The US Supreme Court is leading a Christian conservative revolution

Justice Amy Coney Barrett had been a member of the Supreme Court for less than a month when she cast the key vote in one of the most consequential religion cases of the past century.

© Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images Anti-abortion activists pray outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on October 2, 2021.

LONG READ

Ian Millhiser 40 mins ago

Months earlier, when the seat she would fill was still held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court had handed down a series of 5-4 decisions establishing that churches and other houses of worship must comply with state occupancy limits and other rules imposed upon them to slow the spread of Covid-19.

As Chief Justice John Roberts, the only Republican appointee to join these decisions, explained in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020), “our Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States.” And these officials’ decisions “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.”

But this sort of judicial humility no longer enjoyed majority support on the Court once Barrett’s confirmation gave GOP justices a 6-3 supermajority. Twenty-nine days after Barrett became Justice Barrett, she united with her fellow Trump appointees and two other hardline conservative justices in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020), a decision striking down the very sort of occupancy limits that the Court permitted in South Bay. The upshot of this decision is that the public’s interest in controlling a deadly disease must give way to the wishes of certain religious litigants.

Just as significantly, Roman Catholic Diocese revolutionized the Court’s approach to lawsuits where a plaintiff who objects to a state law on religious grounds seeks an exemption from that law.

Before Roman Catholic Diocese, religious objectors typically had to follow a “neutral law of general applicability” — meaning that these objectors must obey the same laws that everyone else must follow. Roman Catholic Diocese technically did not abolish this rule, but it redefined what constitutes a “neutral law of general applicability” so narrowly that nearly any religious conservative with a clever lawyer can expect to prevail in a lawsuit.

That decision is part of a much bigger pattern. Since the Court’s Republican majority became a supermajority, the Court has treated religion cases as its highest priority.

It’s made historic changes to the law governing religion even before it moved on to other major priorities for the conservative movement, such as restricting abortion or expanding gun rights. The Court has also taken on new religion-related cases at a breakneck pace. In the eight years of the Obama presidency, the Court decided just seven religious liberty cases, or fewer than one per year. By contrast, by the second anniversary of Barrett’s confirmation as a justice, the Court most likely will have decided at least seven — and arguably as many as 10 — religious liberty cases with Barrett on the Court.

In fairness, many factors contribute to this uptick in religion cases being head by the Court, and at least some of these factors emerged while Barrett was still an obscure law professor. The Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), for example, opened the door to new kinds of lawsuits that would have failed before that decision was handed down. And lawyers for Christian conservative litigants have no doubt responded to Hobby Lobby by filing more — and more aggressive — lawsuits.

This piece did not attempt to quantify the number of times the Court has been asked to decide religious liberty cases, only the number of times it decided to take the case.

But the bottom line is that the federal judiciary is fast transforming into a forum to hear the grievances of religious conservatives. And the Supreme Court is rapidly changing the rules of the game to benefit those conservatives.
The Court’s new interest in religion cases, by the numbers

As mentioned above, the Supreme Court heard fewer than one religious liberty case every year during the eight years of the Obama presidency.

In deriving this number, I had to make some judgment calls regarding what counts as a “religious liberty” case. For the purposes of this article, I’m defining that term as any Supreme Court decision that is binding on lower courts, and that interprets the First Amendment’s free exercise or establishment clause. I also include decisions interpreting two federal statutes — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act — both of which limit the government’s ability to enforce its policies against people who object to them on religious grounds.

I focused on these two constitutional provisions and these two federal laws because they deal directly with the obligations the government owes to people of faith and its ability to involve itself in matters of religion.

My definition of a “religious liberty” case excludes some Supreme Court cases involving religious institutions that applied general laws or constitutional provisions. Shortly after Obama became president, for example, the Court denied a religious group’s request to erect a monument in a public park. Yet, while this case involved a religious organization, the specific legal issue involved the First Amendment’s free speech clause, not any religion-specific clause. So I did not classify that case as a religious liberty case.

In any event, using this metric, I identified seven religious liberty cases decided during Obama’s presidency,¹ the most consequential of which was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

Interestingly, the Court did not decide significantly more religious liberty cases in the three years that Donald Trump was president prior to the pandemic, just four in total.² The Court then did decide a rush of pandemic-related religious liberty cases in 2020, including South Bay and Roman Catholic Diocese.
There’s no doubt that the Court’s new majority is eager break things and move quickly

But things really took off once Justice Barrett was confirmed in the week before the 2020 election. As noted above, the Court handed down Roman Catholic Diocese, a hugely consequential case that reimagined the Court’s approach to the Free Exercise Clause, less than a month after Barrett took office. Just a few months later, the Court handed down Tandon v. Newsom (2021), which clarified that all lower courts are required to follow the new rule laid out in Roman Catholic Diocese.

© Alex Wong/Getty Images Then-President Donald Trump watches as US Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett is sworn in by fellow Associate Justice Clarence Thomas as Barrett’s husband, Jesse Barrett, holds a Bible on the South Lawn of the White House on October 26, 2020.

Notably, both Roman Catholic Diocese and Tandon were decided on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency decisions and other expedited matters that the Court typically decided in brief orders that offered little analysis. In the Trump years, however, the Court started frequently using the shadow docket to hand down decisions that upended existing law.

On the merits docket, the ordinary mix of cases that receive full briefing and oral argument, the Court decided two religious liberty cases during Barrett’s first term on the Court, Tanzin v. Tanvir (2020) and Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) — though Barrett was recused in Tanzin and the Court announced it would hear Fulton before Barrett joined the Court. Three other religious liberty cases (Ramirez v. Collier, Carson v. Makin, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District) are still awaiting a decision on the Court’s merits docket.

Meanwhile, three other shadow docket cases arguably belong on the list of important religious liberty cases decided since Barrett joined the Court, although these cases produced no majority opinion and thus did not announce a legal rule that lower courts must follow. In Does v. Mills (2021) and Dr. A v. Hochul (2021), the Court rejected claims by health care workers who sought a religious exemption from a Covid vaccination mandate. And, in Dunn v. Smith (2021), the Court appeared to back away from a gratuitously cruel decision involving the religious liberties of death row inmates that it handed down in 2019.

So, to summarize, by the time the Court’s current term wraps up in June, the Court will likely hand down decisions in three merits docket cases — Ramirez, Carson, and Kennedy, although it is possible that Kennedy will not be scheduled for argument until next fall. Add in the two merits docket decisions from last term and the landmark shadow docket decisions in Roman Catholic Diocese and Tandon, and that’s seven religious liberty decisions the Court is likely to hand down before Barrett celebrates her second anniversary as a justice.

Meanwhile, the Court only handed down seven religious liberty cases during all eight years of the Obama presidency.

So what do all of these religion cases actually say?

As the Does and Dr. A cases indicate, the Court’s 6-3 Republican majority still hands occasional defeats to conservative religious parties. It also sometimes hands them very small victories. Fulton, for example, could have overruled a seminal precedent from 1990, and given religious conservatives a sweeping right to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Instead, the Fulton opinion was very narrow and is unlikely to have much impact beyond that particular case.

But, for the most part, the Court’s most recent religion cases have been extraordinarily favorable to the Christian right, and to conservative religious causes generally. Many of the Court’s most recent decisions build on earlier cases, such as Hobby Lobby, which started to move its religious jurisprudence to the right even before Trump’s justices arrived. But the pace of this rightward march accelerated significantly once Trump made his third appointment to the Court.

Broadly speaking, three themes emerge from these cases.
Exceptions for conservative religious objectors

First, the Court nearly always sides with religious conservatives who seek an exemption from the law, even when granting such an exemption is likely to injure others.

The Hobby Lobby decision, which held that many employers with religious objections to birth control could defy a federal regulation requiring them to include contraceptive care in their employees’ health plans, was an important turning point in the Court’s approach to religious objectors. Prior to Hobby Lobby, religious exemptions were not granted if they would undermine the rights of third parties. As the Court suggested in United States v. Lee (1982), an exemption that “operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees” should not be granted. (Indeed, Lee held that exemptions typically should not be granted at all in the business context.)

Initially, the new rule announced in Hobby Lobby, which permits religious objectors to diminish the rights of others, only applied to rights established by federal law. Under the federal RFRA statute, religious objectors are entitled to some exemptions from federal laws that they would not be entitled to if their state enacted an identical law. As mentioned above, religious objectors must comply with state laws so long as they are “neutral” and have “general applicability” — meaning that they apply with equal force to religious and secular actors.

