Photo of the Day: Farewell, Pete III

FRANK GUNN/CANADIAN PRESS

Paul (Pigskin Pete) Weiler wraps up a 31-year career with one last Oskee Wee Wee Sunday in Hamilton.

Related: Thanks, Pete and Tiger-Cats begin search for next Pigskin Pete.

Into the weekend: Materazzi is back

Recovering from the birthday hooley at JABS Mansion, I'm afraid the blog has been a bit spotty the last couple days (picking cheesies out of the carpet and scraping Orange Crush off the walls is a little time consuming).
So we're going straight into the weekend here, after watching all of about 30 seconds of this morning's Ryder Cup coverage on TSN -- "The Ryder Cup is underway!" said the excited announcer. Tiger put his tee shot into the water. Colin Montgomerie strode up next, looking more and more like good old Keith Appleyard, the crowd went nuts ...

BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS

The glamour, the excitement, the shoes: It's the Ryder Cup.

And off that bit of excitement, that's enough golf, thank you. On to some links and the usual other stuff before the fumigators arrive:

One last look. Marco Materazzi, and his suddenly bulletproof, buttproof chest, has a new shoe commercial out in Italy.

One last read. The Guardian's Richard Williams has seen the Zidane movie that JABS has been all over, and likes it just as much. It opens in the UK next week:

Any conventional film about Zidane would include the astonishing 20-yard volley that won Real the European Cup final on its return to Hampden in 2003, plus the two he scored with his head in the 1998 World Cup final. It would examine, through the use of super-slo-mo, the technical tricks that were particular to him, such as the roulette, in which he deceived a defender by turning his body through 360 degrees, dragging the ball forward with the sole of his boot while in mid-pirouette, facing the way he had come. It would analyse the gift of balance that enabled this heavy-set man to move with such lightness and grace. It would investigate his childhood among north African immigrants in a poor quarter of Marseille; it would catalogue the transfers that took him from Cannes to Bordeaux as a teenager, then to Juventus of Turin and finally to Madrid.
This new film does none of these things.

That's undoubtedly why the guy in the Zidane shirt was among the few walkouts during last Friday's screening at the Varsity (oh, and one more link regarding a release of the film here in NA from one of the co-directors: "This film could certainly play on pay-per-view TV. But we're hoping for theatrical." Let's hope.)

One more film note. Katie Holmes to play Posh in a new Becks biopic? (Thanks to The Offside.)

Weekend assignment. Another tough question tackling the prickliest issues of the day, but that's what we do. Picking up where J.E. Skeets at The Basketball Jones left off, is Pryzbilla the highest Scrabble-scoring name in pro sports today?
UPDATE: Eagle-eyed reader John Richardson sends in this handy dandy score generator and an early entry that rolls into the lead: Wozniewski.

Sports around town. The OHL season is back on, and Brampton and St. Mike's play their home openers tonight. And on Sunday morning all over the place, it's the Scotiaback Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

Watching. Toronto at Calgary, Saturday, 7 p.m., CBC. Forget Ricky Williams. I wanna see Pinball in Coppley and Malcolm in Canali (good catch, Boatmen Blog).

Punters' corner. Ready or not, here's your recreational-purposes-only picks. After a second straight 2-3 week, it's time for a shakeup. I've brought in my dawg Jinks to make the choices, either kibble (visitors) or cookies (home):

BUFFALO (-5 1/2) over Jets. The dawg is nuts.
Cincinnati (+1 1/2) over PITTSBURGH. The dawg is hungry!
Jacksonville (+7) over INDY. The dawg is calming down, a little.
Chicago (-3) over MINNESOTA. Jinks barked on this one. Best bet, that.
N.Y. Giants (+3 1/2) over SEATTLE. This is pushing it. I'd never make this pick. Two in a row on the road? Plaxico would have something to say about that.

 

Not the Sim Old Game

Rick Westhead writes a good yarn today, about the CFL's attempts to develop a computer-game version of three-down football. Sounds easy, right?

Not so. Game makers and CFL official Jim Neish say developing a CFL game costs at least $5 million (U.S.). What's more, even if the league's sponsors like Rona, Sony and WestJet Airlines helped to cover the cost of a CFL game, the league still wouldn't be home free. It simply hasn't been able to find a producer willing to take the time to invest in a CFL title.

The virtual Vince is a real gamer.

It doesn't take a genius to recognize how important, perhaps even essential, the sim version of the real game on the field has become (and how it sells products and helps create and market superstar athletes and perhaps even develop fans, and on and on -- where would Vince Carter be without it?). A recent survey by Mediamark Research noted that gaming is the top online activity among kids aged 6 to 11. For better or for worse, top sellers like Madden 06 have become a doorway to sports fandom.

But despite offshoots (NCAA and the non-NFL sanctioned Blitz among the football titles) and the adaptability of the technology -- on EA's NHL 2006 game, rules, scoring, lineups and other options can be adjusted (though not rink size, as far as I know) -- the CFL has yet to enter this arena even in a piggyback kind of arrangement.

These games are a money maker, but the marketers Westhead talks to aren't sure this one would be a go:

Game makers are skeptical that the CFL game would garner enough sales, especially in the U.S. market where Electronic Arts also makes a college football title, to make its development worth their while.

As someone who's just a little too old to have been around for the wave of computer games that began around 1989, when the first version of Madden arrived -- okay, I'm much too old, though I do recall being hooked on Jumpman, getting over it before Michael Jordan turned it into a trademark -- I'm probably the wrong guy to ask about this. But there's two things here that makes me pause.

The first is that you can't go cheap on something like this, you can't do it half-assed, or you end up looking silly. The second is that the conceit behind computer games is matching up against Ray Lewis or Tiger Woods or Mario Lemieux -- the biggest, baddest and best in the world. The CFL is an entertaining, wacky brand of football, but few would ever contend it's the home of the world's fastest and strongest athletes. To the gaming audience, playing a CFL computer game might well be like going up against the Nationwide Tour, or the Belfast Giants "ice hockey" team.

Still, it's hard not to wish them well and if it does ever come to pass, the payoff would be huge. As one of my regular e-mailers is never shy to point out, the CFL's TV ratings destroy the NBA in Canada. If only they could grab some of the association's video-game coolness, they'd be going somewhere quite new.