It truly is a pleasure cruise

Mr. Till has done an admirable job during the last week, repeatedly beating down the sport-rag jobbers in squash match after squash match as I searched for my lost smile. For a while it felt like I didn't have that toughness needed to take on the heavyweights in the Toronto sports media, but today...today...today I got that smile back, thanks to King Kong Kox who dropped a big ole Bundy Splash on logic and reason this morning in The Star, leaving me with no choice but to come running from the dressing room for the save before Cox could get the five count:

Boston is a tough, tough media town, and these two teams get most of the attention, the same type of attention that goes to high-profile teams in other markets - say, Toronto and the Maple Leafs - and is used as an excuse as to why those teams aren't successful.

The Boston media, or more specifically, the newspaper writers, hounded Ted Williams for years and years. It's an unrelenting media pressure that Boston applies, yet the Pats and Bosox seem to flourish within it.

Talk about small sample size. I wonder why Cox didn't use any of the following to prove his completely invalid point:

The Boston Red Sox (1918-2003)
The New England Patriots (1959-2000)
The New York Yankees
The New York Mets
The New York Knickerbockers
The New York Giants
The New York Jets
The New York Rangers
The Chicago Cubs
The Los Angeles Lakers
The Washington Generals
Iron Mike Sharpe

So the next time you hear a Leaf player talk about how tough it is to play hockey in a city like Toronto, remember how Boston's baseball and football clubs deal with it and recognize such baloney for what it is.

So many things wrong with this. It's like the Shockmaster of sports-writing. Never mind that no Leaf player (in my recollection) has ever blamed the forty-year-and-counting failure of the Leafs on the self-important media. Never mind the fact that Ted Williams never won a World Series. Never mind the fact that every year Manny Ramirez is good for 35 HR, 120 RBI, and a trade demand in December because he is sick of the media attention in Boston. Never mind that the Red Sox missed the playoffs last year and lost in the first round the year before. Never mind that the Red Sox have a massive payroll advantage over every team but one in their sport. Never mind that the Red Sox GM is smart, builds from positions of strength, drafts well, nurtures prospects, and that our GM is John Ferguson Jr. Never mind that there is no way to prove that teams perform in certain ways due to, regardless of, or in spite of media pressure. Never mind that Cox creates a straw-man argument and uses it to bash the Leafs for saying something they've never actually said. And never mind that nobody uses the word baloney once they learn how to curse, unless they are as drunk as Jake the Snake.

Never mind any of these things because anything goes in Cox's lifelong no-holds-barred grudge match against the tag team of the Leafs and common sense.