Woo hoo! On this date in history the Chicago Cubs beat the Detroit Tigers 2-0 to win the world series. On October 14, 1908.

No, no, I have nothing against the Tigers. True, they were once bitter rivals of the Toronto Blue Jays. But hey, I always figured the other city is full of kids desperate to see their team win too. Something to do with sportsmanship or some such virtue.

Nor am I especially a fan of Chicago the place or Chicago sports teams although, again, I have no great animus against them. I just want to see the game played well, both technically and in the proper spirit. Which it often isn’t these days regardless of the sport you have in mind. But I digress.

The point is, I’m cheering for the Cubs because their glorious victory in 1908, back-to-back with 1907 after losing the 1906 series at the end of a modern-era-record .763 winning percentage, was… um… their last World Series win. That’s right. They haven’t won a title in over a century. They haven’t even won the NL championship in 71 years. The last time they played in a World Series, losing to the Tigers incidentally, was the same year World War II ended.

I bring it up not to make myself feel better about being a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. Though their inability to win a Stanley Cup since 1967 does seem a mere blip by comparison now that I come to think of it. Rather, it’s because of a question I have asked myself periodically about the Leafs, namely, would they win if I were their coach?

Now you laugh. But seriously, they’re a big-market team loaded with talent, looking really good on paper a lot of years. How do you make that sort of team lose so consistently that they become a joke? (You know, that photo of a skeleton in a Leafs jersey with a pennant. Ha ha ha.) Does it take some special ability, knowledge and force of character, so that if someone lacking hockey talent, ability or leadership were “in charge,” so to speak, the players would just go out and win on their own? I truly wonder.

It’s a disquieting thought, especially to management. But imagine that I had been blessed with temporary immortality and the irrevocable managership (managerhood?) of the Cubs back in 1909. For a hundred and seven years I’d have sat here on the bench saying things like “Pitch him high and tight, low and away” and “Get the bullpen up” when the starter walked three straight guys and “Slide, slide” when it was obvious the runner should slide, and making 16 consecutive strange signals whose basic message to the runner on first was “Steal if you think you can, but don’t be a doofus”. And a bunch of elite athletes would have gone out there and done the stuff they do like catching line drives and bunting to advance runners and hammering three-run home runs. Year after year.

Surely in one of those years, with me sitting on the bench looking wise and not interfering with them, they would have won a title. At least an NL title if not a World Series. It’s like the theory that a monkey throwing darts at a stock page would outperform most highly paid mutual fund managers. If you don’t know already, or guess from what your own savings are doing, I’m afraid I have to tell you that it’s pretty well attested that random choices would be an improvement. And by the same token, a monkey throwing darts at coaching options for the Leafs, or the Cubs, would have done better than their actual managers and coaches have.

Now I’m not saying I have the sports acumen, judgement or temperament of a monkey throwing darts. Not even. But I suspect I could do a better job of coaching a team than a lot of people who actually do it simply by knowing I’m less fit than a simian equipped with sharp objects and hence not actually coaching much. Give the occasional pep talk, utter banal advice like “Play the man, not the puck” and “Cover the pass, let the goalie handle the shot” and “Get in there and give it all you got” and watch passionately motivated professional athletes do what they love and do best, work things out in the huddle or the locker room and, once every 40 years or so, do it better than any of the other teams.

Anyway, I’m open to job offers. Because the way things are going with both teams, they’re going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to people who consistently make those same athletes perform below .500, way below random, below anything fans can understand or stand.

If the Cubs win this year, and in fairness I should note they were 1st in the NL Central Division, had the best record in the NL and indeed in all of Major League Baseball in 2016, won the Division Series and may well go on to break one or even both their toxic streaks this year.

If so I’m still hoping the Leafs will call. I have my darts all packed.

“A man of my sort, who has traveled about the world in rough places, gets along perfectly well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the lower. He understands them and they understand him. I was at home with herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was sufficiently at my ease with people like Sir Walter and the men I had met the night before. I can’t explain why, but it is a fact. But what fellows like me don’t understand is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba.”

