Category Archives: Sports

| Media, Montreal, Radio, Sports, TV

Ted Bird joins CFCF as weekly sports commentator

Ted Bird

Ted Bird, who left CHOM in January and has been looking for another job since, has picked up a new gig as a weekly sports commentator at CFCF, the station announced today.

Bird, who since leaving the station has started up a personal blog, a Twitter account and a blog for The Gazette, will be offering his take on the world of sports during the Monday newscast at 6pm and 11:30pm (or, more accurately, during Sports Night at 11:45, head honcho Jed Kahane confirms), starting the day after the closing ceremony of the Olympics (March 1).

Stories at CTV and The Gazette.

Here’s the release:

For Immediate Release – Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Bird Lands at CTV

Montreal radio personality jumps from morning drive to supper-hour screen:

CTV is pleased to announce that veteran Montreal morning man Ted Bird is returning to the airwaves as part of the city’s #1 English language Sports team.

Every Monday on CTV News at 6pm & 11:30pm, Ted will weigh in with his ‘Bird’s Eye View’ on the world of sports.

“I’m flattered by CTV’s confidence in me and excited about broadening my broadcast horizons into the television milieu”, said Bird. “I’m especially grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with everyone who’s taken the time to say they miss hearing my voice.  Sadly, you now get the face as well”.

“Ted’s quick wit and solid sports analysis have earned him a loyal following with Montrealers”, said Jed Kahane, CTV’s Director of News and Public Affairs. “We’re delighted to be able to get him back on the air with this weekly commentary”.

“Bird’s Eye View” will begin airing on CTV on Monday, March 1st.

UPDATE: Bird tells me this opportunity came through a lunch he had with CFCF veteran Cindy Sherwin, whom he worked with at CJFM way back when. (Let this be a lesson folks: Networking is what gets you jobs.) That led to discussions with Kahane, who decided to bring Bird on.

Bird also recognizes that having a spot on the most-watched anglo newscast in Montreal will give him a lot more exposure than a blog on the Gazette website, and he laments on that blog that he’ll start to be recognized by his face as much as his voice.

UPDATE (Feb. 24): CFCF is running 30-second ads promoting the new segment with Bird walking through Central Station.

| Media, Sports

You’re going nowhere, Sanka, and you’re thrilled to death about it

From The Gazette, Feb. 10

Saw this ad in the paper today. It’s nice that MoneyGram is willing to support athletes going to the Games, not to mention athletes from another country – and advertising it in a Canadian newspaper. But, of course, the Jamaican Bobsled Team gets support from all corners of the globe (at least ever since Cool Runnings came out).

It’s unfortunate that the team didn’t qualify and won’t be there.

| Sports, Video

Olympic theme songs to build your national pride

If you were watching the U.S. broadcast of the Super Bowl on Sunday, you missed a few dozen CTV commercials reminding you that the Olympics are coming. Among them, this video featuring Montrealer Nikki Yanofsky singing the English version of CTV’s Olympic theme song, I Believe:

Of course, this being Canada, there’s also a French version, sung by Annie Villeneuve, called J’imagine:

How does this compare to previous Olympic songs?

Continue reading →

| Montreal, Sports, TV

Five ways for Montrealers to watch U.S. Super Bowl ads

Note: This post has been updated for the 2011 Super Bowl. For the latest on Super Bowl ads on Canadian cable and satellite, click here.

For 364 days a year, Canadians don’t care about what the CRTC calls “simultaneous substitution” – the policy whereby cable and satellite providers replace a U.S. channel with a Canadian one when both are running the same program. (The logic behind this is so the Canadian station gets all the Canadian viewers and can charge higher advertising rates.)

For Montrealers especially, the U.S. ads are pretty forgettable. Local ads for Burlington businesses or ads for products and services that Canadians don’t get. Besides, commercials in general are meant to be ignored. Nobody really cares whether the Ford ad lists prices in Canadian or U.S. dollars.

But then there’s Super Bowl Sunday. And while two teams fight for the National Football League’s championship trophy, many television viewers will be looking at the full experience, which includes a halftime show and insanely-expensive commercials. Advertisers turn Super Bowl commercials into events, building up hype and spending through the nose on celebrities and special effects to justify the through-the-nose spending they’re doing just to get the airtime.

So if you’re a Montrealer watching the Super Bowl and want the U.S. commercials, what can you do?

