AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Sport in the context of war

In the 41 years I’ve written this column I have been fond of the phrase “sports is the toy department in the hardware store of life.” I love it because it puts the importance of sport, relative to serious issues, in a proper context. The idea is that while sports fans love to debate the fun topics of the day, when compared to real life situations sport has to take a back seat to issues of life and death.

That feeling has never been more palpable than right now, with wars in the Middle East that have the potential to end life as we know it on this planet. At press time it’s America and Israel against Iran in an existential battle between the West and the Arab world, but if Russia or China get involved, things could get dire for the human race very quickly.

It’s difficult to lament the fact that Canada will have to wait at least another year to bring the Stanley Cup ‘home’, when Trump is threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia if it sells nuclear warheads to Iran. Trump entered the war against Iran on his gut instincts, after dismissing reports from America’s many intelligence agencies that Iran was not, in fact, building a nuclear weapon. The fact that a tempestuous, child-like buffoon has the launch codes to America’s nuclear arsenal – and is publicly threatening to use them – should terrify the world, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.

It would be fun to debate whether or not Jonathan Toews – who has won literally every gold medal the sport of hockey has handed out – should become the Jets captain, but not when five-time draft dodger Trump broke his election promise of ending America’s involvement in wars around the world and when he’s so unhinged from reality that he honestly believes he should receive a Nobel Peace Prize for bombing Iran.

It is hard to celebrate Hamilton, Ont.’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s NBA heroics — a Canadian who was the regular season NBA MVP, the playoff MVP and led his team to the championship – when Trump, the biggest religious conman and fake Christian ever to occupy the White House, had the audacity to say “thank you God” for the American bombing raids on Iran.

It would be great to celebrate Canadian swimmer Summer McIntosh’s three new world records in the pool but not when you consider that Trump lied to his own people and the rest of the world when he said he would take two weeks to decide if the USA would join Israel’s war against Iran, only to start bombing Iran mere hours later.

It seems timely to discuss whether the role of taxes is preventing Canadian teams from winning the Stanley Cup, but not when the threat of nuclear war is closer to happening than any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that had the world on the brink of nuclear conflict. Back then the U.S. had a sane president surrounded by knowledgeable generals and experts. Now the U.S. Department of Defense is run by a Fox News TV weekend host.

The Bombers are off to a great start and it’s already fun to anticipate them playing in this year’s Grey Cup in Manitoba, but isn’t the philosophical question about why it’s okay for the U.S. and Israel to have nuclear weapons, but not Iran, roughly a million times more important?

No one alive today saw Babe Ruth be a hitter and a pitcher, so we are beyond lucky to see Japan’s Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers – literally a once-in-a-lifetime phenom who excels at hitting and pitching – but knowing that even a small-scale regional nuclear war and the resulting “nuclear winter” climate disaster could potentially end life on this planet seems to be a much more important topic.

A reasonable argument can be made that sport as a distraction from real life is more important now than ever.

A much stronger argument is that we all need to bone up on issues of war and peace, life and death. The survival of humanity demands it.