Monday Morning Halfback: Canadian tennis, McKenna’s benching and questioning an MLB lockout

Jamie Ross is the Globe’s Sports editor; Cathal Kelly is the national sports columnist.

Jamie Ross: Cathal, Gabriela Dabrowski won her second doubles title in a week on the WTA circuit with her partner Luisa Stefani. They took the China and Wuhan Opens back-to-back. That gives her six titles this season and 26 over her career. Whatever happened to that golden era of Canadian tennis we were supposed to be enjoying, where did everybody else go?

Cathal Kelly: I think what you’re asking me is ‘Should Tennis Canada secede?’ As best I can tell, that’s the answer to everything these days.

Maybe ask the Americans for their support. They love a financially remunerative revolutionary opportunity. Get a few Russian hackers working on the case, and now you’ve got yourself a real grassroots Canadian movement. ‘Make Tennis 2019 Again’.

I will grant you that it’s not what it was back when Canadians were making Wimbledon finals and winning U.S. Opens, but let’s attempt some proportion here. It’s still pretty golden.

I can remember a time when just hearing a Canadian’s name at a major tournament felt like a ‘Who? US?’ moment.

We’ve still got Dabrowski, Félix Auger-Aliassime (ranked fifth in the world) and Victoria Mboko (16th). That’s not a bad line-up. England or Australia would swap with us in a second.

What’s been missing recently is a long march into the very late stages of a grand slam. I’m waiting for Auger-Aliassime to be the guy who does that. He’s one of the very rare pros I keep my fingers crossed for.

If he or any of the others do that once, the ‘golden era’ stuff will be back in a big way.

While we’re on golden eras, the Leafs’ new one hasn’t lasted long. Losses are one thing, but besmirching the reputation of their next future non-Stanley-Cup-winning hall of famer is another. Where were you when Toronto benched Gavin McKenna?

J.R.: Oh god, this again. I kicked us off with Dabrowksi because I thought to myself, ‘There is no way Cathal can bring this back to the Maple Leafs.’ I am a fool.

Is it really that big a deal that McKenna, a rookie, rode the pine for a night against the Sabres? I checked out the time-on-ice stats from Saturday’s loss to the Islanders and he clocked the third-most among forwards.

C.K.: I don’t know how they did your Globe intake, but were you left with an impression that this is a government job?

Here on the private side of media, we give the people what they want, not what we think they should need.

And what the people want is for new Leafs coach Jim Hiller to be ejected from Toronto with great force, since he clearly doesn’t get how things work up here.

Benching McKenna was one thing. I’m not sure how it helped, since he wasn’t on the ice for the team’s late collapse that night.

The issue was the way in which Hiller handled the benching. He couldn’t or wouldn’t explain why he was upset at McKenna. Then, when asked how he’d played, said, “He was okay.”

This kind of passive aggressive weirdness might work in L.A. (though it didn’t for Hiller). In a Canadian market, it creates hysteria.

It’d be one thing if McKenna had been a mess out there from the start of the year. But he’s been somewhere between fine and good. What was the point of embarrassing him? Shades of Hiller’s former boss, Mike Babcock, there.

Even more hilariously, I think Hiller thinks that it’s over now that McKenna has publicly shrugged it off. In Toronto, it’s never over.

End of rant. You tell me what you want to talk about. Is there a charity darts league you’d like to highlight?

J.R.: What Babcock did to Mitch Marner, privately asking him to rank teammates in order of laziness, and then sewering him in front of the entire team by sharing said list, was deliberately cruel.

What Hiller did was less Babcock, more Blue Jays CEO Mark Shapiro, who once balked at calling Vlad Guerrero Jr. a generational player before giving him a half-billion dollar contract. See what I did there? One minute we’re on your 20th take of the Leafs season, and just like that, onto baseball, where the mighty Dodgers will not repeat in the Fall Classic after being humiliated by the Brewers in the Championship Series.

Does this mean we no longer need to worry about a lockout, since it’s now been proven that limitless money doesn’t mean making it to the World Series? No salary cap fight after all?

C.K.: This was never about rationality. It’s about money, and the owners hanging on to as much of it as they can. That said, I suspect a salary cap is a bridge too far for the players.

My lockout guess is that spring training gets cancelled, but that there is a breakthrough around the time that the season is meant to start. What does that look like? Salary cap-lite. Ceilings, but not basements – because the Miamis and Clevelands of MLB don’t want to be told they have to increase spending to a minimum. Something that looks like a salary cap, but isn’t called a salary cap.

Then a quickie warm-up and an egregious, injury-filled April/May. Then they can fight about that, too.

My favourite thing this week was only tangentially sports related – Mark Zuckerberg vs. a pint of Guinness. Can you trust someone who doesn’t enjoy God’s Irish elixir?

J.R.: You cannot.

It looked like he had a mouthful of Listerine. Thank goodness they didn’t ask him to ‘Split the G.’

Speaking of Zuck, I took in The Social Reckoning Saturday night. Totally forgettable and average. Pass on it if you’ve not already wasted your money. One thing that stood out on my going to and from the theatre, however, was that I saw five different men wearing sweat pants. And these weren’t attempts at street style or ‘athleisure’, not that that would be a good enough excuse to wear sweats in public.

They looked like the kind of pants you wear on the sofa during a The Sopranos binge. In the past in this space we’ve made pit stops on dress sneakers and shorts, so tell me, where do you stand on sweat pants?

I refuse to dress down when I travel. In fact, it’s time to get fancy

C.K.: It’s right there in the name. Are you planning on sweating in these things?

If not, don’t wear them out to dinner. If you are both going to dinner and planning to sweat, Google ‘hyperhydrosis’. There are effective treatments.

Every time I say anything about these topics – shorts, dress sneakers, et al – my inbox swells. It’s mostly people taking offence, but I have a few fellow travellers fighting back against Big Sloppy. A few dedicated individuals ready to be the change they want to see in the world – this is how Lenin got his start.

The pandemic was a long time ago. Everybody had fun letting themselves go. Now it’s time to let yourself back in. Even if that requires letting your old pants out.

That said, everybody should do as they like. I encourage more middle-aged men to go out in public looking like they were dressed by their moms. It just means more jobs for me.