My hackles tend to rise whenever some pampered baby of a professional athlete starts preening and strutting about how wonderful he is, how irreplaceable, how divine, and teammates, coaches, never mind the fans, had best understand they must bow and scrape in reverence.
Arland Bruce the Third, late of the Toronto Argonauts but as of now a wide receiver for the Hamilton Tiger Cats of the Canadian Football League, is by all accounts an immeasurably talented football player (although one notes he failed not once, but twice to catch on in the NFL).
It’s just possible the NFL said thanks but no thanks because a couple of teams down there concluded that Bruce’s middle name is Me Me Me. The Argos, though, were evidently willing to overlook that bothersome little detail and so for a while put up with Bruce as he skipped team meetings, ran patterns that weren’t in the playbook, publicly criticized head coach Bart Andrus and first-string quarterback Kerry Joseph, and as if that weren’t enough, flailed around in the end zone with a couple of ignorant and tasteless touchdown celebrations.
The Argos finally had had enough, and suspended Arland Bruce the Third, cleaned out his locker for him, and then in an effort to get something out of this ham-fisted oaf traded him to Hamilton in return for a couple of draft picks and a relative unknown. Bruce will presumably carry on with his act. however, because once a player of his ilk decides 39 teammates and a coaching staff are mere lesser mortals, unworthy of his exalted presence, there’s no changing the spots on the leopard. Or in this case, the Tiger Cat. Good luck, I say, to the Hamilton team.
And then there’s an equally dimwitted egomaniac named Dany Heatley, whose public relations skills are about as subtle as a train wreck. This adolescent knob was on a six year contract extension with the NHL Ottawa Senators. The deal was worth an average $7.5 million dollars a year, or $45 million total. But because the team wouldn’t give him a teddy bear at bedtime, wouldn’t let him stir around in his sandbox whenever he felt like it, and because he didn’t like his coach and wasn’t getting the ice time a man of his colossal talent would warrant, Heatley demanded a trade.
Well, okay said the Senator front office: you don’t want to play here, we’ll see what we can do. What they did was work out a swap with the Edmonton Oilers. It was a potential deal both teams liked, but then Heatley pouted and stamped his little foot and whined away about how he didn’t want to play in Edmonton, so find another team while I go home and sit in my room and play with my blocks.
He’s still there. A couple of teams expressed moderate interest in Heatley, but salary cap issues deterred them from serious bargaining. And that’s been it: no other NHL general manager or head coach seems to be the least interested in a petulant infant of a hockey player, which I think is a good thing because Heatley’s a bozo representing the worst of professional sport. Bruce, too: they’re selfish, barely out of their cribs, prone to tantrums, and they’re contemptuous of their fans, their teams, and their leagues.
Here’s what I’d like to see. Here’s what I expect, actually. Arland Bruce the Third will pull the same stupid stunts in Hamilton, and pretty soon his string will run out and he’ll be sent packing again. Right out of the CFL, as far as I’m concerned. And because Dany Heatley doesn’t want to play for the Ottawa Senators, but evidently has no option now, I figure he’ll sulk and loiter and lolly around and then issue orders, again, that he be traded, and then discover he’s not welcome anywhere, except in the bush leagues where he belongs, or maybe with some fifth-rate team in eastern Siberia.
Take men like Jarome Iginla, who by the way earns less than crybaby Heatley, or Joe Sakic who recently retired from the Colorado Avalanche. Or Ken Yon-Rambo with the Calgary Stampeders: badly injured, needs two major surgeries, but will attend all the team meetings – on crutches — and will prowl the sidelines, on crutches, every game from now on, encouraging his teammates because they are…..his teammates.
Great players, all three, but more than that, class guys all the way. Adults.
Bruce and especially Heatley? Class is the last word you’d apply to these two, so why don’t they face facts? Their 15 minutes are up, and they should clear out and make room for some grownups.
