The Niagara River Lions ended the Saskatchewan
Rattlers’ winning streak at three with a decisive 108-91 victory on a raucous
Friday night at the SaskTel Centre. The River Lions evidently sweat anti-venom,
as this was their second road win over the Rattlers in the early stages of this
2019 CEBL season.
Tonight’s game was billed as the “Friday Night House
Party” at the SaskTel Centre (a.k.a. the Snake Pit) and, just like a frat-house
bash, the atmosphere was loud, chaotic, and at times bewildering. The most
bewildered people in attendance were, by all indications, the men on the court
wearing the home whites with green and wheat trim.
Speaking of “white” and “trim”, the pregame gave the venerable Venom Girls an opportunity to show off the latest lower-body modification to their costumes, as they have switched from black leggings to
white booty shorts. They patrolled the perimeter of the court while DJ Charly Hustle spun the soundtrack—on this evening, fully uncensored
hip-hop. Every man, woman and child who had settled into their seats before the tip-off could groove
out to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” with F-Bombs and N-Bombs fully intact. Eventually,
hype-man Gregor took to centre court to announce the arrival of Swish, billing
him as “Saskatchewan’s number one mascot.” That is a highly controversial
statement. One would have to think that the Riders’ insuperable Gainer the
Gopher would rank higher on the Sask sports food chain.
In due time, the lower bowl (or horseshoe, rather) of
the arena filled in with spectators, making for the most impressive crowd of
the Rattlers’ season so far. When called upon to stand for the national anthem,
the attendees were given no more than a canned instrumental of “Oh Canada.” One
has to wonder: Is this a cost cutting measure? Can the Rattlers no longer
afford singers? Is the team—and the league—in trouble?
The Rattlers players did not look particularly
troubled early on. They jumped out to an early lead, and were all over the
ball. Around the two minute mark, an errant pass went over the head of Bruce
Massey and he made a valiant effort to keep it in the Rattlers’ possession, vaulting
over the front row of upper middle class people at courtside and into the
second row, sending several empty folding chairs clattering onto the concrete. The
fans applauded in appreciation of the valiant effort. Indeed, Massey’s displays
of leadership have not gone underappreciated by the Rattlers’ fandom and the
media. On this very Friday, the Star Phoenix ran a feature on Massey,
noting the passion with which he plays the game. That article’s author, long-time
local word-wielder Darren Zary, even dedicated a few paragraphs to Massey’s tendency
toward excess emotionality (something you could have read about here first on
this blog, as your correspondent had that covered weeks ago).
The Rattlers maintained their moxie through most of
the first frame, but the Niagara defense forced them to take a plethora of low
percentage shots. The Rattlers’ missed most of these, and could chalk it up to
good fortune that they only trailed by four at the end of the first.
Between quarters, Gregor led an adolescent boy out
onto the court for the predictable promotional shot, the inevitable juncture in
any professionally marketed basketball game during which the participating
spectator is given the chance to shoot a basket for a prize. In this case, the
prize was a Rattlers’ jersey. The Rattlers have been running this promo since
the first game, but tonight they allowed the youth to shoot from the foul line,
rather than from half-court. Gregor made some comment to the effect that this way people
actually had some semblance of a chance. Still, the kid ended up missing the hoop by a
wide margin. Regardless, Gregor gave him the jersey anyway. It all seemed very
Canadian—polite and vaguely socialist; presumably, the Rattlers marketing team can
write off the free jersey as a business expense.
Things fell
apart for the Rattlers in the second. Within the first minute, they were down
by ten points, and Niagara was unrelenting, continuing to pound the Rattlers
inside. The River Lions racked up the easy lay-ins, leading by as much as 19
late in the second. Curiously enough, the crowd actually seemed more enthused
in the face of a losing effort, at least relative to second quarters past
wherein the Rattlers held leads. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact it was a
Friday, and that by the second quarter, most of the adults in attendance had
put down more than a few pints of grain alcohol. When Dance Cam made its gamely
rounds and Gregor called upon the spectators to “get down”, people actually
danced.
To say the crowd was “enthused”, however, is not to say that it was entirely into the game. There were a lot of baggy mothers and sallow fathers
conspicuously parenting their kids in the aisles and other unoccupied spaces.
At one point, a well-dressed, morbidly obese man was wiling away the quarter by
guiding his toddling one-year-old in circles around the concrete no man’s land
between the court and the hockey boards. When the child attempted to make some
bipedal headway and then tripped up, tumbling to the hard floor, the crowd let
out a collective “Aww”, which was two-thirds “isn’t that cute?” and one-third
“is he okay?” Evidently, the crowd was more engrossed in this adorable scene
than the increasingly lopsided game at hand.
There was no shortage of children in attendance. When Gregor
made what is now apparently his customary demand from the parents in the crowd
to hold up their children while the Lion King theme played—a ritual now known as
“Cub Cam”—a bounteous crop of photogenic tots was harvested by the camera. Any
given “Cam” ends in a lighthearted sequence, of course, and in this instance the
camera found a grown man who was holding up another grown man (seated on his
lap) by the armpits. Each man had a beer in hand, naturally.
At the half, the Rattlers trailed 58-44.
