You Should Have Heard Her Just Around Midnight
Lisa MacLeod is apologizing again.
The Ontario politician, who grew up in New Glasgow and is the daughter of the late town councillor Danny MacLeod, was at a Rolling Stones concert on June 30 in Barrie, Ont., when she channeled her inner honky tonk woman, charged up to Ottawa Senators owner Eugene Melnyk and dropped the old “do you know who I am?” line.
If that weren’t tacky enough, she proceeded to call him a “piece of s---” and a “f------ loser”.
She almost made a grown man cry: Melnyk, who no doubt wished he could have been dragged away by wild horses during MacLeod’s unsavoury tirade, was so bothered that he contacted Premier Doug Ford to make him aware of this latest incident.
In a tweet that MacLeod sent out on July 4, she said something about trying to communicate to Melnyk her “serious concerns about our beloved Ottawa Senators!” and that “we need to get our team back on the road to winning the (Stanley Cup)!”
As Mick Jagger says, you can’t always get what you want; the Senators aren’t going anywhere except perhaps to Quebec City, so MacLeod, if she really is an Ottawa Senators fan and isn’t just paying lip service to voters in her riding of Napean, won’t be gettin’ no satisfaction anytime soon.
She is still, as of this writing, the Ontario minister of tourism, culture and sport (the political equivalent of being a fourth-line winger with the Flin Flon Bombers, but hey, it could be worse), and has yet to be demoted by Ford, who clearly is stuck between a rock and a hard place: does he keep her to save face, or does he give her the boot, handing her a bouquet of dead flowers when she’s on her way out the caucus door.
I suppose one might say that, while you can take the girl out of Pictou County, you can’t take Pictou County out of the girl.
One last thing: I didn’t overdo it with all those Stones references, did I?
Other Random Sports Thoughts:
• The U.S. women’s team could have acted with a little more class during the World Cup of women’s soccer. They mocked their British opponents, disrespected their own national anthem and the office of the U.S. presidency, and generally acted with a degree of arrogance that turned off even some Americans, as things turned out: when I told one of my American friends that I had been rooting for the Netherlands in the championship game, he said he didn’t blame me, because the U.S. team “wasn’t a likeable bunch.”
Winners should behave like winners, and not like boorish heathens (by the way, we’d be remiss if we ignored that the women’s team apparently generates more money than the U.S. men’s team these days, and therefore the women deserve equal money, if not more).
• Kawhi Leonard spent one year with the Toronto Raptors, played a crucial role in their National Basketball Association championship, and the free agent then signed with the L.A. Clippers (he’s from Los Angeles) this past week. I can understand why Raptors fans are disappointed to be losing such a key player, but they also should be grateful – and to be sure, most are – that Leonard’s brief time in Toronto resulted in a victory celebration.
Kevin Adshade is a writer with The News. His column appears each week.
