Football Classics: A pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life

If the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, with apologies to Dr. King for context, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats should dispatch the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at McMahon Stadium in Calgary tomorrow. Kick-off is at 5 p.m. here in the central time zone.

The stage is set for the CFL’s 107th Grey Cup, which Hamilton last won in 1999 and Winnipeg in 1990.

With their franchise-best 15-3 record, the Ticats topped the CFL’s regular-season standing. The Ticats were also 2-0 this season against the Bombers. The Ticats are currently 3½-point favorites to win the Grey Cup.

Although the Bombers finished third in the West Division, they posted an 11-7 record before registering road playoff wins over the defending-champion Calgary Stampeders and Saskatchewan Roughriders.

I’ve lived in Manitoba for the last 12½ years. During that time, I can’t say I have been a big follower of either the CFL or NFL. But I did grow up in Oshawa, Ontario and remember Grade 9 tryouts for Tom Chase’s Oshawa Catholic High School (O.C.H.S. ) Saints well enough. The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago. Think of football as a pepperoni-and-cheese pizza slice of life.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams in the U.S. south usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most American high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Given the unsurprising, I suppose, apparent dearth of Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans here in Manitoba, I’m told I’ll be treated to my own special “chair” at friends’ tomorrow watching the game on TV. Mind you, geography and just plain contrariness are also factors when it comes to me cheering on the Ticats tomorrow. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of hometown “homers” and their boosterism. Unless, of course, the concept was applied to me growing up in Oshawa, Ontario and cheering for the adjacent Toronto Argonauts, not the Steeltown Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Angelo Mosca-era in CFL football and pro wrestling, or the Toronto Maple Leafs in NHL hockey. That was different. And BTW. Angelo is now 82 and lives in nearby St. Catharines. As for cheering for the Leafs, well, there’s been no harm in that since 1967.

No word yet on if I’ll be sharing my signature homemade cream cheese and crabmeat cracker dip, or consuming that solo, like my seating.

It takes a while to figure out CFL  football loyalties in Manitoba. Who knew there was such a thing as the “Banjo Bowl” annual rematch game after the Sunday before “Labour Day Classic” in Regina between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Saskatchewan Roughriders and then back in Winnipeg the following weekend? Not me. At least not until I moved here in 2007, and learned you either supported the blue-and-gold or green-and-white in the CFL. A bit more latitude seemed possible in terms of NFL fan support choices, but it still struck me there were a lot … a lot … of Green Bay Packers fans up here in Northern Manitoba. While I’m not really a cheesehead myself (being more partial to the Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns), I get their appeal. Based in Green Bay, 140 kilometres northeast of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I get it here in Thompson, Manitoba.

The Green Bay Packers are the third-oldest franchise in the NFL, dating back to 1919, and is the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team based in the United States. In 1923, four years after the team was founded, the fledgling Packers found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy, so they sold shares to the community to keep the lights on. Home games have been played at Lambeau Field since 1957.

The Packers are the last of the “small town teams,” which were common in the NFL during the league’s early days of the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1919 by Earl “Curly” Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, the franchise traces its lineage to other semi-professional teams in Green Bay dating back to 1896. Between 1919 and 1920, the Packers competed against other semi-pro clubs from around Wisconsin and the Midwest, before joining the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the forerunner of today’s NFL, in 1921. Although Green Bay is by far the smallest major league professional sports market in North America, Forbes magazine ranked the Packers as the world’s 26th most valuable sports franchise in 2016, with a value of $2.35 billion.

But speaking of the Bears … the Bears. They are at Ford Field in Detroit this coming Thursday for a U.S. Thanksgiving Day match-up with the hometown Detroit Lions. Kick-off is at 11:30 a.m. here in the central time zone.

The franchises first met in 1930 when the Lions were known as the Portsmouth Spartans and based in Portsmouth, Ohio. They moved to Detroit for the 1934 season. The Bears and Lions have been division rivals since 1933 and have usually met twice a season since the Lions franchise began. The two teams play in the two largest metropolitan areas in the Midwest. Chicago and Detroit’s home stadiums, Soldier Field and Ford Field, are 450 kilometres apart and both are easily accessible from I-94.

This rivalry is the longest-running annual series in the NFL as both teams have met at least once a season since 1930.

Since its inception in 1920, the National Football League has played games on Thanksgiving Day, patterned upon the historic playing of college football games on and around the Thanksgiving holiday, a tradition that dates back to 1876, shortly after the game had been invented, as it was a day that most people had off from work.

