This is how it all began for me professionally: Summer of 1978. Recently graduated from the University of Western Ontario’s journalism school. Trying to cobble together a living, freelancing for the Toronto Sun in sports and the Toronto Star in news, but looking for full-time work. I had job applications all over Canada, and one day, the telephone rang at my parents’ home in Scarborough, Ont. It was Lynn Watson, sports editor of the Calgary Albertan. He was looking for a ski writer. He’d read my clips and was interested. Did I know anything about skiing?
I noted that my parents had emigrated to Canada from Austria, and I’d been skiing since 10. But then I had a question: How come he needed a kid from Eastern Canada to cover skiing when Calgary was less than an hour from Banff? I thought there’d be a lineup out the door looking for that job, especially since this was the heyday of the great Canadian men’s downhill team. The Crazy Canucks were turning the European-centered ski world upside down.
“All my guys want to do is cover curling,” Watson said. I laughed because, of course, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t kidding. It turns out, he had an older staff and curling was an easy sport to cover – indoors, sometimes, from the arena bar at the local bonspiel, where the winning skip would come over and buy reporters a drink. Skiing meant going outdoors, in the snow and cold. I remember babbling about how much I really wanted that job, and, probably, my enthusiasm won him over because he offered me the job. Weeks later, I was packing all my belongings into my car before spending three and a half days driving from Ontario to Alberta, wondering what the future might hold.
That was almost half a century ago.
That was the start for me. This is the end.
After 46 years (and a couple of months) of working full-time as a sportswriter, I’m retiring.
It’s been a great, almost overwhelming ride. At The Albertan, even though I was the junior member of the staff, I got a chance to cover the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., because Calgary’s Ken Read was the favorite in the men’s downhill. And because I was going anyway, I was assigned to cover the 1980 Canadian Olympic hockey team. I traveled with them everywhere – that’s how newspapers operated back in the day. The pre-Olympic tournament in Lake Placid. Three games against Herb Brooks’ U.S. team in Calgary. Three others in the U.S.
I saw the U.S. men’s team play seven times before the Olympics, so when the Canadian team was eliminated, I veered over to cover the final two games of the tournament and accidentally was in place to cover one of the seminal sporting events of the 20th century, the Miracle on Ice.
How different were things in the beginning? We worked on typewriters (manual, not electric) in the newsroom. We took notes by hand. My journalism school made typing and shorthand mandatory courses. I truly believe I had some early success in the business because of the accuracy of my note-taking.
The year the Flames arrived in Calgary, The Albertan folded and was replaced by the Sun. Management sent out a new editor from Toronto who believed in participatory journalism (popularized by George Plimpton). Accordingly, he asked me to try out for the Flames, and much to my surprise, the general manager, Cliff Fletcher, agreed. So yes, that was me, doing the fitness testing and then going on the ice with the Flames during their first training camp in 1980. They had us go through the testing, two-by-two, and my partner was Paul Reinhart, one of the few players whom I knew beforehand (I’d met him the summer before when he was at camp with the Olympic team).
Fitness testing wasn’t much of an issue for me – I was a reasonably accomplished runner – though the strength tests were a bit of an embarrassment. Paul, whose son, Sam, is a star for the Florida Panthers, crushed me in the strength tests, but I did OK in the run, the sit-ups, and the VO2, which was cutting-edge stuff at the time. Going on the ice was another matter. It didn’t take long to realize I was in way over my head the first day. You really need to get down to ice level if you want to experience the difference between a beer league player and an NHLer. Kent Nilsson was a marvel – the only nickname I ever gave a player that actually stuck was for Kent: The Magic Man. He scored 131 points that year, still a Flames single-season record. Soon after the three-part series ran in the newspaper, I accepted an offer from the Herald, Calgary’s more established afternoon broadsheet. Their approach seemed more suited to my voice and my approach to journalism. That turned out to be a great decision.
