CBC Does Unthinkable, Gives Away Hockey Night in Canada Theme

The theme to Hockey Night in Canada is like their 2nd national anthem, it’s been played on the CBC for over 40 years on Thursday and Saturday night hockey games. CBC were unable to pay the composer of the song any good money to renew their contract to play it, and lost it for good. Even worse, their rivals, CTV, just bought it 2 days ago:

CTV Inc. has acquired the rights to The Hockey Theme in perpetuity, the network announced Monday.

The agreement was reached with Copyright Music & Visuals, which was unable to renew a deal with CBC Sports.

CBC Sports executive director Scott Moore said he was disappointed but not surprised the song was shopped elsewhere.

“The two sides were so far apart and there was so much bad blood that we knew a deal would be difficult,” he said. “The reality is it takes two sides to do a deal and we tried everything we could to do a deal.

“We offered arbitration, mediation — we offered to meet their price. On Friday, when it came right down to it, we never got a response from them on our latest offer and find out, in the meantime, they appeared to be negotiating with CTV.”

Moore said CBC had negotiated for 14 months but to no avail, and that the agency was asking for $2.5 million to $3 million for use in perpetuity.

“If they got that from CTV, we would never have been able to get there,” Moore told CBC Newsworld. “It is not a responsible price for us.

What’s interesting about this story, is that CBC is a government channel essentially…couldn’t they have pitched in some money as well? It’s a sad day in Canada, and HNIC won’t be the same anymore.

This by the way, also comes after the announcement of Bob Cole being demoted to a lower team, another legend of HNIC.

I’d have the tune for ya, but uh….the CBC took it down from YouTube.

BREAKING NEWS: Scolari New Chelsea Manager

Just shocking news that came at around 1:08 PM PST, Portugal manager Big Phil Scolari has accepted the position of Chelsea manager, effective after Euro 2008 ends. Scolari planned to leave the national side even before the Chelsea job was even in question, but this announcement comes just hours after Portugal beat the Czech Republic 3-1, effectively sealing a quarterfinals position.

This is quite an interesting announcement considering the time of it, but there should be a press release an hour later, ESPN commentator Adrian Healey just announced it. There will be more to come, so Phil Scolari replaces Avram Grant as Chelsea manager.

My Predictions Are Good

The Lakers have made it a series in a tense 87-81 game 3 victory over the Celtics in the NBA Finals. Kobe had 36, Sasha Vujacic had 20, and I’ve concluded that Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol are worthless in this series.

Game 2 on Sunday was a near classic, it was a 24 points lead for the Celtics and yet they almost threw it away, but held on for the 108-102 victory.

Now about my nearly dead-on predictions so far….