Narrator Richard Hannay in John Buchan The 39 Steps

My latest for The Rebel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGZIiQOur8g

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Rebel, October 13, 2016"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/October/161013Rebel.mp3[/podcast]

Some years ago while visiting Israel I tried to learn a bit of Hebrew. It didn’t really work very well. I picked up a few phrases like “More coffee” and “First, a bathroom” and “My friend will pay” and discovered that roughly half the letters in their consonant-heavy alphabet involve a guttural “ch” sound and that although Hebrew famously has no vowels, it does. But it’s amazing that all around me people were yammering on fluently in it, including immigrants who hadn’t spoken a sentence of it before making Aliyah or their escape.

I mention it not to underline my linguistic lack of virtuosity. Rather, it’s to stress how amazing it is that the first known Hebrew conversation in the modern world took place on October 13 of 1881. To be sure, Hebrew was spoken and sometimes even understood in synagogue rituals and I’m sure some pedants showed off by conversing in the ancient tongue of their people through the centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-136 AD and the dispersal of Israel. But everyday Hebrew lapsed gradually into silence by about 400 AD.

In this of course it is not alone. Who speaks Gothic today, or Phoenician? But Hebrew rose again, in one of those developments we take too readily for granted because we know it happened instead of noticing how weird it is. It revived, and became again the language of a people in exactly the same way that Cornish didn’t despite being a boutique revival project.

Could anyone reassemble Assyria today? Or any number of kingdoms once far larger and prouder than Israel? Yet the nation and the language were both restored by people who may indeed have qualified as “stiff-necked” but in a good way. Especially Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, né Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman, who was part of that first-ever ancient-modern Hebrew conversation and whose son Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda (who changed his name to Itamar Ben-Avi for reasons not relevant to his narrative) was the first native Hebrew speaker in a thousand years and a darn lonely kid because of it. He grew up to be an ardent Zionist and advocate for Esperanto whose total lack of success reminds us again what a miracle it is that Hebrew did revive.

The family had a terrible time getting other people to agree to speak only Hebrew, and were ostracized by the ultra-Orthodox for using it for non-sacred purposes. But they persevered and I can tell you that when I was in Israel, an enormously multilingual and cosmopolitan place for the most part, constantly welcoming immigrants speaking Spanish, Russian or Amharic and needing a lot of help to match that first halting, pointed 1881 chat, we did get into some corners so obscure that we found unilingual people… speaking only Hebrew.

Ben-Yehuda laughs last. Gutturally, I imagine. But long and loud and rightly so.

“A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians – men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except their own.”

Ernest Crosbie

Har dee har har. Exactly 800 years ago, on October 12 1216, Bad King John lost the crown jewels in the wash. Yuck yuck yuck.

Have I gone off my rocker? Very possibly. But the preceding paragraph is not evidence of it. This story, which every schoolchild once did know and giggle at back when they regularly taught anything interesting or useful in school, depends upon there being a river estuary in southeastern England called “the Wash”, where four rivers including the “Greater Ouse”, a very British name, flow into the North Sea.

As part of his campaign to undo Magna Carta and slay his enemies John had brought his army into Lincolnshire and crossed south into Norfolk before falling ill and heading north again. He rode back the long way round but sent his cumbersome baggage train by a more direct but risky route, only traversable at low tide, and the sea came whooshing in and engulfed it.

Now in fairness to John it’s not clear what exactly was lost; apparently it didn’t include the ancient crown supposedly belonging to Edward the Confessor that the wretched Oliver Cromwell later characteristically had melted down. And I suppose such a misfortune could have happened to anyone. He wasn’t personally leading the wagons when they got Washed away. But it did happen to John, and it was the sort of thing that happened to him, and if his enemies exaggerated the extent of the catastrophe, he certainly had made enough of them, and sufficient resentment and distrust among the populace, to make such exaggerations effective. And to give some credibility to the rumour that John had actually pawned some of his state treasures in Norfolk and faked their loss. It’s the sort of thing he would do even if in this case he did not, perhaps because he was too ill to scheme at that point; he died unlamented if not actually poisoned just a week later.

John was a brutal, cunning man. But he also had a lead touch, a gift for using his considerable talents to get himself into worse messes than most people could manage. And his combination of ruthlessness, recklessness, instability and unwillingness to heed prudent counsel that drove his subjects into the revolt that forced Magna Carta on him was on display in a minor way in his rushing about seeking revenge in deteriorating health and suffering this embarrassing setback.

He lost the crown jewels in the wash. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. What a looooooser.

“Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: ‘Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?’ It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.”

George Jonas in National Post May 7, 2015

In my latest National Post commentary, I give credit where credit is due.