RICK'S PICKS

The Power Players

WHO ARE:

The 25 Hamiltonians with the most influence in the wide world of sports

 

We want to know what you think.  Use the comment button below to have your say.

 

When it comes to sport, Hamilton has never suffered an energy crisis. This area has always been one of jockdom’s major power sources and it remains that way.

With today’s Power Players top 25 list, The Spectator recognizes and celebrates those local men and women who wield the greatest influence on the world of sport.

Consider this 2008’s Catalogue of Clout, the Pantheon of Pull.

To make the roster, a power player has to have a very strong connection to the Hamilton area. He or she has to have a major impact which spills well beyond the city and onto a greater stage. And that impact has to be current and sustained.

Rest assured that this list was not easily compiled: neither in who was included and who was not, nor in what order the survivors were ranked.

The debates, gusting up to quarrels, always came around to the core question of what constitutes ‘power’.

In sports broadcasting, for instance, are the people who determine the way we watch our biggest events more influential than those who own the media outlet? So should No. 5 and No. 3 be flip-flopped? Lots of writers saluted when that one was run up the flagpole. 

Similarly, does power rest in the hands of those who fund, and arguably control, sports properties? Or does it belong more to those who bring the events to the public, like broadcasters, without whom there would not be the funding and mass marketplace for leagues and events? Or is it a more liquid implement, wielded by those who can bring together all elements of any equation.

In the end, the latter concept barely won out, although most staff members felt that our top two choices could easily have been reversed, and in fairness Ron Foxcroft and David Braley should share top billing. So here’s the result of our shootout.

  1. Ron Foxcroft

Basketball referee, supervisor, former team owner, whistle inventor, sports entrepreneurial ‘facilitator’.

Very little happens in the sporting world of southern Ontario, and even western New York, that doesn’t have Ron Foxcroft’s fingerprints all over it. Sometimes, though, you have to dust for them.

It is behind the scenes where Foxcroft makes his biggest impact. He is, in short, a world-class facilitator, bringing people together for major sports transactions. Much of the work he has done to help sell, re-finance or downright save franchises and one-off sports events has never been seen by the general public.

Tom Golisano’s purchase of the Buffalo Sabres was just one of the many franchise deals Foxcroft has assisted in one form or another. And among the many high-level sports figures who’ve sought his counsel and contacts are several CFL, NHL and NBA owners and NBA commissioner David Stern.

 

2. David Braley

Owner of the B.C. Lions and mover and shaker behind the CFL scene

There’s more than the power of wealth in David Braley’s reach as a serious player in the sports world.

“I set the tent and then let people with special skills do the detail work,” he once said of his leadership role. “If things start to go sideways, then I step in.”

The auto parts magnate clearly does more than write cheques in his various sports functions. His influence is multi-faceted and runs from local to international in scope. He is in  Vancouver weekly as owner of the B.C. Lions during the Canadian Football League season. And he served as commissioner of the league for a period.

Moreover, his support of the Tiger-Cats went beyond his ownership of the team in the late 1980s and early ’90s. As chair of the 2003 Road World Cycling Championships, his direction put Hamilton on the global sports map. More recently, he provided $6 million to McMaster University for a cutting-edge athletic centre which bears his name and a sports medicine operation. And he has taken the vision of amateur sports leaders and become a prime mover in pushing the 2015 Pan Am Games bid. He has a vision of marrying sports and health facilities at Mac with Pan Am facilities to stimulate the local economy.

The Power Players: Coming Saturday

Hamilton's top 25 sports figures: Who are they?

Find out Saturday

In Saturday's Spectator, and Saturday on TheSpec.com, we rank the top 25 Hamilton area people who have the most influence over the world of sports.
 This isn't about being the best athlete, or being the biggest fish in Hamilton. It's about influence in the wide world of Sports.

Come back to see the list and then tell us what you think. Did we get it right? Do we have the right people?  The right rankings?

 Who do you think should be on the list?

Click on the comments button below to have your say.

Fighting for an education

Mixed Martial Arts comes to high school

Brock Lesnar and Randy Couture as role models?
MMA is still fighting for mainstream acceptance but it  its appeal among a young audience has educators paying attention.
This story from the New York Times looks at a high school that has decided to teach MMA to interested students.
There's a video too.

Where to build it so they'll come?

A new stadium: Where do you sit?

