Cornered

by Ron MacLean

  After a few dates, we were going steady.

  Every time I hear the song “Music Box Dancer” by Frank Mills, I think of Cari. It was playing on the radio one night when I took her for ice cream at the local Dairy Queen. Prior to going inside, we sat in the parking lot, necking in the front seat. All of a sudden, we heard this loud revving. It was my car engine—it sounded like it might explode. People around us were staring. Turned out my car was running, and while we were occupied, my foot had landed on the gas pedal. That song always takes me right back to that moment.

  I’ve never had a serious relationship with anyone else. I am Cari’s first and only love, and she is mine. How often does that happen?

  Cari was starting her third year at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where she was pursuing a degree in Recreation and Leisure Studies. I was twenty-two and had been working for three years. I was wildly in love and remember the 160-kilometre-an-hour drives up to Edmonton with my foot all the way to the floor so that I could shave fifteen minutes off the trip.

  I wasn’t worried that Cari might be seeing someone else—I’m not possessive—but I thought I might lose her if I didn’t tie her up. I was so nervous buying the ring. I went to Peoples Jewellers at the mall in Red Deer. I’m a very impulsive guy. I always regret it when I say no to impulse buying. I’ll see something and kick myself later for not picking it up. I was making $750 a month, and the ring cost $600, which was a big-ticket item for me. I didn’t have a credit card, so I paid cash. I forgot to ask her dad for her hand and felt bad about that afterward. You’re supposed to do that.

  I carried that ring around in my pocket for some time. I didn’t tell anyone about it, but I had a plan. I worked conscientiously. I practised my ad-libs so they’d sound natural. I prepared for that proposal for a long time. I was going to tell Cari that we both had an apprenticeship to get through. Hers was schooling and mine was getting my feet under me in broadcasting. And that I was focused on that first, but I knew it was not fair to let her twist in the wind. I was going to say, “I want to show you some sort of commitment, and with you at university I think it would be a good idea to give you that promise of commitment, something to make you feel good about, so you don’t feel alone.” I envisioned taking her out to a nice dinner in Red Deer and slipping the ring to her under the table, Cary Grant–style, and then giving her my spiel. Thank God it didn’t work out that way. She would never have said yes.

  June 28, 1982, was D-Day. I picked her up and took her to the local Keg ‘n Cleaver steak house. All was going well. She went to the bathroom, and I pulled the little velvet box out of my pocket, gripped it in my hand and rested it on my knee. She sat back down and I found her knee under the table and tapped it with the little velvet box. She’d just taken hold of it when suddenly Joe McKenzie, a football teammate, came by the table to say hi. I have always had this philosophy that we are one in six billion, not one in two. Everyone is equally deserving of unconditional love, whether you are my wife or you are someone I just met. So even though it was supposed to be a big moment for Cari and me, Joe and I talked for about twenty minutes. From the corner of my eye I saw Cari peering down into the box in her lap. When Joe left, I forgot all about the speech I’d prepared. I nodded to the box and said, “Well, what do you think?”

  She held up the ring and said, “It’s beautiful. What’s it for?”

  8

  ONE TO ONE

  Life was busy. I was working six days a week, and on the seventh I would go on location to do a remote. I was determined to succeed. It was a total head-down, we’re-going-to-make-this-work mentality. I was twenty-three and in the fifth year of my career when I was promoted to program director. Small towns, you move up fast, right? The first thing I did was dump the promotions budget, take the entire $10,000 and give it to our morning man, Danny Teed, bumping his salary from $1,300 a month to $2,300 a month. He had a great on-air presence. I figured if we had an amazing morning show we could capture listeners for the whole day.

  Because I had no marketing budget, I went to Waterbed World and pitched a contest. I offered airtime to give away a $200 waterbed per day for an entire month. I said, “On the last day, we’ll give away a whole bedroom suite!” Miraculously, they agreed. In the business, it’s called a contra advertising arrangement. It was a hit with the audience. People started pouring into the store.

