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 unexpected regularity in Europe and charming sports fans at home. Starting with Read, the first North American ever to win a World Cup downhill, they were known coast to coast — Read from Calgary, Steve Podborski from Toronto, Dave Irwin from Thunder Bay and Dave Murray from Whistler. Their run as the Crazy Canucks lasted 10 years, 14 World Cup wins and 39 medals, an Olympic bronze, and a legacy that ignited a Canadian ski program now widely respected around the world.
Halfway through their decade, I became a sportscaster. So my “knowledge base” had to extend far beyond baseball, hockey and football to include such sports as, well, skiing. I was a slow learner. I knew the names of the Crazy Canucks, but not much more. One Sunday night, I was anchoring a two-hour radio show. The last hour was phone-in. My guest, in the studio, was Ken Read and I was only marginally prepared for our one-hour chat. Anyway, that’s what the people phoning in would do, right?
Except, nobody phoned. Well, almost nobody. My wife, a listener who could sense her spouse’s anxiety level, phoned. At her request, one of her friends phoned. There may have been one more. The balance was a Crazy Canuck and a sportscaster who deserved the first half of that nickname.
This was 11 o’clock on a Sunday night on a new radio show that wasn’t yet established. I was a rookie in the radio business, and I anticipated many Crazy Canucks listeners would have their dials set, their ears to the speaker and their fingers dialing the phone. I should have known better.
Read saved the day. He was interesting and interested, polite and comfortable, understanding and genuine. And for the rookie sportscaster across the table watching the phone board go dark, he was a game-saver. Naturally, I became a fan.
Less than two years later, Read was skiing the Olympic downhill at Lake Placid, and favoured to win. Four years earlier, he’d been fifth. A month earlier, he’d won two World Cup downhills and finished second in a third. This was to be his time.
I was among the media people standing at the bottom of the hill on Whiteface Mountain, unabashedly hoping that he would win. But like the phone-in collars, Read was a no-show. It wasn’t even one of those spectacular downhill crashes that snatched his medal. It was a ski binding that broke, or released, 15 seconds from the start. A ski-binding malfunction? That’s…crazy! He never won again.
Even for me, Read’s gold-medal performance late one Sunday night in a radio station studio was no consolation.
