. After less than one season with the team, the Stars were so eager to be rid of Avery they took the cap hit so the Rangers could bring him back to New York.

Avery’s second go-round with the Rangers was less noisy than his first – he even found public approval with by supporting gay marriage in a public-service ad – but he was never more than a fringe player. His best NHL season was 2006-07, split between the Los Angles Kings and the Rangers, when he compiled a modest 48 points.

But Avery’s value was never about points. Although challenged many, many times, the native of Pickering, Ont., was not much of a fighter. But he was a skilled agitator, a player adept at getting under the skins of opposing players, driving them to distraction with his prickly play and active chatter.

An inability to govern what came out of that active mouth kept Avery at the heart of one controversy after another. The end came for him with the Stars when he made vulgar, sexually charged remarks about Dion Phaneuf’s girlfriend, whom he once dated. Ten days ago, Avery accused Philadelphia Flyers forward Wayne Simmonds of directing a homophobic slur at him, although the league was unable to substantiate the charge.

Given the size of his salary and the headaches that come with him, it is unlikely any NHL team will claim Avery from the waiver wire.

Rock royalty at the rink

Matthew Sekeres, Globe and Mail, October 4, 2011


His father is a rock star from Scotland. His mother is a supermodel from New Zealand. And his siblings were once part of the young, hot, party crowd in Hollywood.

But if you’re looking for Liam Stewart, son of Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter, you won’t find him at the latest L.A. night spot, nor will you find him at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum Wednesday.

He’ll be back in Spokane, Washington, nursing an injury, and will miss the Chiefs’ only road game against the Vancouver Giants this season.

The 17-year-old from Hermosa Beach, Calif., is a first-year forward with the Western Hockey League club, and has played two games this year. Born in London, he has also been cleared to play for Great Britain in international competition, which means you won’t be seeing him at any Olympic Games or world championships unless there is a huge improvement in “ice hockey” across the pond.

But if you ever see him in the NHL (he is draft eligible next year), then commissioner Gary Bettman and his minions should jump for joy. Liam’s connections to celebrity would have to run deeper than any hockey player before him, and if you can’t market the son of a rock star and supermodel, than there is just no hope for your marketing.

Here’s a look at the family, not exactly a crowd you’ll see on Saturday morning at the local Tim’s:

Father Rod has moved from rock, to pop, to songbooks, taking his legions of fans with him. He dates (and marries) tall, gorgeous blondes, and his celebrity status is strong on both sides of the Atlantic, even at age 66.

Mother Rachel is a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover girl who was once engaged to L.A. Kings centre Jarrett Stoll, but they broke it off before walking down the aisle. She has starred in a series of reality shows on both sides of the Atlantic. And, of course, there is the Stacy’s Mom video found here.

Half-sister Kimberly once dated Jack Osbourne, son of Ozzy, and more recently gave birth to the daughter of Oscar winner Benicio del Toro. Delilah, born in August, is Rod’s first grandchild.

Half-brother Sean is one of those tragic Hollywood stories: drinking and drugging in his young teens; appearing on celebrity rehab shows in his late-20s.

Stepmother Penny Lancaster-Stewart is a former lingerie model.

Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley pioneer Steve Jobs dies at 56

Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2011


Steve Jobs, who sparked a revolution in the technology industry and then presided over it as Silicon Valley's radiant Sun King, died Wednesday. The incandescent center of a tech universe around which all the other planets revolved, Jobs had a genius for stylish design and a boyish sense of what was "cool." He was 56 when he died, ahead of his time to the very end.

According to a spokesman for Apple Inc. - the company Jobs co-founded when he was just 21, and turned into one of the world's great industrial design houses - he suffered from a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he had undergone surgery in 2004. Jobs had taken his third leave of absence from the company in January of this year, and made the final capitulation to his failing health on Aug. 24, when he resigned as Apple's CEO. After 35 years as the soul of Silicon Valley's new machine, that may have been a fate worse than death.

Jobs died only a few miles from the family garage in Los Altos, Calif., where he and fellow college dropout Steve Wozniak assembled the first Apple computer in 1976. Jobs transformed the computer from an intimidating piece of business machinery - its blinking lights often caged behind a glass wall _ to a device people considered "personal," and then indispensable.

Jobs was the undisputed "i" behind the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, and there was very little about his personality that was lower-case. According to Fortune magazine he was considered "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs," but Jobs also cultivated a loyal coterie of ergomaniacs - ergonomic designers who created the sleek stable of iHits - whose devotion to him was the centrifugal force holding Apple together. Shares of the company's stock plunged 22 points after Jobs announced his final medical leave on Jan. 17.

"A hundred years from now, when people talk about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Gates is going to be remembered for his philanthropy, not technology," said tech forecaster Paul Saffo, "the same way people remember Andrew Carnegie for the money he gave to education, not the fortune he made in steel. But what they're going to say about Steve Jobs is that he led a revolution."

It was a war waged on three fronts - computers, music and movies - and with each successive Apple triumph, Jobs altered the landscape of popular culture. With its user-friendly interface and anthropomorphic mouse, the Macintosh forever changed the relationship between humans and computers. After acquiring Pixar Animation Studios in 1986, Jobs became the most successful movie mogul of the past half-century, turning out 11 monster hits in succession. The 2001 smash "Monsters, Inc." could just as easily have been the name of the company.

But it was with the iPod - originally released just six weeks after the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, 2001 - that Jobs engineered another tectonic shift in the digital world. The transistor radio had untethered music from the home, and Sony's Walkman had made recorded music portable. With one of the world's premier consumer electronics businesses, and a music label of its own, Sony was poised to dominate digital distribution for decades.

But it didn't happen. Jobs took a digital compression format that had been around for a decade, synced it to Apple's new digital download service, iTunes, and with the iPod changed a system for delivering music to consumers that had been in place since Edison invented the phonograph.

It was Jobs' genius for simplicity that led to a pricing standard of 99 cents per song that remained unchanged for eight years, despite initial resistance from the music studios. And it was his irresistibility as a pitchman that brought the record labels so completely into line that iTunes now is the dominant player in the digital music business.

A man of sometimes confounding contradictions, Jobs once traveled to India and shaved his head seeking spiritual enlightenment. But he also brought a fierce urgency to his business dealings, often screaming at subordinates and belittling foes. Feared and revered, Jobs commanded the respect of his competitors, loyalty from the engineers he goaded relentlessly, and loathing from almost everyone.

"It's not easy to like Steve close up _ he does not suffer fools gladly," said Bob Metcalfe, founder of the networking giant 3Com and an old friend of Jobs. "But I like him very much. His energy, and standards, and powers of persuasion are amazing. He is the epitome of a change agent."

Whether by accident or design, Jobs created such an intense aura of mystery about what he was on to _ and up to _ that he developed a cult of personality, sometimes called "Macolytes." His appearances at the annual MacWorld Expo were often an occasion for the rollout of some new product that Jobs - with a rock star's sense of theatricality - had managed, until that very moment, to keep top secret. To his loyal fans, it seemed to matter little that Apple's new device inevitably cost far more than its competitors'.

And while his personal fortune - often the measure of success among the tech elite - was dwarfed by peers such as Larry Ellison of Oracle Corp. and Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp., Jobs' matchless record of innovation over three decades made him the coolest computer nerd in the valley.

"He reinvented the paradigm of what computing is three times with the Apple II, the Macintosh and the iPhone," said Mike Daisey, who built a theatrical performance, titled "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," around a life notable for its highs and lows. "And to be clear, the rest of the tech industry reinvented the paradigm zero times."

