Ah, the smell of success… Not unlike the smell of a ripe jock strap after the fourth quarter of the home golf game, it lingers in the air, reminding all who smell it of the good ol’ days of sportsmanship and camaraderie. This is how I imagine all good sports articles start.
But, as the subtitle of this article might suggest, I know virtually nothing about sports. In fact, despite how much we at Banfield talk about sports, the majority of us are less than proficient at actually playing them.
What I do know about is sports scandals. So, for the purpose of making this interesting to non “sprots” fans, like myself, here is a retelling of Banfield’s sport history through the lens of sports’ greatest controversies.
Softball
This might be hard to believe, but there is a remarkable lack of softball scandals. Crazy, right? So, since baseball and softball are basically the same thing, we’re going to run with the most famous baseball scandal in recent memory: The Bash Brothers doping debacle.
Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were teammates and famous homerun hitters for the Oakland Athletics in the ‘80s. Years later it was revealed that both were juicing on some serious ‘roids. So many ‘roids, in fact, that Canseco gained 34lbs of muscle in one year! This scandal is second only to the most controversial doping scandal of all time: Michael’s Secret Stuff in Space Jam.
Much like the teams marred with controversy the 80s, The OG Banfield OSSC softball team was banned by former CEO Nancy Webb back in the 90s — but for a completely different reason. “Being too good?” you ask. Hardly. Players kept getting injured and softball was canceled for the good part of a decade.
Then, three years ago, the spirit of softball was renewed at Banfield when McMillan approached us to host a creative industry softball tournament. Last year, we even won 4 of 5 games. In a dumbfounding upset, we lost in the final to Kanata’s You.i TV. Tragic as it was, we have our suspicions that some of their developers took a page out of the Bash Bros’ book.
Volleyball
Hot off the press we’ve got the 2019 college admission scandals. For those of you who don’t know, this is just a bunch of rich people who bribed college coaches to give their kids fake sports scholarships. For example, Jeff Bizzack, a rich entrepreneur, paid $250K to get his son admitted to USC as a fake volleyball recruit. The hoax was revealed earlier this year and the trust-fund-kid community hasn’t been the same since.
To those of us who don’t attend, Hope Volleyball sort of sounds like a hoax, too. Hordes of muscular guys and gals frolicking on a beach… in Ottawa? Nah, that can’t be right. That’s the sort of thing that happens in movies.
In any case, Banfield has participated in Hope on and off over the years. Just this past month we won three games at the annual charity tournament. Nobody needs to know how much they bribed me to keep quiet about the number of non-Banfielders we snuck on the team this year…
Golf
It’s a good thing Banfielders golf because I reeeealllyy wanted to talk about the iconic 2009 Tiger Woods cheating scandal. I can’t underscore enough how appropriate his wife, Elin, under the guise of “trying to rescue her husband from the car”, taking a golf club to his Escalade in a fit of pure rage was. Truly a work of art.
Luckily, no Escalades were hurt at this year’s Ronald McDonald House charity game. In fact, there wasn’t even the slightest urge to smash an Escalade since, this year at least, Banfield actually came in not-last. In previous years, we’ve been present at various local games like Hydro Ottawa Golf tournament. It was there that Banfield won the “Most Honest Golfer” award – the only award Tiger will never have on us.
Verdict: If I had to pick, we’re more Elin than Tiger.
Skiing
You might be thinking that I’ll confuse skiing with skating as an excuse to bring up reigning sport-scandal-queen Tonya Harding, but no. There is a CRAZY skiing scandal that very few people have heard of: The 1976 murder of the USA’s most famous skier, Spider Sabich, by his singer/actress girlfriend Claudine Longet. Longet was given a fine of $250 and 30 days in county jail to be served “at a time of her choosing”. She took years to serve the sentence and did it mostly on weekends.
Similarly, in 2018, Banfield’s most famous skier, Tom Lynch, suffered what can only be called a ruptured spleen at the Ronald McDonald House SkiFest. Did he wipe out on a blue square run? Yes. Was his girlfriend around? To this day, we still don’t know. Eerie stuff to say the least.
Bowling
After a quick Google search, it turns out, “Scandals” is actually a type of bowling ball listed on bowlingball.com (“It’s Where Bowlers Go”, get free shipping off your next order when you use code: Bowlfield). The sport itself, on the other hand, is squeaky clean. Not a real scandal to be found (sorry Kellyanne Conway). Nothing to report here, folks.
Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our bowling legacy at West Park Bowling. Long story short: the agency on a whole bowled a total of 3000 points (don’t do the math, please), the majority of which were yielded from between-the-legs bowls à la Ron Swanson, incognito.
Bonus section: Balls to the face
When we aren’t scoring baskets in the end zone and hitting touchdowns at the bottom of the 9th, we’re pretty much dying trying. Examples of some of the injuries:
- Jeff tripped and tore open his skull
- Jimmy took a softball to the face
- Simon cut his eyebrow open
- Tom “fell” at SkiFest (see above)
- Kristal bruised her tailbone at SkiFest, but not from skiing
- Kelly injured knee at CHEO BBQ
- JP took a line drive to the back of the head
42% of these people don’t work at Banfield anymore. I guess not everyone can take the heat.
But you know who doesn’t get injured? Our resident nerds Liz and Katrin who just play Dungeons and Dragons. Says copywriter Liz of their weekly D&D game: “Yeah, I guess it’s fun. I’m busy, can we do this later?” – neat job Liz, stay safe out there!
At the end of the day, I guess we’re all just a bunch of nerds. And if the 80’s taught me anything (besides MLB doping trivia), it’s that, under no circumstances, can nerds be good at sports. So maybe we’ll just stick to being sports fans, you know?