The Tennis Thug (Updated)

Serena Williams' behavior on Saturday night at the U.S. Open was so appalling, so disgraceful on so many levels it's hard to know where to start.

Certainly, it was unusual to see a female professional athlete conduct herself in such a manner, something we've just not seen even with the explosion of women's sports. We now know a woman can be just as much of a jerk or a thug as any man while playing a sport. Congratulations.

What bothered me the most? It was the attitude, the sneering of the multi-millionaire Williams who rained insults down upon the official as though to say, "I'm Serena Williams. You are nothing. You have no right to make a call that interferes with my wonderfulness. You are dirt. You don't deserve to live, but because all these people are around, I will spare your worthless life."

For someone who has on occasion claimed racial prejudice when she has been offended by treatment in tournaments, it was indeed bizarre to see Williams screaming profanities at the small, Asian female judge while brandishing her racquet in a threatening manner.

Full marks to the lineswoman for standing up to Williams, and full marks to tournament officials for backing their official and imposing the code violation that ended Williams' tournament. Some are suggesting the foot fault that ignited the entire controversy shouldn't have been called, at least not at that point in the match. And if a serve was slightly out? Don't call that rule because the match is too close? Tennis pros will tell you foot-faulting doesn't really provide much of an advantage, if any, to the server, but if you have an person there to make the call and they make the call, suggesting they should hold their tongue depending on the score is absurd.

Williams has already been fined $10,500 in total for her ridiculous performance, and it's theoretically possible she could lose her entire $350,000 purse if tennis decides this was a major violation.This one's up to the Grand Slam committee and the USTA, but it's a tricky problem that also lands in the lap of Stacey Allaster, a Canadian who is now at the helm of the women's tour. The already trashy Serena has now veered into Britney Spears territory, and women's tennis understands image is a very big deal in that industry.

Some have talked of suspension for Williams, but really, being eliminated from a Grand Slam semi-final is a pretty big penalty already. It's not like the next Grand Slam event is next week. It's in January in Australia.

A simple heartfelt apology would make the difference, not the contrived public relations doubletalk produced in an official statement yesterday. The apology should be made publicly and in person to the official in question

(Ed. Note: Well, despite some who believe Williams had nothing to apologize for, she has now done so, albeit 36 hours after the fact. It took her a botched press conference and one lame press statement before she got it right, but she has now "sincerely apologized" for her "inappropriate outburst", offering that apology to the lineswoman, her opponent Kim Clijsters, the USTA and tennis fans. Glad to see she finally figured it out.")

Reasons Not To Go

To the cacophony of concern over minuscule Jays crowds this week, let me add a personal experience.

For the 11-year-old boy's birthday, we and another dad and son took in the Yankees game eight days ago at the dome. Picked up the tickets, $50 per, which got us great seats eight rows up along the first base line.

Bought the obligatory overpriced food, and were in place for the first pitch. So far so good.

Joining us for the game in the seats directly in front of us were three young men and two girls, girlfriends to two of the guys. Right away, it was clear that the intent of the men was to quaff as many beers as possible over the course of the game, and of course it had to turn into a marathon.

Now, you can wonder about the financial I.Q. of people who imagine it makes sense to drink wildly overpriced beer to excess while paying no attention to the entertainment on the field, but whatever. As the game wore along, the swearing picked up, as did the volume and the general distraction as they clearly weren't all that interested in the game. They wanted to drink beer and find ways for someone, anyone, to pay attention to them. And, naturally, they always imagine themselves to be the funniest people in the building. By about the sixth inning, it was impossible to ignore them, and the fact there were two small children very close by didn't really impact on them and their behaviour.

Predictably, by the ninth inning, internal tensions had grown, and one stood up, drilled his buddy with a right hand and stalked off.

Now, I should tell you my son and his pal found all of this wildly entertaining. But to me, these were reasons not to go to another Blue Jays game. For roughly $200, you basically buy a lottery ticket and hope you don't get stuck with drunken idiots nearby. Meanwhile, the objective of the organization seems to be to encourage maximum beer consumption, and the results are predictable. It wasn't an awful experience, but it was unpleasant. Call me a prude, I guess.

All this would be fine, it seems to me, if the Jays were grappling with excess demand. But they're not, and crowds of 11,461 and 11,159 this week suggest big problems may lie ahead with the baseball team seemingly sentenced to endless mediocrity.

If you have an outstanding team people desperately want to see, maybe you don't have to worry about whether some people have to grin and bear it when seated near people whose objective is to drink and be loud in general, not loud as baseball fans.

But if you have these Jays, you better make sure that's not happening, ever. If a family can't be guaranteed a family experience, why would a family ever return?.

An Actual Hockey Person

Don't know what's going to happen with Jim Balsillie's longshot bid to put an NHL team in Hamilton over the next few days.

But he's finally got a bonafide hockey man and NHL insider on his team.

