Don Cherry Watch

I've not watched a whole lot of the Winter Olympics. I like a lot of the sports, and my earliest (and best) Olympic memories are of Lake Placid in 1980. But the NBC coverage leaves a lot to be desired, my beloved CBC didn't win the rights for these games, and I've got a lot of other things going on as well.

The one thing I absolutely must watch is the men's ice hockey final, provided a North America team is in it. It appears most likely to be a USA-Canada rematch. Considering that my ethnic heritage could best be described as "Canadian-American", and I appreciate how much hockey means to Canada, I'm cheering for the Canucks.

I grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada, and easily the most entertaining part of the evening is Coaches' Corner with Don Cherry and Ron MacLean. Cherry has been described for Americans in a multitude of ways that get close to his persona but aren't quite right. The one that works best for me is that he's Canada's Jesse "The Body" Ventura. And yes, Ron MacLean is every bit his Mean Gene Okerlund. The main difference is that Ventura's pro wrestling announcer gig was a schtick, whereas Cherry is being 100% himself.

The pro wrestling comparison is valid. Old-school hockey, especially of the minor league variety, appeals to a working-class audience through showmanship and violence. And I mean this in the most loving, positive way. Hockey is being a bit suburbanized and toned down, but it's still great fun. The last time I went to a game in the old Sports Arena, the fans sitting behind us were truly frightening. I love Toledo.

One part of Cherry's persona is his penchant for very nice and very wild suits. It's as if he fashions himself a don in the Scottish mafia. Believe it or not, this is one of his more subdued outfits:
For the 2002 Olympic final between the USA and Canada, watched by 2/3 of the whole country, Cherry's outfit was truly amazing, like he had been baptized in maple leafs. I am so sad that I will not be able to see it this year. But I will be able to follow it on the great blog, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, which is dedicated to Grapes' wardrobe.

I leave you with some of his greatest hits...
At Anaheim for the Stanley Cup Finals

The annual Christmas suit

Celebrity judge for Battle of the Blades, an on-ice version of Dancing with the Stars

Can't top a classic

What Nike Fears

Adidas? No. A shutdown of the NFL? No. It's this.

Things I Learned on Vacation

Things I learned on my trip with my wife's family to the Great Smoky Mountains…

10 family members ÷ 1 cabin X 4 days > our patience

Everything you need to know about Cincinnati can be learned from the highway: it is the home of the Big Butter Jesus, the Creation Museum, and the original Hustler Superstore.

Neither I nor my wife can pass signs for Big Bone Lick State Park without making Beavis and Butthead noises.

My charcoal chimney starter was the single most-useful item I brought.

I cannot drink two cases of beer in four days, nor should I try.

A diet of –tos food is not conducive to running. You know, Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos…

My brother (not that one, the other one) has an amazing ability to find the places in any city with a grad-student hipster vibe. He lives in Charlotte, so we met him, his wife & baby in Asheville on a Sunday morning. He's been there only once or twice yet knew exactly where the overeducated inked-up folk eat a locally-grown organic brunch: the Early Girl Eatery. It's very good (and actually not pretentious at all), probably one of the top five meals I've ever had on the road.
Two brothers, living hundreds of miles away, will both inadvertently dress like the same grandfather.

My brother is only sometimes more mature than his two-year-old.

Pigeon Forge is the world headquarters of crap. We passed through on our way to Asheville, and some of the less trashy things I saw were the four different As Seen On TV Outlet Stores.

Anyone who wears a "Hike Naked" t-shirt lacks a sense of irony. To be fair, though, the guy was not in the act of hiking while I saw him wearing it.

If there's anything cuter than a baby, it's a baby on a motorcycle.
Economic indicators are everywhere if you know what to look for. In Townsend, a bare-bones fifties-style motel had a "No Vacancy" sign lit up on Saturday. On Monday, I had never seen the park and surrounding area so empty in the middle of summer.

There are plenty of hidden gems in the Smokies, even outside the National Park. Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, and Cherokee are such god-awful places that the entire area earned an entry in Jan & Michael Stern's enchanting Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (a book my wife worried that I would use as a checklist). On Saturday morning, however, we went to play golf at the little-known Laurel Valley Golf Club. The view from the 10th tee:
Another hidden gem of the Smokies is the Foothills Parkway. A view from an overlook:

Berea, Kentucky is a much better place than Berea, Ohio. My wife and I knew about the place a long time ago, as we stayed at its historic Boone Tavern Inn one night on our honeymoon fifteen years ago. I'd forgotten what a beautiful little college town it is. Berea College, one of the nation's premier arts institutions, caters to low-income students and requires work-study from all students (thus its ability to keep the Inn, apparently little-used and a very high-class, going for 100 years). While it is very Christian, it is not of the more famously Southern absolutist fire-and-brimstone type; for example, it enrolls two Tibetan refugees every year and has hosted the Dalai Llama. It was the first southern college to become coed and the first to be integrated.

If for a moment you can ignore the crowds, your family driving you nuts, the overcommercialization, the Parks Service understaffing, and the pollution, and you'll see that it's one of the most beautiful places in America.

More Entertainer Deaths

Molly Sugden, aka Mrs. Slocombe, has died. My pussy is distraught at the news.

Are you as surprised as I was to hear she was still alive?

Outliers

I've been unusually absent from posting here in the last few days. Part of this is due to packing up and closing out the last few days of school (there will be no more "Six at Eleven" posts until September) and going down to see the Ohio high school championships.

But mostly it's due to a new project I started up. After reading a post by Scott Bush about educating the fan, I decided to start writing a Toledo-area track newsletter. Issue #1 and issue #2 are available.

I've also been reading an actual non-track book, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. It is an utterly fascinating read, and the basic thrust of the book is that the courses of our lives often turn on little things that come our way. He looks at highly successful individuals and groups and explains how hard work alone does not explain how they got there--that all of them have other things going for them. The final chapter is an explanation of how he, whose ancestors included Jamaican slaves, happened to find himself as a professional writer for the New Yorker instead of some laboring schmuck in the Jamaican highlands.

Anti-Doping News

Not track-related:

How weird does it get? This weird: Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens's ex-trainer says he saved syringes and needles used in the injections of anabolic steroids and HGH into the Rocket.

Read more.