The Canadian Sportsman
Archive for December, 2009
December 04, 2009
Past Posts
Favourite answers from past Post Parades
Kelly Spencer (above) (Jan. 5, 2009):
You dress up as Mrs. Claus each year to give out presents. What’s the best line you’ve heard from one of the seniors?
“Dearie, kindly tell your husband to bring me a new colon for Christmas.”
What’s your best-brush-with-greatness story - psychic edition?
“In a past life: I was a horse trainer in a famed Russian Circus. In this life: Billy Bragg is my friend on Facebook.”
Jimmy Takter (Sept. 16, 2004):
What do people often get wrong about you?
“A lot of times when you speak a different language, sometimes you can sound ruder than you actually are. Language can sound a little bit too tough. We don’t have the word ‘please’, for example, in Sweden. Here they always say, ‘please’. People coming from Europe never say ‘please’. People here say sometimes we’re rude.”
Frank Salive (April 10, 2008):
What’s your hidden talent?
“I used to be gifted in rapid calculations of multiplication and division. It’s been eroded from not using it much over the years.”
The Commish
Everyone gets the “If you were the Commissioner of all of harness racing...” question. Here’s the best responses.
Ron Gurfein (March 20, 2008):
“I would create penalties for performance-enhancement such that if a guy continuously takes horses from established trainers and always improves them, they would be banned for life. Any trainer who wins 40 per cent of his races or 50 per cent of his races is doing something wrong and deserves to be evicted by his peers.”
Jim Simpson (May 22, 2008):
“Ban one-handed whipping.”
Hugh Mitchell (Nov. 27, 2008):
“I would make myself the industry’s benevolent dictator, but I wouldn’t last long.”
Handicapping Challenge
Post Parade subjects set the odds when asked the “chances the following will occur in the next 10 years”
Betting on harness racing will reverse the current trend and start rising?
The Ontario government will change the slots-at-racetracks deal and give the industry a smaller cut of slot revenue
Hugh Mitchell (Nov. 27, 2008) — “Even money.”
Kelly Spencer (Jan. 5, 2009) — “4-1”
Chris Roberts (Jan. 22, 2009) — “3-1”
Hec Clouthier (Feb. 12, 2009) — “4-1 (or less if we don’t get our act together)”
Jack Darling (June 18, 2009) — “3-1”
Sarah Lauren Scott (July 30, 2009) — “20-1”
Ian Fleming — “10-1. The current deal is good for everyone.”
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December 04, 2009
How can you tell driver Jody Jamieson and trainer Jeff Gillis have been friends and business partners for a long time? They both can needle each other publicly about their shortcomings.
“Jeff Gillis doesn’t wake up in the morning without analytically thinking about how he’s going to get up.”
— Jody Jamieson in April
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A few months later, when asked in a Post Parade Q & A to "tell me three things about your friend and business partner Jody Jamieson and one of them isn’t true," Gillis replied:
“His first name is Jody, his last name is Jamieson and he is a good hockey player.”
December 03, 2009
He figured he would be mocked when he picked me up wearing a faded green t-shirt with The Clash splattered across it.
He was right.
The mission of the day was two-fold: cover the Ontario Sires Stakes (OSS) Super Finals at Woodbine for The Sportsman and become a footnote in rock ‘n roll history.
Sportsman editor Dave Briggs has been dabbling with the bass guitar for a year or two now. Like the responsible adult that he is, he didn’t run out and get the fanciest guitar he could find before he’d ever played a note lest he be akin to the guy with the $3,000 golf clubs who can’t drive the ball past the ladies’ tee.
Instead, his wife Laura got him a ‘starter’ bass. He plugged away, took some lessons, made sure he was interested enough to stick with it, taught himself a surprisingly extensive repertoire in a short time and finally decided that it was time to upgrade his equipment.
The plan was that we’d travel together to the races on Nov. 14. A few days before, he floated the idea of making a stop at Steve’s Music on Queen Street before hitting the racetrack.
“Whatever, Guitar Hero,” I said, unable to let the 40-year-old, father of three enjoy his hobby without being subjected to endless ridicule. I’m just not built that way. Did I mention that our friend and harness writer extraordinaire recently began a weekly three-man jam session with two buddies — a chemistry professor and a meteorologist — from his high school days? Sounds like the most boring episode of Behind The Music ever, doesn’t it?
And so we piled into his very un-rockstar red mini-van and careened down the 401 en route to musical nirvana, hell bent on enhancing his sound.
When we arrived at Steve’s, I was surprised to find the place absolutely packed with people — and all different kinds of people at that. I have to admit, I was thinking Dave was going to stick out among what I assumed would be throngs of tatted up, rocker dudes. Those guys were there, of course, but so were a fair number of Asian grandmas, 12-year-old girls, guys that looked like accountants, and what seemed to be dozens of ordinary-looking teens all there to check out the rows and rows of guitars. And play them.
Dave wasn’t there to browse. He’d already picked out ‘the one’ — a Hofner CT Violin Bass a.k.a. the ‘Beatles Bass’ earning its nickname because it was the guitar Paul McCartney played on most of the band’s early recordings.
I thought his decisiveness was going to rob me of the one thing that I was hoping to see at the music store — a re-creation of the famous scene from the movie Wayne’s World, where every loser in the music store tests the merchandise by playing Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven.
Although he was sold before we even got through the door, Dave was convinced by one of the salesmen to plug in for a few seconds and take the Hofner for a test drive. I’m told he played a little of Green Day’s American Idiot but I couldn’t make it out over the din of, yes, other dudes trying to play Stairway a few meters away.
“Oh yeah, we could keep this place open 24-7 no problem,” said a worker, growing agitated at closing time as he unsuccessfully tried to direct the rockers and wannabes out the door.
After a long wait at the checkout counter, we left the musical mad house with the goods. As we made our way back to the rockmobile with Dave carrying his spiffy new guitar case through the crowded downtown streets, I offered him a brief reprieve from jokes and sarcasm.
“Wow, you weren’t even close to being the biggest dork in there,” I said, with true sincerity.
“Rock on,” he said.
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