Strippers

Saturday night's hockey game* here in Christchurch had two cheerleading squads: one cheering on the Canadians, the other, the Americans. They were introduced as the Calendar Girls Cheerleading Squad.

For folks outside of New Zealand, Calendar Girls is a strip club. I'm not going to link there from here, but their site says the VIP rooms include a "full service" option; prostitution is legal in New Zealand.

So I thought it was remarkable both that a family-oriented event like a hockey game would have strippers as cheerleaders and that nobody would particularly mind. We were sitting a good distance from where the cheerleaders were, but they seemed more competent in cheerleading than I would have expected; Susan, who was watching the cheerleading more closely than I was (I was watching the hockey - seriously), was rather sure that one or two girls were far too young to be employed by Calendar Girls. She thought one of the Calendar Girls might have brought her daughter along. It all seemed really odd. I didn't see the girls well enough to gauge ages, but it didn't seem crazy to think that Calendar Girls might have diversified into other business lines with the loss of their downtown venue to the earthquake red zone.

Well, I was wrong on two counts. First, the girls' only affiliation with Calendar Girls was that they found out rather late in the game that they were sponsored by a strip club / brothel. And that then leads to the second: folks very rightly minded.

A row has broken out after a group of young cheerleaders, including one aged nine, was used to promote Christchurch strip club Calendar Girls.

The All Star Cheerleaders performed at an international ice hockey match on Saturday night at the CBS Canterbury Arena.

Coach Claire Stackhouse said the group did not expect to be associated with Calendar Girls.

She was not in town for the event but said she had been told the cheerleaders, mostly 15 and 16-year-old girls, were introduced as the Calendar Girls cheerleaders.

She said some parents were concerned.

The owner of Calendar Girls claims to have asked the cheerleading coach for an older group of cheerleaders and for that the cheerleaders be well warned of the sponsorship arrangement so that anyone objecting could pull out. The parents say they had no clue 'till the night of the event. I've no clue where blame lies, but I can well imagine that a whole lot of parents - and the cheerleaders - would rightly be more than a bit annoyed if the coach didn't tell them about the sponsorship arrangement.

I do like though that there would have been no controversy about the sponsorship had the group been older and informed.

*For those interested, a team of Canadian former NHLers and minor league players beat a similarly composed American team 7-3. The first period was dull: each team ran only two lines and were changing shifts every minute or less; the defencemen who should have run point would change shift when their team hit the offensive zone and the offensive line would change shift while the opponents then ran back to the defensive zone. Lots of back and forth, but only because nobody was playing very hard. Things really picked up in the third period: they actually kept the defencemen on point and so were able to start building plays.

Being in Christchurch in an arena filled with folks in NHL garb and surrounded by US and Canadian flags was surreal. One side of the arena was meant to be for Canadian supporters; the other side, for Americans. But there must have been rather more Canadian supporters as I didn't see any US flags over on the Canadian side where we sat but a fair number over on the US side.

Oh: @Asgardsfall seems to have caught me at the game...

Go Canucks!

CBC Vancouver interviewed me last week about prices and ticket scalping; the resulting feature aired Monday morning and is here. The CBC used a lot more of their interview with Mike Munger than they did of mine, but that was efficient.

A few bits that didn't make the cut:

• Economists are usually puzzled by scalping; why would the venue be leaving money on the table?
• In the music industry, the puzzle was largely solved by that the venue was in cahoots with the scalpers and earning a good chunk of those rents; but, I'd be surprised if the Canucks were selling blocks of tickets via StubHub.
• The Canucks are doing very well financially. Why might they be selling tickets lower than market clearing rates? To keep the loyalty of long term season ticket holders for starters: those folks might fail to renew tickets if they thought they'd been hard done by. And, the mix of fans at the game changes in ways potentially detrimental to television revenues and to merchandise sales; the Canucks have a more complicated maximization problem than just "get the highest possible ticket revenue."

We'd also talked a bit about the benefits of price gouging in Christchurch after the earthquake, but that went far too far afield for this piece.

I did chuckle that Mike was introduced as being a wacky libertarian while no such disclaimer was put on my bit.

The Yanks were the favourites?

Apparently Obama now owes Harper a case of Yuengling; had Canada lost the gold medal hockey game to the US, Harper would have owed Obama a case of Molson Canadian.

If it's the Yuengling Black & Tan, then the Americans must have been the favourites; it's a better beer than the Molson Canadian. At even odds, Obama could have staked some Iron City: about on par with Molson Canadian. If the Canadians were the favourites, Obama could have put up some Natural Light.

Cheap shots at Don Cherry

Today's National Post has a healthist condemning Don Cherry, one of the elder gods of hockey, for a hockey culture that encourages hits to the head and concussions. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Cherry has consistently argued for a physical form of the game, but one that's sensible: no hits to the head, no cross-checking from behind, and no stick play. So unless he's changed his tune a lot since I left Canada, this is just a cheap shot.

Cherry has previously argued that players wearing face shields are a danger to others as they pay less attention to keeping their sticks down on the ice. One of my honours students a year or so ago found that Cherry was right: players wearing visors were more likely to draw stick related penalties than were other players, all else equal. I'm hoping to get time this coming sabbatical to work up the results with Tim a bit more formally and get the paper out.