Oh my goodness. It seems as if there is a little bit of corruption going on in FIFA, that international soccer federation thing that oversees all the major events that this no-hands style of football provides. C'mon now, you weren't surprised at all, were you! Me neither.
Major League baseball with performance enhancing drugs, Olympic Games with city and federal officials bribing IOC members to get siting approval. Tour de Anything in cycling ... lots of doping and drugs and well, you name it.
How about big college and university sports in the US of A? The NCAA jokesters with their ruling body for scholastic based sports? Their football bowl games are rift with scandals, paybacks, under-the-table payoffs and regulations run amok.
In fact, it seems the only organized sport I can detect lately that hasn't been touched by major scandal is the good old Canadian Football League.
The CFL has had its regulatory run-ins, but those are usually individuals who have done something they weren't supposed to on a one-off situation, not the wholesale repetitive misdemeanours that occur with the NFL and the NBA and Major League baseball.
It's probably because the CFL is still too small potatoes to attract the big time scam artists and professional cheaters. But maybe we can look for it sometime soon in Saskatchewan with all those sales of Roughrider jerseys and seat warmers. Maybe somebody is getting a kickback and we just haven't heard about it yet. If there is any scamming going on, it will have to be in Regina and in Saskatchewan because this is the only place where they're making serious money.
Maybe we should put Robbie, the province's official investigator, into an underground mode to follow Jim Hopson around town just to make certain he pays for those beers, and isn't getting some kind of shakedown from the goodfellas or a rake-off from Rider cape sales.
Forgedaboutit ... don't worry about Darian Durant taking HGH, let's make sure he doesn't ingest too many of those milkshakes from the Milky Way.
Hey, sticking to the sporting world for awhile, how about that poor old Jo Jo Reyes of the Toronto Blue Jays who finally broke his winless streak at 29 games by winning a game about a week ago. Can you imagine? He must be a pretty good pitcher to have stuck around the major leagues for that long without a win! Of course that sounds about right for the Jays. It seems that they are taking a page from their sporting counterparts, the Maple Leafs. You know their book, How to Make Millions By Not Really Caring. Never has a hockey team gone so long, so successfully, by simply short changing their hapless and apparently not-too-clever fan base.
I believe that situation is slowly changing in Leafville. The rumour has it that they'll actually have two legitimate hockey players in their lineup next season and neither one will be named Sundin. That has to be progress.
OK, enough on the sports commentary.
Prediction: A football player attending the Saskatchewan Roughrider training camp will pull a hamstring muscle in a morning workout and miss the afternoon session. Just taking a calculated guess here.
