Rails from the Rails 16 - A Great Game, A Terrible Business

Rails from the Rails 16 - A Great Game, A Terrible Business(as seen here)

All Aboard: The following is an excerpt from a message I received from a fan and friend:

If you're ever stumped for an idea I would love to read how the off season (or mid season) roster changes affect the team atmosphere. What kind of effect does, or can, it have in the locker room? How does it change the game for you when you play against guys like Jeff Keeping, or Jordan Younger later on? How hard is it for a new guy to fit in, especially if he's traded for a long time team mate? Just something to think about.

I have decided to share a few thoughts I have about this topic.

Tickets Please: I think the title of this piece sums it up. The personnel changes that can happen to a team can be beneficial on the field but remain difficult for the players off the field. I first heard this saying from long-time teammate and sometimes sage Chad Folk. It bears repeating. Talking about professional football he said “It’s a great game, but it’s a terrible business.” Well, terrible might not have been the adjective he used but you get the idea. There are several things which cause player movement and I’ll tackle them one at a time.

The first locker-room altering event is a trade. Over the course of my career, trades have been relatively rare. Considering the fact that they are a constant possibility, they actually don’t happen very often. That being said, there are 2 trades that have affected our locker-room and me personally to a greater degree than the others. The first was a trade orchestrated by J. I. Albrecht and John Huard. I remember walking into the locker-room the first day of training camp to be informed that our own Mike O’Shea had been traded. O’sh has always been a team leader and an important cog of the machinery that makes up a healthy locker-room. Aside from being a friend, Mike is and was one of the best linebackers to play our game. His replacement, Calvin Tiggle, was an excellent player as well but was not someone I was good friends with. I think that was a rather bad first step on a perilous journey for Albrecht and Huard. This year we I had a similar experience with a player who I have spent 1/3 of my life sharing the same locker-room. Again, this was a difficult situation and many of us miss seeing Prefontaine on a daily basis. These types of “blockbuster” trades, as well as many others, definitely remind the players that this is a business. And the constant changing of personnel definitely causes a constant morphing of the locker-room chemistry.

Free-agency is another occurrence that can cause player movement. There have been many friends I have watched leave a team I have been on for other teams. This can be tough, sometimes tougher than the trades because the person who leaves often does so by his own volition. He likely has good reasons to do so, but it still leaves one wishing they didn’t leave. In my first year playing with the Argonauts I had the good fortune of playing with fellow offensive lineman Jeremy O’Day. He was also my roommate when we went on road trips. Jeremy is a good friend despite the fact that we only played together one year. The following year O’Day signed with Saskatchewan as a free agent. He has gone on to have a stellar career there. However, it would have been nice to keep him around a little longer so I could have continued to teach him in his apprenticeship as a fisherman. I was reminded of another good friend lost to free-agency a few weeks back. I had phone interview to do with Mike Hogan and Sandy Annunziata. Upon getting on air, I was verbally lambasted by Sandy for my physical appearance…man I miss that guy. Sandy made the locker-room a place for laughing even if you had to laugh at yourself once in awhile. This year the o-line watched another good friend leave for another team. Jeff Keeping, not only a friend but a UWO grad as well, signed with Montreal. Jeff was a great locker-room guy and was a lot of fun. He is missed regularly and us o-lineman are constantly text messaging him to let him know what he is missing. Free agency is another way in which a football team faces changes. It would be easy to call it a bad thing, but one must also remember that free agency brings its share of good guys into the locker-room as well.

The last way we can lose teammates is through retirement. Retirement is an interesting event because sometimes it is chosen and sometimes it is forced upon people. Jimmy Kemp is one of the best friends I have played football with. He opted to retire from football in order to pursue other interests. Jimmy still had years of playing left in his body but he chose a different route. Though he has been retired for quite a few years, I still find myself saying “I wish Kemp was around to see this!” Noah Cantor is another good friend who retired while still able to play the game at a high level. Being a defensive lineman he had many faults, but he was still a good guy who made the locker-room a more enjoyable place to be. Losing such quality individual cannot but make a difference to a team and individual players.

I have gone through the three main ways in which rosters are altered: trades, free agency and retirement. They cause a considerable amount of change in a locker-room. At times, a new player can step in and compensate for the loss of the player that they are replacing. But sometimes that is not possible regardless of how great the new guy is. How well a new player fits in really depends on the new player. Is he going to buy in to what the team is doing? Is he willing to fill the role that he has been brought in for? It takes all types to make a team successful and there is room for many personalities. Football players quickly learn that player movement and roster instability are part and parcel of the game, or business, that we participate in. One has to deal with these changes as anyone else would in their own line of work. Sometimes it is fairly easy, while other times it is much more difficult. And with the loss of some teammates one is never quite the same.

I appreciate the feedback I receive from many of you in regards to Rails from the Rails. In an effort to hear back from more of you, here is an email you can send comments to: football@judestjohn.ca. I hope to hear from you.