The football-on-Thanksgiving Thursday game tradition is firmly established in Detroit. With the exception of a six-season gap from 1939 to 1944, the Thanksgiving Day game has been played with no interruptions.

The Detroit Lions Thanksgiving Day heritage gained national attention with the very first game in 1934. Knowing the publicity potential of radio, NBC Radio, set up a 94-station network to broadcast the Lions-Bears showdown. The famous announcing team of Graham McNamee and Don Wilson described the action. The Chicago Bears took that one in a 19-16 victory over the Detroit Lions on Nov. 29, 1934.

In 1876, the college football teams at Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day. The University of Michigan also made it a tradition to play annual Thanksgiving games, holding 19 such games from 1885 to 1905. The Thanksgiving Day games between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s have been cited as “The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football.” In some areas, most commonly in New England, high-school teams play on Thanksgiving, usually to wrap-up the regular-season.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

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Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Tim Chey and the Christian cinema ‘cheese’ factor

There was much consternation among Tim Chey and his Christian movie fans recently when all of the major Hollywood  movie studios took a pass on releasing his $50-million epic, David and Goliath, shot last year in Morocco and produced by RiverRain Productions.

The usual suspects, including the secular media, were trotted out for a whipping, and Chey and his supporters decided to go ahead and release the film on their own in 31 cities on Good Friday, April 3, while they tried to raise more money to get the film shown on more screens in more cities through Indiegogo, a San Francisco crowdfunding company. The movie earned about $161,000 at the box office over the Easter weekend. When the Indiegogo campaign closed March 12, they had only managed to crowdfund three per cent of their $777,000 USD goal, with 499 donors contributing $19,653 USD. According to the filmmakers, GodVine reported “The Hollywood studios have rejected David and Goliath for being too Bible-based and religious. One studio executive said, ‘You mention God in almost every scene.'”

Godvine went onto quote Chey as reportedly saying, “We were constantly being ridiculed by the secular media.” Contrast that with the upbeat tone Chey took in a Beverly Hills, California-based Ripple Effect Communications media advisory on April 21, 2014, just weeks before shooting was set to get under way for David and Goliath in Morocco.  “Chey, who just finishing location scouting in Morocco, is jubilant,” according to Carol Edwards’ media advisory for Ripple Effect Communications. “We’re going to have thousands of extras, A-list special effects, and it will exceed the epic-look of ‘Noah,’ Chey was quoted as saying. “The $50 million dollar film comes at a perfect time. Hollywood is embracing faith-based films as of late and the audiences are growing at a record pace according to reports.”

What a difference a year can make.

Martin Stillion, reviewing David and Goliath in Peter T. Chattaway’s “Filmchat” on the religion blog Patheos April 5, wrote that Chey “undertook a mendacious, self-pitying marketing campaign to position the film as the ultimate underdog, “rejected by Hollywood for being too ‘God-centered’ – a claim based on an alleged remark from one of those potential distributors.

“This may seem a little puzzling. Why wouldn’t distributors be interested? After all, David and Goliath comes along at a time when a lot of attention is being paid to both “faith-based” films (God’s Not Dead, Old Fashioned, Do You Believe?) and Bible epics (Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Son of God), and several of those films have done well financially. So Chey’s film, a faith-based Bible epic that retells one of the most archetypal biblical stories, is in the right place at the right time.

“But it forgot to bring the right stuff.

“I could give you a dozen reasons that distributors wouldn’t want to touch this film, and none of them have anything to do with its being ‘God-centered.’ They have to do with its being a very, very bad movie. I know that’s a common criticism of faith-based films, but seriously, this one makes God’s Not Dead look like Blade Runner.”

Chey has directed 10 feature films, including the $20 million Carry Me Home with Cuba Gooding, Jr., Suing the Devil with Malcolm McDowell, Genius Club with Stephen Baldwin and Final: The Rapture, starring Jah Shams, Mary Grace, Carman, Masashi Nagadoi and Dave Edwards, which depicts the apocalyptic chaos that ensues for four nonbelievers – an African-American, an Asian, a Hispanic and a white man living in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and on a South Pacific island, after the Rapture occurs.