A new stadium in Hamilton. That's the big prize for the city in a successful Pan Am bid.
The price tag is in the range of $200 million.
But where should it go? A stadium is a tricky thing to put in a city. Typically not used very often, a stadium is a key municipal facility,  a showcase even, but typically they are not used very often.
Put it in the wrong place and instead of an economic stimulus, you've killed a neighbourhood.
That's why modern stadiums  are built as multipurpose facilities that can generate traffic and uses- and revenue outside of the big seat-filling events.

Spec sports reporter John Kernaghan writes about the choices the city faces in Saturday's Sports section.

Earlier this year, John wrote about a civic stadium built for the Euro 2008 soccer tournament that fits that bill. 

Here's an excerpt from that story:

The spanking new Letzigrund, which unfolds inside to show thelatest in multi-purpose stadium design, is a good template forHamilton to consider as it works alongside seven other municipalities in an effort to bring the Pan Am Games here.On a recent tour, Letzigrund manager Peter Landolt proudly showed The Spectator a handsome facility that by municipal decree must balance elite sport use with recreational needs and general public access. Taxpayers have little appetite for big projects built for 10 pro football games. Ratepayers in Hamilton might like a stadium, such as Letzigrund, which has a gymnasium for gymnastics clubs and basketball, an indoor warm-up running track and a mandate to make the pitch available to youth soccer. Moreover, the design of the stadium, with a "floating" roof set on "dancing" columns, makes it both a closed dome and open urban park where local runners can use the track and people can picnic in the stands on lunch-hour.

No one has actually proposed where the city would like to build a Pan Am stadium, but we know from the city's Commonwealth Games bids where the possible locations are.
Many like the idea of a waterfront stadium (usually west of Bay, just south of the railyards. But that comes with issues around parking and neighbourhood impact.
Another site being talked about is somewhere near Confederation Park. With the QEW and Red Hill expressway, that gives you highway access, and also visibility as a civic landmark.
There is also talk of undeveloped land on the East Mountain, again where the LInc and Red Hill give access and acknowledge the growing population muscle of the mountain.
What's best for you? What's best for the city?

No Games, no Olympians

In Saturday's newspaper, reporter John Kernaghan examines the decline of Ontario as a source of  Canadian Olympians.
With more than a third of Canada's population, Ontario used to produce as much as 40 per cent of the elite athletes heading to Olympic games.
That number has been steadily falling over the past few decades.
For the summer games in 2004 it was 29 per cent, in 2000, it was 23. In 1984, it was 36 per cent.
For the winter games, it's even more dramatic: In 1984 it was 48 per cent. In 2002 it was 21 per cent, in 2006, 22 per cent.
Take out the hockey players and in 2006, Ontario supplied just 14 per cent of our winter Olympians.
Here's another statistic John looks at: Seven international games will have been held in Western Canada  by 2010, since the last big international games was held in Ontario.
That games? The 1930 Empire ( now known as Commonwealth Games) in Hamilton.
The legacy of facilities and critical mass of coaches, trainers and athletes from those games means those western provinces are now the centres for development of elite athletes. Not only that, bu tmany of the top level athletes Ontario produces, move elsewhwere to train.
Those numbers add weight to the argument about why this area should be pursuing the Pan Am games- and why the Canadian Olympic Committee is prepared to change its bidding process for the Games and name the Ontario bid as Canada's bid.
Look for John's piece in Saturday's sports section.

Gold relay team into hall of fame

The images of Robert Esmie crouched in the starting blocks, the words “Blast Off” shaved into his hair, and a grinning Donovan Bailey crossing the finish line with arms raised are among the most enduring in Canadian sport.
Esmie, Bailey, Glenroy Gilbert and Bruny Surin, along with Carlton Chambers, who ran the preliminary rounds, teamed up to capture gold in the relay at the 1996 Olympics, upsetting the Americans on their home turf.
Now, 12 years later, the men’s 4x100-metre relay team is headed to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, in an illustrious class that includes boxer Lennox Lewis, hockey’s Steve Yzerman, swimmer Nancy Garapick, and short-track speedskater Marc Gagnon. (Canadian Press)

Feel like a dose of nostalgic pride?

Watch the race here.

Canopy pilots

Not sure if this sport is more about bravery or plain foolishness.
Skydivers have apparently been looking for something new to revive their sport and have found it. Swooping is a competition for skilled, experienced divers. Swoopers, or canopy pilot, as they are also called, jump out of planes at low altitude and come down on a marked field and then swoop across it, skimming the ground. They score points for speed, distance and accuracy as they fly across that field. Sometimes they swoop over water.  They sometimes skim the ground at 80kph. Injuries are not unknown. Broken legs are common, so common, they just call them 'femuring' in the swooping world.
Check out some action here.
As one competitor says, it's one thing to swoop well. But you also have to land well. Or else you can't do it again.

