Justin edges Jeter
Prior to his big-league debut on June 10, 2003, Justin Morneau gathered with Minnesota Twins teammate Corey Koskie and Colorado Rockies star Larry Walker for an all-Canadian photo behind home plate at the Metrodome.
Afterwards Walker sent an autographed bat over to the Twins clubhouse with a message for the young phenom: "To Justin, Make Canada Proud."
The hulking 25-year-old first baseman from New Westminster, B.C., did just that Tuesday when he won the American League Most Valuable Player award in a tight vote over New York Yankees superstar Derek Jeter.
"I never asked for that, he did that on his own," Morneau said of Walker's gesture that day. "I thought that was pretty cool for a guy that's been around that long to do that for me. It's something I'll never forget."
The feat links Morneau, raised among the generation of B.C. baseball players inspired by Walker, with the star he grew up idolizing as the only Canadians to win the award in the majors. Walker was the National League MVP in 1997.
"Justin's breakthrough, his ability to get the big-leagues fast and do as well as he did, will really open up the doors for a lot of other kids to emulate him," said Ari Mellios, Morneau's coach with the North Delta Blue Jays in the B.C. Premier League in 1998 and '99. "It changes a lot of people's perceptions and attitudes toward Canadian kids."
Walker, of course, was the first player to accomplish that with his emergence as a Montreal Expos star in the early 1990s. Ryan Dempster, Jason Bay, Jeff Francis and Adam Loewen, to name a few, credit Walker for making them believe they could make a career in baseball and Morneau's award should inspire a new group of kids.
But Walker's help for Morneau went well beyond serving as a hero. At the World Baseball Classic this past spring, the Maple Ridge, B.C., native mentored Morneau as a coach. And when Morneau struggled out of the gate in April, text messages to Walker helped keep him straight.
"I'd say I don't feel that good and he'd give me something simple to try and not make me think. That was the biggest thing for him, just go up there and just hit," said Morneau. "For him to even care about what I'm doing makes you feel pretty good."
Advice came from other places, too.
Teammate Torii Hunter pressed on him to not get so down on himself when he struggled. Manager Ron Gardenhire did the same, giving him a stern talking to in an early May meeting that helped pull him from and capitalize on his vast talents.
The message eventually got through, as after a slow start in April (.208, five homers, 15 RBIs) on the heels of a disappointing 2005 that left some questioning his future, he tore up the league.
Morneau finished batting .321 with 40 homers and 130 RBIs. He became the first Twins player to hit 30 or more home runs in a season since 1987 and his 130 RBIs are the second-best in team history to Harmon Killebrew's 140 in 1969, when he won the MVP award.
"You can say he lit a fire under me maybe," Morneau of the meeting with Gardenhire. "I just felt better in my swing and all of a sudden something just clicked, I got a little confidence going and after that just kind of took off. I don't know if it was from that meeting getting me more focused and tuned in on what I needed to do on the field or not, it definitely woke me up."
The reigning MVPs in the AL, NBA (Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash of Victoria) and NHL (San Jose Sharks centre Joe Thornton of London, Ont.) are now all Canadian.
Morneau picked up 15 of the 28 first-place votes and 320 points in balloting by the Baseball Writers' Association of America, to finish 14 points ahead of Jeter, who had 12 first-place votes.
Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz finished third with 193 points, followed by Frank Thomas, who recently left the Oakland Athletics for the Toronto Blue Jays, and Chicago White Sox outfielder Jermaine Dye.
Morneau slept little Monday night while awaiting word on the vote and spent a tense morning at his girlfriend's Minneapolis apartment when the phone call came.
"Last night even I was saying I don't expect to get it. I might have given myself maybe a 50-50 chance," Morneau said. "I didn't want to set myself up for disappointment if I didn't get it."
Morneau is the second member of his team to win a major award this season, joining AL Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana.
"I'm putting my money on Justin Morneau," Santana said after his win last week. "Hopefully, he'll have a chance for everything he did for our team."
Morneau is returning home this weekend and will serve as Marshall for the Santa Claus Parade in New Westminster. He's also changing his off-season routine and will spend the winter in Vancouver working out with Loewen, Aaron Guiel and Adam Stern.
"I have to go out and prove myself again," said Morneau. "There's going to be a lot more eyes on me now, teams are going to be paying a little more attention and I just have to build on this year and get better."
Morneau can also now look his boyhood hero in the eye from more level footing with the MVP award on his resume. Walker was among the first to call him and congratulate him.