Here are your options:

  1. Watch the U.S. network over the air. As much as the CRTC would like, it can’t stop U.S. stations from transmitting across the border. So you can hook up an antenna and watch it that way. The U.S. network affiliates in Vermont and New York have good coverage in Montreal if you have a good antenna. The catch is that since 2009 they broadcast only in digital, which means you need a television with a digital tuner (most recent HDTVs have this) or a converter box (like this one or this one). Elias Makos has more details for Montrealers wanting to watch U.S. stations over the air.
  2. Watch west-coast feeds. This method has mixed success. The cable and satellite companies are supposed to replace all feeds they’re asked to, but some forget (or aren’t asked?) to do this for west coast feeds, which carry the Super Bowl live at the same time as the east-coast stations do. There’s no guarantee of success with this.
  3. Watch the ads online. These advertisers aren’t about to sue people who put their ads online, and they’re more than welcome to you watching them as many times as you want after the game. YouTube and Spike TV have special sites setup with Super Bowl commercials. The latter includes an archive of past Super Bowl ads. Adweek has a section on Super Bowl ads too
  4. Get the feed illegally. If you subscribe to DirecTV or other U.S.-based satellite services, this whole post is moot and you’ll get the U.S. feeds. You can also try hunting for website streaming the Super Bowl from a U.S. location, but the NFL works diligently to shut those down, and if the entire point is to watch the ads, then you might as well just go to YouTube and see them there legally.
  5. Go to a friend’s house or bar that has done one of the above. Of course, the harder it is for you to get the feed, the harder it is for them too.

Ways that no longer work:

  1. Watch the U.S. network in HD on Videotron Illico digital TV. Videotron made a point of announcing in the past that they would have the U.S. feed untouched in HD. They can no longer do this for customers in the Montreal area with the setup of CFCF-DT in 2011.
  2. Watch the game on Bell TV. The CRTC closed a loophole in 2009 that would have allowed Bell to give most of its subscribers access to the U.S. Super Bowl feed. If you use Bell TV satellite service, you’re out of luck.
| Media, Montreal, Sports

Bertrand Raymond retires from Journal de Montréal

Bertrand Raymond

It wasn’t a very well-kept secret, but on the one-year anniversary of the Journal de Montréal lockout, sports columnist Bertrand Raymond has filed his final column.

As Raymond explains it, he knew he would never be going back to the Journal shortly after the lockout, when a bailiff came to his home to collect his laptop and cellphone (which were Journal property).

Ce jour-là, j’ai su que je ne travaillerais jamais plus au Journal de Montréal. Je ne voulais plus jamais y mettre les pieds. Je ne me trouvais plus aucune affinité avec des gens qui me traitaient comme un criminel. C’était quoi, l’urgence d’un tel geste ? Que voulaient-ils que je fasse de ces appareils ? Que je m’en serve pour faire sauter l’édifice ? Nous ne sommes pas des terroristes, nous sommes des journalistes. Les médias ne font pas la guerre. Ils la couvrent. Ils la commentent. Ils la vivent pour mieux raconter aux gens ce qui se passe.

Peut-être voulaient-ils nous faire sentir bien petits face à l’Empire ? Peut-être cherchaient-ils à nous humilier davantage ? Qui sait ?

Nous soulignons aujourd’hui, chacun à notre façon, un bien triste anniversaire. Un an sans travail, ça ronge l’enthousiasme; ça gruge le moral. C’est une année inutilement perdue dans une vie qui défile déjà trop vite.

Je veux être certain de vivre assez vieux pour ne pas oublier cet anniversaire. C’est pourquoi je choisis cette date pour partir. En annonçant ma retraite d’un métier qui a été toute ma vie, je veux m’assurer de ne pas avoir à vivre une deuxième année de lock-out.

Raymond has worked at the Journal for 40 years, and has been a columnist for the past 24. He was fiercely loyal to his newspaper before the lockout, but then fiercely loyal to his union afterward, even going so far as to blast Yvon Pedneault for writing for the Journal de Québec during its lockout in 2008-09.

After a vacation, Raymond will remain a part of RDS’s Antichambre and la Ligue en question, and hinted about doing more for the all-sports network.

His departure is being noted by his colleagues, both at Rue Frontenac and in other media: La Presse’s Réjean Tremblay, The Gazette’s Mike Boone and RDS’s Luc Gélinas devote columns to Raymond’s retirement. (UPDATE: Corus Sports also has a quick question-and-answer with Raymond about his best and worst moments, and Patrick Lagacé has a few words on his blog)

But I feel most sorry for Four Habs Fans, who will have to find someone else to make fun of. (UPDATE: FHF bids Bertrand goodbye in its own way)

For the record, this stands as the final column he wrote for the Journal, a column about Mark Streit published one year ago today.

UPDATE (Jan. 28): Rue Frontenac has an article and a photo gallery from Bertrand’s retirement party.

| Canadiens, Media

Red Fisher’s almost-100 years

Red Fisher

Red Fisher

Lost in all the hoopla of the Habs centennial is a really long piece by Red Fisher (it was spread out over three pages) about his career covering the Canadiens and all the great moments of the second half of its first century.

I point to it particularly because Fisher goes into a bit of detail in how he got started in the news business, before he even started covering the Canadiens:

A man named Hugh E. McCormick helped make the dream a reality.

I was a first-year student at Sir George Williams College, The Georgian’s one-person sports staff, when McCormick, the owner of the suburban N.D.G. Monitor, Westmount Examiner and Verdun Guardian, sent out a call for college students to report on the sports activities at their schools. A phone call to his office told him I was interested.

“You’ve got the job,” McCormick said immediately.

