Football and politics

What do you say when you meet up with someone who you really respect, but in a very public work, you want to tell them – and fail to tell them – that they’ve missed the point? That’s the dilemma I faced at a Conexus Credit Union branch when I ran into Rod Pedersen, CKRM’s sports director, play-by-play guy for the stations’ Pats and Riders broadcasts, and author of Green Magic, a book about the 2007 Saskatchewan Roughriders.

The book, originally (at least in my mind) was to have been the subject of an 800 word review, which got cut down further and further into a squib of a review that appeared in the pre-Christmas edition under recommended gifts (the same thing happened to two other books, by Jim Pitsula, that I wanted to review for prairie dog). Space considerations and other stories thwarted my and Whitworth’s attempts to publish anything else.

The worst I can say about Pedersen’s book is the best that I can say: inside a good book is a great book struggling to get out. Green Magic was written because the Riders couldn’t or wouldn’t publish a commemorative DVD of the 2007 season (something about not being able to secure broadcasting rights). Pedersen’s book is good at describing the 2007 season, but he’s a sports guy, not a political studies major, sociologist or historian. And the REAL story of the Saskatchewan Roughriders – how they went from a mom-and-pop organizations where the season ticket drives could have been themed by Pete Droge and the Sinners to the flagship not just of the CFL but also of, for lack of a better term, Saskatchewan Inc., has yet to be told. I think Steve Mazurak (former Rider receiver, local boy, ran for the Liberals in the same riding where I ran for the Rhinos in 1984, currently the Rider’s VP of marketing) is the Riders’ unsung hero for putting the Riders on a much more stable financial footing.

The Riders took everything in the Al Ford business playbook, made a photographic negative out of it, and succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. No more frantic pack the park days that revealed the Riders then-true purpose (not to win football games, but to get 20K or so in the city to buy meals at the restaurants and bars and sleep off the hangovers in the hotels). After Hillsborough, these were acts of madness. As well, the Riders lifted the home blackout policy, got ‘retro’ third jerseys,’ and otherwise gave the Riders a massive warchest.

Somebody writing a story like that could have given the Saskatchewan equivalent of America’s Game, a great book on how the NFL reinvented itself into the marketing machine it is today. Maybe that wasn’t Pedersen’s mandate or ambition when he wrote Green Magic: I wish it was.