Richard Peddie has survived as the head of the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertaiment despite presiding over a losing team for the past five years for one reason: he makes MLSE a tonne of money. With the arrival of Brian Burke a year and a half ago he left (allegedly) the running of the hockey team to the truculent one while he returned his focus to all of the non-sports related activities that kept MLSE's earnings skyrocketing specifically Maple Leafs Square, the city's latest commercial/residential skyscraper complex. As you can probably tell from the official twiterati's tweeting, re-tweeting, and endless repeating a new segment of the complex is opening up this weekend.
Real Sports Apparel and Real Sports Bar and Grill will soon be opening their doors to any fan willing to pay a healthy premium for the address on his jersey or meal's receipt. As you can imagine, with most things done by MLSE, I have some problems with how they've done things.
The apparel store should be just MLSE gear. If someone wants to buy a Senators hat or a David Beckham LA Galaxy jersey then let them figure out how on their own. If you're worried about losing your grip on the city (and we know that you are) facilitating the devil's choice (ie cheering for anyone else) might not be the best idea. Not that the website doesn't do it's best to avoid showing any connection with the Maple Leafs at first. General Canadiana pictures and a Crosby jersey are all that greet visitors. The store's in Maple Leafs Square, I think people know owns it. And God forbid you turn up the volume on your computer. The music and flash only site are straight out of...whatever some computer geek would say.
But the real fun comes on the bar side of the website. The picture above highlights the most egregious sin. Mike Milbury could probably teach a course on why 'pansy' and its derivatives might not be the smartest adjective to use. Having lost a pretty close member of the MLSE family in Brendan Burke you'd think that someone doing the site editing might have given their word choice a second glance. I get Executive Chef Tony Glitz's (really, did they expect anything less?) idea of trying to sell to sports fans as though we were some species of sub-human troglodytes who cannot countenance anything beyond strict heterosexuality expressed through portion sizes but this isn't Philly (or Detroit for our St. Louis and Chicago friends). Normally, I'd chalk up this kind of mistake on MLSE's part to ignorance rather than malice but having read the employment section of the website (excerpted below) I might have to re-consider. Tony Glitz was really specific about some of the positions:
- Servers - Real Sports fans don't want dudes serving them food. Take note applicants
- Hosts - Yeah, this is really for hostesses
- Dishwashers - Uh, we can't say no Portuguese...but no Portuguese.
What else can we expect at Tony Glitz's monument to masculinity?