Last Stop: Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival. ~C.S. Lewis

Rails from the Rails 15 – The World for a Cup of Coffee

Rails from the Rails 15 – The World for a Cup of Coffee (as seen here)

All Aboard: Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water. ~The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674

Tickets Please: Lots of people have a drinking problem. But it usually is an issue of drinking too much alcohol. My problem is with a beverage of another sort; coffee. I am a hardcore coffee drinker. I have a minimum of 3 coffees a day, whether I need them or not. And over the past several months I have indulged in the world of coffee more than I have in any other period of my life. I’d like to share a little bit of that journey with you.

Brewing: This whole period started out with buying a new coffee brewer. Our old brewer had a carafe that was constantly spilling annoying streams of coffee whenever it was poured. It was my sister, Heidi, who finally became fed up with this. She offered $100 to us if we would buy a new coffee maker. This got the ball rolling.

I did some research on the internet to find out what the experts thought about drip coffee makers. We own a Starbuck’s Barista espresso machine, a stove-top espresso pot, and a French-press coffee maker as well. And I wanted to add and top-of-the-line coffee brewer to that line-up. The experts were unified in their praise of one home coffee brewer: the Technivorm Moccamaster.

Technivorm’s brewers were singled out for several reasons: their ultra-hot brewing temperatures, their dependability, and their approval by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The Technivorm brewers use a 1400 watt heater, as opposed to the 800 watt heaters of most household coffee brewers, to get water to a steamy temperature of 200°F. Apparently this is the ideal temperature for brewing delicious coffee. Their dependability indicates that the company uses quality parts and materials and assembles the machines properly. I don’t know much about the SCAA but it sure sounded respectable to me.

So, we bought the Technivorm KBT741 from Transcend Coffee, a coffee shop in Edmonton (www.transcendcoffee.com), and we are more than pleased with this brewing unit. The coffee is hot; I measured the temperature of the water before entering the filter cone and it was indeed 200°F as promised. The coffee tastes great. I would even say it tastes better but that may be in my head. And it is carrying the workload of brewing many pots of coffee for my wife, my friends and family, and me.

Grinding: All the coffee aficionados out there insist that one of the keys to great coffee is having freshly roasted beans that you grind just before preparing. More on the fresh beans later, but first let’s talk about grinding. The essential tool for grinding coffee beans is a birr grinder. They are more expensive than a blade grinder but are superior for several reasons of which the most important to us home coffee makers is consistency. Birr grinders consistently grind coffee to a uniform grind. We had our new-fangled coffee brewer and it only made sense to buy a grinder that would match the brewer. We ended up purchasing a Krups Birr grinder from Starbucks. This little unit is relatively quiet and, like our brewer, we have been very pleased with the results.

Coffee: We found ourselves on the verge of being able to produce an exquisite cup of coffee. We were always content with the coffee we made before, but, our new journey into coffee-nirvana was a slippery slope. We couldn’t own a birr grinder and the queen-mother-supreme home coffee brewer and be satisfied with the regular coffee we always used. So the search was on for the final ingredient for top-notch coffee; freshly roasted coffee beans.

I “Googled” the words “coffee roaster London Ontario” and came up with a site that listed a coffee shop that I was not familiar with: Fire Roasted Coffee Company (www.fireroastedcoffee.com). This store must have come in under the radar because I’m usually on top of coffee developments in my town.

On my first visit I was fortunate enough to be able to roast some coffee beans in a home roasting unit with FRC Company’s proprietor Dave Cook. He sent me home with a small batch of coffee that he and I roasted as well as a couple pounds of freshly roasted coffee. The coffee from FRC is outstanding and its freshness has to be one of the reasons. Freshly roasted coffee has a “pop” to it that is unforgettable and the intensity of the flavours has me hooked. I have made many trips back to Fire Roasted Coffee Company’s Art Roastery Studio in London. I have been there to buy coffee: single varietals, coffee blends, espresso blends. I was also invited to partake in a coffee tasting evening which was a lot of fun. We tasted 12 fair trade organic coffees from around the world with exotic names such as Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Mexican Oaxaca and Dominican Republic Bani. It was almost shocking to taste how different coffees from different regions can taste. You would think that coffee is coffee but not so. The variety of tastes and textures was definitely unexpected. Fire Roasted Coffee Company is going to be my portal to the next stage of my coffee odyssey which will be home roasting. There are home roasting appliances that are both effective and user-friendly. And the opportunity to have the freshest roasted coffee possible is something that I need.

So there you have 3 of the main aspects of a good coffee; brewing, grinding, and roasting. Where to and what else will my passion for a good cup of coffee take me? I’ll let you know. Oh yeah, and by the way…just because I get a headache in the afternoon if I don’t have a coffee in the morning doesn’t mean I’m addicted. It’s not the caffeine I crave, it’s the epicurean experience.

Last Stop: Apparently, a “cup of joe” has been a term to denote a coffee since the early 1900s. There are several explanations for this term. Here is the one I like the best:

In 1914, the secretary of the US Navy, Admiral Josephus 'Joe' Daniels abolished the officers' wine mess. From that time on the strongest and thereby drink of choice on board navy ships was coffee. It was dubbed 'a cup of Joe' after the secretary.