Sporting Madness

(This is the first part of a three-part, three-day series on concussions. See a list of links to some of my previous writing on concussions here .) Concussions have been getting a lot of attention in the media lately, which is great to see. For far too long, they've been the dirty little secret of sports. As fans, we love to sit in arenas or stadiums and watch violent hits, but we don't often like to think about the consequences of such entertainment. There's a good reason Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Charles Tator called out Don Cherry last week; Cherry's certainly not the only one to blame, but he has promoted hard-hitting hockey and fights for years, has consistently taken stands against any kind of headshot ban, and makes plenty of money from his "Rock Em, Sock Em" video line, featuring the most violent hockey moments and plenty of head shots. Of course, Cherry completely missed the point in his Coach's Corner , saying he had nothing to say to Tator a...

An interesting combination of circumstances conspired to form the genesis of this post. Yesterday, I was riding back from a field trip to the Globe and Mail 's Toronto office with several Journal colleagues, sitting in a crowded van, listening to 80's music and reading Sports Illustrated 's Fifty Years of Great Writing . The Simple Minds song Don't You (Forget About Me) of Breakfast Club fame came on, and it struck me that in many ways, that's what great sportswriting is really all about: capturing the games, events and legends and firmly entrenching them in the readers' minds. The ability to do that turns a talented backfield from merely Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden , who would have been remembered as merely one of the many talented units in 1920s college football and likely forgotten about soon afterwards, into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse , who have remained outlined against a blue-gray October sky for almost 84 years and seem probable to...

The recent death of Windsor Spitfires captain Mickey Renaud hit pretty close to home for me : when an apparently-healthy young athlete inexplicably collapses at the breakfast table, it's tough not to think about both your own mortality and the role athletes play in our lives. Writing about a tragedy like this is a tough task, and it takes a special talent to portray someone accurately through the reminisces of friends and teammates. It's also an incredibly difficult topic to tackle, especially given the insular nature of sports in general and junior hockey in particular: these already close-knit communities tend to close ranks even more after this sort of tragedy. Fortunately, Gare Joyce has what it takes to do the job, and turned out a tremendous piece for ESPN's Page 2, more than worthy of further analysis here. Consider the title, "O captain, our captain," an allusion to Walt Whitman's poem about Lincoln's assassination, which was later famously refe...

Seeing as there are so many quality sports writers out there these days, and many of them are producing fine books, I figured I’d start occasional posts about the best works by sporting journalists I’ve read recently. To start it off, there’s Future Greats and Heartbreaks by Gare Joyce, which I received for Christmas and promptly read in the next couple days: it's very difficult to put down. The book provides a fantastic look at the profession of hockey scouts with a good deal of access from the inside, as Joyce was able to sit in on the Columbus Blue Jackets’ 2006 draft preparations and was involved with much of their subsequent scouting season. There are also interesting takes on a variety of other topics related to junior hockey, such as the tragic Swift Current Broncos bus crash of 1986, the world junior championships, and the players who never make it to the big leagues. Another thing that helps this book excel is Joyce’s terrific writing talent. As established in his previo...