Jobs insisted the products Apple brought to market not merely be great, they must be "insanely great." It was his focus on design that allowed Apple to maintain a hold on the imagination of the public that often was disproportionate to the company's market share.

Apple's product lines were a projection of his sense of style, transforming the boring, putty-colored boxes of computers sold by competitors like Dell Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. into a compote of fruit and berry-flavored iMacs. Yet Jobs himself rarely deviated from a single, Mao-like uniform of blue jeans, black turtleneck and sneakers, turning that into a kind of meta-fashion statement: Think different. Dress the same.

His first brush with pancreatic cancer did nothing to slow Jobs down during the final years of his life. If anything, he seemed more driven than ever. Speaking to the Stanford University graduating class of 2005, a year after surgery to treat his illness, Jobs said, "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

In a curious way, Jobs started his own life by living someone else's. He was given up for adoption by his biological parents - Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian-born graduate student - shortly after his birth in San Francisco. His parents eventually married and had a daughter, but it was not until Jobs and his long-lost biological sister were both grown that he discovered she was the best-selling novelist, Mona Simpson.

Even growing up in the profoundly non-conformist '60s, Steven Paul Jobs always seemed different than his peers. His adoptive parents - Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and an accountant in middle-class Mountain View - took every utterance of their restless son seriously. When Steve declared he wasn't learning anything at his junior high school, and told them he refused to return the following year, the family abruptly moved to Los Altos so he could attend Homestead High.

It was there that he telephoned William Hewlett, president of the electronics manufacturing giant Hewlett-Packard Co., and asked him to donate parts for one of Steve's engineering projects at school. Hewlett was so impressed that he offered the teenager a summer job.

If Jobs already had a sense of his own manifest destiny, he didn't reveal it. After a single semester at Reed College in Portland, he dropped out of school, then spent the following year learning the I Ching _ a Chinese system of symbols used to find order in chance events _ while dropping acid and dropping in on Reed's philosophy classes.

He took a job with the computer game maker Atari in 1974, but stuck around just long enough to save money for a pilgrimage to India. After tramping around in traditional Indian garb and a backpack _ his shaved head and spectacles giving him a vaguely Gandhi-like appearance _ Jobs returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, spiritually uplifted and flat broke.

He stumbled upon Wozniak in 1975, presiding over a geekfest called the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, Calif., and convinced the brilliant Woz to start a company with him. Jobs would remain the man behind the curtain, creating Apple's razzle-dazzle, but unlike the Wizard of Oz, Jobs welcomed attention.

"Every time I designed something great . . . he would say, 'Let's sell it,' " Wozniak recalled once at an Intel Corp. conference. "It was always his idea to sell it."

Jobs decided to name the startup Apple, after the Beatles' record company. From the outset, he made no secret of his appetite, conspicuously taking a bite out of the Apple logo. He and Wozniak trumped Microsoft's early operating system by adding a mouse and a pioneering graphical user interface that allowed users to stop typing commands in bewildering DOS code. It took Microsoft until 1985 to counter with its clunkier Windows operating system.

But in one of his rare miscalculations, Jobs refused to license Apple's interface to other computer makers, and it quickly became a Microsoft world. As a business, Apple computers were a boom and bust operation. The sophistication - even artistry - of the engineering created a fanatical following for the company's products, but the Apple faithful remained a small, if vocal, minority.

Jobs needed a businessman who could turn his ideas into gold, and found him in Pepsi CEO John Sculley. When Sculley wavered, Jobs reeled him in with his most famous seduction line: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children," he asked Sculley, "or do you want a chance to change the world?"

But it was Sculley who rocked Jobs' world, outmaneuvering him in Apple's boardroom, and forcing him out of the company in 1985. "What can I say?" Jobs admitted later. "I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for. Starting with me."

With the fortune he made on the sale of his Apple stock, Jobs immediately started another computer company. But NeXT - which started as a manufacturer of overpriced workstations, and ended as a designer of overpriced operating systems - represented for Jobs a decade of wandering through the wilderness.

He didn't make the journey alone, marrying Laurene Powell in a Zen Buddhist ceremony in 1991. The couple had three children - Eve, Erin and Reed - and Jobs had a fourth child from a previous relationship with Chris-Ann Brennan. Lisa Brennan-Jobs, now 33, was born around the same time as Apple's third-generation computer, which was marketed as the Lisa.

By 1995, NeXT still had not acquired the type of industry buzz that Jobs was accustomed to creating. The workstations had a sheen of technological sophistication, but were so expensive to produce that few companies could afford to buy them.

Apple, meanwhile, was faring even worse. Its share of the personal computer market had dwindled so alarmingly that the company was even considering a switch to Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. Inside Apple, that was viewed as such a full blown retreat that when NeXT's operating system was offered as an alternative to Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio, he grabbed it. Apple paid $429 million for NeXT, but taking Jobs back as an adviser turned out to be far costlier to Amelio than the price tag.

Jobs derided the CEO behind his back as a "bozo," helping to set the stage for Amelio's ouster a few months later. Insisting he had nothing to do with Amelio's firing, even as he was installed as the company's "interim" CEO, Jobs hand-picked a board of directors loyal to him, then set about returning Apple to profitability.

Apple was still teetering on the brink of extinction in 1997, with just a tiny fraction of the PC business, when Michael Dell, Jobs' PC doppelganger at Dell Computers, sneered that if he ran Apple he would "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Never one to back away from a fight, or to forget a slight, on the day that his company's market capitalization surpassed Dell's in January of 2006, Jobs sent a congratulatory memo to Apple employees _ though by that time, nine years later, he may have been the only one still keeping score. "It turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future," Jobs gloated. "Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell."

Jobs' resurrection at Apple remains one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the annals of American business. Until his rebound was cut short by cancer, it stood as a near-perfect rejoinder to the F. Scott Fitzgerald aphorism, "There are no second acts in American lives." As a young man, Jobs merely helped lead the world into the computer age. In the final years of his life, he turned Apple into a kind of beloved nation-state: a company whose reputation for innovation gives it a reach far exceeding any worth calculable on a balance sheet.

"Steve Jobs has a way of making people believe," 3Com's Metcalfe told the San Jose Mercury News in 1997. "It's called the reality distortion field. Whenever you get near him, no matter how mean he might be, there's this field that distorts reality. You are made to feel that if you disagree, you are a jerk."

The iPhone was an example of the kind of upside down world Jobs could create with his distortion field. Long lines formed outside Apple stores before the first iPhones went on sale in 2007, and the device received endless _ mostly rhapsodic _ coverage in the press. Yet even after the fourth-generation iPhone was released in 2010, Apple's share of the U.S. cell phone business stood at 22 per cent, behind Android and RIM's BlackBerry.

Even Apple stores, which were originally created to provide showplaces for the company's product line, turned into tech temples, and became so popular they generated the most profit per square foot of any retail outlet in the country.

Though computers remain Apple's most profitable product line, Jobs sought to lead the company away from what had become, increasingly, a commodity business. He made the transition from computer niche player to consumer electronics giant official in 2007, dropping the word "Computer" from what is now simply Apple Inc.

For a decade, Jobs was the only CEO of two major American corporations, running Apple (as the iPods got smaller and smaller), and Pixar (as the box office hits got bigger and bigger). With comparatively little fanfare, Jobs annexed this second fiefdom when "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas decided to cast off his digital animation division. Jobs scooped it up cheap in 1986, and within two years, Pixar had won its first Oscar for the animated short film "Tin Toy," director John Lasseter's five-minute forerunner to "Toy Story."

"Toy Story," the first fully computer-animated feature, followed in 1995, and it marked the beginning of a box office run so successful that Jobs was able to sell the company to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock. That transaction made him the largest single shareholder in the world's dominant media conglomerate.