"He said he thought he was more excited than I was. He said, 'Just wait, it's going to be crazy, just have fun with it,"' said Morneau. "To be put next to a guy, who in my opinion should be in the Hall of Fame, the greatest Canadian position player that's ever played, to be alongside him is a real honour."
Toronto's Triumph heading for Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame
Triumph, a Toronto-based hard-rock trio formed in 1975, will be inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame in March 2007.
Producer David Foster will be inducted into the Hall of Fame during the same ceremony, scheduled for Canadian Music Week.
Triumph, whose hits included Never Surrender and Just One Night, was known for its hard-rock power chords and intricate light shows.
The members are guitarist/singer Rik Emmett, drummer/singer Gil Moore and bassist/keyboardist Mike Levine.
They first recorded with the independent Attic label and then caught the eye of RCA, which re-released their second album, Rock & Roll Machine.
They continued to record throughout the 1980s with Progressions of Power (1980), Allied Forces (1981), Thunder Seven (1984), Stages (1985), The Sport of Kings (1986) and Surveillance (1987).
Emmett left for a solo career in 1988 and the group continued with a new guitarist, finally splitting up in 1993. Another album, Classics, was issued in 1989 after Emmett left.
Moore is the owner of Metalworks Studios, based in Mississauga, Ont., and continues in the production end of the music business.
Levine is pursuing internet-based business interests related to the entertainment field.
Triumph will be inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame on March 10 in Toronto during the Canadian Radio Music Awards.
200,000 'Casino Royale' Bootlegs Downloaded, Says Report
From Russia with love -- and perhaps a degree of malice as well -- came the first bootleg copies of Casino Royale, the latest James Bond flick.
According to Envisional, an online company that monitors Internet piracy, a poor-quality copy of the film, apparently captured with a camcorder in a Russian theater, first popped up on Internet file-sharing sites on Friday, the day the movie opened.
But sound and picture quality were said to be poor.
However, on Saturday a higher-quality copy, uploaded in Italy, also became available. By the end of the weekend, the two copies were being spread around, and by Sunday they had been downloaded some 200,000 times, Envisional claimed.
Meanwhile the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America announced Monday that they are launching a joint campaign called Holiday Blitz aimed at fighting movie and music piracy.
The campaign will include heightened security at movie theaters to prevent camcording and a crackdown on bootleg production. The trade organizations said Monday that during last year's Holiday Blitz some 1.3 million illegal CDs and DVDs were confiscated.
O.J. Simpson project may turn up on Web
NEW YORK - The O.J. Simpson project is dead, but the book and the TV interview could turn up in bootleg form in this age of YouTube and eBay, when scandalous information seldom stays secret for long.
News Corp., owner of Fox Broadcasting and publisher HarperCollins, called off Simpson's "confession" Monday after advertisers, booksellers and even Fox personality Bill O'Reilly branded the project sick and exploitive.
A two-part interview had been scheduled to air Nov. 27 and Nov. 29 on Fox, with the book, "If I Did It," to follow on Nov. 30.
HarperCollins spokeswoman Erin Crum said some copies had already been shipped to stores but would be recalled, and all copies would be destroyed. She would not say how long that would take, although industry insiders believe several days would be needed to destroy a print run that was likely in the hundreds of thousands.
But with the interview already taped, and truckloads of books either sitting in warehouses or headed back to the publisher, Simpson's supposedly hypothetical account of how he would have committed the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman appears all but certain to surface.
"A book becomes collectible when it's hard to find, and this will become very, very collectible, surely worth four figures," said Richard Davies, a spokesman for AbeBooks.com, an online seller that specializes in used and collectible books.
Steve Ross, senior vice president and publisher of the Crown Publishing Group, said tens of thousands of returned books are destroyed every day.
But it's entirely possible that the Simpson TV interview will get out in some form, said Jeff Jarvis, operator of the BuzzMachine Web log and a journalism professor at City University of New York.
"All life is on the record now," he said. "Anything you can do can get out there and get out there quickly."
The Simpson book will also almost certainly remain underground, with another publisher unlikely to take on "If I Did It."
Even Michael Viner, whose previous releases include a memoir by disgraced New York Times reporter Jayson Blair and a tell-all by four Hollywood call girls, said his Beverly Hills-based Phoenix Books was not interested.
"It's the public equivalent of doing a snuff film," said Viner, referring to films that claim to show a person being killed. "People can make money by doing snuff films, but no one wants to be associated with it."
