In rural Nova Scotia, a billionaire's playground expands its horizons
PLUS: A sports league dumps the draft, the NFL adds Fridays and inside an imagined strategy session of the federal NDP.
As you might have gathered from the subhead up there, this is a rather eclectic edition of the newsletter. A lack of focus? Perhaps. But there’s something for everyone!
I had the chance in the summer to take a quick trip to the middle of nowhere. OK, that’s not precisely true, but Fox Harb’r Resort, on the shores of the Northumberland Strait across from Prince Edward Island, does feel like a very strange place to build a golf resort.
Which is sort of the point. The idea is for it to be exclusive, and that it is. They are building a second course on the site, and in so doing also mostly redoing the original 18 holes. An interesting fact, though only if you know anything about golf-course architecture, is that Doug Carrick and Tom McBroom are combining forces on the project.
It wasn’t exactly the Capulets and the Montagues joining forces, but Carrick and McBroom had been competing for the same design jobs for decades. At Fox Harb’r, they would be partners.
My full dispatch, for the National Post, is here.
A North American league ditches the draft, finally
The NWSL was not that long ago not much more than a semi-pro league. But women’s sports is a fast-growing property, and the soccer league has been riding the wave. One of its franchises recently sold for $250-million. (Not a typo!)
The league also recently signed a new Collective Bargaining Agreement with its players, which among many details binned the amateur draft. There’s a specific reason for this, because soccer leagues in Europe do not have drafts and wouldn’t think of trying such a thing, because the standard there is that athletes have some agency over their professional futures like, you know, every other job in existence.
But the fascinating question here is, if the NWSL can ditch the draft and continue to grow, will North America’s other sports leagues eventually be forced to follow suit?
The claim is that even though teams compete against one another, they recognize that a degree of cooperation is required in sharing incoming talent equitably to ensure the league's long-term survival. Without the draft, the argument goes, all the good players would end up pooled in New York or Los Angeles or Miami and the whole thing would eventually fall apart. This is why athletes are subject to a draft process that would be unthinkable if it were carried out by, say, movie studios or legal firms or basically any other business.
My piece on all this for theScore is here.
Friday Night Lights
Last week I suggested a column on the NFL’s incursion into Friday nights to my crack editor at theScore. I had a vague feeling that the league had previously promised to avoid playing on Friday nights to avoid conflict with high-school football, and now here the NFL was doing exactly that. Because they can.
It turned out the story was even a bit weirder. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 prohibits NFL games on Friday nights, but only from the second Friday in September onward. Because the Friday of Labour Day week was Sept. 6, the league was free to exploit the loophole. (Credit to the crack editor for discovering this fact.)
It’s all part of what seems to be the NFL’s manifest destiny. More games in prime time, more games overseas, more games on more broadcasters. Again, they are doing all this because they can. I’m just not sure where it ends.
Inside the NDP strategy meeting (not really)
My latest column for the Toronto Star imagines the strategy session that led to the NDP tearing up the agreement that allowed the Trudeau government to survive confidence votes thanks to NDP help.
This headline really hits it:
Donald Trump: still bad
This one was published a week ago, which means several scandals ago in the life of the Republican nominee for President. Still, it holds up: nothing this guy does will bother his diehards.
A scandal grows over time as more people learn about it and as more details are added to the initial cause for outrage. Trump is the first politician to outrun a bad-news cycle by creating another bad-news cycle for himself. The media is stuck with the perpetual problem of trying to give proper attention to Scandal X while not ignoring the latest developments of Scandals Y and Z.