Explaining LeBron: A numbers game

LeBron James shot 2 for 18 and had 10 turnovers in game one of the Celtics Cavaliers series.
Just a bad game for LeBron?
Maybe.
Maybe there was more at work here. Turn out that the Celtics have gone a little MBA, in their approach to the game.They have a backroom secret weapon, a geek/ basketball nerd who spends his life analyzing and creating statistics.
The numbers wizard Mike Zarren was trained by Steven Levitt, the man who wrote Freakonomics. Among his findings  noted in a May 4 New York Times piece?

The story says  "the most efficient shot to take besides a layup? Easy, says Zarren: a three-pointer from the corner.

What’s one of the most misused, misinterpreted statistics?
“Turnovers are way more expensive than people think,” Zarren says. That’s because most teams focus on the points a defense scores from the turnover but don’t correctly value the offense’s opportunity cost — that is, the points it might have scored had the turnover not occurred."

All well and good. But read this passage from the Times story on Zarren, printed just before the series started. Is it prescient?

Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse clicks, he can call up every clip in which LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers has touched the ball at the top of the key and see whether he went left or right, was double-teamed or not, passed or shot — and, if the latter, whether he missed, scored or was fouled. So if the Celtics dampen James’s scoring the next time they play a high-stakes game against the Cavs, Zarren might be entitled to a smidgen of credit.

Falling short in the long game of life

We all know the magical tales of the athletes who made it big, overcoming huge odds, poverty, broken families. For so many athletes, sports is a way of escape from the lives that offer no other route out.
Those stories inspire us.
But what of those desperate for escape who choose that path but fall short? What of the dreams of those who stake their lives on making it..... and then don't.
George  Vescey writes in the New York Times this week about Alan Seiden, the star of Jamaica High and of St. John's College, at his time, the best basketball player in the city.
Of course you've never heard of him. He led his high school to a New York city championship in 1955 and four years later to a win at a national college tournament.
That was the high point of his life.

The time to truly appreciate Alan Seiden was on Tuesday afternoons and Friday nights, when he would dribble arrogantly, the gym going crazy, and finally elevate himself for the jump shot that would beat Lane or Jackson.

Seiden got his shot at the big time, but fell short. Basketball remained the centre of his life, but always as a tarnished dream, as he gradually fell lower and lower down the rung, landing in beer leagues and  with his reputation damaged by ties to some unsavoury characters.
He played until his 60s, that failure to make, it the defining moment in the course of his life. He died this week. Vescey, who knew him, writes a fond and perhaps too gentle obit on a man who never got over being not quite good enough.

“It ruined his life,” said (former teammate Artie)Benoit, a former star at Adelphi College who knew Seiden since they were 11. “Some people play college ball and get on with their lives, but Alan could not do that."

Click here to read Vescey's story.

Understanding the Derby

I want to help you understand the Kentucky Derby.
Apparently, going there is a bit like Woodstock, a bit like Bourbon Street in New Orleans.
Who knew?
I thought it was all about a horsey set in big hats .
In fact, the Derby, the first leg in the triple crown is one of those sporting events that transcends its sport.
Even if you aren't into horse racing, but are a sports fan, you still pay attention to the kentucky Derby.
It's more than a race.
It's like the Masters is to golf, an event steeped in tradition and quaintness. Hats are a big thing. So are drinks called Mint Juleps. There is Millionaire's Row, the place where that rich horsey set goes.
But there is also the infield, and this is where the Derby resembles NASCAR. The infield is for regular folks and families. It sounds like more fun than the grandstands.
This espn travel article explains it all
even so far as suggesting you bring your own flask to top up those juleps, since the servers have been known to shortchange that part of the mix a bit.
As for the race itself, the Derby is a bit like the Daytona 500 in that it seems out of place in the racing season and an odd fit with the rest of the thoroughbred sport.
This year, all the talk is about Big Brown.
It's all explained here.

As for the history of the race, everyone knows the story of the great Secretariat, the greatest horse with the greatest win of all time.
Secretariat blew away the field by 31 lengths, the greatest margin of victory ever.

Work your way through all of this and you will understand the Derby.