  I really wanted to improve what we did at the station. I’d read a couple of books by Jay Trachman on the art of personality radio. He was the creator of an informative publication in the business called One to One. Today it would be like a blog on the subject of communication. Jay advised that in order to succeed, you had to be the best at being brief, believable and real. It was good advice. The problem with most on-air people is that they don’t reveal themselves. You connect with listeners when you understand that they are like you, not who you wish to be. Talk to the listener who has the same ideas, same politics, same prejudices, same humour, same likes and dislikes, and hope like hell that’s enough to win the day.

  I called Jay in Fresno, California, and asked if he did seminars. He said he had never done one, but he had been thinking about it. I flew him up to Red Deer to consult for a fee of $500. I wondered what Jay would be like. I didn’t even know what he looked like. I drove to Edmonton to pick him up at the airport. I waited and waited, but he didn’t deplane. Then I heard an announcement: “Would Ron MacLean please report to immigration?” An immigration officer pointed to this older-looking gentleman with a slight build and asked me if I knew him. I was taken aback. I expected a studly type to go with his resonant, rich, mellow voice. I said, “Yes, I do know him. He is here to do a seminar at CKRD radio.”

  “Well, have you arranged for papers for him to work in Canada?” he asked.

  That hadn’t occurred to me. I told the officer that I didn’t know about that sort of thing. And he asked, “What’s he going to be doing exactly?”

  I said, “He’s going to be playing cassettes of each of the announcers, and then he is going to comment on them.”

  The immigration officers consulted and then told me they agreed to look past my omission, but warned that you can’t have people working in Canada without a work visa.

  Jay seemed to take the whole thing in stride. On the way to Red Deer, I pumped him for advice. I was determined to go beyond good to great. “What’s the best tip you can give me?” I asked. He talked to me about preparation. “For every hour you are on air, you should do ten hours of preparation,” he said.

  Our entire on-air staff gathered at the Red Deer Lodge, and Jay listened to each DJ’s “aircheck” and offered his opinion on areas to improve. He was playing Danny Teed’s tape and stopped it twenty minutes in to give Danny a tip. Danny said, “Geez, Jay, I’ve been in the business for twenty years. I can’t change that now.” And Jay slammed his fist on the table and said, “Danny! You’re an adult. You can change anything you choose to!” That got our attention.

  We had a manager in Red Deer we hired from Lethbridge, Alberta, where he was a popular morning man. His radio name was Wayne Barry. Wayne Heinrich is his real name. He was a godsend, because I was at the point in my career where I needed to home in. I was still trying to be all things—mostly Johnny Carson and Dave Hodge—a compilation of the best. Wayne dialled me in as to what to do to focus. I had an interview show on CKRD that was sort of like CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera. I managed to land interviews with a few newsmakers, including Senator Keith Davey, a former radio guy and sales manager for CKFH in Toronto from 1949 to 1960; Iona Campagnolo, president of the federal Liberal party in 1982—heavy-hitting politicians, artists and athletes. Wayne was a huge influence in terms of Radio 101.

  One time, we were giving away two tickets to a Red Deer junior hockey game. A caller came on live, trying to win them. I was kind of being the hip DJ, Mr. Smart Ass, having fun at the caller’s expense. The next day, Wayne pulled me into his office and he said, “You know, Ron, when you had that
guy on, it was kind of funny. But the truth of the matter is you made him look stupid. The opposite would have been better. It’s not you who should be the star of that conversation, it’s the caller. The caller was good enough to listen to our station. And he was good enough to phone you and enter the contest. And what did you do? You turned on him with your skills. He was out of his depth, whereas you are comfortable on stage. You shouldn’t work at making yourself shine—make your guest shine. Remember, if you make them look good, you’ll look good.” He was so right. I adopted that philosophy immediately.

  Jay taught us “You be you,” and Wayne was saying “You be you, but don’t hog the limelight—let the guest be the star.” These were really important lessons that shaped me, like the field goal.

  Jay turned that first consultation in Red Deer into a whole career of seminars. He was very successful at it, one of the best in the business. Sadly, he died in November 2009.