Doug MacLean confirmed to The Star this morning that he has joined Balsillie's organization as a hockey "advisor." MacLean has extensive experience with NHL expansion clubs and started the Columbus Blue Jackets from the ground up. The likelihood is that he would become a senior executive with a Hamilton team, but he wasn't speculating on the future this morning.

"I'm an advisor, that's it," he said.

For the first time, then, Balsillie's group has an actual NHL insider on its roster, an individual who has been to NHL board of governors meetings and personally knows most of the movers and shakers at the highest level of the league. In fact, MacLean almost became part of a group that was going to buy the Tampa Bay Lightning several years ago before the tandem of Oren Koules and Len Barrie took on that particular project.

MacLean has spent the last few seasons working on television with Sportsnet and on the FAN590, co-hosting an afternoon show with Jack Armstrong. 

Some might quibble with his hockey credentials - although what he left behind in Columbus looks pretty darn good now, doesn't it? - there's no question the affable and quotable Prince Edward Island native would be a perfect front man for hockey in Hamilton.

That, of course, may still be a distant dream. But at least instead of suits and lawyers, there's an actual hockey man associated with Balsillie's push to take the Phoenix Coyotes and move them to Canada.

How High Will He Go?

This is Jim Balsillie's trump card. And a measure of how much he wants this to happen.

All along, throughout the slow, molasses-like bankruptcy process of finding a new owner for the Phoenix Coyotes, the unsaid issue behind the scene has been Balsillie's deep pockets and the limit, if there is one, to how much he might be willing to pay for the Coyotes in an open auction.

Of the three bidders left, none seem likely to out-bid the Waterloo billionaire on a dollar-to-dollar basis. In theory the NHL could, but there have to be real limitations on the price NHL owners would be willing to pay to buy this team through auction. It's one thing to bid $140 million with the out being selling the team in order to move it elsewhere after one year.

But let's say Balsillie, who upped his offer to $242 million last night, would be willing to go as a high as $400 million to get the Yotes and move them to Hamilton. That price might even make sense for a franchise in lucrative southern Ontario, but the NHL would be facing a major loss if it wanted to try and match that offer and later sell the team to Las Vegas or Kansas City or wherever.

Open Ice Holdings, meanwhile, has $150 million on the table, but there are lots of conditions on that, certainly enough that the NHL felt it had to put its own bid in.

So how high would Balsillie be willing to go? Assuming this auction finally goes ahead on Thursday and Friday, we may finally find out. More specifically, we'll find out if he's willing to try to blow any and all other offers out of the water.

One Long September

Just 29 Blue Jay games to go and one big question looms.

Will this team win 70 games? It's going to be close, quite probably, a sensational swoon given that in May many were talking wild card and praising Cito Gaston as a magician.

Gaston and Paul Beeston are the Teflon Tandem, blamed for nothing, while J.P. Ricciardi is blamed for absolutely everything.

But 70 wins? Really?

The truly noteworthy part about being at the ballpark Thursday night, meanwhile, was the absolute indifference there is to the horrible season being experienced by Vernon Wells, one of baseball's highest paid players.

The Yanks brought all their big contracts to town and put them all on display in a powerful showing. The Jays have two biggie deals - Wells and Roy Halladay - and on a night Halladay wasn't pitching Wells once again really didn't figure much in the result. He went 0-4 with a walk and a run scored, didn't make a play of significance in the outfield and struck out to end the game.

Ho-hum. Just another nothing night.

But people don't seem to really react to this. They just shrug. No significant booing, as you might expect in a town where the likes of Bryan McCabe and Vince Carter were vilified in recent years.

It's as though Jays fans feel helpless in the face of Wells' gigantic $126 million deal signed in December of '06 that has made him the game's most untradeable player.

He got $25.5 million to sign, and while playing for a mere pittance of a salary this year - $1.5 million - the dollars really take off next year. It''s $12.5 million for 2010, then $23 million followed by THREE more seasons of $21 million.

In June, baseball people were wondering if Wells was off to a slow start and would turn his season around. As folks in the game love to say, it's a long season.

Well he hasn't. And fans, at least Thursday night, seem to have just accepted it, seemingly knowing that even if they decide to boo their lungs out at the worst contract in team history, they better be prepared to do it for five more years since Wells isn't ever going anywhere.

Maybe that's why fans boo individual players sometimes, hoping that management will ultimately decide to send that player packing.

But the Jays can't do that will Wells and the fans know it. This isn't B.J. Ryan, where simply dumping the player will mean a short-term hit, albeit a big one.

Backloading this contract, it appears, will be as destructive as the overall dollar amount.

And the fans seem resigned and simply shrug.

Nastiness, Citizenship and Absurdities

Three topics worth perusing this morning:

NHLPA

There is no sports organization I've ever been in contact with over the years that has the level of personal viciousness that currently exists in the NHL Players' Association. It goes both ways, too, between the camp that once supported deposed leader Paul Kelly and the old guard that appears to now be back in charge. Told that Vince Damphousse had suggested "paranoia" was behind Kelly's dismissal, one former player who served as a key union executive derided Damphousse as a guy who "took a $250,000 job with the union and did nothing." 