At his death, Steve Jobs sat at the summit of an information and entertainment empire, through which he controlled a large part of the culture's digital means of production _ and with the iPhone and iPad, its reproduction. He tamed Leopard; befriended Mickey Mouse; kept music and movies, and even Pluto, all spinning in their separate orbits, so they intersected, but rarely collided.

Jobs did all that through the force of his personality, which was sometimes maddeningly abrasive, and the perfection of his vision, which often seemed limitless. But now, suddenly, the bright star at the center of Silicon Valley's universe has gone out.

Red Wings coach a Mac man

By BRUCE GARRIOCH, QMI Agency, Oct 7 2011


DETROIT - When asked about facing his good friend Paul MacLean, Red Wings coach Mike Babcock smiled.

“Did he tell you that (we’re friends)?” Babcock asked.

All kidding aside, the Red Wings boss was singing the praises of his former assistant, who will make his head-coaching debut Friday night at Joe Louis Arena.

For nine years, Babcock and MacLean worked together — first in Anaheim, then in Detroit. They built up a friendship based on mutual respect and that’s why Babcock believes MacLean was a can’t-miss choice.

“He went to three Stanley Cup finals with me and we won a ton of games here,” said Babcock. “He knows what winning is all about. He knows what expectations are. He knows how to handle a bench.

“He’s been the minor-league coach of the year in the St. Louis organization. One of the reasons I hired him in Anaheim is he was willing, as a former NHL player, to go to Quad Cities (UHL) and win a championship. No NHL player is going there.

“That just meant the guy wanted to coach. He’s going to do a really good job. He’s going to have a good relationship with (GM) Bryan Murray and I think that’s imperative as a coach. Your relationship with your general manager is so important. They’re a team in need of change. They want to get younger and better. He’s the right guy for the job. I’m going to wish him luck every night, except when he plays us.”

Babcock said one of MacLean’s strengths is communication with the players.

“I think with his pedigree as a player, scoring as many goals as he did, and the work ethic he developed as a coach, I think he’s set up for success,” said Babcock.

“The line I always like that Mac had was, ‘No one ever made me do it.’ He was talking about backchecking and the defensive side of the game and he really believes the coach’s job is to make them do it. I really believe the same thing.

“He’s going to be good. With the relationship he has with Bryan Murray, he’s going to have the backing of the GM. When you have the backing of the GM, your communication skills get better.”

Babcock spoke with Murray — who gave the Wings bench boss his first head coaching job in Anaheim — in the spring and gave MacLean a ringing endorsement.

“When a guy calls you and you have a relationship with him, you don’t just promote your own guy — you tell him the truth. And I told him what I knew about Mac and the job he had done for me. In the end, it was a decision (Murray) had to make. In the end, they’ve chosen a real good man, a real loyal man and I think he’s going to do a real good job for them.”

Tom Thompson: Should the NHL season start earlier?

Tom Thompson, The Hockey News, 2011-10-07


Change is the one constant in professional sports – from the product on the field to the scheduling of the games themselves and everything in between. In the past, who would have predicted Super Bowls in February, World Series games in November or Stanley Cup finals in mid-June? Sports fans appear to be happy with this timing, as interest in all of the championship finals is at an all-time high.

Each sport is now re-examining its approach to the start of the season. Traditionally, baseball, football and hockey have held lengthy training camps with numerous pre-season games, but in recent years, each sport has questioned this approach. Athletes condition their bodies year-round and report to training camps in close-to-peak form. A lengthy training camp conditioning regime may not be necessary any longer. Each league must now consider the wisdom of moving more quickly into the regular season, especially because pre-season games don’t generate the same revenue as regular season games. This presents hockey with some interesting challenges.

NHL training camps currently open about one week later than they used to. However, a good deal of informed opinion within the NHL claims the league should follow the NBA’s route and opt for a later start to the regular season. Why compete with the baseball playoffs throughout the month of October? With no need for extended training camps anymore, this school of thought could lead to even later camp openings.

But there are other hockey people who are now expressing a contrary point of view. They argue the start of the regular season should be even earlier than it is now. Give each club a few days of training camp and a limited number of pre-season games and they will be ready for regular season action. They claim hockey should actually be an easier sell to the public in early autumn than in June.

Proponents of an earlier start concede the fact competition in autumn comes from both baseball and football. In June, the baseball season is still in its first half and the only other competition comes from the NBA playoffs. However, if the Stanley Cup final took place in May, the competition from baseball would be less and the basketball playoffs would be in an earlier stage. Hockey would have an easier time dominating the media limelight during the time its most important games are being played.

Recent talk about expanding the playoffs makes it even more crucial to consider starting the regular season earlier. Given the outstanding entertainment level of last season's playoffs, who can blame the NHL for wanting to increase the number of post-season games?

Several other factors will encourage an earlier start to the season. The NHL has shown a commendable concern in recent years for various types of injuries. Common sense would dictate that if players are tired, they are more vulnerable to injury. Expanding the number of days available to complete the regular season would reduce the fatigue burden on players.

Another consideration can be referred to as the "European factor." The NHL, quite understandably, has been attempting to enhance its global presence in the game. More and more teams are venturing to Europe to play pre-season and regular season games. This is a trend that is sure to continue and likely to expand. The travel required is substantial, so more days for the regular season would reduce this burden as well.

The argument about the start of the regular season isn’t totally one-sided. The competition for the entertainment dollar in autumn is fierce. NHL crowds in October are typically the lowest of the season. In many parts of the United States, there is considerable competition from college and even high school football until well into November. Comparable competition simply doesn’t exist in May or June.

The NHL is a business trying to survive and prosper in difficult financial times. Strategy must make sense on a business basis. The format for scheduling is an integral part of this process.


Tom Thompson worked as head scout for the Minnesota Wild from 1999-2001 and was promoted to assistant GM in 2002, a post he held until 2010. He has also worked as a scout for the Calgary Flames, where he earned a Stanley Cup ring in 1989. He currently works as a scout for the New York Rangers. He will be writing his Insider Column regularly for THN.com throughout this season.

European invasion

Jeff Marek, Sportsnet.ca, October 8, 2011


On HOCKEY CENTRAL Friday, John Shannon talked about the future of the NHL in Europe and you better get used to it folks, because it isn't going away.

As a matter of fact, the league is looking to expand there. As John mentioned, starting as early as next season, don't be surprised if games are not played at the beginning of the season, but rather in the middle of it.

And what's the end game for the NHL in Europe? A TV footprint? Expansion? Sell some merchandise? Extend the brand? All of these things have been discussed at length by the board of governors.

Two years ago I received a collection of documents from 1994 outlining meetings and plans between the NHL and IIHF to set up a two-tiered league in Europe, and while I don't think the NHL has any plans in the immediate future to set up shop overseas in that fashion, there are a number of highly influential owners who see Europe as an untapped goldmine for the league.

Los Angeles is most likely at the top of that list with the parent company of the Kings, AEG, owning a number of rinks across Europe. The NHL has plans to do much more overseas and that's also why the league's relationship with the IIHF, and KHL for that matter, is crucial to unlocking the treasure chests that exist in Stockholm, Moscow, Helsinki, Prague, Trencin, etc.

This is one of NHL deputy commission Bill Daly's pet projects.

I know it was against a rookie-laden Ottawa Senators team, but you can't help but be impressed at how the Detroit Red Wings looked Friday night. It was no rust, all polish in a 5-3 win against the Sens.

