We were sitting at the kitchen table, the young hockey player and me. He was home alone, at the hockey household where he was staying. His “house mother” was the former wife of one superstar, and the mother of another. He was living in the shadow of what is still […]
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.
Without doubt, it’s the most famous pitching performance in World Series history and without a doubt, that’s never likely to change. This week is the 69th anniversary of the perfect game pitched by a mediocre New York Yankees right-hander, Don Larsen. The only perfect game pitched in the Series has […]
Before digesting the changes coming to the Canadian Football League, I needed a conversation with my inner being, and it went something like this: “Self, make sure to take your open mind into the reading room. It’s human nature to resist change, and resistance strengthens with age. If changes can […]
As somebody who has played (at) golf for almost 90 per cent of his life, as somebody who believes in being a “rules follower,” I’ve never been comfortable with either taking or giving “gimme” putts. Perhaps because I know how to miss a one-inch putt. No kidding! Or maybe it […]
Whenever a major-league pitcher’s earned run average dips below 2.00 (Pittsburgh’s Paul Skenes), Bob Gibson’s name surfaces. Gibson’s 1.12 ERA is among baseball’s unbreakable records. yet just one Bob Gibson statistic unlikely to be surpassed. There are still people who remember his 1968, a year memorialized in the U.S. for […]
My friend Ken Dryden died on Friday. His is not a name I drop lightly. Calling our friendship a close one would be misleading, but it was a good one for a long time, 50 years. For me, it was never about name dropping. We’d hoped to meet, for the […]
My wife has never watched as much Canadian football as her husband, but it pretty much disappeared from her entertainment calendar the day they got rid of Matt Dunigan. Just to be clear, that didn’t happen this summer, when TSN started televising the new season’s games without Dunigan, for the […]
It was 43 years ago this month that Jim Rice the future Baseball Hall of Famer became Jim Rice the Humanity Hall of Famer by saving a little boy’s life. A story always worth repeating, it’s also an example of how a famous athlete, even with a questionable reputation, can […]
If athletes were thoroughbreds (as in racehorses), who would be each sport’s leading sires — the quarterback or centre fielder or defenceman with an offspring of equal or greater ability? As generational all-stars go, baseball has the Ken Griffeys (Jr. and Sr.) and the Bonds (Bobby, Barry); hockey has Bobby […]
The next time you see somebody protecting their head from the sun with that funny little baseball cap that seems to be missing only a propeller on top, the hat the Montreal Expos made famous, it’s worth remembering how it all began. This may seem a stretch but…putting a major-league […]
Every sports fan should go to the Hockey Hall of Fame once every 50 years, and so I did. It was as shocking as it was impressive, which explains why my wife and I were there twice in six days. There’s too much to absorb in one visit, or maybe […]
I don’t make a habit of sending birthday greetings to sports personalities I’ve met, especially if they were casual acquaintances… especially if we talked perhaps a dozen times… and especially if we hadn’t seen each other in almost 50 years. The exception is Marv Levy. Next week, one of the […]