In terms of pathos, the highlight of the night was the
halftime show. At this juncture, a band called “Die Harden” took to the
makeshift stage at the curvature of the horseshoe. The lead singer and
guitarist were jacked, short-cropped muscle-heads in tight shirts and camo
pants; the rhythm section consisted of jean-jacketed longhairs. If the members of the crowd who’d
remained in their seats had expected easy listening, they were sorely
disappointed; Die Harden’s was not a sound for sore ears. The band started with
a cover of Metallica’s “Fuel”, which proved to be serviceable, in that it was an earsplitting wall of sound drenched in generic aggression. At this point, most of those who had remained
in their seats began filing out. Die Harden then moved into their “original
material.” This accounted for one song—cookie-cutter screamo that cleared the rest
of the surrounding seating. The concrete no man’s land in front of the band
remained empty throughout the set, save for a few moon-faced dudes with hands stuffed in the pockets of their ill-fitting jeans. Swish
made a brief stop in front of the makeshift stage, nodding his perpetually smiling, fanged
head in summary approval and sporadically popping an empty thumbs-up. Die
Harden finished its set with another cover, this time the Beastie Boys’ “Fight
for Your Right (to Party)”. This salvaged the performance. To their credit, the
band did something even Charly Hustle couldn’t manage to do on this evening: effectively
censor song lyrics for all audiences. For the original, timeless lyrics intoned by Mike D
at the summation of verse two, “Now your mom threw away your best porno mag”,
the Die Harden lead screamer changed this to what sounded like “Now your mom
threw away your best Rattlers’ swag.” If your correspondent heard right and
this was indeed the change, then that right there is virtuoso bowdlerization.
Mercifully, the cover ended and so too did the set. All told, Die Harden was a
jarring disjuncture from the constant hip-hop that throbs throughout the gameplay.
 |
| Swish turns his back on Die Harden |
While the end of Die Harden may have brought relief
for its auditors, the second half brought little relief for the Rattlers. They
made turnover after turnover, and Niagara consistently converted these into
points. The Rattlers’ defense always seemed to be scrabbling and clambering,
rendering them utterly porous on the whole. On the sidelines, the Rattlers’ craggy
coach Greg Jockims was uncharacteristically animated, throwing up his hands lamentingly
on at least one occasion after the Rattlers’ surrendered the ball. The morale started
to hemorrhage even faster when Niagara’s Boucard, a prim and crafty Quebecois, landed
a soul-crushing alley-oop dunk. Most if not all hope was lost.
One of the few bright spots in the latter half of the game
came when Gregor led in the singing of “Sweet Caroline”—or more accurately the
singing of the build up to the chorus of that song and then the chorus proper,
with all the now-customary echoic phonemes and scat-talking uttered overtop. DJ Charly Hustle segued
into a deft mashup of that Neil Diamond classic atop the beat from “Forgot
about Dre.” That adroit remix marks him as the only winner on the hometown side
on this evening.
The Rattlers trailed 90-64 going into the fourth, and
while the score may not have had much of an effect on the persistently loud
(and progressively intoxicated) onlookers, it apparently rattled the Venom
Girls. We the male gazers in attendance were promised a floor-show from these
serpentine sweethearts, but when the accompanying music hit, the Venom Girls
just held unmoving in their original pose. As this went on and on, the crowd—especially
the randy men—grew more and more agitated. Had someone in the sound department
missed their cue? Were the Venom Girls trolling us, the fans, for not cheering
louder for previous routines in previous games? Was this some kind of
post-modern, Zen experiment bent on taking the art of cheerleading to strange
new places? Ironically enough, the nagging questions and the nervous burble
they aroused created more of a reaction than the Venom Girls received for any
previous performance. Finally, they started into their usual unremarkable,
step-aerobic themed capering, which ended abruptly due to what were by now
pretty obviously time constraints. Apparently, someone had missed their
cue.
The Rattlers made a bit of a push in the fourth so as
to mitigate the damage on the scoreboard. They managed to get within ten, but the
renewed hope was short-lived. At one point, before hope was completely lost,
Rattlers’ forward Terry Thomas forced a turnover and streaked down court with
an open basket in front of him. He went up for a one-hand monster dunk, and
wound up slamming the ball onto the back of the rim. It bounded away and back into
the hands of the River Lions, all to the collective groans of the attendees.
This failed dunk synopsized the whole evening on and off the court—a bunch of
loudness that didn’t ultimately do anything.
The final camera to make its rounds was “Flex Cam.”
This climaxed in a shot of a slender, ropy forty-something ginger intensively flexing his beer-free arm, pushing up a taut mound of bicep. Gregor
likened him to Scott Steiner, the unhinged, indubitably steroidal pro wrestler of yesteryear.
The crowd loved it.
The score was 108-91 for Niagara at the buzzer, and still
people cheered, seemingly as into it as when the Rattlers were winning in
previous games—maybe even more so. From a marketing perspective, this is a big
positive: the Rattlers have won over a substantial swath of hometown fans. But
in being more intense and more “into it” in a losing effort, and potentially identifying
more strongly with the team when they lose, does this not perhaps get at
something deeper in the collective unconscious of the Saskatchewanese? Are we
more ourselves when we are coming up short? Does a team, somewhat perversely,
only become truly ours when they are coming up short, as we have in our lives
outside arenas and stadia? Decades of cheering for the Saskatchewan Roughriders will do this to
a person.
We should think hard about all this, but we won’t. And
with that being as it is, the mood in the SaskTel Centre remained festive and
upbeat even in the face of defeat, and the well-watered Rattlers’ fans
staggered out to their cars not unsatisfied.