As we talked about on HOCKEY CENTRAL Friday, many still marvel at the job the Wings have done with Todd Bertuzzi. Mind you he's bought in, chiseled his body down from the 240 he used to play at for the bulk of his career and is playing "Wings hockey."

Bertuzzi looks like he still has plenty in the tank too. Add him to the list of reclaimed hockey payers who's careers have been turned around in Detroit just like Kris Draper, Dan Cleary and as I mused about in my last blog, I'm betting they do the same with Fabian Brunnstrom.

How'd you like that pass by Sergei Kostitsyn to set up Ryan Suter for Nashville's first goal Friday? A thing of beauty in my books, but I suppose you could look at it a number of ways (much like how hockey people have been trying to figure out the Kostitsyns for years).

On the one hand, I don't know many players who would surrender an almost perfect shooting lane like that to feather a sweet pass that put Suter in the clear. On the other hand-and maybe knowing how the Preds like to play a very conservative game this is how Barry Trotz felt about it-he turned a solid scoring chance into a high risk situation. Thankfully for Sergei, Suter buried it behind Steve Mason.

However you feel about the Don Cherry rant from Thursday, one thing that can't be factually denied was his stat about players committing suicide.

Grapes alleged that previous to Rick Rypien and Wade Belak, since 1999 eight players have committed suicide and not one of them was a fighter. Trevor Ettinger took his own life in 2003, Jake Gilmour in 2005, Mark Potvin in 2006. All three were noted scrappers with high penalty minutes.

Chris Nilan fired back at Cherry early Friday morning on Sportsnet 590 The FAN on the Brady and Lang show and demanded that Grapes apologize to him on Coache's Corner for misrepresenting his comments.

Anyone think that's happening?

The fork in the road for Jets’ boss Cheveldayoff

roy macgregor, Globe and Mail, Oct. 10, 2011


Kevin Cheveldayoff was given an abject lesson by his 12-year-old son on what it means to care so much about a hockey team that you will go to the wall for it.

It was late June of 2010, and the new general manager of the Winnipeg Jets was then assistant GM of the Chicago Blackhawks, a team that had just won the Stanley Cup but was so overloaded with contractual challenges that the league's salary cap was forcing management to dismantle their championship team.

At the NHL entry draft in Los Angeles, Cheveldayoff and his boss, Chicago GM Stan Bowman, struck a deal to send several of the team's looming contract problems, including blossoming forward Dustin Byfuglien, to the Atlanta Thrashers for future picks and prospects that helped Chicago stay within the cap.

Cheveldayoff thought he'd had a great and successful day, and shortly after midnight returned to the hotel suite he had rented for his family to join him.

“I opened the door,” Cheveldayoff remembers, “and out of the dark my son suckers me to the side of the head and says, ‘I can't believe you traded Buff!'”

Serendipity, then, that little more than a year later Cheveldayoff is GM of the Jets, the team that only months ago was located in Atlanta, meaning Buff is back in the fold and all is well again in the Cheveldayoff family.

If that's not full circle enough, Cheveldayoff, Byfuglien and the rest of the Jets will be in Chicago Thursday to take on the Blackhawks.

Things have a way of working out. Consider, for example, how this native of Blaine Lake, Sask., finally made it to the NHL – even if it wasn't at all as he had dreamed.

Cheveldayoff was hockey obsessed while growing up. So was everyone else, though few actually chased the dream. Older brother Ken turned to football, went to college, then into politics and has held several portfolios in the Brad Wall provincial government.

Cheveldayoff had the skill, and the drive, to make it. It all came from inside. His parents ran a grain farm but put no pressure on him whatsoever, he claims.

“The best thing my father did for me was what he didn't do,” Cheveldayoff says. “He never pushed me at all to play the game. He enjoyed it. He knew I enjoyed it.”

The youngster was good enough to make the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League and good enough to be considered an excellent prospect. He was also a fine student. While his father worked the farm, his mother taught school, and Cheveldayoff was named the junior league's scholastic player of the year in his draft year. It seemed all was going according to plan.

But then that dream began to take unexpected turns.

His father, Alex, died suddenly of a heart attack. Cheveldayoff was just 17, and suddenly hockey didn't seem quite so all-important. “I was forced to grow up at a young age,” he says. “I was always someone who was very realistic about playing.”

He was still drafted high – 16th overall in the 1988 draft by the New York Islanders – but the following season he blew his knee out so severely that it required reconstructive surgery in New York. All four ligaments were torn. The knee never truly came back.

Unable to crack the Islanders lineup, he moved about the minor leagues, the high point being his winning the Unsung Hero Award for the Salt Lake Golden Eagles. He got it for fighting, unable to contribute much through skill: “I'd say I lost a step except I never really had one to lose.”

He never forgot something his father had told him. “I fought a lot when I played junior hockey,” Cheveldayoff remembers, “and he'd always come out and say, ‘You know, you better watch it, some day you're going to get your clock cleaned, so be ready.'”

He just didn't see exactly what would clean his clock as a player. It turned out to be his good friend and former teammate Butch Goring. Goring had retired and was running the Denver Grizzlies. He called. “I thought he was going to invite me for a tryout,” Cheveldayoff says. But it wasn't. Goring needed an assistant coach and an assistant GM. Was Kevin interested?

“I talked to my wife,” Cheveldayoff says. “I told her, ‘Look, I'm not going to make the National Hockey League as a player, I know that, and this is the direction I want to go.'

“From that point on it only solidified my dream to make the National Hockey League, and when I had to get out of playing in the sense that the opportunities weren't there for me to be a National Hockey League player, I set my focus on wanting to become a National Hockey League manager.”

He was 24, and never looked back. In 15 years managing at the International and American Hockey League levels, he played a role in a remarkable seven league championships. His greatest success came with the Chicago Wolves, from which the Blackhawks plucked him not long before they, too, won the league championship.

When time came for True North Sports & Entertainment to select the general manager who would guide the reborn Jets, Cheveldayoff was at the top of the list, highly recommended by any number of hockey insiders.

No one else was even interviewed.

Cheveldayoff's hope is to bring Prairie work ethic and determination to the new team, to have high expectations and to do whatever it takes to meet those expectations. He knows from growing up here – and knows, as well, from his son's reaction to the Byfuglien trade – just how much a team can mean to people.

He recalls flying in from Chicago for the press conference that was going to announce his appointment. No one was supposed to know, but it seemed they already did. When the family – Kevin, Janet, Chase, now 14, and Alexis, 11 – moved to the customs booth, all the customs agents left their posts and gathered around.

“‘We only have two questions,' they told me. ‘What's the name of the team? And when are you going to win the Stanley Cup?'

The Best Passing Quarterback Ever
It's just too bad Anthony Calvillo plays in the CFL

By Michael Weinreb, GRANTLAND..COM, OCTOBER 9, 2011


The quarterback won a championship and went to Disneyland, and no one really noticed he was there. The few who did were polite and courteous, and they took pictures and shook his hand and walked away, and it is at moments like these that Anthony Calvillo finds himself thankful that he never made it anywhere near a Super Bowl. "I don't think Peyton Manning could take his kids to Disneyland," says his wife, Alexia. "I'll bet it would actually be dangerous."

On Monday, presuming he throws for at least 258 yards, this man you've probably never heard of will become the leading passer in the history of professional football. He has accumulated more yards than Peyton Manning, more yards than Dan Marino, more yards than John Elway and Jim Kelly and Fran Tarkenton and Joe Montana and Brett Favre, and he has done it all without ever being even marginally famous in the United States. This in itself is a remarkable accomplishment. That he is 39 years old and still considered one of the two or three best players in his adopted country is another. That he has continued to play football even after both he and his wife fought cancer is still another. Not only is Anthony Calvillo the most prolific anonymous quarterback who ever lived, his is one of those great American stories, an epic tale of failure and adversity and redemption. It just happened to take place in Canada.