Eric Lindros, meanwhile, has been tarred and feathered by the Kelly camp, with all kinds of personal accusations and smears. In this vicious circle of allegations and counter-allegations, it's difficult to see who actually might be telling the truth, and who is just following a personal or group agenda. Over the next few weeks, Kelly's enemies will start to leak out "details" of his firing, and will try to make it appear as though he was just like Ted Saskin, nosing around where he shouldn't have been nosing. Surrounded by enemies from the day he took the job, one wonders what Kelly was supposed to do to while simultaneously trying to learn the job, defend himself, ignore the constitutional breaches of others and advance some kind of progressive agenda.

Here's the most salient point. NHL players, above all, seek consensus, and don't like those who think differently. They want to be told what to do, and Alan Eagleson, Bob Goodenow and Saskin accommodated that need. Kelly didn't want to tell them what to do, so he was slammed as "soft" and ousted less than two years into the job.

PACMAN

Well thank goodness somebody came to their senses in Winnipeg and yanked the welcome mat out from under Pac-Man Jones. The office of commissioner Mark Cohon was silent on this one, but you have to hope maybe a phone call or two was made from Cohon to the Bombers at least asking the question, "Do you really want to do this?" Happily, its seems possible that Jones was having trouble crossing the border with his long laundry list of legal woes, which makes one somewhat hopeful that Canadian authorities are on the ball.

From a football point-of-view, it's seems pretty doubtful Jones could have been a difference maker in Manitoba. Nobody wants him in the NFL, a league that will ignore any indiscretion if a guy can play. Based on Jones' play in Dallas, his long layoffs have left him a below-average cover man, and its seems doubtful he could have stood up to the high-paced CFL pass-every-down game.

Of course, Jones didn't apparently even know where he was going to play, suggesting in some on-line communique that he was going to play in the "UFL" and then bolt back to the NFL in time for the playoffs, according to the Winnipeg Sun.

COYOTES

The notion proposed in a Phoenix bankruptcy court yesterday that the Phoenix Coyotes could pull up stakes partway through the season and move to Hamilton was the height of absurdity. This kind of nonsense doesn't help Jim Balsillie's bid, and neither did attacks on NHL owners like Eugene Melnyk. More and more, this fight seems to be bringing out the absolute worst on both sides, with both the NHL and Basillie staking out increasingly extreme points of view. Right now, its appears virtually certain the team will stay put for one more season, and it would do Balsillie well, if he has hopes of ever winning the support of other NHL owners, to start supporting their business and helping the franchise he wants to buy stop swirling down the toilet.

Aiding the death of the Coyotes may not necessarily be in the Balsillie's long-term interests.

Waltzing Around The Truth

If the first casualty of war is truth, there is surely the sniff of cannon fire around the business of professional hockey these days.

The NHL can't quite get its story straight when it comes to the Phoenix Coyotes and dealing with Jim Balsillie. The NHL Players' Association, meanwhile, just decapitated its executive director, Paul Kelly, and is determined not to honestly tell the larger hockey community exactly why they did that.

The two issues are not un-related.

While the league and players are, according to the last CBA, supposed to declare all hockey-related revenues and share them according to a set formula, the league has effectively cut the union right out of all discussions relating to the bankrupt Coyotes. Astonishingly, the NHL has committed $140 million to buying the Coyotes if necessary, monies that, at least in theory, are partly those of the NHLPA.

But the union has no say.

With Kelly, meanwhile, the union at least had some potential to improve their working relationship with the league, although after putting the union in a stranglehold in the last CBA negotiations, the NHL, quite naturally, feels it can do whatever it wants without consulting a fractured, dis-spirited and dysfunctional union.

Now the players are clearly looking to go more hardline, although they won't say that, hiding behind bureaucratic doubletalk and pretending that Kelly wasn't undone by an internal coup.

If that's the direction in which the players go, any possibility of forging a better working relationship with the league, and possibly getting a bigger say in issues like the Coyotes, will go out the window.

The union seems to want a second Bob Goodenow. The league successfully separated Goodenow from the union in 2005 - some would argue the lockout was really about that and nothing more - and would be only too happy to do it again in the next round of labour talks.

The players, with no unity or collective backbone, are in no position to stand up to the league, but they may be driving themselves to the edge of that cliff again. 

But they won't be honest with their plans, and the skullduggery which unseated Kelly is an ominous sign of the civil war that is still being waged within that organization.

The league, meanwhile, keeps trying to pretend that Phoenix is salvageable. Only enormous concessions from the City of Glendale can make that work, and local politicians are saying they won't be giving away anything significant to make the Coyotes stay.

So nobody's dealing in truth these days in the hockey industry, perhaps a sign of a bigger war lying ahead in the near future.