HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1996-09-11, Page 5Arthur Black
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1996 PAGE 5.
Sports world
has become
totally unreal
It takes only a year or two for the
exaggerations to come true.
Nothing will remain in the next 10 years.
Or there will be twice as much of it.
Warren Bennis
That's the thing about the future: it always
surprises you. Who would have guessed, 15
years ago, that we would be walking around
today with chocolate-bar-sized wedges of
plastic jammed to our ears, chattering about
Websites, a movie about a pig called Babe
and the former Soviet Union?
Not to mention sports. Fifteen years ago
the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver
Grizzlies would have sounded like some
kind of an environmental update. And the
Anaheim Mighty Ducks would have been
the punch line in some stand-up comic's act.
The world of sports has become totally
unreal. How unreal?
Take downhill skiing.
In Tokyo.
It is now possible to emerge from the
Minami-Funabishi subway station about 30
minutes from downtown Tokyo, exchange
your business suit for a set of downhill togs
and for about 4,300 yen (approximately $75
Kiwi gets
name change
You probably all know what is on the
roundel of a Canadian military aircraft; it is
the maple leaf.
This roundel harks back to the
red/white/blue roundel of the British Royal
Air Force and most countries of the British
Commonwealth still have them in some
form on their warplanes.
Do any of you know what is on the planes
of New Zealand? While you are scratching
your head, I will tell you that it is the Kiwi
bird, a shaggy, flightless bird that has its
home in that country.
You will then exclaim the kiwi is a green-
coloured fruit that has become popular over
the past decade and you would be right.
Then the question arises how the fruit got
the name of the national bird. Therein lies a
tale.
The fruit was not always know as the kiwi.
Originally it was called a Chinese
gooseberry. It was grown in New Zealand
and some enterprising farmers there got the
idea of thinking up a new name for it. They
hit upon the word kiwi as a more attractive
version of Chinese gooseberry and, in order
to push the fruit on local and foreign
markets, formed the New Zealand Kiwi fruit
Canadian) spend the evening schussing
down a 300-foot artificial ski slope in the
Tokyo Ski Dome.
The. Ski Dome features man-made snow,
two chromium yellow quadruple ski lifts and
a pair of runs that are 1,600 feet long.
And it's all inside a building.
What's more, Ski Dome is just one of
seven indoor ski areas you can find in Japan
and make use of any time of the year.
Makes you wonder about the future of
places like Whistler and Mont Tremblant.
Sure, the scenery is better in Canada...hut
it's mighty tough to run those moguls in
August.
Of course Japan has a bit of a history of
enclosing outdoor .sports in shrink-wrap.
Entrepreneurs in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto
long ago mastered the dynaMics of the
indoor golf game. It is possible to play nine
holes on a number of Japanese golf courses
which run up and down instead of out and
about. You shoot a towering tee-shot from
the third floor, take an elevator down to the
second floor and with luck, find yourself just
a short putt from the green.
A Japanese aberration you think? Not
necessarily. Last December, the World Team
Masters Ski Jumping Competition was held,_
in the shadow of the World Trade Centre in
deepest, darkest, downtown M'anhattan.
Granted, the ski jumpers landed only about
30 metres. from the ramp, as opposed to the
190-odd metres jumpers normally cover —
but this was in downtown New York!
It's only a matter of time before some
Donald Trumpish sports tycoon puts up a
By Raymond Canon
Marketing Board in 1988 and sales took off.
For the vast majority of people in the
world who are acquainted with the fruit, that
is the only meaning of kiwi that they know.
Unfortunately for the New Zealanders,
farmers in other countries discovered that
the fruit could be grown in quite 'a few
places throughout the world. They also
noticed that New Zealand's efforts to export
this fruit were succeeding to the tune of over
50 per cent increase each year. In a few
years the islands' virtual monopoly of the
market dropped to about 25 per cent as
countries such as France, Italy and Chile
brought their own version to consumers who
appeared happy to buy it regardless of where
it was grown. The current world market
today is in the neighbourhood of 800,000
tons.
You can rest assured that the New
Zealanders resented the loss of their
monopoly and they have now taken steps to
get it back. They have decided to rename the
fruit and this time to register the new name
as a trademark so that the French, Italians or
any others currently selling kiwis will not be
able to jump to a new name.
The country hired a British firm to help it
come up with a new name and the inevitable
poll was taken. It was decided that a catchy,
zesty name would fit the bill and eventually
one was chosen. Because of this, when next
May rolls around, the fruit that you now
know as kiwi will, if it comes from New
Zealand, be henceforth called the Zespri.
building that will easily accommodate the
Matti Nykanens and Steve Collinses of the
ski jumping world.
