TED BITS, Ted McIntyre - Mats Sundin and the Age of Losers!

We live in the age of Tiger Woods, arguably as pure a warrior as there has been in our lifetime of sports watching—the Terminator of athletes—relentless, unsatisfied and with an insatiable appetite to win (or just as important, a supreme distaste for losing.) Tiger, however, is surrounded by apathy. Only a few players are similarly driven, but none possesses the killer instinct or the arrogance required to put away a superior opponent. God! Nicklaus would never have lost a tournament in guys like Trevino, Player and Palmer were as complacent as Els, Mickelson and the like. I refuse to believe that Tiger is THAT much better than everyone else in golf. He doesn’t shoot 58 for four rounds in a row. In fact, he’s never even broken 61 in an official tournament. And I know enough to turn the TV off once he has TIED his match-play opponent or drawn even with whoever’s in second place in stroke play. I now know who’s going to win–for sure. Time to flip to another channel and another sport where at least one of the opponents haven’t already resigned themselves to losing.
Speaking of complacency, allow me to depart the realm of golf to beat on Mats Sundin for a while. Who are these apologists for Mats in the media and on radio talk shows? “It’s not Mats’ fault he has a no-trade contract.” “He’s earned the right to say no.” “He’s a devoted veteran captain and deserves to do whatever he wants.”
OH PLEASE. No wonder this town hasn’t had a hockey team even MAKE IT to the Stanley Cup in more than 30 years. It’s part of the franchise’s (and evidently its fans’) pervasive attitude of apathy. Nobody was asking Sundin to be shipped off to some Russian gulag where he’d get his fingernails yanked out until he gave up the secrets to the Leafs’ power play system. They were basically saying, “Mats, PLEASE go to a better, happier hockey team for the next 12 weeks and try to win a Stanley Cup. If you go, we can obtain a bare minimum of one good draft pick and another young prospect, and then sign you to a two-year deal in the off-season with a team that now has a much rosier future. Apparently, however, the concept of leaving Toronto for the spring was so abhorrent that Sundin could not conceive of subjecting himself to this insidious “rent-a-player” deal. He’d rather just retire at the end of the year with his longtime team getting nothing in return, or sign with someone else, or go on playing with a franchise that has no future.
Yep–that sounds like prime Toronto Maples Leafs captain material to me.

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