The Canadian Sportsman
So long, Metro 6 Shooter. I barely knew ye.
My buddy Carl and I played the thing a week or so ago at my local simulcast joint and we had some fun with it. I hadn’t played Yonkers since I was in short pants, so it was a real blast from the past.
Playing Yonkers reminded me of smoking in hospitals and calling secretaries ‘secretaries’. It was like fishing without a license and using the imperial system, while giving your foul-mouthed kid the strap.
And then, snap, the good old days were gone again. They cancelled the new Pick 6 wager just five weeks in because — dagnabit — people won the damn thing!
I know us bettors get a bad rap for bitching and moaning about every little thing, but c’mon. The tracks have to ride it out a little, don’t they? Of course, it’s no fun seeding a pool with big money and then have someone keep winning it before those losing bets start to roll up, but, geez, five weeks?
Believe me, I’ve had losing streaks that have lasted for five weeks and I never took my ball and went home. It’s like a casino closing down just because the house took it on the chin for one blackjack shoe.
People will say the bettors didn’t support it and that it wasn’t ‘catching on’. They’ll say the bettors didn’t build the pool up enough. They’ll say they tried to give the bettors what they want, but the ingrates couldn’t be bothered. They’ll say that we can’t say they didn’t try.
Five weeks!
Give us a chance. It’s Saturdays in the middle of the summer. Some of us have nagging wives that make us go to our niece’s weddings instead of the racetrack on Saturdays in the middle of the summer. Believe me, I’d rather have been stuffing $100 into the Metro Shooter than stuffing $100 into a flowery $4.99 wedding card for my lovely niece and the G20-protesting-hippy that she married.
Give us a chance. Carl and I aren’t hooked into Facebooker or Twiddle so it takes us a while to get the word out. Our social network gets together Thursday mornings at the donut shop to sort out who’s buying the week’s 649 tickets. We told everyone there that they should give this Metro Shooter a shot. A bunch of the guys said they’d try it. Now they’ve got nothing to try.
I guess next Saturday Carl, me, and the donut shop boys will go fishing instead — after we get our licenses.
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I don’t get all hyped up over much of anything any more. Truth is, I never really did. I’ve always been the kind of gent who resists whatever it is that everyone else is getting excited about, basically just out of spite.
I will get excited when I see fit and not one second before, and certainly not just because the newspaper or Oprah tells me I should be getting all riled up.
Right now, we are all supposed to be excited about soccer, aren’t we? Well, don’t let my Scottish-German heritage fool you — I’m not excited.
I’m not going out for a stiff drink at 8:30 in the morning. I’m not putting my ’87 Grand Marquis through the indignity of having to drive around draped in dollar-store miniature flags. And I’m certainly not watching a sport than can end in a 0-0 tie or a game that doesn’t seem to end at any specific time. It’s like watching a horse race with a surprise finish line. Nuttier than squirrel droppings, if you ask me.
Ever notice that they don’t even bother hiring a futbol colour commentator for the TV coverage? That’s because there’s not enough action to keep one guy busy, let alone two.
And that’s not even the worst of it.
My wife Bernie accidentally left the TV on CBC after watching that filthy Coronation Road show yesterday. I was napping on the couch and woke up to the most god-awful sound I’ve ever heard. It reminded me of a kid playing the clarinet for the first time crossed with the mournful cries of a beached whale surrounded by an angry swarm of bees.
My son Robbie tells me it’s just some sort of tribal horn that people bring into the games. Well, that’s just great. Congratulations, they’ve managed to bring the experience of flies buzzing around my head in Africa right into my living room in Ontario.
All this soccer hype sort of reminds me of racing. I’ve also grown tired of people telling me to be excited about all the big shot two-year-old horses from last year that are supposed to blow my mind again this year.
Just like I’m old-fashioned about clapping or cheering as opposed to tribal horns, I’d also prefer to wait and see who will be the best on the track in 2010 as opposed to predicting it months ahead of time.
So reading glowing reviews about horses that should come back and race just as well as they did last year impresses me about as much as getting stuck in a traffic jam en route to Flamboro because all the previously-closeted, local Slovenia soccer fans in Hamilton have taken to the streets.
Then I have to hear all about the ‘upsets’ that have been happening in the early stakes season. Well, guess what, they weren’t upsets to me because 2010 is a new year and I don’t give any horse the benefit of the doubt just because it was a two-year-old star. That’s why I look forward to this time of year, when everybody stops talking about who is going to be good and starts talking about who is good. Amen to that.
In the future, let’s just agree to save the hype for someone who is more easily led —soccer fans, perhaps?
I’m sick and tired of the government sticking its grubby hands in my pockets. Every day they come up with some new way to nickel-and-dime me, and the rest of us.
In Ontario, we’ve got this new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) set to come in this summer. Soon we’ll be holding the bag and paying 13 per cent tax on lots of stuff that we used to only pay five per cent. All because some fancy pants politician clapped his hands and made it so.
‘Harmonized’ makes it sounds like these taxes go together like peanut butter and jelly. The two taxes, the GST and the PST, will now be in harmony. Isn’t that nice? Sounds like hooey to me. Sounds like something my tree-hugging son Robbie would’ve named it or that airy-fairy horse psychic lady who also blogs for The Sportsman — she’s all into peace and harmony and the rest of that free-spirit crap. Hope she likes trying to charge people eight per cent more to get their horse’s head read. Good luck to you, sweetie.
She’s also probably a big fan of the government’s mandatory Emissions Tests for older vehicles. She just loves the cleansing of toxins and the release of negative energy so it’s right up her alley. Well, guess how my 1987 Grand Marquis just did on its e-test? That’s right, not so good. Let’s see how she likes it when her tenement-on-wheels ‘harmony’ van has to take the test.
I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t take out my frustrations out on such a nice, clueless lady when it’s really Uncle Sam — or whatever the hell we call him in Canada — that really gets my goat.
It’s going to cost me another couple hundred bucks to get my car up to snuff and back on the road, just so I can drive myself downtown to pay another fee to renew my driver’s license and health card. Oh, and I might as well fork over the money for Patches’ dog tags while I’m at it, even though Patches hasn’t left our yard since 1997.
And for what? The government doesn’t do much of anything for me. I pay my fair share of property tax, but they’ve done nothing to get rid of the hophead teenagers that hang out in the public park near my house.
I can tell you for a fact that those kids are putting their own harmful emissions into the air every night and they damn sure aren’t being fined by the government because of it.
Harmony, Sharmony.
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