Whpt next? Indoor triathlons? Enclosed
mountain-climbing? I'm not sure, but right
here in North America it's now possible to
custom-order your own trout stream.
Steve Fisher will be happy to do the job
for you. Steve's a contractor who lives in
Missoula, Montana. He specializes in
building custom-made trout streams. You
call Steve in and the first thing he does is
whomp you up a five-foot waterfall, built
out'of fiberglass ''rocks". The waterfall feeds
into a 20 foot long stream that ends in a
pond. A hidden irrigation system of pumps
and aerators keeps the five thousand gallons
of water you'll need bubbling...just like a
real stream. Fisher even supplies bulrushes,
lily pads, insects and of course trout, just to
make the whole thing worthwhile.
Cheap? Not really. You'll need at least a
half-acre of land and about $35,000 before
you can wet your line in your own private
Steve-Fisher-designed trout stream. But I
guess folks who have a bad case of the
fishing bug are like ski nuts who would ruin
an otherwise nice trip to Tokyo by lining up
for lift tickets outside the Tokyo Ski Dome.
How was it that the humourist P.J.
O'Rourke defined skiing? "It consists of
wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and
equipment and driving 200 miles in the snow
in order to stand at a bar and get drunk".
Still, it's better than fishing I guess.
Someone defined fishing as "a jerk at one
end of a line waiting for a jerk at the other."
1
Remember you read it here first.
I should point out that, if my memory
serves me correctly, the French were not
quite so successful in protecting the name
champagne. A bottler from another country
marketed a champagne-like drink using the
name and the French went to court over the
battle. They came out with something less
than a victory, but that has not deterred them
from pushing their products as the real thing,
not a foreign imitation.
Will the New Zealanders' actions open the
door for all sorts of efforts to protect a name
of something that has, up until now, been in
the generic class? Maybe we could change
the name of our Northern Spy apples to
something like Chinook and register it. We
have a unique cheddar cheese; how about
thinking up a new name, something that is
snappy and Canadian, so that we will no
longer have to worry about the pale imitation'
that comes from the United States.
Maybe we have a growth industry on our
hands.
Got a beet?
Write a letter
to the editor
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
A turbo charged drive
You can't live in the past. Life is too short,
too good, to wish for what once was, for a
return to the way things used to be. But
sometimes, just every once in awhile it's a
little tough not to be tempted.
This weekend I had a burning temptation
to get out of the 1990s — so I did. Certainly
while it's safe to say that life in the 90s is
exciting, that the adventure of existing and
keeping up in the techno-modern age is a
challenging one you would hate to have
missed, aren't there times when you wish
this drive to the future would slow its turbo-
charged pace?
Maybe it's my age and the old adage that
the more time goes by, the faster it moves,
but this decade seems to be travelling at a
frenetic pace. And not just in time, but as a
curious oxymoron of progression and
decline, where advancements give us
surging hope, then moral degradation buries
it in a morass of confusion.
There were times in the 60s, too, when
everyone seemed to be going a little crazy.
But it was a weirdness based on idealism.
We believed we'd find the common sense
that we were sure existed in life. The 70s
were just silliness, while the 80s proved that
even free-thinking hippies could be bought
by the material world, beginning a descent
into an abyss of self-indulgence and
gratification.
This decade seems to be one of taking all
our knowledge to improve ourselves and our
lifestyles. Not a bad thing, but unfortunately
in our haste to get there I wonder if we've
forgotten that some simplicity, some
ingenuousness isn't so bad.
Everything from entertainment to doing
business is calculated. We can turn on any
sound system, any television in our home,
without leaving the comfort of our recliner.
Telephones record our messages, deliver our
messages, send us messages and even refuse
a message. With the drumming of our
fingers we can, in the wink of an eye,
discover information and data on every
subject imaginable.
Even for those of my generation, who
grew up with moonwalkers and automatic
transmissions, the changing world can at
times seem bizarre. After all, for someone
who remembers when you actually had to
have sex to get pregnant, the concept of
genetic engineering is not just fascinating,
but vaguely frightening.
And if it has that effect on me, it often
gives me pause to consider how this science
fiction we're living is playing out for the
'older' generation, a group of people who
lived through the depression and war, for
whom indoor plumbing was a luxury and the
boisterous simplicity of a hoe-down was the
best kind of fun. It's got to be overwhelming.
But never dull. For better or worse there
are some amazing things 'being done and
achieved in this world. For better or worse it
will continue.
And from time to time, I know I for one,
will quite likely glance fondly to less
frenetic times and as I did this past weekend,
light some candles, play some Gershwin and
wish I were there. It's just a short breather
before getting back in the turbo.
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