HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1995-09-27, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 1995. PAGE 5.
Stengel —
the all time blooper
I'm sorry that I missed the 30th
anniversary of the Sonny Liston/Cassius
Clay fight last spring. (You may or may not
remember that May 25, 1966 was the night a
fast-mouth Cassius Clay — soon to be reborn
as Muhammad Ali — decked a growling bear
of a boxer named Sonny Liston, against all
predictions, and thereby won the title of
Heavyweight Champion of the World.)
You may also have forgotten — or
repressed — the memory of the performance
of Robert Goulet that night. Mister Goulet, a
Canadian, had been hired to sing, before
millions of boxing fans, the national anthem
of the United States of America. It was an
assignment for which Mister Goulet was
eminently qualified. He was handsome; he
spoke English; he could sing. And that night
Robert's rich baritone rang out from
ringside, reverberating from the arena walls,
bouncing off the interstellar satellites around
the cosmos, merrily tympaning against the
eardrums of quadzillions of fight fans from
Kenora to Korea, from Tswwassen to
Timbuctoo.
There was only one teensy weensy thing
wrong.
The words. Robert Goulet forgot ... the
words.
Right there on National — make that
Good or not so good
Hardly had the rumours started flying
when I began to be asked about the
effectiveness and fairness of Premier Mike
Harris' economic cuts. When the figure of
$1.9 billion came out along with the details,
the questions escalated. Since an assessment
of his "mini-budget" is beyond the scope of
this column, I thought I would instead tell
you about similar movements in other
countries and let you make up your mind
from that.
What has happened all over the
industrialized world is similar to what is
going on in Ontario. Our social welfare and
health programs were put in place when tax
revenues were climbing and it was blithely
assumed that they would continue to do so in
the foreseeable future. Thus, little thought
was given to the possibility that, one day,
these revenues might be overtaken by
climbing costs in the areas I indicated above.
Who worries about going to the
Emergency Dept. of a hospital with a
hangnail when nothing comes out of your
pocket. Why not go on one of the many
welfare programs when things are tough;
everybody else is and there is a minimum of
red tape. Why not stay on unemployment
insurance as long as possible since you get
almost as much as the last job you were at?
Such are the rhetorical questions asked
many times by those who are in need and by
International — television. Canada's own
Robert Goulet, hemming and hawing and
erring and aahing over the words to the U.S.
National Anthem.
Oh well. Not as if the Yankees haven't
paid us back. Remember 1985? Yankee
Stadium? The Blue Jays hell bent for the
World Series? And Mary O'Dowd stands up
to warble the anthems.
She did real well on the Star Spangled
Banner ... but she bobbled the words to 0
Canada like a third-string shortstop with
peanut butter on his glove.
And just last year we suffered through the
performance of Dennis Parks, a lounge
singer signed to sing the anthems at the
opening of a Canadian Football League
game south of the border.
Dennis did a fine job. He had memorized
every word of our patriotic ditty.
Unfortunately, he neglected to note the
tune. When Dennis sang 0 Canada, it
sounded a lot like Auld Lang Syne with
overtones of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.
Hey — nobody's perfect. There's something
about sports that brings out the fumble-
footedness of commentators.
Remember the Heidi Games?
Let me take you back to 1968. The New
York Jets are playing the Oakland Raiders.
The Jets are leading 32-29, with just over a
minute left in the game.
We're talking Superbowl Countdown here,
where every game counts. Jets 32, Oakland
29, just over a minute left.
And NBC television switches to the
Sunday Night movie — Heidi.
y Raymond Canon:
those who think they are in need.
The first to find that costs were getting out
of control were the New Zealanders, and
ironically it was a Socialist government who
had to put the clamps on because of the
excesses of a rightest government. The
champs were much more severe than
anything Mike Harris has done to date and
what have they found out? For openers the
turnabout does not come overnight. It takes a
few years for the drift to slow down and
reverse itself and costs to come under
control.
Did the voters take it stoically?
Do pigs fly? There were screams all over
the place.
There is a cardinal rule in such occasions;
voters are all in favour of the necessary
reforms being made if, and this is a big if,
nothing is done to hurt them personally. The
second cardinal rule is that such an
occurrence is impossible. If the situation is
bad enough to require such medical
treatment, just about everybody is going to
be hurt.
In my Economics classes I teach that there
is no such thing as a perfectly positive
economic measure; some group or groups
always gets hurt.
The Swedes are finding this out. The
country has had arguably the most generous
welfare and health system in the world; it is
currently in the biggest trouble. Interest rates
are higher by two to three per cent than they
are here, unemployment is high and the GDP
forecasts are much more subdued than in this
part of the world.
Sports fans of North America went
ballistic — tens of thousands of viewers
called NBC to vent their wrath. And those
were just the TV watchers who knew how to
dial a phone!
