As another horse racing season wound down this month with the Breeders Cup, and as the sport of kings inches closer to extinction, here’s the question: Can this sport be sustained by people who say “there’s just something about horse racing.” This is a sport — of royalty or not […]
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.
To understand the nation-wide phenomenon of the Toronto Blue Jays, it’s worth examining the demographic of this coast-to-coast love affair and, if possible, its roots. The Avengers. They may never forget Monday, October 19, 1981. Blue Monday. The day Canada’s original major-league team, the Montreal Expos, lost the pennant. The […]
This week was to be an opportunity to tell the story of somebody who did something no other major-league pitcher has ever done — or would ever do. A chance to re-visit the warm Baltimore day when a pitcher who would never make it to the Hall of Fame experienced […]
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 […]
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 […]