“How much do you pay?” he was asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I’ll take it,” I replied.

It goes from there to an adorable story about him writing a story about a junior football game for the Standard and having it tossed in the garbage by an editor.

But what gets me is that Fisher worked for free, and later took a significant pay cut, just so he could follow his dream of reporting on the Canadiens early in his career.

Half a century later, not much has changed. Plenty of young journalists would make a similar choice now, willing to sign their souls to the devil to get a press pass into the Canadiens dressing room.

More insight into Fisher’s career can be gleaned from this Dave Stubbs piece, first published in April 2006, when the Habs honoured his 50 seasons covering the team.

Speaking of the Canadiens centennial, Mike Boone’s weekly Eeee-mail makes note of the team’s mastery of marketing (to the point where we’re all getting sick of it). Jack Todd echoes that, noting the contrast between the Habs’ history and its present (and perhaps suggesting a link between the non-stop commemorations and the bad performance of the team).

By the way, I used to find it funny that Boone’s column, which appears opposite Red Fisher’s Red Line page every Saturday, was essentially a column about Fisher himself. Only Boone could pull off writing a column about another columnist and making it worth reading. Sadly, even Boone has reached his limit. Last week he officially retired the Living Legend of Sports Journalism schtick after 10 years.

A moment of silence for the passing of one of The Gazette’s silliest running gags.

| Montreal, Sports, TV

Alouettes parade to get live coverage on TV

Championships in Montreal are more rare than we’d like them to be, yet this year we’ve had two – the Impact and the Alouettes. (And with the Habs being shut out at home to the Leafs, a trifecta seems unlikely.)

Wednesday sees the players and fans meet to celebrate for the victory parade down Ste. Catherine St., from Crescent to Jeanne-Mance starting at 11:40am.

Surprisingly, despite it being a local event (and one coming with little advance notice), there’s going to be actual live coverage of it by local television.

Here’s what’s been announced:

  • Global (CKMI) will have live coverage from 11:30am to 1:30pm (Mike LeCouteur with The Gazette’s Herb Zurkowsky and the Q’s Ken Connors). It will also be streaming the parade live at globalmontreal.com
  • CTV (CFCF) will have live coverage from noon to 1:30pm, preempting its entire noon newscast. Sports reporters will be in the crowd, Mutsumi Takahashi and Randy Tieman at the end of the route. Lori Graham and Todd van der Heyden will be in the parade itself. It will livestream the entire parade at montreal.ctv.ca
  • CBC (CBMT) has no announced live coverage
  • Radio-Canada will not have live TV coverage on the main network, but will be livestreaming the parade at radio-canada.ca/sports
  • TVA and V have nothing announced as far as live coverage
  • RDI will have a live special from 11:30am to 1:30pm. Simon Durivage hosts with Marc André Masson, Jean St-Onge, Jacinthe Taillon, Antoine Deshaies and former Als player Bruno Heppell
  • LCN has not announced anything, but expect it to give good coverage to the parade
  • RDS will have live parade coverage from 11:30am to 2pm (it’s the only network to actually change its electronic and online schedule to reflect the coverage) with David Arsenault, Marc Labrecque, Pierre Vercheval and Denis Casavant.
  • TSN has not announced anything, but considering their current plan for noon is World Championship Darts…

So that’s four channels carrying live TV specials (CFCF, CKMI, RDI and RDS), and three sources for live online streaming, at least.

Maybe what’s surprising is that, in this local TV death spiral, I find this surprising.

(Of course, you won’t be watching the parade on TV because you’ll be on Ste. Catherine St. celebrating, right?)

UPDATE: CTV Montreal and RDS have archived footage of the parade and party afterward. The Gazette and Rue Frontenac have put together artisty videos.

| Sports

Go Als Go!

Alouettes

OK guys. One more game. Everyone expects you to win (even Herb Zurkowsky).

Please don’t choke. Please don’t choke. Please don’t choke…

The Grey Cup (Montreal Alouettes vs. Saskatchewan Roughriders at Calgary) airs on TSN and RDS at 6:30 p.m., because CTV believes it can make more money off the Amazing Race and Desperate Housewives than the championship game of the Canadian Football League. (Save local TV!)

UPDATE: I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. They choked hard. And again. And again. And they won! Next time you have an argument with someone about how the CFL is boring, make this Exhibit A.

| Montreal, Sports, Video

The Expos Five Years Later

Elias Makos, who used to work in the Expos’ marketing department before the franchise moved in 2004, moderated a panel at the recent sports journalism workshop at Concordia University looking at Montreal’s major-league baseball team.

And, fortunately for us, his work teaching Concordia students to handle video has come in handy here, and the entire hour-long discussion is available on YouTube:

It has more to do with the Expos and sports business than journalism, but it’s still a fascinating look at what went wrong with this franchise from people who know.

The panel includes:

Jack Todd, of course, also has some thoughts on the matter, which he shared in a column. His talk at the conference is recorded audio-only here, though there’s a lot of noise.