That brings us to Roman Catholic Diocese and Tandon, which redefined what qualifies as a neutral law of general applicability so narrowly that hardly any laws will qualify. (A more detailed explanation of this redefinition can be found here and here.)

Indeed, Roman Catholic Diocese and Tandon permitted religious objectors to defy state public health rules intended to slow the spread of a deadly disease. If the Court is willing to place the narrow interests of religious conservatives ahead of society’s broader interest in protecting human life, it seems likely that the Court will be very generous in doling out exemptions to such conservatives in the future.
Fewer rights for disfavored groups

While the Court has been highly solicitous toward conservative Christian groups, it’s been less sympathetic to religious liberty claims brought by groups that are not part of the Republican Party’s core supporters.

The most glaring example of this double standard is Trump v. Hawaii (2018), in which the Court’s Republican appointees upheld then-President Trump’s policy banning most people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. The Court did so, moreover, despite the fact that Trump repeatedly bragged about his plans to implement a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

© Win McNamee/Getty Images Protesters demonstrate against then-President Trump’s Muslim travel ban as protesters gather outside the US Supreme Court following a court-issued immigration ruling on June 26, 2018. The 5-4 ruling upheld Trump’s policy imposing limits on travel from several primarily Muslim nations.

The Trump administration claimed that its travel plan was justified by national security concerns, and the Court held that it typically should defer to the president on such matters. But that does not change the fact that singling out Muslims for inferior treatment solely because they are Muslim violates the First Amendment. And, in any event, it’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court would have shown similar deference if Trump had attempted a shutdown of Roman Catholics entering the United States.

Similarly, in Dunn v. Ray (2019), the Court’s Republican appointees ruled against a Muslim death row inmate who sought to have his imam present at his execution, even though the state permitted Christian inmates to have a spiritual adviser present. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “the clearest command of the Establishment Clause ... is that one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.”

In fairness, the Court does not always reject religious liberty claims brought by Muslims, even if those claims prevail less often than in similar cases brought by conservative Christians. In Holt v. Hobbs (2015), for example, the Court sided with an incarcerated Muslim man who wished to grow a short beard as an act of religious devotion.

After Dunn triggered a bipartisan backlash, moreover, the Court appeared to back away for a while. Nevertheless, during November’s oral argument in another prison-religion case, this one brought by a Christian inmate who wishes to have a pastor lay hands on him during his execution, several justices appeared less concerned with whether ruling against this inmate would violate the Constitution — and more concerned with whether permitting such suits would create too much work for the justices themselves.

Thus, while the Court typically sides with conservative Christians in religious liberty cases, people of different faiths (or even Christians pursuing causes that aren’t aligned with political conservatism) may be less likely to earn the Court’s favor.
The wall of separation between church and state is in deep trouble

Several of the justices are openly hostile to the very idea that the Constitution imposes limits on the government’s ability to advance one faith over others. At a recent oral argument, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch derisively referred to the “so-called separation of . . . church and state.”

Indeed, it appears likely that the Court may even require the government to subsidize religion, at least in certain circumstances.

At December’s oral arguments in Carson v. Makin, for example, the Court considered a Maine program that provides tuition vouchers to some students, which they can use to pay for education at a secular private school when there’s no public school nearby. Though the state says it wishes to remain “neutral and silent” on matters of religion and not allow its vouchers to go to private religious schools, many of the justices appeared to view this kind of neutrality as unlawful. “Discriminating against all religions,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested, is itself a form of anti-religious discrimination that violates his conception of the Constitution.

For many decades, the Court held the opposite view. As the Court held in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”

But Everson’s rule is now dead. And the Court appears likely to require secular taxpayers to pay for religious education, at least under some circumstances.
Why is the Court hearing so many religion cases?

There are several possible explanations for why the Court is hearing so many more religion cases than it used to, and only some of these explanations stem from the Court’s new 6-3 Republican majority.

The most significant non-political explanation for the uptick in cases is the pandemic, which triggered a raft of public health orders that religious groups sought exemptions from in the Supreme Court. Though a less ideological Court would not have used one of these cases to revolutionize its approach to the free exercise clause, as it did in Roman Catholic Diocese, the Court likely would have weighed in on many of these cases even if it had a Democratic majority.

Similarly, some explanations for the uptick in cases predate the confirmation of Justice Barrett. The Hobby Lobby decision, for example, sent a loud signal that the Court would give serious consideration to religious liberty claims that once would have been turned away as meritless. That decision undoubtedly inspired lawyers for conservative religious litigants to file lawsuits that they otherwise would not have brought in the first place.

The Court also started frequently using the shadow docket to hand down highly consequential decisions well before Barrett joined the Court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the Court was using shadow docket cases to grant “extraordinary” favors to Trump as recently as 2019.

But there’s no doubt that the Court’s new majority is eager to break things and move quickly. Ordinarily, for example, if the Court were going to fundamentally rethink its approach to an important provision of the Constitution, it would insist upon full briefing, conduct an oral argument, and spend months deliberating over any proposed changes. Instead, Roman Catholic Diocese was handed down less than a month after the Court had the votes it needed to rewrite its approach to the free exercise clause.

There are also worrisome signs that the Court’s new majority cares much less than its predecessors about stare decisis, the doctrine that courts should typically follow past precedents. Just look at how the Court has treated Roe v. Wade if you want a particularly glaring example of the new majority’s approach to precedents it does not like.

Roman Catholic Diocese was handed down just six months after the Court’s contrary ruling in South Bay. And there’s no plausible argument that the cases reached different outcomes because of material distinctions between the two cases. The only real difference between the two cases was that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sat on the Court in May 2020, and Amy Coney Barrett held Ginsburg’s seat by November. That was enough reason to convince this Court to abandon decades of precedent establishing that religious institutions typically have to follow the same laws as everyone else.

The Court’s current majority, in other words, is itching for a fight over religion. And it holds little regard for established law. That means that a whole lot is likely to change, and very quickly.

¹ The seven Obama-era religious liberty cases that I identified are Salazar v. Buono (2010), Christian Legal Society v. Martinez (2010), Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC (2012), Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014), Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), Holt v. Hobbs (2015), and Zubik v. Burwell (2016).

² The four religious liberty cases from Trump’s pre-pandemic presidency are Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), Trump v. Hawaii (2018), and American Legion v. American Humanist Association (2019).

YouTube fishing star who reels in sea monsters: "I want to have a sustainable fishery"

CBS News 

Josh Jorgensen is obsessed with trying to reel in sea monsters — and more viewers. He's become the world's most popular fishing star on social media — his YouTube videos passed a billion views last year.

© CBS News 0129-cbssatmo-sharkhunter-glor-883581-640x360.jpg

It's been quite a journey for a kid who grew up north of the border, in Windsor, Ontario.

"I've always been absolutely in love with fishing. In 2003, my parents got a condo in Florida and we started coming down here on vacation. I saw a guy catch a shark from the beach and I was like, 'I have to start doing that,'" Jorgensen told CBS News' Jeff Glor.

Jorgensen said he would catch sharks on the beach and then bring pictures of his catch back home to Canada, but no one believed that he caught them on the beach.

"They said, "Oh, you caught it on a boat and brought it to shore. There's no sharks at the beach." So I started filming and posted on YouTube. I didn't know what I was doing," he said.

The videos took off, and in 2008 Jorgenson created BlacktipH. Fueled by advertising dollars from YouTube, he's been on fishing adventures around the world. He's currently based in Jupiter, Florida.

"There's no way we would have ever been able to capture the audience we did without living in Florida. Florida's amazing," Jorgenson said.

On one trip, Jorgenson was pulled out of the boat by a catch. "I was trying to do it all by myself, and that wasn't smart," he said.

For Jorgensen, the filming is just as enjoyable as the fishing. But these days, it is even more challenging. Part of the problem: a numbed audience.

"What worked two, three years ago doesn't work now," he said. "It would always be like the fish would be a major part of the story but we realized that we kind of caught everything, so from a business perspective we need to make it more about the adventure and not so much about catching this one fish."

Adventure and adrenaline may still pay the bills, but they are not BlacktipH's only missions. Jorgenson said protection and preservation are also a critical part of the operation.

"We just really need to focus on our water quality and we need to focus on sustainable fishing regulations, you know? We need to reduce limits, create more slot sizes," Jorgenson said.