A confession: Until midsummer, I had no idea who Anthony Calvillo was, either. But I've long harbored a fascination with the Canadian Football League, with its colorful nicknames (Eskimos and Blue Bombers and Argonauts) and its bizarro edicts (110 yards instead of 100, three downs instead of four, 12 men instead of 11), with the idea that there is a league just like ours and yet completely different, as if it were birthed on an alternate plane of reality. Is there a more apt metaphor for how America sees Canada than how Americans view the CFL? Most of our knowledge is acquired out of desperation and boredom; the CFL regular season starts in June, when we are jonesing hard for football, and when it does show up on our television — say, on an otherwise idle Friday night on the NFL Network — it is more Rube Goldberg than Vince Lombardi, because of its extra-man-per-side and its stretched field and because it allows us to reconnect with former college standouts we had otherwise forgotten. In Canada, Ken-Yon Rambo and Avon Cobourne are stars. Every so often, some underevaluated or late-blooming talent will find his way from CFL to NFL stardom (we may refer to this as the Warren Moon Exception, of which the most recent example is the Miami Dolphins' Cameron Wake), but this is such a rare phenomenon that it still seems like a hiccup in the system when it happens. The truth is nobody in the United States grows up dreaming of winning a Grey Cup.

Of course, I realize that the previous paragraph is a biased assessment of the CFL. I realize that Canadian professional football has its own rich history, and that it holds a unique place in the Canadian psyche that, as an American, I could not begin to adequately characterize. But part of what makes the CFL so charming is that I'm not sure Canadians can really characterize it, either: Author Steve O'Brien's book about the CFL (subtitle: The Phoenix of Professional Sports Leagues) — one of the only comprehensive league histories I could find — begins by paraphrasing Winston Churchill's "riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma" quote, discusses for 300 pages the league's errors of judgments and perceived inferiority complex, and ends with a quote from Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" about not knowing what you've got 'til it's gone. When I told the customs agent at the Montreal airport that I was a sportswriter, he assumed I was here to cover a tennis tournament, and when I told him I was here to write about Canadian football, he stared hard at my passport, crooked his head, and said, "Really? You know it's not very good, right?"

And so I think it's fair to say that Anthony Calvillo, who has played for the Montreal Alouettes since 1998, is famous in certain Canadian households and a complete unknown in others. Of the top nine passers in the history of North American professional football,2 Calvillo's name is the least recognizable. He is not an NFL icon, and he is not the brother of a Pro Football Hall of Famer (as is the longtime CFL star Damon Allen, brother of Marcus), and as far as I know he's never had a cereal named after him (as with Doug Flutie, who acquired yards and fame both north and south of the border). He gets recognized on the street by fans, and yet a vast number of Montrealers have no idea that his team even exists. His own wife, born and raised in this city, had never heard of the Alouettes until she began dating Calvillo. When I tried to get a cab driver to take me to the stadium on a game night, I had to show him on a map. Then he asked if I was going to a handball match. "I didn't know anything about the CFL myself," Calvillo says. "Not until I started playing in it."

This summer, as the NFL players were locked out and the season appeared to be in jeopardy, I wondered if the CFL would have a crossover moment in America, as it did during the players' strike of 1982, when the networks were desperate for something to fill the empty hours on Sunday. Anthony Calvillo thought about that, too. How could he not? He grew up in East Los Angeles, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, and like the rest of us, he dreamed of someday playing quarterback in the NFL, though it never seemed a particularly realistic goal. Upon graduating from La Puente High School, Calvillo had no scholarship offers, so he attended Mt. San Antonio, a local junior college; after two years at Mt. San Antonio, Calvillo had three offers: one from Louisiana Tech, one from Southern Illinois, and one from Utah State. His size was the primary issue: Calvillo is listed at 6-foot-1, one inch taller than Drew Brees (and at least three inches taller than Doug Flutie), but this was the early '90s, when "short" quarterbacks were still considered anathema. The other schools seemed too far away from Los Angeles, and so Calvillo committed to Utah State, where the offensive coordinator was Jim Zorn and the coach was Charlie Weatherbie, who played for a season with the Edmonton Eskimos.

"The guy had ice water in his veins," Weatherbie says of Calvillo. "Bombs could go off around him and he wouldn't even see it. He could throw in the pocket, and he was a great decision-maker. We'd throw something like 46 times a game."

In Calvillo's senior season, he threw for 3,148 yards and 19 touchdowns, and Utah State won the Big West Conference championship and defeated Ball State in the Las Vegas Bowl. Still, no one in the NFL showed much interest. "They just didn't think he could see well enough in the pocket," Weatherbie says. Zorn made inquiries to the CFL, and an expansion team called the Las Vegas Posse put Calvillo on its negotiating list, meaning he'd have to try out with them if he wanted to play. This was a watershed moment for the league, as it had decided to expand into America, primarily out of financial desperation (which is always the foundation for a sound business strategy). Teams sprouted up in Shreveport and Sacramento and Baltimore, as well, and no one seemed to understand exactly why this was happening or what it meant or how the hell Canadian football was actually played. The people were vaguely curious, and then Labor Day came around and they forgot it existed.

Calvillo had already presumed he would seek out a job as a coach and teacher, but he went to the tryout in Vegas nevertheless. As he remembers it, there were 13 quarterbacks in camp, from Oklahoma and Illinois and Northwestern, names he can still recite — "guys I watched on TV," he says. "I thought, OK, I'm not gonna compete with them. But after that first day, and after I saw them throwing, I knew right away that I could compete."

Calvillo not only made the team; he became the starting quarterback. The Posse practiced in the parking lot of a casino and played their games in 120-degree weather before an ever-dwindling fan base (their largest crowd all season was 12,000). They played one season, went 5-13, and folded. In 1996, as Art Modell completed his backroom negotiations to move the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, the CFL's American experiment met its inevitable demise. The Baltimore Stallions wound up in Montreal, and Calvillo, thrown into the league's dispersal draft, played three middling seasons in Hamilton, Ontario, before moving to Quebec, where both he and the franchise appeared to have equally indeterminate futures. In his first season with the Alouettes, Calvillo threw six touchdown passes and 10 interceptions, and then everything changed: The Alouettes adapted to their identity just as their quarterback adapted to the CFL.

They sell smoked-meat sandwiches at Alouettes games, and while this should not come as a surprise, it is a wonderful regional anomaly. Smoked meat (salted and cured beef brisket piled to excess on a couple of hapless slices of rye bread) is to Montreal as cheesesteaks are to Philadelphia, the defining food of a city with a myriad of artery-clogging establishments, including a place called Au Pied de Cochon, where the specialty of the house is a lobster crammed inside a pig's head, and where the waiters periodically towel the grease off the fixtures. To outsiders, Montreal is a city of indulgences, a haven for youthful misbehavior and sloppy bachelor parties, and the crowd at the Alouettes game reflects that. They are here for a good time, to consume Canadian beer and smoke cigarettes on the concourse and bask in the evening; for many of them, the action on the field seems a secondary concern. The stadium is a gathering place.

