Vancouver
Small-Town Sign
a special t
This is an excerpt from the paper...
The word came down from the mountain in March: the Americans now own the Vancouver Canucks. Oh, they own a lot more than the Canucks - they own controlling interest in the Northwest Entertainment Group (NEG) that owns the Canucks plus a basketball team, a programming network and a few other bits of the Canadian sports/entertainment media - but it boils down to the same thing: Vancouver is a world-class city now. Everything inside its heart is "international." This is not a rap on the American, John E. McCaw, who has just purchased an additional 30 percent of NEG to gain a controlling interest in the corporation. McCaw lives just across the border from Vancouver, in Seattle, and he has a long-standing interest in the Canadian sister-city. In fact, one doesn't mourn too long for the lost "Canadian" owner in NEG and the Canucks, Arthur Griffiths. When Griffiths made the deal that allowed McCaw to rescue debt-heavy NEG with an infusion of $110-million (U.S.), it was from his resort home in Sun Valley, Idaho. Idaho, if one remembers geography correctly, is somewhat south of the border, n'est-ce pas? So, realistically speaking, there will probably be more attention paid to Vancouver by the new owner, rather than less. This sale, in fact, is the direct result of a lot of attention being paid to Vancouver these days, now that it has emerged as a world-class metropolis - no longer the small-town backwater of Canada's forgotten west coast. The American - er, Canadian
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of building up local support for a new arena, rallying the legions of hockey fans around the idea, floating certain initiatives through the legislative chambers and, finally, building a less-than-perfect, '60s-style arena where the back rows were distant from the action and women had to stand in long lines at the inadequate bathroom facilities. It was all pretty inadequate if you thought about it, basically only good for giving the locals the feeling that they now had a real "place" for their pro hockey team to strut its stuff.
There is something odd about small-town thinking. It tends to get caught up in illogical fantasies about "community" and "belonging." The small-town boosters who gave Vancouver the Pacific Coliseum seemed to wish upon the home team their own sense of peace with the place they lived in. Never mind the fact that professional hockey players are on the road more than half the season, or that they rarely stay more than a few seasons at a time with any one club. The Vancouver Canucks, and the Pacific Coliseum, became the focus of British Columbians' hockey-pride, a mighty powerful sense of community in Canada.
What they failed to realize is that, as Vancouver continued to grow - in both size and sophist
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Pacific Coliseum, Hockey Canadian, Idaho Idaho, Buy Will-Buy, Vancouver Sun, Motors Yes, Arthur Griffiths, Entertainment NEG, McCaw American, Vancouver Canucks, world-class city, pacific coliseum, vancouver sun, urban environment, arthur griffiths, professional hockey, vancouver canucks, vancouver pacific coliseum, canucks plus, small-town thinking, percent neg, attention paid vancouver, arthur griffiths sister,
Approximate Word count = 1446
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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