Decisions and Experiments

In Sports by Brock Bourgase

In the final minutes of a 24-22 loss at home to the B.C. Lions, the Toronto Argonauts ran an inside draw run on a crucial second down. Gaining merely negligible yards and the team faced a desperate third-and-ten situation that the Argos could not convert. Creativity plays a role in sport but should be limited to the proper time and place. The best time to experiment is often earlier rather than later as the breaks of the game provide several second chances. Toronto gambled was a gamble against daunting odds and lost. Perhaps if video analysis had shown a hole …

The Blind Side

In Books by Brock Bourgase

Michael Lewis’ latest novel, The Blind Side, is part-sport, part-economics, part-psychology, and part-sociology. While writing an article about his high school baseball coach that was published as the novella Coach, he re-connected with teammate Sean Tuohy, who was adopting a 6-5, 350 pound offensive lineman who played left guard for the Briarcrest Christian School football team that Tuohy coached. That student-athlete, Michael Oher, became a living example of how sport and money have become intertwined while the rich and poor and black and white have grown apart. At the beginning of the book, Oher is a marginal student and physical …

Of Mice and Men and Method Acting

In Films by Brock Bourgase

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden retells the story of Cain and Abel, depicted by the Trask family as generations move from Connecticut to Salinas, California. East of Eden was also adapted to the screen, directed by Elia Kazan and featuring James Dean. Although Steinbeck and Kazan have achieved the peak of their professions – the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Academy Award for Best Direction, respectively – Kazan clearly outshines his literary counterpart in bringing the oft-repeated story to life.