In my 20 years at the Herald, I covered world hockey championships in Vienna and Zurich, made trips to the Soviet Union in 1987 for the Izvestia tournament and in 1989, on the Friendship Tour with the Calgary Flames, covered games in Prague, Kyiv, St. Petersburg and Moscow. When the expansion Tampa Bay Lightning joined the NHL and played one season at the Thunderdome, that was my standard joke for a few years – that I’d covered hockey from St. Petersburg, Russia, to St. Petersburg, Fla., and hundreds of places in between. The Herald sent me to Japan to cover the 1998 Nagano Olympics, the first time NHL pros were allowed to participate. Later, with The Globe and Mail, I got a chance to write the lead story for the three gold medals the Canadian men won in 2002, 2010 and 2014. I wasn’t assigned to Turin in 2006, so you can’t pin that loss on me.
But journalism isn’t all celebratory, either. There were some really hard moments: the Swift Current bus crash, the Humboldt Broncos bus crash, the deaths of George Pelawa and Steve Chiasson.
None was more personally and professionally challenging than the events of September 2011. I’d been admitted to the hospital in Calgary with a collapsed lung that stubbornly refused to heal. It was determined that I needed major surgery, a thoracotomy. While I was preparing for that operation, the plane carrying the Lokomotiv hockey team crashed in Russia, killing almost everyone aboard, including Brad McCrimmon, who had become a friend over the years. That spring, I’d seen Brad postgame after a Detroit-Phoenix playoff game. He introduced me to his parents that night and mentioned the possibility of a new adventure in the fall. I’d previously written a book about hockey in Russia a few years prior with Dave King, the first Canadian to coach in what was then called the Russian Super League.
One of the things Dave highlighted in the book was the perilous nature of air travel in Russia during his tenure with Magnitogorsk. My office, knowing I had a relationship with both Brad and Dave, wondered if I could write the story. I don’t think they knew exactly how challenging that might be, in a hospital bed, with three tubes surgically implanted in my chest. But I agreed. I talked to Dave. We both got a little emotional talking about Brad, this incredibly interesting, complicated, salt-of-the-earth human being, and somehow, I managed to get some words on the page and a column filed. I was on medical leave for three months before I was healthy enough to return to work. I can honestly say that the memory of McCrimmon was the single biggest inspiration that got me through those challenging times.
Back when I was attending high school in Toronto, I once wrote an essay for Mr. O’Reilly’s English class. I think it was probably Grade 11. The assignment was “What would be your ideal job?” My answer was hockey writer for the Toronto Star. I also knew how impossible that would be. A pipedream. Because in those days, there were only three NHL teams in Canada – Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Toronto had three newspapers, and each had two full-time hockey writers, plus columnists covering the teams. But I could do the math. There might be 10 to 12 jobs in the entire country for a hockey writer. The odds were better to make it to the NHL as a player than as someone covering the sport. So that was a whimsical notion.
If you’d told 15-year-old me that I would eventually land one of those jobs, I would not have believed it. But then, the 15-year-old me couldn’t have imagined all the other blessings that came to me professionally over time. The friendships I’ve developed, working with so many talented, interesting colleagues. Jim Matheson. Michael Farber. George Johnson. David Shoalts. Too many to name. The places I’ve had a chance to visit, usually on the company dime.
I like to tell one story all the time, to amuse my younger colleagues, of how generous things used to be in the early days. I’d just joined the Herald, hired by a fine man named George Bilych. One day, George was explaining to me the expense account policy at the Herald. “We want you to live on the road the same way you do at home. If you have a glass of wine with dinner at home, have a glass of wine with dinner on the road. Just expense it. If you go to shows at home, go to a show on the road. Just expense it.”
