Sporting Madness

In an effort to corner the market on Tim Tebow-themed musical compositions , here's another one! This isn't even written by me, but was brilliantly put together in a Christmas Eve series of tweets by Global's Justin McElroy (a former CIS Blog colleague). Here they are, preserved in a Storify for posterity and ease of reading:

Well, the Jim Balsillie story continues to develop. The most interesting news since my last post is that of Gary Bettman 's apocalyptic reaction yesterday [ James Mirtle , From the Rink ]. I'll have more analysis on this one later, but for now, I figured I'd start the day with an appropriate song. Here is my version of "The Ballad of Jim and Gary" (apologies to The Beatles ): Standing on the plane down to Phoenix, Trying to get the team refinanced. The man in the back said, "Jim Balsillie's back". I said "Hell no! Just give us a chance." Jim, you know it ain't easy, You know how hard it can be. But the way things are going You're gonna crucify me. At first, things with Jim went so well, In Pittsburgh, we thought he'd be fine. But then the press called to say, "He wants to move away," So I told him he had to refrain. Jim, you know it ain't easy, You know how hard it can be. But the way things are going You're ...

Some of the finest things about soccer are the inventive anthems each team's fans come up with. They can reference a past triumph, immortalize a particular player, or mock rival players, teams, fans and even the referees. They're also one of the prime reasons why soccer is so much more interesting and interactive than other sports: most North American pro sporting experiences involve blasting canned music (occasionally all right), doing "The Wave" (see Drunk Jays Fans for a great takedown of that one), running stupid animations on the scoreboards (Ben Knight had a nice rebuke of those), or trying to pump people up via the stupid NoiseMeter (no outside destruction of this is needed). Songs have always been a hallmark of the European soccer experience, but they've caught on in North America as well: the Whitecaps have long used "White is the Colour" (a takeoff on the popular Chelsea song " Blue is the Colour "), and TFC supporters have come up ...