He said people shouldn't necessarily catch less, but keep less.

"Do you really need to keep 60 Mahi a day? No. It's ridiculous. You know, it takes hours to filet them and what do you do with 500 pounds of Mahi meat?" said Jorgenson.

"I want my kids to be able to enjoy what I've enjoyed, you know? I want to have a sustainable fishery," he said. "It's really important to respect the fish that you're catching, especially when you're catching a large fish. Large fish are normally breeders, so you want to take good care of them. You want to make sure that they're healthy when you release them. You want to make sure that you don't fight them too long."

He started his journey 15 years ago and said the ocean looks very different now.

"There were so much more fish back then. And that's nothing. Can you imagine what it was like 60 years ago, 100 years ago? If I could have a time machine I would go back and go fishing," Jorgenson said.

The story of Anne Heggtveit, who won Canada's first-ever Olympic alpine ski gold

Kevin Mitchell

Anne Hamilton has a dog to walk, specially-made shoes that let her move around pain-free, and a rowing machine in the garage

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© Provided by National Post Canadian skier Ann Heggtveit takes a corner on a ski run in the Laurentians in this 1954 photo.

“I’m trying to stay fit,” she says with a laugh, “while paying for sins of the past.”

Those sins were committed on a pair of skis, and involved the things she put her body through on various mountain slopes as a young go-getter. In the last 10 years, the 83-year-old woman has had a knee replaced, and ankle-fusion surgery stemming from a decades-old spiral fracture in her leg.

She lives in North Carolina now, far from the Ottawa home of her youth. Some acquaintances know about her 1960 Olympic slalom gold medal, and her status as the first Canadian to win an Olympic event on skis.

Some have no idea.

“It’s not something I really talk about,” Hamilton says. “It’s just another lifetime.”

She was Anne Heggtveit then, and a real natural. Her father, Halvor Heggtveit, was a Canadian cross-country ski champion. Anne’s prowess on the boards got her a mention in the Ottawa Citizen at age two. At six, the “Ottawa mite” was filmed on the slopes by a Canadian army film unit and landed a full feature in the same paper, along with a photo.

And so it went, accomplishments growing, until she’s 21 years old, 115 pounds, perched on two slim boards, winning an Olympic gold medal at Squaw Valley — “digging, swishing and swinging as she went,” wrote the Canadian Press.

“I’m no ski expert.” entertainer Bing Crosby said while watching from up close, “but there was a beautiful run by that Canadian gal, just wonderful.”

Walter Cronkite interviewed her; Ed Sullivan introduced her to America, live and in person, on his show.

She also won the Olympic combined, but the International Olympic Committee did not then give out gold medals for that. If they did, she’d have two.

“This is the greatest thing to happen to Canada in any Olympics,” team manager Andy Tommy unabashedly told reporters after that breakthrough performance.
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And then she retired, because there was nothing left to do in the sport, and national-team skiing in 1960 was not like national-team skiing in 2022.

(Photo: Bill Lingard Newton collection, Ottawa City Archives)

“I remember being asked afterwards, how did it feel?” Hamilton says now. “That’s a very difficult question. I trained, in my case, from age two until I was 21. And all of a sudden, what you were raised to do, you achieved. It’s gone. And you’ve got this void you’ve got to deal with, and to figure out who you are. I don’t care if you’re Simone Biles or who you are, you’ve got to — at some point — deal with that.

“We didn’t have the kind of team support they have now. A lot of the fund raising was done at a local level. My ski club, my ski zone. Everybody was scrounging for money; there was no Alpine Canada or anything like that. The minute the Olympics was over, that was the end of our ski team for that year. We were funded to go to the Olympics, and then we go home.”

So Heggtveit, who had also competed at the 1956 Olympics, stepped away from elite skiing at the age of 21, after which she won the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s top athlete for 1960.

She met and married Ross Hamilton, and raised a family. Decades later, she got the itch to return to school, and got her bachelor of science in accounting at 54 years old. She worked in that field for several years, then got into botany and photography. She made and sold flower arrangements; shot weddings; sold cards with her photographic work on them.

She filled the void; chased and found her passions. She has the gold medal safely stashed away, and laughs when asked if she ever just stands and looks at the thing.

“You know, you can’t keep those around the house, though I do have a nice picture of it on the wall, a really good reproduction,” she says. “If I really feel like looking at something, I can look at that.

“The only time I really think about my old life and career,” she added, “is when the Olympics roll around, and I get calls like yours.”© Montreal Star Anne Heggtveit in 1960, surrounded by young fans with ski poles.

But her memory is keen, and she’s full of stories. The night before racing the slalom at Squaw Valley, skiers had a chance to study the hard, fast Papoose Peak courses up close. She declined, because she knew she would then race them in her mind all night long, costing her precious sleep.

The next morning, she climbed the hill and studied the first course, memorized the gates quickly, then did the same for the second course when it was time to run that.

After an excellent first run, she went for broke on the second.

“I decided I was going to crash or stand up,” she told reporters later, and won gold because she did the second and not the first.

Hamilton is a big believer in the mental side of the game. Taped beside her bed back then was a clipping on the power of positive thinking, and even today, when she sits in front of the TV and views the Olympics, she watches with a gold-medalist’s eye.

“You look at the top 20 or 25 women, they’re almost technically the same,” she says. “Really, the edge is all mental. It’s whoever can handle that, the mental aspect of it, at the right time. That’s the whole secret to it.”

Hamilton was a slalom specialist, and also skied the giant slalom and downhill. But Slalom was her focus, and she saw it as the path to an Olympic medal. And that’s how it played out.

“A few of the home-town press who can remain unnamed — I don’t even know if they’re alive at this point — neglected to go to watch the race, because I’d had two 12th-place (finishes) in my two previous events,” she says with a laugh, referring to her showings in the giant slalom and downhill. “They admitted it, and they admitted where they were. Those were the days.”

Hamilton says she’ll watch the 2022 Winter Olympics with great interest — she loves the Summer Games, too — and will “keep hoping for some maple leaves up there on the podium.”

She had her knee replaced 10 years ago and hasn’t skied since, so there’s no chance Canada’s first-ever Olympic slopes winner will try to replicate whatever exploits she sees on the Chinese mountainside.

“You get to the point where to ski the way I like to ski, I’m not in shape to do that, so I’d be stupid to do it,” she says, laughing. “You have to think logically. But it’s fun to talk about it.”

kemitchell@postmedia.com

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Hanna Bunton on the realities of being a women’s hockey star

“WHEN THAT HAPPENS, WOMEN’S HOCKEY IS GOING TO EXPLODE”

By Kristina Rutherford

© Provided by Sportsnet

PWHPA star and 150-pound dog owner Hanna Bunton on the state of the game and her hopes for its future

LONG READ

Hanna Bunton has played professional hockey in China, where she put up nearly a point per game and earned a living wage. She has won a world championship gold medal for Canada, threading a pass to a teammate for a tap-in game-winner in overtime against the Americans. She has graced the cover of Elle Canada along with Brigette Lacquette and Sarah Nurse, fellow members of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association. In short, Bunton has had quite the life in hockey — and she’s only 26.

At the top of the women’s game for much of her career, Bunton is currently playing for the PWHPA’s Calgary chapter, while also working as Hockey Canada’s coordinator of hockey development for its U-18 programs. She coaches on the side too. The Belleville, Ont.-born forward took time for a lengthy chat with Sportsnet on a variety of topics, from heavier ones like the state of women’s professional hockey in North America and the need to address racism in the game, to lighter stuff, like her love of the sport, fashion and her 150-pound dog, a mastiff mix named Raider.


SPORTSNET:

What’s Raider up to?

HANNA BUNTON: He’s currently laying on my bed and he’s not supposed to be on my bed. It’s one of the rules, but he looks so comfortable and I know he’ll be quiet while I’m doing this interview if I just let him sleep on the bed. He’s allowed right now, but as soon as this is done he’s getting pushed off the bed [laughs].

He must take up the whole bed.Basically. He is a huge boy, and he is the most fun to have. He gets so much attention and I just love having such a big dog — honestly, like a horse — in my apartment in Calgary.

