Quick recap for the folks who don’t speak fluent Canadian.
A Hat Trick happens when the same player scores three goals in a game, but a Gordie Howe Howe Hat Trick means something slightly different. Before Howe became the namesake of a brand new bridge spanning Windsor and Detroit, he was a legendary member of the Red Wings, a high-scoring forward who never backed down from a physical confrontation. Because he measured his success both in goals scored and opponents battered, hockey fans invented a new metric to track how well he, and subsequent generations of NHL power forwards, had played on a given night.
If you record one goal, one assist and one fight, you’ve achieved the Gordie Howe Hat Trick, and displayed the kind of range that would make sports science writer David Epstein salivate.
As a sports writer, I’ve built a brand on that type of versatility, and it’s all on display right now at CBC Sports Dot Ca, where I publish a lot of my freelance work these days.
If you head there right now you’ll find a feature I wrote on Tammara Thibeault, a decorated Canadian boxer with an audacious plan. This weekend she fights for a professional world title, and two years from now she hopes to compete at LA28 and atone for her underwhelming performance at the Paris Olympics. If the next 24 months unfold according to her projections, she’ll become the first pro world champ to win Olympic boxing gold.
Scroll down a little further and you’ll see an analysis piece I wrote about another group of people seeking one more shot at Olympic glory — Canada’s men’s 4×100 relay team, fresh of a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games. They won gold in Paris, but a repeat is far from guaranteed. The four core sprinters are all on the far side of 30, and integrating younger talent is tricker than it seems. My piece examines the challenges Team Canada will face in their ongoing race against both the stopwatch and the aging process
And if you’ve seen either of those stories, then you’ve also scrolled past my column in Gianni Infantino’s failed plan to sell an ownership stake in the FIFA World Cup to Jared Kushner’s little brother’s private equity firm. By now you’ll have noticed that he’s abandoned the scheme, citing the disunity the proposal had caused. Beyond disunity, the plan was bad for business. The people putting $4.2 billion into your account won’t see much return on that investment if half the eligible teams — including name-brand squads from UEFA — boycott the next World Cup. Grand Opening, Grand Closing, both motivated by money.
If you’re keeping score, that’s a boxing feature, a track analysis piece, and a blazing hot sports business take, same site, same week. That’s the kind of hat trick only I can score. I’d call myself the Gordie Howe of sports writers, but maybe he was the Morgan Campbell of old-time hockey stars.