The Simpson saga took another twist Tuesday when his former sister-in-law, Denise Brown, accused News Corp. of trying to buy her family's silence for millions of dollars.
A News Corp. spokesman confirmed that the company had conversations with representatives of the Brown and Goldman families over the past week and said that they were offered all profits from the book and TV show, but he denied it was hush money.
"There were no strings attached," News Corp. spokesman Andrew Butcher said.
Denise Brown told NBC's "Today" show that her family's response was: "Absolutely not."
"They wanted to offer us millions of dollars. Millions of dollars for, like, 'Oh, I'm sorry' money. But they were still going to air the show," Brown said. "We just thought, `Oh my god.' What they're trying to do is trying to keep us quiet, trying to make this like hush money, trying to go around the civil verdict, giving us this money to keep our mouths shut."
Pre-publication sales for "If I Did It," had been strong but not exceptional. It cracked the top 20 of Amazon.com last weekend, but by Monday afternoon, at the time its elimination was announced, the book had fallen to No. 51.
Clarkson, Rascal Flatts win big at AMAs
LOS ANGELES - The Black Eyed Peas, Kelly Clarkson, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rascal Flatts were double-winners Tuesday at the 2006 American Music Awards.
The Black Eyed Peas were named favorite group in the rap/hip hop and soul/rhythm & blues categories. Clarkson captured trophies for pop/rock female and adult contemporary artist, categories presented before the televised presentations began in the performance-filled show.
Red Hot Chili Peppers were named favorite alternative artist and favorite pop/rock group. Rascal Flatts won favorite country group and the T-Mobile Text-In award, which is chosen by fans.
Blige accepted the female soul/rhythm & blues artist award from surprise presenter Britney Spears.
The newly single Spears looked sleek in a knee-length cream-colored frock and long blond hair.
Oscar winner Jamie Foxx was named favorite male soul/rhythm & blues artist.
"I'm like a rookie in this music thing," he said. "This means a lot more than you think, man."
Foxx wore a white tuxedo and sat behind a grand piano to perform "Wish U Were Here" from his 2005 album, "Unpredictable."
Nickelback took home the trophy for pop/rock album. Dancehall singer Sean Paul was named favorite male artist in the category.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers accepted their awards via satellite from London, with bass player Flea beat-boxing as lead singer Anthony Kiedis thanked "the American people." The Black Eyed Peas also accepted their awards from abroad, thanking fans via satellite from Costa Rica.
Among country honors, favorite female artist went to Faith Hill and Tim McGraw's "Greatest Hits Volume 2" was favorite album. Country singer and American Idol Carrie Underwood was named favorite new breakthrough artist.
Eminem was favorite male rap/hip-hop artist. Shakira won favorite Latin artist and Kirk Franklin captured the award for contemporary inspirational music.
"I know that a lot of people that say that they're Christians — you know, we don't always represent, and we don't always live it and we do sometimes some very stupid things, and you know we're not doing a good job," said Franklin, wearing blue jeans with a black velvet tuxedo jacket. "I want to make sure that when you see my life that it's a life that I'm gonna be proud of."
Talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the three-hour ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium, televised live on ABC, with a skit that placed Spears' ex, Kevin Federline, into a wooden crate dumped into the ocean. Kimmel cracked that Federline was the world's first "no-hit wonder."
Beyonce began the show, belting out her single "Irreplaceable" while vamping around the stage in a sparkly sequined minidress. The Pussycat Dolls also chose sequins for their performance, while Nelly Furtado opted for a skin-tight white dress and stick-straight hair.
Gwen Stefani made a stylish return to the music scene, performing the single "Wind It Up" from her forthcoming album, "The Sweet Escape." The new mom, wearing a skimpy sequined shift and a shoulder-length platinum bob, yodeled and rapped convincingly throughout the tune.
Not to be outdone, rapper Jay-Z stepped out of retirement and back into the spotlight, accompanied by scantily clad dancers as he performed the single "Show Me What You Got" from his new record, "Kingdom Come."
Lionel Richie made a festive return to the American Music Awards. Introduced by his diminutive daughter, Nicole Richie, the former Commodore performed a medley that included his '80s party anthem, "All Night Long."
Barry Manilow performed a medley of favorites from his latest collection, "The Greatest Songs of the Sixties."
Some awards were announced off camera before the broadcast presentations.
The American Music Awards honor the best in pop/rock, country, soul/rhythm & blues, rap/hip hop, Latin, alternative, adult contemporary and contemporary inspirational music. Nominees were chosen based on record sales and winners were selected by a survey of about 20,000 listeners.