And it is a beautiful stadium, nearly 100 years old, named after Percival Molson, a prolific athlete who was killed by a German howitzer during World War I. Until 1998, the Alouettes played at a half-filled Olympic Stadium, the staid and cavernous dome that the Montreal Expos called home, but in 1998 (the same year Calvillo arrived) they were forced to host a playoff game at Molson Stadium because of a U2 concert, and they never went back. It's not really an exaggeration to say U2 rescued football in Montreal: By embracing the intimacy of their new home (with a capacity of 25,000 rather than 56,000) and its stunning views of the city skyline, the Alouettes have found a niche. To get to Molson Stadium you walk up the steep incline of Mont Royal, past the dormitories and science labs of McGill University, past worn fraternity houses, past a pair of husky scalpers whose Expos jerseys are one of the few things that separate this walk from the one you might make on a Saturday afternoon in South Bend or Ann Arbor or Tuscaloosa. The other, of course, is that people are speaking French.

Hearing a French public address announcer at a football game is like listening to a version of Remembrance of Things Past as read by John Facenda. It doesn't make intuitive sense. (If someone spoke French at an SEC game, it might spark a riot.) But this is Canada, and leaving aside for a moment the intricate French-Canadian politics that define Quebec as a province, the CFL was constructed by splitting differences: first with British rugby and then with American football, producing "a uniquely Canadian version that evolved through protracted compromise," according to the sociologist Robert Stebbins. Ever since abandoning America and paring its membership down to eight teams, the CFL has tried to emphasize Canadian nationalism in its marketing.3 An advertisement on the JumboTron melds together sepia-toned footage of dudes tromping through the snow and hoisting the Grey Cup over their heads before fading into the slogan: Notre Ligue. Notre Football. (Our League. Our Football.) Hence the three downs instead of four, and the 12 men per side instead of 11, and that cavernous playing area (110 yards plus a 20-yard end zone on each side, and 65 yards wide rather than 53⅓), and the goal posts set at the front of the end zone, and the unlimited motion in the backfield preplay, and little idiosyncratic touches like fluorescent penalty flags.4 I went to see Calvillo play against the Edmonton Eskimos in August, and every time I felt like I was settling into watching a football game something odd would happen: A 12-yard field goal or a second-and-10 from the 52 or a score of 20-4.

That "4" was put up not because the Eskimos sacked Calvillo twice in the end zone, but because of the novelty concept known as the single, or rouge: One point is awarded when the ball is kicked into the end zone by any legal means other than a made field goal, and the receiving team is unable to scuttle the ball out of the end zone by either running or kicking it back out, which can lead to a back-and-forth straight out of Benny Hill. As an American, you probably find the rouge an idiotic perversion of the game, and I wouldn't blame you. Even Canadians are self-conscious about the rouge, and there's been discussion about abolishing it. Thirty years later, the rouge was the first thing Charlie Weatherbie mentioned when I asked him about adapting to the peculiarities of the CFL.

"For me, the biggest thing to adjust to [in this league] was the size of the field," Calvillo says. "I learned right away that there are certain throws you just should not make because of the size of the field. Like the out route — it's a 40-yard throw and the ball stays in the air forever. At first, I just ran the play that the coaches presented to us. Looking back at it now, you just do what you're told. It wasn't until I got older that I learned the philosophy of what you're trying to do as an offense."

Calvillo is not very big — he is listed at 213 pounds — and he struggles against pressure, but when he finds a rhythm he is still the best quarterback in the CFL: In a September game against Hamilton, he completed 31 of 45 passes for 421 yards and four touchdowns. He leads the league in touchdown passes, passing yards, and quarterback efficiency. He happens to wear Kurt Warner's no. 13, and this almost seems like too obvious a comparison given their equally improbable backstories, but it's hard not to make it anyway. The CFL's rules place a premium on the passing game; with three downs and unlimited motion, every offensive coordinator has to think a little bit like Mike Martz,5 and Calvillo has completed more than 60 percent of his throws every year since 2003. That's the advantage of a wide-open field: An open receiver has a tremendous amount of room to run, and Calvillo has a knack for finding his wideouts in space. It's what's enabled him to anchor a dynasty in Montreal.

Since 2000, Calvillo has played in eight Grey Cups; in 2002, the Alouettes beat Edmonton 25-16, but Calvillo completed only 11 of 31 passes, and after he lost four more Grey Cup games between 2003 and 2008, he became something of a tragic figure among the media,6 a nice guy who got lucky once and looked like he might never win the big game again.7 "For a long time, all people wanted to talk about was those games, those games, those games," Calvillo says. "The one thing I told myself is that I was never going to quit on it. I was never going to give up. And the last two years, people aren't talking about those losses anymore."

Now, after two straight Grey Cup victories, people have begun to ask Calvillo about retirement. Now he has become Brett Favre without the tabloid sleaze, and people want to know how much longer he can keep doing this, and Calvillo has come to embrace the publicity he gets rather than guarding himself from view. (He's not making NFL money, but he is making enough to live comfortably.) In 2007, his wife was diagnosed with lymphoma, and she insisted that he keep playing rather than sit in a hospital room with her; last offseason, Calvillo announced that he'd been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and he had surgery but never really thought about quitting. He says that he's in the best shape of his career. He's given up gluten and dairy products and sugar, and he's working with a local trainer who promised him no more pulled hamstrings, and so far it's worked. "When I started this [regimen] going into the 2009 season, after every game, I felt like I could go play another one," he says. "Which was sick, because I'd never felt like that before. This year, it's taken me a bit more to maintain my body. With the thyroid surgery, they had to cut some muscle in my shoulder, and that's made it even tighter."

He knows the end is coming soon. He just isn't ready for it to happen yet. Nine years ago, Calvillo had a brief window open with the NFL; he met with the Jaguars and the Seahawks (he calls those workouts "ridiculous," and says they were more meet-and-greets than actual opportunities), but he had a real chance to catch on with the Steelers, who were starting Tommy Maddox and preparing to jettison Kordell Stewart. If Charlie Batch signs elsewhere, they told him, they'd bring him in as a backup. And then Batch re-signed and the window closed, and Calvillo went back to Canada, back to that alternate reality, back into a world where quarterbacks may not make NFL money but can also walk unmolested through the streets of their own city.

"I remember him saying to me, 'What boy doesn't dream of one day being the best in the world?'" Alexia recalls. "He said, 'I know I could play down there, but you have to be given the right chance at the right moment.' I think there was some disappointment, but it wasn't like he was looking for a job. He knew he had a good thing going here. This was his life. And we're just normal people moving through life like everyone else. Our daughter lined one of his trophies with princess stickers, and he refuses to remove those stickers."

On this night in August, Montreal beats Edmonton 27-4, and Calvillo throws for 261 yards and is unhurt despite absorbing one of those frightening hits in which his legs get bent back in a direction that legs aren't meant to bend. (When I ask him if he attributes this to his conditioning program, he tells me he attributes it to luck.) When it's over, the Alouettes emerge from a cramped locker room and sign autographs, and one woman delivers a tin of cookies to her favorite player, and it all feels a lot like the aftermath of a high school football game in Ohio. Calvillo is one of the last to emerge, and we stand out near the middle of the field and remark on its sheer scope. He'd told me earlier about the advice Doug Flutie gave him when he was thinking about jumping to the NFL ("The media is 10 times worse, because there's so many more of them"), and he told me that he didn't want his records to be compared to those of Favre or Montana or any of the others, and he told me that he no longer worried whether people in America knew who he was.

"This is it," he says, and he throws his arms up into the vast expanse, a man who has come to relish the compromise.

Edmonton arena blackout beaters
Bettman muzzles arena parties, but not before they hint at intentions

By TERRY JONES, QMI Agency, Oct 12 2011


NEW YORK - Only minutes before Gary Bettman issued the media blackout to Daryl Katz and Mayor Stephen Mandel, the Oilers’ owner decided he had something to say.