Other sports bloopers? Mostly verbal,
thank goodness. There was the time Curt
Gowdy explained to a breathless TV
audience that:
"...Brooks Robinson is not a fast man, but
his arms and legs move very quickly."
— And the Canadian golf commentator
who once whispered into his microphone:
"Arnie Palmer is getting ready to putt. Arnie,
usually a great putter, seems to be having
trouble with his long putt. However, he has
no trouble dropping his shorts."
Let me leave you with the all-time Sports
Bloopmeister — Casey Stengel. Here's how
the famous New York ball club manager
answered one reporter:
"No manager is ever gonna run a tail-end
club and be popular because there is no
strikeout king that he's gonna go up and
shake hands with and they're gonna love ya
because who's gonna kiss a player when he
strikes out and I got a shortstop which I don't
think I coulda been a success without him if
ya mix up the infield ya can't have teamwork
and it's strange thing if ya look it up that the
Milwaukee club in the morning paper lost a
doubleheader and they got three of my
players on their team and you can think it
over."
Or as Yogi Berra so succinctly put it: "If
people don't wanna come out to the park,
nobody's gonna stop 'em."
Sweden has also taught us another truism;
the higher percentage of the population
dependent on government transfer payments
for all or part of their income, the greater
will be the screaming when the day of
reckoning comes. One gets the impression
that the Swedish national anthem is filled
with the words whine, groan, snarl and pout.
Is Mike Harris justified in being so hard so
fast? It depends on whom you ask. The
Bolivians would agree that it is better than
waiting; they were plagued with 10,000 plus
per cent inflation, and couldn't seem to get
rid of it as long as the government tried to
follow a gradual approach. It was only when
they bit the bullet that it started to come
down with any degree of rapidity.
On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher
would probably say that, while youhave to
go in fast, be careful what areas you pick. In
spite of her popularity as a result of the
Falklands War, she was done in by her own
party no less as a result of her reforming
zeal. Harris is not in that position at the
present time but strange things happen in
politics.
Will Harris make mistakes in his
cutbacks? Undoubtedly! I have yet to see an
economic program anywhere that got
everything right. There will be overkill in
some areas, underkill in others. The secret of
the New Zealanders, the French, the Swedes,
the Dutch and any others, is to recognize
mistakes and to rectify them before they get
out of hand.
Governments everywhere have found that
Continued on page 8
The
Short
of ►t
By Bonnie Gropp
The day the music died
I haven't lived this long without
discovering that very few solutions come
without a price.
I have had an interesting time with my car
of late. Like me, it is getting up there in
years and parts don't always work the way
they should. The most recent malfunction is
a power seat with a mind of its own. Perhaps
it's just getting tired of being stuck up front
to accommodate my short legs, but for
whatever reason it has taken to moving back,
on Li own, without warning and often while
in motion.
I did manage to maintain my sense of
humour, however, when at times I held a
death grip on the steering wheel as the earth
moved under my seat, but it was clear an
immediate, if quick, fix was needed. So, by
eliminating the power source, Monday
morning I was back in control of the driver's
seat, confident and calm.
This soon, however, switched to panic
when I found the solution had indeed
exacted a price — my radio. I like to think
that I am learning patience, that I have
learned to adjust to the curves discovered in
the road of life, but losing my music? I
prefer hearing Silence is Golden, not living
it.
Sitting in what was now the dull void of
my automobile, I felt at loose ends. I know
there are people who appreciate the peace
and quiet, who would never dream of
disrupting some moments of solitude with
outside influences of any kind, but I
certainly don't understand them. I simply
cannot function without music. This is not a
circumstance that is all in my head either.
Nor, evidently, am I alone.
Parents are forever telling their kids that
they can't possibly study with their stereo on,
and likewise feel that to concentrate they,
too must have almost complete quiet. Music
was always in evidence in my home, and I
believed, despite all the naysayers, that I had
become so used to working with it, that I
couldn't work without it.
As it turns out I may not have been too far
off the mark. Some time ago, I was very
interested in, and rather patronizingly
pleased, to read the findings of a study.
What was discovered was that the technical
age has brought so much noise and mayhem
into our daily lives that as a result, people
find it more difficult to be productive in
peace and quiet.
As I wrote this column, I took a few
minutes just to sit and listen, really listen. It
was an orchestration of phenomenal noise. A
printer, zapping out its mailing list, droned a
tedious background buzz for shop talk, the
tap, tap of keyboards and the intermittent
and unrelenting shrill of the phone and fax.
And above it all danced the light and
frivilous sounds emanating from my radio.
What was truly amazing was that until I
had made a conscious effort to pay attention,
I really had been almost oblivious to most of
it.
In a busy office or household, noise is a
part of the environment. It is the sound of
life and I like it. I do what I'm doing much
better with it. So, with that in mind, if you
see my car coming towards you, until I have
a chance to get my radio fixed, you may
want to get out of the way.
Arthur Black
International Scene