Hathaway eyes 'Get Smart' role
Anne Hathaway is in negotiations to take the female lead in the big screen version of "Get Smart."
Star Steve Carell has been attached to the Peter Segal-directed project for a long time and production is finally expected to begin in March.
According to Variety, Hathaway ("The Princess Diaries") is close to signing on to play Agent 99 opposite Carell's Maxwell Smart. The parts were played by Barbara Feldon and Don Adams in the original television series, which was created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry.
The latest incarnation of the "Get Smart" script was written by "Failure to Launch" scribes Tom Astle and Matt Ember.
After appearing last winter in the Oscar-winning drama "Brokeback Mountain," Hathaway had a surprise smash this summer with "The Devil Wears Prada."
Film director Robert Altman dies
LOS ANGELES - Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind "M-A-S-H," "Nashville" and "The Player" who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5 Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.
The director died Monday night, Joshua Astrachan, a producer at Altman's Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York City, told The Associated Press.
The cause of death wasn't disclosed. A news release was expected later in the day, Astrachan said.
A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001's "Gosford Park," he finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.
"No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have," Altman said while accepting the award. "I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film I didn't choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition."
Altman had one of the most distinctive styles among modern filmmakers. He often employed huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue and filmed scenes in long tracking shots that would flit from character to character.
Perpetually in and out of favor with audiences and critics, Altman worked ceaselessly since his anti-war black comedy "M-A-S-H" established his reputation in 1970, but he would go for years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a hit.
After a string of commercial duds including "The Gingerbread Man" in 1998, "Cookie's Fortune" in 1999 and "Dr. T & the Women" in 2000, Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain for 2001's "Gosford Park."
A combination murder-mystery and class-war satire set among snobbish socialites and their servants on an English estate in the 1930s, "Gosford Park" was Altman's biggest box-office success since "M-A-S-H."
Besides best-director, "Gosford Park" earned six other Oscar nominations, including best picture and best supporting actress for both Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith. It won the original-screenplay Oscar, and Altman took the best-director prize at the Golden Globes for "Gosford Park."
Altman's other best-director Oscar nominations came for "M-A-S-H," the country-music saga "Nashville" from 1975, the movie-business satire "The Player" from 1992 and the ensemble character study "Short Cuts" from 1993. He also earned a best-picture nomination as producer of "Nashville."
No director ever got more best-director nominations without winning a regular Oscar, though four other men — Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Clarence Brown and King Vidor — tied with Altman at five.
In May, Altman brought out "A Prairie Home Companion," with Garrison Keillor starring as the announcer of a folksy musical show — with the same name as Keillor's own long-running show — about to be shut down by new owners. Among those in the cast were Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones.
"This film is about death," Altman said at a May 3 news conference in St. Paul, Minn., also attended by Keillor and many of the movie's stars.
He often took on Hollywood genres with a revisionist's eye, de-romanticizing the Western hero in 1971's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and 1976's "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson," the film-noir gumshoe in 1973's "The Long Goodbye" and outlaw gangsters in "Thieves Like Us."
"M-A-S-H" was Altman's first big success after years of directing television, commercials, industrial films and generally unremarkable feature films. The film starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould was set during the Korean War but was Altman's thinly veiled attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
"That was my intention entirely. If you look at that film, there's no mention of what war it is," Altman said in an Associated Press interview in 2001, adding that the studio made him put a disclaimer at the beginning to identify the setting as Korea.
"Our mandate was bad taste. If anybody had a joke in the worst taste, it had a better chance of getting into the film, because nothing was in worse taste than that war itself," Altman said.
The film spawned the long-running TV sitcom starring Alan Alda, a show Altman would refer to with distaste as "that series." Unlike the social message of the film, the series was prompted by greed, Altman said.
"They made millions and millions of dollars by bringing an Asian war into Americans' homes every Sunday night," Altman said in 2001. "I thought that was the worst taste."
Altman never minced words about reproaching Hollywood. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such attacks.
"Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.
Altman was written off repeatedly by the Hollywood establishment, and his reputation for arrogance and hard drinking — a habit he eventually gave up — hindered his efforts to raise money for his idiosyncratic films.
While critical of studio executives, Altman held actors in the highest esteem. He joked that on "Gosford Park," he was there mainly to turn the lights on and off for the performers.
The respect was mutual. Top-name actors would clamor for even bit parts in his films. Altman generally worked on shoestring budgets, yet he continually landed marquee performers who signed on for a fraction of their normal salaries.