“We are here to get it done,” Katz told QMI Agency before Wednesday’s crucial meeting with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who is playing the role of facilitator to get the Edmonton downtown arena project back on the rails in time to get the deal done by Katz’s Oct. 31 deadline.

“We commend everyone involved in their willingness to meet, particularly the mayor and Gary Bettman,” said Katz.

“We have some significant issues to resolve. We’re confident where there’s a will, there’s a way.

“We’re hopeful we’ll be able to come away with an agreement which will enable us all to move forward. We have to get this deal right for the city of Edmonton and ourselves.

“We feel this is about seizing the opportunity to transform our city and lock the Oilers into longtime sustainability in Edmonton.”

A lot of on-the-record-words there, for Daryl Katz.

But maybe Bettman’s lack of words spoke the loudest.

About 35 minutes into Mandel’s meeting with Bettman here Tuesday afternoon, word came down from his 45th-floor offices at NHL headquarters.

The mayor sent word down to the street where a gathering of media members were waiting for the City of Edmonton contingent to emerge from the meeting.

“Gary Bettman has asked for a media blackout until the meetings Wednesday are complete,” the reporters were told by a media relations rep of the Avenue of Americas, not far from Radio City Music Hall where they stood.

The mayor took just over an hour to present background to Bettman, to bring him up to speed on the City of Edmonton side of proceedings.

But to call for a media blackout suggests that this isn’t another stage of the proceedings here but, quite likely, the final showdown.

GET 'ER DONE

If you know Bettman, who seldom commands people to come to his office, this has almost certainly become the time and place he intends to finally get it over and done one way or the other.

If you read between the lines, and indeed the actual words of both Mandel and Katz going into the meeting Wednesday, some form of compromise seems to be in the air.

Mandel, in an interview Monday, made some surprisingly strong statements.

“I wouldn’t be taking this trip if my expectations weren’t optimistic.

“Most people want to see this deal get done,” he said of the $450-million proposed downtown arena and entertainment district, which would totally transform the city.

“Not all. Some don’t. But I know without a doubt that if we get it done and look back five years from now and 10 years from now, nobody will be saying a negative word. And I know if we don’t get it done, and five and 10 years from now we don’t have a hockey team and we don’t have any improvements to our downtown and we look back, there will be a lot of people wondering how we could have done that to our city.

“I think everybody involved, including Daryl Katz and Gary Bettman, want the team to be successful and stay in Edmonton.”

That certainly sent a message that Mandel was coming here to get the framework to get a deal by the deadline.

While there’s still the missing $100 million from the province, that doesn’t seem to be what the parties are here to deal with so much as the city not getting off the pot and dealing with Northlands on the non-compete clause.

This is High Noon in a lot of directions when it comes to the future of the Oilers, but it will likely be long before noon Wednesday that the Northlands issue is put on the table to get dealt with.

There were indications that Katz might be bringing a compromise solution to the table which would allow the non-compete clause to be removed in exchange for the city restructuring another part of the deal.

By the time it was time to check that out, however, Bettman’s media blackout had kicked in.

FRASER: YOU BETTER HURRY UP AND TAKE THAT FACEOFF

Kerry Fraser, TSN.CA, 10/12/2011


Got a question on rule clarification, comments on rule enforcements or some memorable NHL stories? Kerry Fraser wants to answer your emails at cmonref@tsn.ca!

Hey Kerry,

During the Florida-Pittsburgh game on Tuesday night, I noticed in one faceoff that the linesman dropped the puck when there was no one in the circle for the Pens. Is this allowed?

Thanks,
Wes Krentz
Unity, Saskatchewan

----

Wes: Not only was the correct faceoff procedure followed by linesman Steve Miller but a goal did result against the Penguins on the ensuing end to end rush.

A few years ago, in an effort to speed up the game the League instituted a "hurry up faceoff" procedure. Here is how the process works. Once the neutral zone referee completes the line change that each team is allowed to make (last change to home team) he will then lower his hand to indicate no further change. This triggers the linesman at the faceoff location to blow his whistle which is a signal to both teams that they have no more than five (5) seconds to line up for the ensuing faceoff. At the end of the five seconds, the lineman is instructed to conduct a proper faceoff.

The word "proper" means that both centres should be positioned for the faceoff with their sticks on the ice utilizing the correct on-ice markings and teams are in an on-side position with no encroachment. This is however, assuming that both opposing centres are in the immediate vicinity of the faceoff spot. The linesman can and will eject a center that does not comply, stands back and attempts to quarterback or if his team commits a violation for encroachment. The optimum word here is "immediate vicinity" of the faceoff spot.

The language of Rule 76 for faceoff Procedure clearly states that, "If a centre is not at the designated face-off area once the five (5) second time has elapsed, the linesman will drop the puck immediately." The rule further directs the linesman to drop the puck immediately if the centre is back from the face-off spot, is "quarterbacking" or refused to come into faceoff area when instructed to do so, or is just slow to arrive when the five seconds has elapsed.

In practical application of the faceoff procedure every linesman in the league will attempt to work with the centres wherever possible utilizing common sense. Should the centre be moving to the faceoff spot and in close proximity after the five seconds has elapsed the linesman will simply wave the slowpoke out of the circle for a replacement. If the defending team center was in violation of this rule to the extent we saw last night I have to believe that he would be ejected from the faceoff before the puck was dropped on the stick of the attacking center; although I have been on the ice when this happened. You should have seen the mad dash fire drill that resulted from that one!

Last night, Penguins centre Joe Vitale was excessively slow getting to the face-off location judging from the fact that he wasn't even in the wide camera frame of the television broadcast. Linesman Steve Miller was ready to conduct the face-off along with the entire Panther unit that hungered for the black disc.

The faceoff procedure was followed perfectly in this situation when Miller dropped the puck. So many nights I heard catcalls from the crowd when a frustrated fan would shout at a linesman, "Just DROP The Puck!"

Last night in Pittsburgh, Steve Miller complied with their ongoing request. You can bet the Penguins' centre ice men will be first to arrive on the scene in the future!

Rookie GM on hot seat in hockey mad Sault

Darren Yourk, Globe and Mail, Oct. 13, 2011


Kyle Dubas’s life story is worthy of a Bruce Springsteen tune: Kid grows up in a far-flung, blue-collar town learning the value of hard work from his steel-worker grandfather. Kid has hockey in his blood, but a series of concussions dashes his dream of playing professionally. Kid leaves for the big city to get a business degree and makes good before giving it all up to come home to resurrect the sacred local junior squad.

Dubas, 25, is the first-year general manager of the Ontario Hockey League’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. His hiring in April raised eyebrows in a community that takes its Hounds seriously.

“Every single topic with the team is hotly discussed, whether it’s who the backup goaltender is or why the eighth defenceman isn’t playing,” said Dubas, the second youngest GM in OHL history. “It doesn’t bother me, but I begin to worry when it starts to flow to the players because they are just kids. I look at it as my job to defend the guys.”

The pressure hardly took Dubas by surprise. Born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, his family’s past is intertwined with the franchise. His father is a former Greyhounds intern and his grandfather Walter coached the team from 1960-67, working at the Algoma Steel plant by day and stepping behind the bench at night.

Dubas’s parents divorced when he was eight, frequently leaving him in the care of his grandparents. If the Hounds were playing at home, Kyle and Walter were always in the same seats just inside the blueline. The old coach’s message to his grandson was simple: Winning teams never lose a battle.

“No grit, no glory,” Dubas said. “My grandpa told me that the minute you start listening to the press and the fans is your first step toward sitting with the press and the fans.”

