Bulls & Bears: Looking ahead to Super Sunday after suffering a shocking one in L.A.
Credit to Author: Gord Kurenoff| Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 22:19:41 +0000
Canadian soccer is riding high on Christine Sinclair, who is now the all-time international leader in goals scored. Sinclair tied and then broke American Abby Wambach’s record with two goals Wednesday in an Olympic qualifying romp against St. Kitts and Nevis.
And the 36-year-old from Burnaby doesn’t appear ready to stop at any point soon. It was her 290th international appearance for Canada.
It’s been a bullish week for Austrian tennis star Dominic Thiem as he finds himself preparing for his third Grand Slam final — the Australian Open men’s singles final against the juggernaut that is Novak Djokovic, who has won 18 of 19 sets played in his six match victories so far, including the victory that eliminated Canadian Milos Raonic in the quarter-finals.
It’s also football’s biggest weekend of the year, with Super Bowl 54 the San Francisco 49ers’ defence against the gunslinging quarterbacking of Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs.
With average North American television audiences in the range of 32 million for the wild-card round, 34 million for the divisional playoffs and 40 million for the conference championships, a competitive game should score north of a baseline of 105 million Americans and Canadians tuning into Hard Rock Stadium in Miami on Super Sunday.
Yet all of those success stories seem muted this week.
The sudden death of NBA superstar Kobe Bryant, who perished along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others in a tragic helicopter crash near Los Angeles last Sunday, has left a big hole in the basketball world and gutted those inside and outside of Los Angeles and Laker Nation who associated the 20-year NBA superstar with his never say die attitude and penchant for work ethic and clutch performances.
The loss of life is unspeakably sad and a reminder to cherish every day. Yet the pall cast by the grieving for the families who were devastated is a reminder of the vulnerability of the human condition.
We’ve never seen anything like the global response on social media and other tributes to Bryant, his jersey numbers and his Laker colours of purple and gold.
The Pro Basketball Hall of Fame moved to immediately honour Bryant posthumously as a first-ballot inductee. Teams from around the NBA — including the Toronto Raptors — staged moving tributes to Bryant invoking the numerology of 8 and 24.
And the NBA itself rolled out plans for a new format to its All-Star Game to honour the five-time NBA champion. And that doesn’t include the three-million strong petition started by Vancouver teenager Nikyar Moghtader with a view to asking the NBA to change its logo (from the silhouette of Jerry West to a silhouette of Bryant).
Whether or not that happens, it’s a fascinating reflection of the way Bryant — despite his flaws and the way he polarized people in the early stages of his career — resonated with people. It’s almost as if those imperfections made him more real.
The reverberations around Bryant’s death were far-reaching, for he was no ordinary superstar. Born in Philadelphia, lived in Italy and multilingual, he was extremely popular in retirement, most notably in China — where he sold more jerseys than Yao Ming.
The multi-faceted Kobe Bryant — NBA champion, successful investor and mentor, promoter of girls’ and women’s basketball and Oscar winner for the animated short based on his poem Dear Basketball — connected with people like few ever do in life or in death.
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