So, first trip to New York, and a colleague at the Calgary Sun, Steve Simmons, said: “Let’s go to a Broadway show.” I had no idea about theatre in New York at this point, but Steve did, and he recommended we see a revival of “42nd Street,” starring Jerry Orbach (long before Orbach became known for his television work). Tickets were a pricey $50 U.S. a pop. In 1980. But we went and enjoyed the show immensely. When I got home, I dutifully filed my expenses. Sure enough, a week later, the expense account was approved, every last item.
And so, for most of that first decade, as long as George was in charge, the Herald paid for dinner and a show, and there were lots of them over the years. I always found something interesting to do wherever I traveled in North America, and if you happened to land in Tampa Bay a day early and Jimmy Buffett happened to be in town, well, you know who was first in line at the box office.
But the attraction of the job in the early days wasn’t just the generous expense accounts or the bars, restaurants, concerts and beaches that you visited.
In the years I traveled with the Flames, I took the same flights, stayed at the same hotels and rode on the team bus. The travel secretary – for the longest time, the wonderful Al Coates – would hand me a boarding card, just as he did the rest of the team. Often, I’d find myself sitting next to a player. Those flights across the country were long, and this was an excellent way of getting to know a player outside the rink.
Traveling with a team allowed you to observe how everyone interacted with one another. Sometimes, the details of a person’s life that you picked up in casual conversation could often be an entry point of a story, when you finally got around to profiling them. You needed to gain their trust, but you always needed to keep them at arm’s length. And every time you wrote something they didn’t like, you heard about it, usually the next day. But then you’d clear the air, and on you went.
That was one of the best things about the job. It took you everywhere. Sometimes, you knew you were witnessing history. Other times, it came as a complete surprise. I was at the final game played by the Colorado Rockies (April 3, 1982, against Calgary). I was at the first home game played by the San Jose Sharks (Oct. 5, 1991). I was there, in Florida, the night the Panthers defeated the Flames 4-3 in their home opener and Scott Mellanby scored twice. Afterward, Panthers goalie John Vanbiesbrouck noted how, just before the game, a rat had scurried across the dressing room floor in the old Miami Arena, and Mellanby, who had his stick with him, sent it splattering against the wall, with a quick flip of his wrist. Not a hat trick, but a “rat trick.” When the Panthers unexpectedly made the Stanley Cup Final later that season, plastic rats rained down on the ice surface after Florida goals, a tradition that continues today.
By the mid-1990s, I was still covering the Flames but writing more bigger-picture stories and features. Before games in Calgary, I often sat at the same table as the team’s doctors: Nick Mohtadi, whose amateur tennis career I had chronicled two decades earlier, and Winne Meeuwisse, who, at the time, was head of the NHL’s physician society.
One night, Winne mentioned a possible story idea: That he and every other NHL team doctor were meeting at the 1997 All-Star Game in San Jose to discuss concussion protocols. Ultimately, that meeting resulted in the NHL establishing concussion baseline testing. I remember writing the story and also sending a file to Sports Illustrated (because I was one of their hockey stringers in those days) on what I thought was an important, developing story. I wrote a lot about concussions in the mid-to-late 1990s before the issue really sunk into the public consciousness. I’m heartened that just last week, the NHLPA, under Marty Walsh’s leadership, formed a chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) advisory committee to further pursue this important work.
Beyond all the files I sent to SI over the years, I also spent 25 years writing for The Hockey News, first just the weekly Calgary files, and then, ultimately, graduating to the back-page column. In those days, The Hockey News was the sport’s bible. It would arrive weekly at the Canadian embassy in Moscow in the diplomatic pouch. The first time I introduced myself to Igor Larionov, he said he knew who I was and recognized me instantly from my column picture in The Hockey News. Its reach was so wide back then that it even got referenced in the movie “Slap Shot.”
Primarily, Steve Dryden and Jason Kay were my editors at The Hockey News, and I’ll never forget how Steve generously fed me extra assignments during a challenging eight-month period between November 1999 and June 2000 when my newspaper went on strike and I was earning $10 per hour in strike pay in exchange for 20 hours of picketing duty each week. Except for game nights, I mostly chose to walk the 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift, so I could get after my supplementary freelance work during the day. That was a cold Calgary winter.