His first job with the team was taking care of sticks and water bottles as a dressing-room attendant when he was 11. Concussions ended Dubas’s playing days when he was 14, but didn’t curb his passion for the game. He took a job as a hockey operations assistant with the Hounds, exposing him to player development and the logistics of running a junior franchise. He moved to St. Catharines, Ont., in 2003 to enroll in Brock University’s sports management program, balancing a full-time course load with scouting junior B and midget games for the Greyhounds.

After graduating with honours, Dubas set his sights on the agent business, landing a job with Uptown Sports Management, an agency in Burlington, Ont., representing OHL, minor pro and NHL players.

“It’s a cutthroat, dirty business,” he said. “I was 20 years old trying to recruit players, and other agents were telling guys, ‘You can’t let him represent you. He’s 20. He’ll screw up the pivotal moments in your career.’ ”

Dubas was representing players such as Kyle Clifford (Los Angeles Kings) and Andrew Desjardins (San Jose Sharks) and helping Uptown establish offices in Calgary and Stockholm when the GM opportunity arrived. The Greyhounds’ owners, having watched the team miss the playoffs four out of eight years, decided it was time for a change.

Lou Lukenda, the Greyhounds’ majority shareholder and president, said the original plan called for the team to hire a veteran hockey man until Dubas walked in for his interview armed with a 95-page blueprint on the future of the team.

“He came well prepared and has some excellent ideas,” Lukenda said. “We thought his experience as an agent could help us and we liked the idea that he wanted a team that would be good every year, as opposed to the idea of building a team to try and go all the way for one year, only to pay the consequences for the next three or four.”

Lukenda said four other quality candidates interviewed, but the board was unanimous in wanting Dubas.

He went to work trying to change the environment surrounding the franchise, interacting heavily with fans via Twitter and dubbing the 2011-12 season “The Rising,” borrowing the title from the 2002 Springsteen album. He said his goal is to build a constant pipeline of talent through the draft and get everyone –fans, players, coaches and front-office staff – pulling in the same direction to put the Greyhounds on an equal footing with traditional Western Conference powers such as London, Windsor and Kitchener.

“We’re not going to beat those teams on revenues and budgets, so we need to beat them on the culture of our team,” Dubas said. “When a player comes to our team, he needs to know we’re going to get the most out of him in the classroom, in the community and on the ice.”

Before I made it: Tyler Ennis

Tyler Ennis With Kevin Kennedy, The Hockey News, 2011-10-15


I played my first hockey game in a house league in Edmonton. I can still remember my first goal, not because it was good, but because it was on my own net.

My dad got me into hockey at first and he put me on skates early, around three years old, and I just loved it. I grew up with Jared Spurgeon who is now a defenseman with the Minnesota Wild and both our dads coached us throughout minor hockey We were both little guys and it’s pretty cool that we both made it.

I remember being really active as a kid. I played tons of sports, but always came back to hockey. My dad made me a nice little hockey station in the basement and we played hockey all the time, sometimes on the street, sometimes in the basement. I also played a lot of basketball and golf as a kid.

It’s kind of weird, but my favourite time of the year to play hockey was the summer. When I was in novice I played on Team Brick and I remember we played in the big tournament against guys like Kyle Turris, Luke Schenn and P.K. Subban. We didn’t win, but it was a lot of fun. Only Jared and I made it to the NHL from that team, but there were definitely a lot of great players. I remember looking at team photos of the past Brick squads and each team had a couple guys who made it to the NHL so I figured I had a shot as well. To be honest, it actually wasn’t until peewee that I had any real success. That year we won everything - the league, the provincials - it was awesome.

I played junior close to home in Medicine Hat and I got a chance to play in the Memorial Cup and the world juniors where we won the gold medal. The next big day was the draft and I remember I wasn’t sure if I was going to be drafted in the first round and didn’t know if I was going to go to the draft. I was with my agent and my family and they convinced me to go and said it would a fun experience either way.

Buffalo called me at 26 and the feeling was unbelievable. I was very proud and happy to be able to celebrate with my parents. My brother was vacationing in Thailand at the time and I remember that he texted me about it that night. Everyone was just really proud.

On the day I got called up to the NHL team for the first time, I remember I was at the morning skate in Portland because we had a game that night. My coach called me into his office after the skate and told me I might be going up to Buffalo because a player had gotten hurt and was getting checked out. He just told me to keep my phone on and on the way home he called me and said, “Ya you’re going up for sure.” I quickly grabbed my stuff and ripped on to the plane, barely making it on time and I arrived in Buffalo just before the pre-game skate.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any friends or family there on such short notice, but they were all watching at home and got everybody together. It was so cool and I even scored in my first game!

Sleeping giant pries open Canucks' eyes

MATTHEW SEKERES, Globe and Mail, Oct. 14, 2011


On Sunday, Vancouver scientist Pat Byrne will head to Rogers Arena, home of the Canucks, and begin setting the NHL team's travel plan for the remainder of the season.

By that time he will know the score of a Rugby World Cup semi-final match between New Zealand's All Blacks and Australia's Wallabies. Byrne doesn't really follow rugby, but both sides are clients.

So is a premier NFL team that Byrne won't name because the organization demands that their relationship remain confidential. All he will say is that the franchise is a recent Super Bowl winner.

From hockey to rugby to football, the 58-year-old from Langley, B.C., is becoming a player in the world of big-league sports as franchises look for every edge to help their competitiveness. More and more, teams are calling on Byrne, the so-called “sleep doctor” for the Vancouver Canucks.

He says that sports account for just 15 to 20 per cent of his business, but the co-founder and vice-president of business development for Fatigue Science, a Hawaii-based firm that helps businesses assess and mitigate fatigue-related risk, believes that an avalanche of interest is coming.

“Industry understands the link between sleep and accident risk, but sports people confuse how they feel with how they actually perform,” Byrne said.

“Athletes who say they feel fine have terrible reaction time because there is chronic sleep restriction. They get used to [poor sleep].

“So full credit to [Canucks general manager] Mike Gillis when he came in because he realized that they had a problem with travel,” Byrne added. “It was very exciting for me because if you are a scientist, you want to tackle your hardest problem first, and the Canucks were the hardest problem because of their location. If you could solve their travel and sleep and fatigue problems, then you could fix anybody's problem.”

Byrne, who holds degrees in biology, chemistry and a master's in biochemistry from Western Washington University, began working with the Canucks four years ago when he was granted a 30-minute audience by Gillis. He walked into a Rogers Arena conference room and saw every relevant member of the Canucks' staff, including head coach Alain Vigneault, team doctors, trainers, etc. Ninety minutes later, Gillis turned to him and said: “When can you start?”

Byrne's work culminated last year when Vancouver posted the NHL's best road record, 27-10-4, which was nothing short of remarkable given that the city is the most northwest outpost in the league and that the team bears a heavier travel burden than its competitors.

Byrne's annual project begins in earnest after the first road trip of the season. The Canucks complete a four-game road swing Saturday in Edmonton, at which point the players will return home and turn in their ReadiBands.

The computerized bracelets monitor the players' sleep patterns, so Byrne gets a handle on who sleeps well on the road, who sleeps on the plane, who takes an afternoon nap, and how often they awake. From there, he aggregates the data, seizes up the road schedule, and gives the Canucks a travel plan through the use of a software program that turns sleep data into performance data.

Byrne bought the technology from the U.S. military and owns a third of the company. His investors include Brett Conrad and Darrell Kopke of lululemon.

Mostly, Fatigue Science works with industry, such as mining companies and airlines, where sleep deprivation is more a life-and-death question than an issue of wins and losses. But as the Canucks story has spread, and as more athletes Down Under, specifically the Australian Institute of Sport, have come on board, Byrne has been receiving more interest from sports organizations.