You’ve lived there a couple of years now. What made you decide to move?When the CWHL [Canadian Women’s Hockey League] folded [in 2019], I was unsure where I wanted to be. I decided I wanted something new, to try a place I’d never lived before. One of my really good friends, [PWHPA forward] Rebecca Leslie, was in Calgary. We ended up living together when I first moved here. I love the decision I made. It’s so fun being close to the mountains, I’ve gotten really into skiing and snowboarding since I’ve been out here.

When are you on the ice next?We’re typically practicing Wednesday nights, later at night, and Sunday nights.

What does later at night mean?

Like 8:45 [laughs] until about 10 or 10:15.

And then you all work the next morning

.Yes. One of my best friends here, Kaitlin Willoughby, she’s a full-time nurse. She starts at 7 a.m. and she’s at practice on Sunday nights till 10:15. It’s pretty impressive what some people do.

I don’t want to dwell on the negative, but I think people who don’t already know should know about the realities here for a lot of the best female players in the world.For sure.

When’s your next game?

We have an exhibition on Friday — it’ll be only our second game of the year. And then our next showcase is March 4 to 6. [Editor’s note: The next PWHPA showcase is in Ottawa in late February, but Calgary isn’t among the four teams featured that weekend.]

How many times a week are you on the ice?

I would say, on average, two. Potentially. Maybe once.

© Provided by Sportsnet

What needs to change about the state of the pro women’s game?

Obviously, if you want the best product on the ice with women’s hockey, the opportunities and the resources need to be there. You’re not going to get the best product when you’re on the ice once or twice a week, you’re not playing games, you’re working, you’re coaching. You can’t be your best at everything you’re doing when you’re spread thin.

We’ve seen so many players in the NHL who hit their peak at 26, 27, and unfortunately that’s just not the case with women’s hockey, because by the time you’re 26, 27 — right around my age — you’re only on the ice maybe once a week, or you’ve already stopped playing because the opportunities aren’t there. I think when those opportunities are there, women’s hockey is going to change drastically. I would love for there to be a league where you can get paid a liveable wage — where you’re able to live day to day comfortably, and you’re able to train every single day. When that happens, women’s hockey is going to explode.

Do you see that happening while you’re still playing?

I hope so. I’ve always said that I will play until someone tells me, “You can’t anymore.” [Laughs.] I will do my best. At the end of the day, I’m well aware of everything hockey has brought to me and I want those opportunities for the next generation. And I hope that, if it’s not in the next couple years, at the very least, in the future the little girls that I coach have those opportunities.

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I feel badly asking you some of these questions, because you and other professional female players hear them all the time. Is it tiring to repeat these same messages about things that need to change and never seem to?

Yeah, I think so. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something to change. [Laughs.] Maybe it’s a little bit tiring but if we don’t keep having these conversations, we’re probably going to go backwards. And I think having these conversations maybe inspires other people to have these conversations and it reaches different people than it’s reached in the past. We want to be having these conversations or we’re not going to see the change.

Well said. Growing up in Belleville, how’d you get interested in the game?

I think I started playing when I was about four or five. The Belleville Bulls were the OHL team that were there at the time and we had season tickets, and I would go with my dad and my grandfather. It was a pretty special excursion, every Wednesday and Saturday were their home games and it was something I always looked forward to. I had a little Bulls bag I would bring. I had a stuffed bull and a jersey. I used to even take stats at the game. So I don’t know, maybe I was more of a nerd watching it, but it was such a fun experience.


Did you aspire to be a Bull?

Yeah, I was always thinking, I want to play and I want to be as good as these guys are. I remember looking up to them, thinking they were the coolest people in the world.


You also played basketball and ran track competitively. Why did you choose hockey ultimately?

When I got older, I saw that hockey could probably take me somewhere.

Where did you think it could take you?

There was a team called the East Coast Selects and they would scout and find players in Ontario. I ended up going to Europe in both Grade 7 and 8 with them for a summer travel experience. We went to three different countries each year and there were girls from all over Ontario and a couple from the U.S. That felt like the first time that I had been noticed from somewhere outside of Belleville and I thought, Oh, this is pretty cool, hockey could take me somewhere.

There was a girl named Jackie Jarrell, who’s from Belleville as well. She’s about 10 years older than me and she went to Mercyhurst and played Division 1 hockey there. So I saw her and thought, Oh wow, I can get a scholarship somewhere.

My last year of midget, I was offered to play in the junior league with Whitby and I decided I was going to stay back and play a year in Belleville. [Editor’s note: With the Bearcats that season, Bunton put up 94 points in 51 games]. I was in Grade 10 and I think it was probably one of the better decisions in my hockey career, because I ended up getting noticed by Team Canada that year. I was able to be a dominant player in Belleville as opposed to going to Whitby and maybe struggling to find myself.

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What was that first experience like with the national team?

I made a series against the U.S. in the summer, my first Team Canada U-18 camp, and then unfortunately I was released for the world [championship] roster. That was a devastating time in my hockey career. But I ended up playing in Whitby [the next season], and we were pretty dominant in the PWHL that year. … I went on to play for Team Canada [in 2013], and we won gold at the U-18 world championships — that was really fun. We had a great team and we were so close, and I went into that tournament knowing that I wanted to be one of the top players and make a difference.

And you did, in overtime. What do you remember about that play?

It’s probably one of the craziest games I’ve ever been a part of. We scored to tie it with 18 seconds left in the game, and then scored in the first two minutes of overtime to win gold. It was my first shift of overtime, and I was out with Karly Heffernan. I cut behind the net, got rid of my defender and I walked along the goal line and saw that she was open in front of the net. I passed it to her and she had kind of a tap-in goal. I remember that moment was so surreal. I think I saw it before it even happened.

The IIHF cancelled that tournament this year and last year because of COVID, but went ahead with the men’s [until they had to cancel the most recent edition due to COVID outbreaks]. What are your thoughts on that?

It was definitely disappointing to see. I have a different lens on it. I coordinate the U-18 program [for Hockey Canada], so just being able to now work for the program that gave me so much is pretty special. When I think back to my friendships and the experiences I’ve had and the development it helped within my own career, I just can’t imagine those girls not having that same experience. It’s happened a couple years in a row now. I hope the IIHF finds a way to make that tournament happen. I think not only do the girls deserve it, but it’s a crucial step in development for these girls to get to the next level in their hockey careers.


Is there a player you want to highlight that’s part of that U-18 program that you think has a bright future?

There’s a player named Avi Adams. She’s going to Cornell University, so maybe I’m a little biased [that’s Bunton’s alma mater]. She’s quite a player and she ended up making that world roster and I was excited to see what she could do at that level.

What happened with your own national team aspirations by the end of your college career?

In college, I played on the U-22 team, which is now the development team, with Team Canada. I had gone to a couple of senior camps and that was definitely my aspiration. But unfortunately my senior year at Cornell, around Christmastime, I wasn’t selected for a tournament with the development team and I had previously been on the team for three years. It was pretty disappointing and they kind of just said my career within Hockey Canada at that point was taking a stop. It was obviously really hard for me. I was about to graduate and thought maybe there would be some opportunities with the senior team, but at the same time I think it took a weight off my shoulders in my senior year and I was able just to play for the love of it. I think that was when I got the best out of my hockey career at Cornell.

Did you wonder whether college was the pinnacle for you?

I think a little bit. Obviously a lot of really talented players end up hanging their skates up even before their career’s at its peak. I knew I was not ready to be done playing hockey, but I knew a career had to take a step forward and the hockey had to take, maybe, a step backwards, which was something that was going to be really sad to me. But what happened with the [CWHL expansion to China] was the perfect timing, just when I was graduating. I feel like I was pretty lucky. Going into China, I felt like I was at the top of where I had been in hockey as well.

How do you describe that experience of playing in China [Bunton played there for two seasons, until the CWHL folded in 2019], helping to grow the game there and also helping develop China’s national team players ahead of the these Beijing Olympics?

It was honestly an experience that’s hard to describe. To be able to be immersed in a culture that otherwise I don’t know if I would have gotten the opportunity to be involved in was quite special. And there’s just so many funny stories you wouldn’t even believe happened. You’re obviously trying to be a professional sport in an area that hasn’t had that sport before. There were so many stories about how they thought ice was ready and there were huge holes in it, and we go in there and we have to tell them: “We can’t play in those conditions.” We’d have people come in and walk through our locker room without thinking twice about it. It was such a funny, unique experience but it was really special. To have all the Canadian teams come over to China, I had a lot of friends on other teams and got to kind of share the experience with them. I had a scooter over there and I’d take them for scooter rides.

