Having been something of a newspaper junkie for most of my life, I’ve collected front pages that were historic or clever, or both. One in particular is about the Toronto Maple Leafs, the National Hockey League team that generations of hockey fans have ridiculed. This headline started at the top, […]
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.
May 1 is the 33rd anniversary of a Major League Baseball record that will surely never be broken. On that day in 1991, Nolan Ryan no-hit the Toronto Blue Jays. It was his seventh no-hitter. He was 44 years old. He was in the 25th season of a career that […]
The uncomfortable link connecting sports and gambling has always existed, and always will. Baseball had its Black Sox scandal more than a century ago. Hockey’s first player suspended for gambling was Babe Pratt, in 1946. Football sat down its glamorous superstar, Green Bay’s Paul Horning, for betting in 1963. (Pratt […]
The Stanley Cup playoffs start this week and, for the third straight spring, there are no Montreal Canadiens. The last time this happened was 23 years ago. The last time before that was ’22. That’s 1922. So this is just the third time in more than a century that hockey’s […]
Ask who was the best Canadian golfer in the Masters and the response is always Mike Weir, who this week makes his 25th appearance at Augusta. The infamous Green Jacket has been in Weir’s closet since he beat Len Mattiace in a playoff to win the 2003 Masters. But is […]
The email was from Megan Walchuk, this newspaper’s editor. Letters from the editor, even emails, sometimes mean the writer did something wrong. This one was different. Megan’s message was: “An old friend of yours reached out and asked to be connected. I don’t like sending out other people’s e-mails, so […]
My first Vancouver Canucks game was also theirs, featuring 17 players from places like Goderich, Winnipegosis, Cudworth, Earlton and Noranda. None from Sweden. One (Paul Popiel) was from Denmark by then a U.S. citizen and the only non-Canadian in the line-up. Six weeks later, the Canucks dressed a Lebanese forward […]
The incomparable linguist Yogi Berra allegedly said: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Eight years ago this week, faced with that decision, the fork my wife and I took on an interstate in Missouri led us to the Harry Truman Presidential Library in his hometown, […]
This story is about minor hockey. Specifically, about illegal actions and turning a blind eye in minor hockey. It’s a true story…from 38 years this month. Our elder son was 12. He was playing peewee hockey. It was house league. His team reached the house league final. The only hope […]
Tiger Woods, with most of his replays (good and bad) now distant ones, has done it again. In his 20s, he was too good to be true, until he wasn’t. Then his well-documented womanizing brought him down to earth, or lower, and he went from the PGA’s most-beloved golfer to […]
Almost 100 years ago, the seeds of all today’s national curling championships were planted (and fertilized?) by tobacco…Macdonald Tobacco. The 1927 Macdonald Brier was “the first Dominion curling championship” at a time when the country was called the Dominion of Canada. The first rock was thrown by a Quebec lead, […]
When Winnipeg Blue Bombers legends Kenny Ploen and Gerry James died last week — on the same day yet! — it moved me to re-visit their dominant team from 60-plus years ago. This is, after all, a “Distant” Replays. It’s widely acknowledged the greatest Canadian Football League team is the […]
