As much as I have a soft spot for Canada’s 1986 World Cup soccer team, it’s worth noting that its comparison to the Canadian team that will go to Qatar this year, pandemic and wartime permitting, is really not much of a comparison at all. The ’86 World Cup team […]
Bob Dunn – Distant Replay
How being in the sports media gave one writer & broadcaster the opportunity to interview sports personalities he never imagined he’d even meet in places he never imagined he’d be. These will be his stories about their stories — or just about them — from the pages of his past, while working out of Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver in the 60s and 70s.
Like most people who follow golf, I saw Tiger Woods for the first time on television. Never a big fan of late-night TV, I did not see him at age two, smacking a golf ball into a screen on the Mike Douglas Show, a replay that has been shown ad […]
There is a tendency these days to criticize — or punish — a Russian just for being born in a country that’s now threatening world peace. All Russians, without exception, because their lineage is a four-letter word. Most of us have a problem with that. I was reminded of this […]
Re-visiting an old interview with Jean Beliveau reminded me why he should — in perpetuity — be held at a level of esteem reserved for precious few professional athletes. At the time, the classy captain of the Montreal Canadiens was two years into retirement. I was new in town, and […]
Ah, spring training, a strikeout victim this year but long the country club of baseball writers. The rest of the continent in the throes of winter while they sit by the pool concocting story ideas to write before their tee time. Sports writing utopia. The best part of the baseball […]
Fresh from two weeks of OD-ing on the Olympic Games that I once again wasn’t going to watch, I may have come full circle on their legitimacy. Decades ago, I was a young reporter so interested in the Olympics that I paid my way and took my vacation to cover […]
This month, Martin St. Louis was named coach of the Montreal Canadiens. As a Hall of Fame player and an unproven coach, his selection immediately raised the question about whether great players make great coaches, the conventional theory being that they don’t, because their players are often incapable of meeting […]
When you’re a member of the sports media, you’re not supposed to have a personal bias about the athletes you cover. Sometimes, it happens. For me, it happened with Ken Read. He was an international skiing star, leader of the famous Crazy Canucks, who were winning World Cup races with […]
He was once a pro boxer who went home to work in a dry cleaning plant, with an 11-year-old son who played hockey. Dad painted his son’s sticks so that if somebody swiped one it would be easy to identify in the small town where they lived. “I painted one […]
When Bobby Orr was at the peak of his career, I stumbled on a story that would’ve been a “scoop” except it wasn’t breaking news, just speculation. Orr’s bad knees were going to end his career sooner than planned — according to an orthopaedic surgeon who had seen it happen […]
With a possible work stoppage on the horizon, there was even less baseball news than usual this winter. Then this week, Dave Van Horne retired. It’s 21 years since he was the Montreal Expos’ play-by-play broadcaster, a position that made him (and probably still does) the voice of Canadian baseball. […]
A hockey dad is waiting for his son to make his NHL debut — on Hockey Night in Canada with the Toronto Maple Leafs — and to see him interviewed between periods. The father lives in remote British Columbia, where the station carrying HNIC is showing a Vancouver Canucks’ game […]