I always considered myself a newspaperman at heart, but over time, I found there were opportunities to do both radio and television work on the side. For years, my favorite host on Calgary radio was Rob Kerr. Among other things, Rob reunited Al Morganti and me on the East-West Hot Stove.
Then there was a period of time, for more than a decade, that my friend John Shannon had me on the “Hockey Night In Canada” segment Satellite Hot Stove. The Satellite Hot Stove was John’s brainchild. It appeared in the second intermission of the first game of the HNIC’s doubleheader, and it linked four people – the host Ron MacLean, and usually John Davidson in New York, Al Strachan in Toronto and me in Calgary – via satellite. Sometimes, we did a pre-tape. Sometimes, we went live. It was part analysis, part gossip, and the segment proved wildly popular.
The chemistry was good, and people seemed to enjoy the back-and-forth banter. It was eight minutes of TV, once a week, and maybe you’d get to contribute about two minutes worth of conversation in every segment. In the meantime, I’d be writing five columns a week at my primary job. And yet, during those years, often, whenever I’d run into someone who’d recognize me, it would be the TV appearances they’d comment on, not the work I was doing in print. It was sobering to realize how much the power of television could trump that of the written word.
Probably the most unexpected event in my professional life came in 2001 when I won the Elmer Ferguson Award, which is how the Hockey Hall of Fame honors journalists. I was just 45 at the time, the youngest ever to win the award, so I was completely caught unawares, and maybe even a little sheepish. Ultimately, the fact that I received the award while my father was still alive meant the world to me and to my mom. The 15 years I spent on the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee – from 2004 to 2018 – provided some of the most stimulating hockey conversations I’d ever been involved in. Those annual June meetings were stressful, exhilarating and stimulating. Term limits, which I believe in, meant I couldn’t serve beyond 2018, and I miss those meetings every year.
Here’s something not everybody knows about me. When I began school, I couldn’t speak a word of English. We spoke only German at home, as my parents were also in the process of learning a new language after arriving in Canada. The fact that I ended up making a living writing in what is effectively my second language is the thing I take the most pride in.
I’m not sure exactly what the future holds for me. I still get asked to appear on radio shows and podcasts occasionally. If the requests continue, I’ll probably keep saying yes. Many people have told me you can always write books – and maybe that’s a possibility in the future. But my standard answer today is I want to take a break from writing about sports. That’s the whole point of retiring. If I wanted to continue writing sports, I would stay right here at The Athletic.
I can’t stress this point enough. This has been a wonderful final act for me.
When I joined back in September 2017, it was at the urging of James Mirtle. I owe James a lot. We were colleagues together at The Globe and Mail for years. In November 2016, I was in Toronto for the Hockey Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, and James and I met for a drink. He told me he’d resigned from The Globe that day. He’d been offered a chance to lead The Athletic’s expansion into Canada. At some point, he wanted me along for the ride. He didn’t have anything firm to offer right then because it was early days, but 10 months later, things were moving fast and he wanted to put me in touch with company co-founder Adam Hansmann to make a formal offer.
His pitch: Did I have one more professional act left in me? James sold me on the energy of a startup and the idea that everything was on the table. If something worked, great. If it didn’t, we’d try something else. I signed a two-year contract, and before you knew it, two years turned into seven. I had a chance to work with so many of the brightest up-and-comers in the industry and have collaborated with many of them over the years. That’s been fun, and revitalizing.
So, I’ll end there. I want to thank everyone who read my work over the years – the ones who liked my storytelling and even the ones who didn’t. If you’d told that teenage wanna-be sportswriter that this would be how his professional life would turn out, he wouldn’t have believed it.
Even today, the aging adult version can’t believe it, either.
(All photos courtesy Eric Duhatschek)