  Whoever did the noon-to-4 p.m. shift on CKRD-AM radio automatically did the weather on TV, so getting bumped from 8 p.m.-to-midnight to noon-to-4 was my big break. Environment Canada painstakingly explained the weather map to me. They told me about its features and the effects of different weather systems on central Alberta. I discovered that the number one information measure for Red Deer was not temperature, it was relative humidity, a critical factor for the farmers in the area.

  For the most part, I loved the gig, but Red Deer was a small station, and so there was a series of equipment malfunctions. A clip wouldn’t come up, and the anchors would throw to me. I was budgeted to do three minutes, and suddenly I had eight minutes to fill. The adrenalin would hit hard. I would turn my back to the camera, pretending to look at the weather map, gulp a few times and try to regain my composure.

  Wayne Barry asked me to be the colour man/engineer on road games with the local junior hockey team, the Red Deer Rustlers. And we were such a team at CKRD that I didn’t dream of saying no. As usual, my first attempt wasn’t exactly smooth. At 5:30 p.m., during the warmup, we could not get a signal back to CKRD, so we unscrewed the mouthpiece on a phone receiver and wired the phone directly into the audio board using alligator clips. The next problem was that, although I knew all the Rustlers and their numbers, I knew only one player on the Fort Saskatchewan Traders—Sid Cranston. So I sweated it out every time Sid went back to the bench at the end of a shift.

  For two years, I was host and colour man to Frank Ryan’s play-by-play. As the bus hurtled up and down the Trans-Canada Highway, I’d look at the lights of the cities and farmsteads and wonder if the people in those homes could hear my work. I thought it must be cool to work on a network show.

  Then the CKRD supper-hour TV news went from thirty minutes to a one-hour format. Maybe it was because I was long-winded and could help them stretch the ‘cast, but they asked me to give up weather and do the sports. I had to be talked into it. I tried to make the weather interesting by drawing sports logos on the map, using them as locators and forecasting game outcomes. I tried not to be a sports guy. I loved sports and I was such an obsessive guy, I knew I’d develop tunnel vision like Cari’s next-door neighbour Don Drummond, who was the sports editor of the Red Deer Advocate. He was a prototypical sports guy—beer in one hand, cigar in the other, talking sports 24/7. I remember one night in 1983, during the Progressive Conservative leadership race that pitted Brian Mulroney against John Crosbie and Joe Clark, among others. I mentioned that it would not be easy to choose the next leader. Don replied, “It has to be Gretzky, even if Messier is the true leader.”

  I was swamped. At the time, I was program director, the 9 a.m.-to-noon DJ, the TV weatherman and the voice of the Rustlers. I did a lot of commercials and promotions, plus, because it was a small community, I was the first guy they called to do speeches and emcee jobs—gratis, of course. On my day off, I did on-location broadcasts.

  I didn’t know it then, but I was six months away from hosting my first NHL game.

  9

  A LUCKY SIGN

  I’ve always had this joyful feeling—”What a break! How in the world did you get to be alive? How did you get to be here?” Everything I’ve been given seems to be a really neat gift. But I’m conflicted. Part of me feels that I don’t deserve it. I was bumbling along, DJ-ing on the noon-to-4 p.m. shift on CKRD radio in Red Deer, doing the sports on TV during the supper-hour news and then hopping the team bus to broadcast the Red Deer Rustlers. I was content, but juggling a little too much and wondering about my future, when I got a huge break.

  In 1984, Jim Van Horne was the main sports guy at CFAC, Channels 2 & 7 in Calgary, when he accepted a job at a brand-new television sports network called TSN. They also hired Peter Watts and John Wells away from CBC Edmonton. Chris Cuthbert, Gord Miller and I were the beneficiaries of TSN’s formation. Their moves opened the door for kids from smaller centres like Red Deer to move up to the big time.

  I got a call out of the blue from John Shannon, the western producer for Hockey Night in Canada. The signal from CKRD Red Deer came in to Calgary, and he’d seen me doing the weather. He and CFAC news director Ted Arnold invited me to Calgary to apply for Jim Van Horne’s position. The job was to host thirty Calgary Flames telecasts and to work as a sportscaster Wednesday through Friday at noon and on Saturday and Sunday evenings. I was so green I assumed I had the job. Why else would they call, right?