After the mid-1970s, the quality of Altman's films became increasingly erratic. His 1980 musical "Popeye," with Robin Williams, was trashed by critics, and Altman took some time off from film.
He directed the Broadway production of "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," following it with a movie adaptation in 1982. Altman went back and forth from TV to theatrical films over the next decade, but even when his films earned critical praise, such as 1990's "Vincent & Theo," they remained largely unseen.
"The Player" and "Short Cuts" re-established Altman's reputation and commercial viability. But other 1990s films — including his fashion-industry farce "Ready to Wear" and "Kansas City," his reverie on the 1930s jazz and gangster scene of his hometown — fell flat.
Born Feb. 20, 1925, Altman hung out in his teen years at the jazz clubs of Kansas City, Mo., where his father was an insurance salesman.
Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II and studied engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia before taking a job making industrial films in Kansas City. He moved into feature films with "The Delinquents" in 1957, then worked largely in television through the mid 1960s, directing episodes of such series as "Bonanza" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."
Altman and his wife, Kathryn, had two sons, Robert and Matthew, and he had a daughter, Christine, and two other sons, Michael and Stephen, from two previous marriages.
When he received his honorary Oscar in 2006, Altman revealed he had a heart transplant a decade earlier.
"I didn't make a big secret out of it, but I thought nobody would hire me again," he said after the ceremony. "You know, there's such a stigma about heart transplants, and there's a lot of us out there."
Beatles project a labour of Love
Famed Beatle producer's son had no idea where remixing Fab Four songs would take him, or whether anyone would approve of the result
You might expect the son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin to treat the Fab Four's master recordings with kid gloves.
But not Giles Martin, who worked with his 80-year-old father on experimental remixes of existing recordings made by the Liverpool foursome at Abbey Road for the 'new' Beatles record, LOVE, which hits stores today.
"It's funny. The Beatles didn't really mean much to me as a kid -- at all -- because I was born in the wrong era," said Martin, 37, while in Toronto recently for an invitation-only playback of the 26-track LOVE.
"I didn't really hear the White Album until I was 22. When you're a teenager you kind of rebel against your parents anyway. And my dad, at the time, wasn't against the Beatles, but wanted to move on from that. It's only now, it's only recently, for him -- and I think for the Beatles as well -- that they can look back on this era and say, 'That's when they were at their peak.' It's a remarkable seven years of imagination and collaboration and inspiration. It really was."
The genesis of LOVE was to provide the soundtrack for Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas show of the same name at The Mirage, which opened earlier this year.
Although some Beatles fans might consider it sacriligious to fiddle with Fab Four songs, Martin said his job was to "change things."
"They wanted to do something that was different, which is very Beatles in a way, so that's what I was employed to do," said Martin, whose early production credits include albums for Kulashaker, Monorail and Hayley Westenra. "I just thought I was going to get fired while I was doing it. I'm surprised it got as far as it did."
Martin said it was quite nerve-wracking when he first played a 25-minute demo of Beatles remixes for Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Yoko Ono.
"I probably knew Paul best, but I was most wary of Paul just playing things to him, 'cause he's a great musician -- and not that Ringo isn't, or Yoko or Olivia don't care.
"They heard the first demo we did, and they really liked it. And I don't think they really believed that it was ever going to fully reach its full course. But they loved the idea of it. And my risk involved was upsetting them. And upsetting my dad. So the nervous thing wasn't actually doing it. The nervous thing was letting it go. I thought I was going to be absolutely (criticized) for it. And I probably still will be."
Strangely enough, Martin was born in 1969, the same year The Beatles were breaking up, and he shares Lennon's birthday -- Oct. 9.
"(Lennon) turned around to my dad and said, 'Now you know what kind of a--hole he's going to turn out to be!'" Martin said with a smile. "I found it really interesting to talk to Yoko, actually. I didn't know Yoko very well before this project. I now know her quite well. And she's a fascinating woman, she really is. But you know she's very, very, very intelligent and she knows her stuff. And the same with Paul. You can't get anything by them."
In the end, Martin is most proud of the musicianship that LOVE evokes. Some songs are drastically remixed, with snippets of other Beatles tunes inserted in a collage effect, while others sound largely unchanged.
"You hear the complexity of what they're doing, linked at the same time, with the fact that they were the world's greatest pop band," Martin said. "And I don't like all the history side of it because, I suppose, of my dad being who he is. I find it a bit boring, I suppose, in a way. And what really interests me was the fact that they were a good band."