Trotting out the secular media – or even other Christians – as a whipping boy is not exactly a new theme for Chey. In an April 25, 2014  Christian Post story by Stoyan Zaimov, headlined  “CP Exclusive: ‘David and Goliath’ Director Assures Big-Budget Movie Will Be ‘Biblically Correct in Every Way,’ Chey is quoted as saying, “We were constantly being ridiculed by the secular media, our films were being sabotaged by online piracy, and fellow jealous Christians were mocking us saying the acting was bad, script was horrible, etc., etc.

“Thousands of people were coming to Christ so why did I let that bother me? I don’t know. The Lord showed me clearly it was a spiritual attack. I repented and began to trust the Lord again. Within two months, we raised millions of dollars and made the $20 million dollar Carry Me Home on the early life of John Newton, writer of Amazing Grace and now David and Goliath.”

Bad scripts and bad acting are hardly new criticisms when it comes to the Christian movie genre. Nor are they ones without merit. As I observed in a blog post last Sept. 15 headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” the “big knock against the Christian movie genre for more secular moviegoers – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir, there hasn’t been, aside from the occasional blockbuster, much for broader audiences to judge such films on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing.” You can read the piece here at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/

The story of Chey’s conversion from atheist to born-again believer has been oft told in many places, but the shorthand goes something like this. Chey was born and raised in Los Angeles and  “once threw his mother’s Bible in the trash and hectored his Christian friends,” noted Matt Soergel in a generally flattering piece in the Florida Times-Union when Suing the Devil was released in 2011. Chey was educated at Harvard University, University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles and Boston University School of Law. He practiced law for three years, but “realized I just didn’t have a heart for law,” he told interviewer Nathan Jones of The Christ in Prophecy Journal of David Reagan’s Princeton, Texas-based Lamb & Lion Ministries in a Jan. 20, 2014 broadcast interview. “I was an artist, caught up in something that really meant nothing to me,” he told Soergel of the Florida Times-Union.

His first film, which he wrote and directed was, Fakin’ Da Funk, a 1997 comedy starring Pam Grier and Dante Basco about a Chinese son adopted by black parents who relocates to South Central Los Angeles. A second story involves Mai-Ling, an exchange student played by Margaret Cho, who by another twist, gets sent to the wrong ‘hood.'”

The film was nominated for the Golden Starfish Award at the 1997 Hamptons International Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 1997 Urbanworld Film Festival.

In 2001, Chey was in his mid-30s, single, and in the Philippines scouting locations for his next movie. After a busy night boozing at strip clubs,” Soergel wrote in his May 23, 2011 piece for the Florida Times-Union, he picked up the Gideon Bible in his hotel room and began reading: “”I got down on my knees and accepted Jesus Christ right there,” Chey said.

He was back in the Philippines in 2002 in Manila, Pasig City, Bataan, Manila Bay, and Antipolo to direct Gone, his first Christian-themed film, a post-apocalyptic thriller based on his screenplay, starring Dirk Been and Joel Klug star as tenacious lawyers who are sent to Manila to defend a multinational corporation, but instead, meet their fate in the Last Days after the Rapture.

Suing the Devil, released in August 2011, was his fifth Christian-themed movie and set in Australia, where he obtained much of the financing for it. It’s about a young law student who files an $8- trillion dollar civil lawsuit against Satan for all the misery he’s caused humanity. Corbin Bernsen, played divorce lawyer Arnie Becker on TV’s L.A. Law, which ran from for eight seasons on NBC from 1986 to 1994, and is a long-time evangelical Christian, plays a TV news host.

To law student Luke O’Brien’s (played by Bart Bronson) surprise, a loquacious Satan – in the form of Malcolm McDowell, star of the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange – shows up to defend himself.

Describing McDowell to Soergel, Chey said, “He’s a seeker. We had great talks. We talked a lot about God, a lot about life. He’s a spiritual person.”

In a June 2010 interview, about 14 months before Suing the Devil was released, McDowell had this to say about the movie: “From my point of view – I play the Devil – [the film] is about a loser that can’t get his act together or his life together and blames everybody else for his loser-ness. He’s a big loser, and so he, of course, blames the Devil and he goes to court to sue the Devil. And I answer the summons. And so it’s really a comedy in a courtroom.

“You know, I’m not into the religious connotations of what good and evil are. In fact the Devil I played is not really evil. I mean, the Devil really is charming, seductive. I mean, it’s like Nazism … charming, seductive, all these things. It’s just the underbelly of angst … but it was really actually a terrific script and I had a ball.”

How that fits in with Chey’s observations 11 months later in the Florida Times-Union, I leave for you to decide.

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