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Was that the most money you’ve made playing hockey?

Yeah, for sure [laughs].

Star players were paid six figures. 

Did you feel the future of the sport was headed in that direction?

A little bit. I think I was realistic that probably coming back to Canada, that’s not going to be the case. We did a lot of work in the community and with [Chinese-born teammates] to have that salary, but I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t extremely nice to be playing hockey, making a living wage and just getting to train full-time. That’s when I felt I was at the very best in my hockey career, because I was able to train every day, full-time. Then you come back to Canada and you have to work full-time, you’re coaching on the side, you’re practicing maybe twice a week.

That’s your current situation.

Yes.

In your spare time, I hear you’re also very into fashion. Who do you look up to most in the fashion world?

Fashion in the last maybe two or three years has been something I really enjoy. I’d say my biggest fashion icon would probably be Hailey Bieber. I love how simple and elegant her style is, and I love how she does a lot of oversized looks. That’s something I’ve always loved doing.

Who’s the best-dressed in the women’s game? 

Maybe… you?

[Laughs.] I think I would get some heat if I said I was the most stylish. There’s a lot of people. One thing about style that’s fun is that it’s honestly how you see it. How something makes you feel may not be the same as the way it makes someone else feel — that’s the cool thing about it. Someone like Marie-Philip Poulin has great style. I love that she always wears hats to games. That’s super fun.

You have so few games, you could really nail it with your outfits ahead of every one.

It’s actually true. [Laughs.]

Do you know what you’ll be wearing in March to your team’s next showcase event?

I love a good matching set, a suit or something like that, and I slick my hair back in a bun. That’s my go-to look. It’s funny, I had some new outfits for the games that were in Toronto [in December], but I ended up not being able to play in those showcase games, so I have those outfits stored. It was a tough decision, but I ended up not playing because of everything going on with the pandemic at that time, and we were about to be leaving for Europe for our U-18 program, and that was happening within a week of that showcase. I was the lead of that team, so I thought it was in my best interest that I was healthy before going to the world championships for work.

When was the last game you played?

Nova Scotia would’ve been the last one. [Last] November. It’s been so long.

It has. And it’s also been a long time since you posted a vlog. Your last one was in September, and you “committed” back then to two a month. It’s been crickets ever since.

[Laughs.] Yeah, you’re holding me accountable, I like that. I’ll get back at it. It’ll be my new year’s resolution. I had a little ski trip this weekend. We stayed in Banff, and I actually vlogged it, so it’ll probably be going up within the week.


Is that an important part of being a pro hockey player, being visible in that way?

There’s obviously two sides to it. It’s something I really enjoy doing. But I also think as hockey players in general, not just female hockey players, it’s one sport where I feel like maybe we don’t show our personality as much as other sports. I think that’s something that really helps engagement with fans, when they feel like they know who they’re watching.

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Recently you released a statement on your social media about Jacob Panetta, shortly after he was suspended from his ECHL team. [Panetta allegedly made a racist gesture toward Jordan Subban during a game.] Why was that important to you?

It’s obviously a heavy conversation. I just felt it was necessary to release something because I feel like as white people and as white athletes, a lot of the times we rely on our BIPOC community to speak out on these issues and I just felt like it was time. It wasn’t just their job to condemn the racism that was in hockey. Whether it was intentional or not, you have to realize what your gestures could make someone else feel. And you have to be aware of what you’re doing and who you’re doing it to. I think obviously it was disappointing to see. I felt a really strong need to speak out as a white hockey player and not just let the conversation fall on Sarah Nurse, on P.K. Subban, on players like that. When we’re the ones who’ve created the problem, we also need to be the ones to stand up and start the conversation on fixing it.


That was really well-put. Thank you. 

You’re close with a lot of members of Team Canada. How much are you looking forward to watching your friends compete at the Olympics?

I’m so excited. I’ve been around them so much this year, them being centralized in Calgary, and there are so many players I’m really close with. I know they’re so prepared. Since their world championships [in 2021] I can only imagine they’ve gotten so much stronger, being together every single day since then. I think with all the challenges they’ve had this year with the pandemic and cancellations, I’m so excited to see them get over there and compete, and I know that they’re probably the most prepared they’ve ever been. It’s going to be so fun to watch.

What will it be like watching Mélodie [Daoust] compete over there?

 [Bunton and Daoust, a forward for Canada, are dating].I’m so excited to watch her. I’ve known Mélodie for a long time. We actually played in Germany together in a Nation’s Cup when we were on the development team, so we’ve been good friends for a long time. I’ve always been a huge supporter and fan of hers. Obviously getting to watch her compete, being her partner and that side of it is something that’s different for me, but it’s so exciting to watch someone that you love and care about get to accomplish their goals. I’ve always been so impressed with the player that she is and the friend that she is, and she’s always been amazing, but to see it from a different side and be able to cheer her on is going to be so fun and exciting. I’m so proud of how hard she works and I know she’s been through a lot this year, being in Calgary and being away from Mathéo [her son], and this is kind of the end goal. It’ll be really nice to watch her accomplish this for a third time.


How will you cope with the nerves?

I’m honestly a pretty calm person. I think I’ll be pretty relaxed and I feel like in those games I’ve always had my best friends playing. Emily Clark [a forward for Canada] has been my best friend for over 10 years, so I’ve always been really close to the players. I do get really nervous but I feel like I almost try to be a calming presence for them. But it’s honestly harder to be a fan watching than it was even playing those high-stakes games as player.


Let’s hear your gold medal game-winning goal prediction.

You know what, I think I would be a really poor betting person if I did not say Poulin.

Solid bet. Thank you very much for this conversation, for addressing so many topics. Is your dog still asleep on your bed?

Oh my gosh, Raider is now on his back on the bed. He looks like the king of the bed. As soon as I hang up, he is onto the couch and off the bed. [Laughs.]

A couple minutes later, Bunton texted this photo of Raider on the bed, but said she’d given him the boot:

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Photo Credits

Ted Belton; Courtesy Hanna Bunton; Heather Pollock/PWHPA; Courtesy Hanna Bunton; Heather Pollock/PWHPA; Courtesy Hanna Bunton.

ALBERTA WRESTLING
Oral History: How Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart became the Excellence of Execution

LONG READ

Kevin Michie 

SPORTSNET

 19 hrs ago


The best there is, the best there was and the best there ever will be. It’s not a mantra, it’s the truth.

Throughout his professional wrestling career, Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart lived by those words. It was taken as fact in a world of fiction, and understood as non-fiction when collecting facts as to why he’s considered by many the greatest pro wrestler of all-time.

It’s with this understanding that it should come as no surprise that Bret became the first professional wrestler to be honoured on the Canadian Walk of Fame last month.

It’s easy to consider Bret Hart as one of the greatest ever when you add up all the five-star matches, the pool of career accolades and the testimonials among fans and wrestlers. But how did Bret reach this pedestal of greatness? What qualities did Bret possess that made him stand above the rest in a sports entertainment industry full of giants?

Sportsnet sat down with Bret and several members within the professional wrestling business to break down the characteristics that made ‘The Hitman’ such a legendary figure.

His Foundation

There is perhaps no more well-known family in pro wrestling. The Hart family’s legacy was forged in Western Canada thanks to the success of Stampede Wrestling, a regional wrestling promotion established long before Bret began paving his own way to superstardom. Once in WWE, his legacy was cemented thanks to several noteworthy matches and storylines throughout the 1990s. Much of that legacy surrounds Bret’s family, and his father Stu Hart.

Bret Hart: I was the son of Stu Hart, and my dad was Canadian amateur champion. Being the son of a wrestling promoter and a guy that was certainly a legend in the wrestling business, the wrestling profession, as a legitimate tough guy, at wrestling. I had to live up to my dad’s reputation and I remember thinking, ‘I need to try and be the star for my dad. I’m going to be the star he needs me to be.’

Natalya Neidhart (WWE Superstar; Hart family member; Calgary, AB native): You think about what my grandfather passed on to Bret, and Bret carries that on today, and I look up to Bret so much that for me, and my own career in WWE, especially as a woman, I try to think about those qualities: dedication, durability and passion. Bret is the person that carries that torch today but it all came from my grandfather, Stu Hart.

