He scored two touchdowns in an unspectacular seven-year Canadian football career. He threw one pass, caught 12 and ran the ball for 457 yards in those seven years, or less than one-third of what Winnipeg’s Brady Oliveira will finish with when his season ends on Saturday. Yet Karl Hilzinger remains […]
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.
If you search for Amazin’ Mets on the Internet you may find, as I did, that auto-correct calls them the Amazon Mets. Be that as it may, the New York Mets are the antithesis of the team that was forever attached to the adjective. For one thing, the real Amazin’ […]
Officially, Pete Rose died on September 30, 2024. He was 83. In reality, Rose died August 24, 1989. He was 48. That’s the day baseball’s all-time hits leader was banned from the game he loved, told he would never have a home in its Hall of Fame. The number that […]
The era in which I grew up, in life and in sports reporting, was known for its macho…and that’s being charitable. In terms of gender comparisons, sport was often considered an oil and water mix. Consequently, when the so-called “Battle of the Sexes” came along in 1973, it was regarded […]
This was once the week that was in baseball. The week that the nation was, by Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, in a way it never could be today by Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge. Ironically, the target for all four, in the last week of their regular seasons: 60 […]
Let me put it this way: Anybody who has done public relations for a (women’s) fashion show is qualified — or at least entitled — to write about the clothes that people wear. Especially when it’s the clothing that athletes wear and includes a retrospective of how things have changed […]
John Robertson, my predecessor at the Montreal Star on the Expos’ beat in the ’70s, was once asked if he knew how to throw a screwball (It’s entirely possible Robbie also asked the question). In any case, he said he knew. “Place two fingers across the top of Mike Marshall’s […]
The last time I met George Chuvalo was the day after the last time Canada’s most famous boxer lost a fight. It was also the first time I met Chuvalo. His loss was a 12-round decision to Muhammad Ali, for something called the “North American Boxing Federation” championship. Six years […]
Even a Canadian football dinosaur didn’t instinctively know that this weekend is the 75th anniversary of the “Labour Day Classic.” It’s a weekend of special football games that seem to have been played since, well, forever. Most fans know the traditional schedule: Edmonton’s in Calgary, Winnipeg’s in Regina, Toronto’s in […]
The only pitches I ever threw were brochures that landed on the desk of potential clients. They needed convincing that my proposals were, indeed, as good as I thought they were. In other words, my expertise about the other kind of pitching — the kind baseball players do to earn […]
When I made my first “friend” in professional baseball, he was on crutches, sitting in a snow-tainted box seat watching his teammates-to-be. His name was Ellie Hendricks and Winnipeg was the furthest he’d been from his native Virgin Islands, in both miles and degrees. How the baseball equivalent of a […]
In 1866, London and Sheffield decided their soccer match should consist of two halves totalling 90 minutes. In 1868, the newly-formed Football Association added extra time could be added by the referee. That became the rule world-wide. Soccer has always been in tough when applying for membership in the exclusive […]
