It’s about time and endurance, the athletes we watch, the things they endure, the conditions we force them to endure and the official response, which is destroying one sport and threatening the health of athletes in another.
It’s about football games that are anywhere from half an hour to an hour too long. It’s about tennis players battling in heat and humid conditions that call for a radical and intelligent response on the part of officials — not broadcasters suggesting that it’s “survival of the fittest” and that if you’re on the verge of heat stroke, you don’t deserve to win.
It’s about baseball games that are too long, football games that are too long, tennis matches that are too long and inept officiating (in the case of the Canadian Football League) that might render one of our favourite sports entirely unwatchable.
During those frightening minutes Monday when Genie Bouchard looked as though she might expire on the court, comments were made by Virginia Wade and her broadcast partner suggesting that it’s survival of the fittest out there and that if Bouchard was on the verge of heat stroke, she didn’t deserve to win. (Wade also suggested, bizarrely, that Bouchard was too thin to withstand the heat. Apparently she’s never seen a Kenyan marathon runner.)
It’s obvious that we are in need of some education here. Climate change is affecting all outdoor sports in radical ways. What is called for is intelligent response and flexibility, not some Cro-Magnon thumping a tub and insisting on respecting tennis’s three-minute medical timeout rule when an athlete’s life could be in danger.
As for 300-pound football players kept on the field far into the night because the refs are throwing a flag on every other play — that isn’t just a threat to the health of the athletes, it’s a threat to the league itself. The Friday night game between the Alouettes and the Ottawa Team With No Name was as nearly unwatchable as a sports event can be.
The record will show that the Als broke their season mould by scoring a first-quarter touchdown. In truth, the officiating crew should get credit for the major, because they drove the ball relentlessly down the field with flag after flag against Ottawa. When the Montreal drive stalled on the one-yard line, an official contrived to find a defensive lineman for the Team With No Name with his knuckle over the line before the snap.Given a fresh set of downs with a yard to go, even the 2014 edition of the Alouettes is likely to score.
Some of the flags, perhaps as many as half, are necessary and unavoidable, especially when the issue is player safety. But there is no infraction too minor, no offence too petty, for a CFL ref to toss a flag. In the late going Friday, after the issue had been decided, Alouettes receiver S.J. Green got 15 yards for giving an Ottawa defensive back a couple of harmless whacks far from the play.
It’s football, for the love of Vince Lombardi. It’s supposed to be rough. But Friday night, Ottawa was flagged 16 times for 135 yards, the Alouettes another 11 times for 70 yards. That’s 27 penalty flags for over 200 yards, and it doesn’t even count a couple of flags that were picked up because they shouldn’t have been thrown in the first place.
I understand that the decision to turn this into the Canadian Flag League is not entirely the fault of the on-field officials. Coincidentally or otherwise, things were actually getting a bit better when Als head coach Tom Higgins was in charge of the officiating. Now it’s out of control — and we’re not talking some early season adjustments. We’re halfway through the season and the zebras are dominating every game.
The Team With No Name is an expansion franchise and the Alouettes play like one, but even the Sunday barn-burner between Winnipeg and Saskatchewan featured 20 penalties — at least twice too many. In Monday’s 13-12 yawner between Hamilton and Toronto, the Tiger-Cats were flagged 17 times for 111 yards and still somehow won.
Obviously, the CFL is not the only league with time issues. But the state of the league is sufficiently fragile that it might be the only one under active threat from flag-happy officials. The NFL is coming back, the NCAA is already rolling, we’re a little more than a month from hockey season and baseball’s post-season. How can the CFL compete for television viewers when a truthful highlight-reel package would be an endless sequence of referees tossing flags?
Nor is the problem entirely with a game that is festooned with flags. The decision to allow video-replay review on pass-interference calls is absurd. The delays are endless and the calls (whether those made on the field or off the replay) are entirely subjective because a pass-interference penalty is subjective by definition.
With one exception, I’m opposed to all replay reviews, period. Reviews work in only one sport. Ironically, that sport is tennis. A player calls for a review in tennis, there is a pause of a few seconds, and we get the technological evidence — clear, precise, quick and beyond argument. But in every other sport, replay is a time-wasting disaster.
Mercifully, the reviews aren’t adding much time to the already lengthy men’s matches at the tennis majors. On Saturday, it took Milos Raonic and Victor Estrella Burgos an hour and 57 minutes to play the first two sets, both of which went to tiebreaks, as did the third set. At that pace, a five-set match would take nearly five hours to play. With global warming, the potentially catastrophic effects on a player’s health are obvious, especially in New York and at the Australian Open, where cramping is a constant hazard.
Unfortunately, it’s all part of the great, insatiable maw of television sports. We demand more and more and more, and inevitably, much of what we are getting is unendurable — for athletes and spectators alike.
Friday night, the Alouettes game, the Blue Jays-Yankees game and Roger Federer’s third-round match at the U.S. Open were all 7 o’clock starts, with the tennis actually the last to begin. But Federer had dispatched his opponent in three sets, showered, changed and was chatting with the TV hosts when the Blue Jays recorded the final out at 10:26 — four minutes before the referees at Percival Molson put another game out of its misery.
Please, someone. It’s time to invoke the mercy rule.