TJ Wilson (former WWE Superstar; Hart family member; Calgary, AB native): Bret really (hit) that stride in those early ‘90s. I think he exploded so much that everybody wanted to learn his backstory, and that’s where all the Hart family stuff came in. It’s like seeing a Marvel movie and then going back and seeing the backstory of the next movie that comes out.

Jimmy Korderas (former WWE referee of 20-plus years; Toronto, ON native): Stu was all about respect and that showed with all his children. And it filtered down, you see it with (Natalya), you see it with TJ. In Stu’s mind, respect for the business and those you work with was first and foremost and that was very apparent with Bret, because that’s the way he treated everybody. He treated everybody with respect.

Dave Meltzer (Wrestling Observer Newsletter; San Jose, CA native): It’s funny because he was actually a dual citizen (Bret’s mother Helen was American), but everyone knew he grew up in Calgary and was the first Canadian to win the WWE title. I think being the first, and also calling attention worldwide to the heritage of Stampede Wrestling which was unknown outside of Canada, was part of it.

Bret: When I first went to WWE, they wanted me to say I was from America. And I remember going, ‘I’m Bret Hart from Calgary.’ That’s where I’m from, that’s where I want to be from. I stuck to my guns and made them. I stayed ‘Bret Hart from Calgary’ with my dad’s history which eventually got worked into my storylines about The Dungeon and growing up in the Hart family.

The Dungeon was a training ground for prospective wrestlers, situated in the basement of the Hart family home in Calgary. The Dungeon received its name thanks to the small and dank conditions, in both appearance and scent, but also due to the harsh nature of the training. Stu would bring interested grapplers downstairs to test their aptitude for the profession and commitment to the craft. It wasn’t unusual to hear screams and cries for help as Stu locked a trainee in a submission hold. Each member of the Hart family — the British Bulldog, Dynamite Kid, Jim Neidhart, Brian Pillman, Superstar Billy Graham and many more — trained under Stu in The Dungeon.

© Provided by Sportsnet The “Dungeon” in the three-storey Calgary home formerly owned by pro wrestling’s famous Hart family. The house went up for sale in 2010. (Jeff McIntosh/CP)

Eric Young (former WWE Superstar; Florence, ON native): All of these amazing talents have come through The Dungeon. The mystique of it, the prestige of saying, ‘Oh I trained there. I survived The Dungeon.’ Everybody wants to, especially if you’re Canadian, you want to hook your wagon to that because it’s just this unmatched success and unmatched lore and that’s because it was promoted and talked about in very high regards on WWE television.

Korderas: It’s a who’s who list of who was there (trained in The Dungeon). If there was a Mount Rushmore of families, the Hart family is definitely on that Mount Rushmore of wrestling families, for sure.

Bret: I just think all of this went into this character that I was at the beginning, a real wrestler, with a real history and a real reputation. I was always trying to live up to be the son of Stu Hart. I always had so much weight on my back to live up to my dad’s reputation to be tough and to be the best.

Natalya: My grandfather, his only refuge was wrestling. So for our family, we bleed it. It literally is in our hearts. We bleed pro wrestling. When you think about the greatest pro wrestling families of all-time, the Harts are No. 1. We really are so passionate about the industry.
His Canadian Roots

Bret changed the line of thinking that international wrestlers couldn’t be supported in the United States, as Hart proudly proclaimed his Canadian-ness, and fans around the world embraced it. In 1997, as Hart chastised the U.S. and American fans as part of a storyline on WWE television involving likes of Shawn Michaels and Steve Austin, he was still lauded across the globe, particularly in Canada.

Bret: I was always mindful that I needed to be a hero in Canada. I need fans in Canada to go, ‘Yeah that was cool what Bret Hart did, I still back him even though he cheated last night.’

Sami Zayn (WWE Superstar; Montreal, QC native): I would love to do a more modernized version, a bit more of an intellectual approach, a bit more of a factual approach to what Bret did in 1997 because I thought it was revolutionary. It’s never been done before and it’s never been done since. Global hero, despised in one country like that. It was revolutionary, we all remember it, we all rave about it to this day.

Meltzer: I think he played into Canadian frustration over Americans considering them like the little brother and acting superior. He played into things in society like health care and violent gun crimes that Canada was superior to the U.S. in that nobody in wrestling had ever done. The fact he did that in the U.S. and got booed for it made Canadians proud of him. Plus, WWE did a lot of TV out of Canada that summer and it was really a perfect storm. I think there was also the element that Canadians were more into wrestling itself and Americans were more into show biz wrestling, and Bret represented the former. The other key to Bret’s legacy is that he was the hero to Canadian kids wanting to be wrestlers in that era and a lot of Canadians turned out to be strong at the mechanics of wrestling since Bret was so good at that aspect.

Young: There are a lot of Canadian wrestlers. I don’t know what it is, there must be something in the water, (but) we seem to be good at it. Bret would be a huge part of any of our careers: idolizing him, learning from him, and watching how he did it.

Wilson: Being born in wrestling, it was a very different setting than a lot of other people. You have to experience it a little bit in Calgary, and the Hart house, to fully understand. I think that’s where that believability becomes so important to Bret, through his whole life.

His Execution

In a world of scripted sports entertainment, the only aspect of a Bret Hart wrestling match ever left to be determined was whether it would be awarded a five-star review. Hart wanted to be the best professional wrestler in the industry and did so via a commitment to believability inside the ring.

Bret: I’ve always taken myself pretty seriously. All my dreams came true when I won the world title (for the first time in 1992). It gave me credibility and it made my life. I had proven a point to myself. I didn’t get into wrestling to be a wrestler, I got into wrestling to be the best wrestler in the world. And suddenly I was the best wrestler in the world. That meant so much to me that I gave so much and tried so much harder to live up to that. I think that I did a good job as a hero for the rest of my career.

Natalya: He really had such a strong foundation, and that foundation, that work ethic, I think that Bret is one of the greatest engineers or architects in the history of pro wrestling. His precision, just how he believed in himself and how he believed in his work. His integrity, his quality of work, his work ethic… it’s just second to none.

Korderas: Going into the business we have the suspension of disbelief, and we want to believe that everything we see is real. The thing about Bret Hart was everything he did in the ring made you believe. He was so crisp with everything he did.

Young: I think he’s the best storyteller ever, in the history of pro wrestling. Every single thing he did was done with absolute perfection and that’s where the believability comes.

Natalya: (The Hart Family) cares so much about the quality of the sport, as much as anything, and I think that transcends. I think people feel that when they watch a Bret Hart match. That’s timeless. You think about some of the greatest pro wrestling matches in the history of the industry — whether it’s Bret Hart vs. Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 12, Bret Hart vs. Steve Austin at WrestleMania 13, Bret Hart vs. Owen Hart at WrestleMania 10 — some of the most iconic pro wrestling matches in the history of the industry involve Bret Hart.

Young: I think he’s the best storyteller ever, in the history of pro wrestling. His ability to use physicality and wrestling as a vessel to tell this amazing good vs. evil story. Whether it was him and Shawn (Michaels), these two top-of-the-mountain babyface wrestlers wrestling at WrestleMania 12, one of the most iconic matches of all-time, or whether he was wrestling a limited Diesel, who was a big guy but couldn’t do a whole lot. Those were two completely different opponents but he could have these amazing matches and tell these amazing stories.

Bret: It’s quite a complicated thing to have an Iron Man match with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 12. Very few wrestlers in the industry anywhere can do that. My matches were always very tight, always very believable, always very logical. All you have to do is see Bret Hart take one front turnbuckle and you start to question whether wrestling is real or not

.

© WWE Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania 12. (Photo courtesy WWE)
His Influence

As Bret’s star power grew, buoyed by his in-ring prowess, many aspiring pro wrestlers took notice. Wrestlers today who name Bret as an influence include top WWE stars such as Drew McIntyre, Roman Reigns, Edge and more. Hart’s commitment to his craft is now applied by wrestlers across the industry.

Bret: I was six-feet tall, I was 235 pounds, I didn’t have a super physique, I wasn’t a car salesman interview guy. I was all about the wrestling, though. Even when I was a nobody, people would say, ‘He’s a good wrestler.’ I was a wrestler’s wrestler. I understood the moves, the timing and how to tell a story. I became famous amongst my peers for being the best guy out there to tell a great story.