  On August 20, 1984, I walked in and presented myself at the reception desk. “Hi, I’m Ron MacLean, and I’m here to see Ted Arnold and John Shannon for the Flames position.” The receptionist was Lee Haskayne, the wife of Dick Haskayne, a very successful Calgary oil executive. At the time, Dick was president of Husky Oil and Gas. Dick and Lee were down to earth. Lee worked at the station because she loved the people. Lee said, “That’s fine, Mr. MacLean, have a seat over there with the other gentlemen.” I looked over at nine guys seated in the waiting area. I recognized “Mr. Ski” Mike Lownsbrough, CFCN’s Doug Smith and CFAC sports guy Grant Pollock. My heart sank right through my chest. I felt complete panic. “Oh my God, they’re considering all of us for this position!” I was shocked and worried. Grant had the great Lyle Waggoner hair and was dressed in a well-fitting black jacket and camel pants with a white shirt and pale yellow tie. He looked like he’d just stepped off his yacht. I felt confident in my light grey textured sport coat, but I started to second-guess the pink shirt and tie. I had sailed in, ready to start the job as this likeable fellow from Red Deer, and was instead trying to stay afloat in the deep end.

  I knew it would be at least an hour before it was my turn, so I went for a drive down Memorial Drive, to the Dairy Queen by the base of Foothills Hospital. I lined up behind a guy with a freshly amputated arm. He had obviously snuck out of the hospital for a Mr. Misty. His bandages were blood-soaked, which made me feel kind of dizzy. This added to the surreal quality of the whole bizarre day. I drove back to 2 & 7, trying to talk myself down. “It’s just a job. Relax. You’re happy where you are in Red Deer. If you don’t get the job, it’s no big deal.” But my chest was thumping. I could not get my heart to stop racing.

  I went back and waited for another twenty minutes before I was called into the studio. I sat down and was given an IFB—an interruptible foldback earpiece. I could hear the director, Larry Brown, along with Shannon talking over the music and the effects. They had me do an opening to a Flames–Oilers telecast, a forty-five-second blurb about the Battle of Alberta, and Shannon said, “That’s no good, Ron. You have to project. You have to pick it up. Yell a little! This is K-Tel hockey. We’re selling the game here.” So I did it a second time, and this time I was loud.

  Shannon started to ratchet things up more. He was trying to replicate the tension and pace of a real hockey game so that he could gauge my response. We moved to hockey highlights. They gave me nine goals in forty seconds. You had to know your stuff, have an understanding of the game and get the names right. There weren’t many things there that really threw me off. Next, I interviewed twenty-three-year-
old Flames forward Jim Peplinski.

  I powered through the Peplinski intro without taking a breath. “We’re back live at the Saddledome in Calgary, where, after twenty minutes, the Calgary Flames, on the strength of a goal by Kent Nilsson at 18:12—a power-play marker, the Flames’ first of the ‘84–85 season—enjoy a one–nothing lead over the Vancouver Canucks, a game reminiscent of the styles I’d expect the two teams to employ, and perhaps you do, too. The Flames coming off a year with high expectations, the semifinal last season against the Edmonton Oilers. Many people have already said that this is the year that the Flames will really get a chance to come on, and this is the gentleman [turn to Peplinski] that … can … perhaps …” Shannon was barking at me to stop. “No, Ron! Finish your thought over the scoreboard, come to a complete stop and then introduce the guest. Don’t just come back with, ‘Welcome back to the Calgary Saddledome, where it’s 3–2 Calgary, and I’m pleased to be joined by Jim Peplinski.” Start with ‘Welcome back to the Calgary Saddledome. It’s 3–2 Calgary after twenty minutes.’ Pause. Let them get the graphic off the screen while we go to a two-shot, then, ‘We are pleased to be joined by …”

  He continued teaching and explaining all during take two, but I plowed through, not letting it throw me. “We’re back live at the Saddledome in Calgary, where, after twenty minutes, the Calgary Flames, on the strength of a power-play goal by Kent Nilsson, their first of the ‘84–85 season, enjoy a one-to-nothing lead.