Natalya: Bret’s always been my inspiration, as far as going, ‘I want to be like Bret Hart where I can have a great match with anyone.’ Bret had a magic about him, it really was art. He could work with anybody and bring out the absolute best in them, like a magician. And then whenever that person would wrestle against someone else, it wouldn’t be the same magic, because the magic was Bret. Bret was so confident in his own abilities that he wasn’t afraid to help someone else look good, because he knew just how great he (was).

Wilson: He saw his matches like little movies and I think that’s why he took certain pacing to his matches. I think that’s where all that believability comes from because he’s seeing it as scenes and if this scene’s not believable, we can’t go to the next scene.

Young: As a person that’s been in wrestling and understands it at a very high level now, it was Bret’s self-belief. It’s not cockiness. He believed that he was Bret Hart. He believed that he was the Excellence of Execution. He believed that he was the best there is, the best there was, the best there ever will be. … Everything he did was perfect. He didn’t do something unless it made sense and unless he could do it well.

Ricochet (WWE Superstar; Philadelphia, PA native): He’s actually an inspiration of my style now. I’ve been going back and studying a little bit of Bret Hart, trying to take a little bit of his direct style of wanting to win the match. I’ve always been a fan of ‘The Hitman’.

Korderas: He is one of the best innovators, but he did it in a different manner. He knew that he had to make it as authentic as possible. For example, the Sharpshooter. It’s the little things that matter and Bret was a master at doing the little things. He was able to do everything well. People wish that they could be as smooth and as believable and as technical as Bret is in the ring.

Natalya: I think he’s the greatest of all-time. He didn’t have all the smoke and mirrors, he didn’t have all the crazy pyro, he didn’t have a crazy entrance. You were just getting the true character. And he believed in himself so much and he took being a champion so seriously, like it was a part of who he is.

Wilson: There’s a certain intangible that Bret had … he was able to make these timeless classics, and those matches hold up. They don’t just live in nostalgia from 20 years ago, 30 years ago. You pull them up and watch them today, they still hold water, they still hold the exact same amount of water today … (if not) more.

Korderas: Bret was great at making it look so good. It just felt like it was so easy, so natural to him.

Bret: I always was real because I believed I was real, in the sense that it was a character that was formed from the beginning that was based on reality. I always to try to explain to people that I was Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart when I was 6-years-old.

Turmoil ahead for Italy after bruising presidential vote

The re-election of President Sergio Mattarella in Italy has temporarily averted a political disaster and may ease the passing of key reforms, but Machiavellian plotting by political parties has just begun, analysts warn.

© Handout Italian President Sergio Mattarella has been re-elected but that is unlikely to halt the Machiavellian plotting among political parties

© Alberto PIZZOLI Italy's Prime Minister, Mario Draghi signalled his interest in the presidential job but was not picked

After six days of deadlock and amid fears the government could fall, the 80-year old -- who had made it clear he did not want to serve a second term -- agreed Saturday to put parliament out of its misery.


It was, he told the country, an exceptional situation: debt-laden Italy, one of the worst hit by the 2020 pandemic in Europe, was "still going through a serious health, economic and social emergency".

Mattarella needed at least 505 votes from an electoral college of 1,009 lawmakers and regional representatives in Saturday's vote. He won 759, earning another stint as president in spite of himself.

The only other serious contender for the job -- Prime Minister Mario Draghi -- was needed at the head of government to keep Rome on track with major reforms to the tax and justice systems and public sector.

Draghi, brought in by Mattarella last year, has been racing to ensure Italy qualifies for funds from the EU's post-pandemic recovery scheme, which amounts to almost 200 billion euros ($225 billion) for Rome.

- 'Near-impossible job' -

Many were concerned Italy would slip behind on the tight reform schedule should Draghi step down as prime minister, or that his elevation would spark snap elections in the eurozone's third largest economy.

Mattarella's election removes that immediate risk. But fractures within Italy's parties have deepened over the past week and are expected to worsen further as campaigning intensifies ahead of a 2023 general election.

"The question is whether the key ingredient of Draghi's government -- a broad, cross-partisan majority -- will still be there in a few days," Francesco Galietti of political consultancy Policy Sonar told AFP.

"If not, the situation will rapidly become untenable".

Wolfango Piccoli of the Teneo consultancy said rebuilding trust within the ruling coalition was "a near-impossible job", and a realignment was now likely "both within individual parties and alliances".

The biggest loser is Matteo Salvini, head of the anti-immigrant League, who had hoped to play kingmaker but instead failed to get his candidate elected and was forced to ally with the centre-left bloc.

That public embarrassment may spark a leadership contest, just as the right-wing bloc collapses.

- 'Machiavellian' -

Giorgia Meloni, head of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, who did not want Mattarella as president, accused Salvini of betrayal and said she was no-longer allied with him or centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi.

A leadership battle is also expected within the once anti-establishment Five Stars Movement (M5S), which may affect its entente with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).

Draghi will have to ensure the government can continue to function -- though Piccoli points out the PM's standing "has been affected too", after he signalled his interest in the presidential job but was not picked.

Galietti said he expected the political scheming now to be "as Machiavellian as it gets".

But Lorenzo Codogno, a former head economist at the Italian treasury, said the division between the weakened parties could have silver lining.

"There will be less veto power by parties, and this may facilitate Draghi’s job in finding a compromise among different positions on reforms," he said.

AFP

Welcome to the Year of the Tiger

Tom Murray 1 day ago

EDMONTON JOURNAL

Sonny Sung has many fond memories of celebrating the Lunar New Year while growing up in Taiwan.

© David Bloom Chef Sonny Sung demonstrates how to prepare duck with glutinous rice in preparation for Lunar New Year at Evario Kitchen and Grill.

“When you’re young, you’re always waiting for New Years,” explains Sung, currently the executive chef at Evario Kitchen and Bar. “First of all you’re wearing new clothes because your family buys you some, and secondly there are the red envelopes with money that you’re given by everyone in the family. It’s very enjoyable.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the 16-day celebration that Sung and more than two billion people scattered across the globe participate in every year. Commemorating the last day of the year according to the lunisolar calendar, Lunar New Year also marks the end of winter and will herald in the Year of the Tiger this Tuesday. The fun continues until the first full moon of the year, which is marked by a Lantern Festival. Traditions that have accumulated during its history, which stretches back more than 2,000 years, include ritual house cleaning, firecrackers, incense burning, ceremonies, offerings to ancestors and deities, the always impressive Lion Dance, and perhaps most importantly, the food.

Most dishes would be familiar to westerners: spring rolls, steamed fish, chicken, dumplings and sweet rice cakes are among the items found on any family’s table, as well as sticky rice, braised shiitake mushrooms, duck and the famous longevity, or long-life noodles. Also called Yi Mein noodles, it’s a simple dish often served at New Years and birthday celebrations, and is meant to symbolize longevity.

Edmonton-based graphic designer Alex Chan, who spent part of his childhood at his grandma’s village in Hong Kong, recalls many of the meals of his youth.

“For my mom, it was the only time that she made so many deep-fried dishes,” he laughs. “They weren’t things she made on a normal day, because they’re unhealthy and you waste a lot of oil making them. She still makes a few dishes for New Years, but not any of those.”

He’s a long way away from throwing firecrackers around the common area as a kid, but Chan still reaps the benefits of the red envelopes.

“It’s because I’m still a bachelor,” he chuckles. “I grew up in this very small village, which is a bit strange because 99 per cent of Hong Kong is urban. It meant I got a very traditional Chinese New Year. But growing up we would sometimes use the money we got from the red envelopes to gamble. Chinese New Year is the only time children would be allowed to do this, so we played a game with dice called Fish, Stream, Chicken. For a lot of kids, this was their introduction to gambling.”

yegarts@postmedia.com

   

‘Klondike’ Review: Harrowing Drama Braids Marital and Political Warfare on the Russian-Ukrainian Border

Guy Lodge 22 hrs ago

© Courtesy of Sundance Institute/Kedr Film

Personal and political turmoil face a serene camera in “Klondike,” a vision of the ongoing war in Donbass war that brooks no compromise in depicting the severe impact of the conflict on the region’s civilians — in particular, the innocent women to whom the film is dedicated. Ukrainian writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach largely assumes the viewpoint of a heavily pregnant farmstead owner as her life and home quite literally fall apart on July 17, 2014, the day a Malaysia Airlines passenger flight was shot down over Donbass, killing nearly 300 people. Irka (Oxana Cherkashyna) is determined to stand her ground even as her fellow villagers flee oncoming armed forces. In Er Gorbach’s potent film, shot in unbroken, unblinking takes that observe obscene violence and destruction with cold candor, Irka’s resistance to warfare is at once fierce and futile.

Winning the directing award in Sundance’s World Dramatic competition — ahead of a European premiere in Berlin’s Panorama strand — ought to boost “Klondike’s” profile with more adventurous arthouse distributors. Er Gorbach’s film remains a tough sell, however, with its relentlessly downbeat worldview only sporadically tempered by quietly mordant humor, stray instances of domestic tenderness and the considerable beauty of cinematographer Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi’s deep, desolate widescreen compositions. As Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border intensifies, meanwhile, “Klondike” has chilling topicality in its favor, even if the tensions it shows are all too longstanding.

The real-life plane crash isn’t the first shattering event that jolts “Klondike’s” fictional narrative into action. That comes in the film’s opening scene, as the modest farmhouse that Irka shares her her husband Tolik (Sergey Shadrin) falls prey to a mortar misfire — decimating one exterior wall, and leaving the interior a wreckage site of dust and debris. An alleged “mistake” on the part of local anti-Ukrainian separatists — one of whom is a none-too-apologetic friend of Tolik’s — the incident is, in Tolik’s view, the final straw that should prompt he and his wife to get out of dodge before their child is born. Irka, however, resents the idea of having to leave her home over men’s fighting, and obstinately enters survivalist mode: preserving vegetables, milking their one weary cow and attempting a cleanup of their ruined, now al-fresco living room.

Yet when the plane goes down not far from their farm — the crash site a smoking red flag on the horizon, approached in long shot by crawling emergency vehicles — even Irka’s doughtiness takes a knock. A large scrap of aircraft fuselage is flung into their farm, standing in stark fields like a surreal, skeletal monument to lost life; they’re further drawn into the tragedy when a Dutch couple turn up days later in search of their missing daughter, one of the plane’s passengers. Er Gorbach’s script condenses history somewhat by having contentious NewsCorp footage of anti-Ukrainian rebels ransacking the crash site — embedded in the film itself — emerge mere days rather than a year later, fueling ideological discord between Irka and Tolik.

Irka, like her volatile younger brother Yuryk (Oleg Scherbina), is loyally pro-Ukrainian, and while Yuryk condemns Tolik as separatist scum, the truth is he’s that not very politically impassioned at all. As Tolik attempts to play all sides for the sake of domestic contentment and protection in the community, his middle ground becomes untenable once aggressive soldiers invade their vulnerable home turf — with Irka due to give birth at any moment. Without undue contrivance or melodrama, El Gorbach overlaps escalating marital tension with the larger war closing in on the couple to claustrophobic life-or-death effect, building to a finale of staggering savagery. There’s enough vivid conflict at play here that the insertion of the real-life Malaysia Airlines horror perhaps isn’t strictly necessary as a contextual device — though its accompanying circus of mourners, gawkers and authoritarian ghouls contributes to the film’s spiraling end-of-days atmosphere.

That air of chaos, meanwhile, is kept in check by the stark formal rigor of El Gorbach’s filmmaking. Acting as her own editor, she’s sparing with her cuts, opting to reveal key information either through long, patient pans, or by letting human interactions play out in full, sometimes in the middle distance, as the camera plants itself and watches. The rolling panorama from Irka’s bombed-out living room — over multiple planes of emptying, pointlessly fought-over farmland, toward the smoldering atrocity on the horizon — becomes the film’s default view, picturesque and unspeakable in equal measure. Irka is sufficiently fascinated by it to suggest they rebuild the missing wall simply as a giant window, though it pains the viewer to imagine what will ultimately be left to look at, and who will be left to look.

'All That Breathes' Review: Sundance-Winning Doc Surveys Interspecies Life, Both Ailing and Flying, in Polluted Delhi

Murder trial over Bangladesh factory collapse resumes after five years

Bangladesh has resumed the murder trial over one of the world's most devastating factory disasters after five years mired in appeals and court procedure, prosecutors told AFP on Tuesday

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© MUNIR UZ ZAMAN Bangladeshis mourn relatives killed in the collapse of Dhaka's Rana Plaza, home to numerous textile factories

More than 1,130 workers died in 2013 when a nine-floor warren of textile factories in the capital Dhaka fell down.

The collapse of Rana Plaza -- where clothes for top fast fashion brands such as Zara, Primark and Benetton were produced -- highlighted unsafe conditions in the country's lucrative garment industry and triggered mass protests demanding action from global retailers.

A court in 2016 charged 41 people with murder for signing off on building standards and forcing employees to work despite cracks appearing in the complex the day before the disaster.

But the case was halted for more than five years while several defendants tried to get their charges vacated, and the country's high court suspended the indictments of two local officials accused of approving the shoddy building.

On Monday, a judge ordered the trial resumed for 36 of the original defendants -- three have since died -- while a prosecution request to vacate the two suspended indictments will be considered separately.

"We want to conclude the trial as quickly as possible. Already too much time has been wasted," chief public prosecutor Sheikh Hemayet Hossain told AFP.

"The building didn't have any (construction) plan. It would shake when machines were switched on. And the owner of the building, Sohel Rana, used hired muscle to force the workers to go to work on the day of the collapse."

Hossain said all of the accused except Rana have been free on bail.

Rana's father, who was a co-owner of the complex, is among the defendants who died before facing trial, fellow prosecutor Shamsur Rahman said.

- 'Of course we want justice' -

Bangladesh's economy has soared in recent years, largely on the back of its $35 billion garment trade, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the country's exports.

The industry is second in size only to China's, but fires and factory collapses are common due to lax building regulations and improperly kept volatile chemicals.

Its operators are also a powerful political lobby, and Rana's connections to the ruling Awami League party have been widely reported in local media.

He became a nationally reviled figure after the disaster, with survivors recounting how they were slapped and threatened into working on the day of the collapse.

Rescue workers struggled for weeks to retrieve the bodies from the ruins, but some of those in Rana Plaza that day are still unaccounted for.

"We haven't got justice for nine years," said former garment worker Rehana Akhter, 35, whose left leg was amputated after she was trapped in the complex.

"Of course we want justice. They should keep (Rana) alive so that he could look after the amputees like me and all other victims."

sa/gle/cwl/leg

AFP

The unsolved mystery of the SS City of Boston's disappearance

Randi Mann 

The SS City of Boston was an iron-hulled, single-screw passenger steamship. Its maiden voyage was on Feb. 8, 1865, from Liverpool to New York. Its final sail took place on or after Jan. 28, 1870. Of course, no one knows the exact date as she disappeared.

The City of Boston's final voyage was supposed to be from Nova Scotia to Liverpool. Onboard was Capt. Halcrow, plus 83 crew, 55 cabin passengers, and because it was the 1800s, an additional distinctly counted 52 steerage passengers.

© Provided by The Weather NetworkMemorial in St Pancras Parish Church London to victims of loss of SS City of Boston 1870. Courtesy of Cj1340/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0

It did not make it to its destination, and no one is completely sure what happened to the ship, but there are some conjectures.

A violent storm occurred on Jan. 30, which could explain the ship's fate. Others suggested that a collision with an iceberg could have caused it to sink.

People said they saw the ship off the coast of Ireland on Feb. 25, reporting that both cylinders in the engine appeared to be broken.

But on April 25, a piece of wood with the inscription "City of Boston is sinking. Feb. 11" washed up at Perranporth, Cornwall.

In November of the same year, a message in a bottle found at Crantock, Cornwall, described that the ship had collided with another vessel and was sinking.

© Provided by The Weather Network

Inman Line of Mail Steamers "City of Boston." Courtesy of Wikipedia

One theory even suggested that the ship was sunk on purpose by "Dynamite Fiend." This rumour started after an explosion at the German seaport of Bremerhaven killed 80 people. The dynamite was planted by someone who wanted the insurance money for the ship, but it blew up prematurely. It was later disproven that there were any relations between these two incidents.

The disappearance of the SS City of Boston remains a mystery, but to learn more about the ship, listen to today's episode of "This Day In Weather History."

This Day In Weather History is a daily podcast by Chris Mei from The Weather Network, featuring stories about people, communities and events and how weather impacted them.

Thumbnail image: The Missing Screw-Steamer City of Boston, by Edwin Weedon. Courtesy of Wikipedia