by Ron MacLean
Brian replied that he had no interest. And that he’d had a nonstop “rain of shit” from HNIC. He was referring to Coach’s Corner, where Grapes complained about the way the Leafs’ coach, Ron Wilson, was treating Kadri. Grapes said, “You had a kid last year with a swagger, kinda cocky, and he’s got magic hands. You tellin’ me this guy couldn’t have played last year? … Lookit here, he got six goals here and he got one lousy game! And the guys they had on right wing … you coulda put the kid on right wing. He can’t get into any trouble. He goes down to London, dominates, and then they brought him up here and he’s gotta play on defence! I have never in fifty years seen a kid treated as a rookie like this guy. Why ridicule? Maybe knock him down a peg or two. Why go to the kid and rip him in the paper like that? I don’t understand it myself. Terrible. Dumb move.”
I texted back and reminded Brian of the positive things Don had said on the same show. Grapes had high praise for the fourth line. “Zigomanis, last game, five-for-five on draws. Terrific! Colton Orr, Brown, Zigomanis—that’s my type of line!”
I told Brian he was either not listening, bullying or just worn down and venting. “Brian, that makes no sense … This is silly. I’d enjoy the chat and, obviously, so would the viewer.”
Brian wrote, “Pass.”
I let him know I was banking on him for the CBC blog I was writing. I told him not to be a fascist and said that Gary Bettman showed up on XM Radio each week. Brian answered that he had no obligation to come on the show. And that I could write and say whatever I wanted. We went back and forth some more, ending with him finally telling me, “I am not doing it. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
I texted, “Huh?”
He replied, “Shakespeare.”
That 1985 training camp was magical. Glenn Hall was an assistant coach for the Flames. Glenn, who was the first butterfly goalie, was one of my heroes. From Humboldt, Saskatchewan, Glenn won the Calder Memorial Trophy as rookie of the year in 1955–56, took home three Vezinas as best goalie, won the Conn Smythe Trophy in 1967–68 for most valuable player of the playoffs and made it into the Hockey Hall of Fame. The Flames were trying to figure out who was going to be the backup goalie to Réjean Lemelin. Donnie Edwards had moved on, so it was between Doug Dadswell, Marc D’Amour and Rick Kosti.
After practice one morning, the scouts and coaches, including Gerry Blair, Ian McKenzie, Al Coates and Al MacNeil, took off to eat while Glenn was in the washroom, so he was stuck at the rink. I happened to be there too. It was just me and Glenn Hall. We went to the little rink concession and had french fries and coffee. I was just thrilled to spend an hour alone with him.
The scouts all came back to watch the next session of practices. They all sat in a row behind Glenn, who was holding a huge black binder. I feel kind of bad about what I did next, but it’s the truth. I was two rows back, and I tried to peer into Glenn Hall’s binder so that I could get the inside track on who the front-runner for the backup goalie job was. I saw that Glenn was working his Sharpie marker, and I figured I might be able to see who he was complimenting—Kosti or D’Amour or Dadswell.
I manoeuvred myself into a position where I was finally able to see what he had been writing and was now showing to the scouts. It turned out he was telling the guys what he thought of them for taking off at lunch and leaving him with me. In big block letters, he’d printed FUCK OFF.
I just loved that about Glenn Hall.
That trip to Moncton was a great education. Cliff Fletcher was such a presence, and he has never changed. He was with the team in the Soviet Union a few months before the communists relinquished power. I was there, too, covering the Calgary Flames just ahead of the 1989–90 season. Calgary, the Stanley Cup champions, played an exhibition series with the Washington Capitals. The games were played in St. Petersburg, Kiev and then Moscow. Calgary also played the Central Red Army, the reigning Soviet champions, in Moscow. It was kind of a big deal.
Don Wittman and Harry Neale were on that trip with me. The night before the Red Army game, Don passed a kidney stone. He was so happy he ordered a bottle of champagne. Don’s not a big drinker, but he had forged through such pain and he wanted to celebrate. I was lying low because I had been partying during my days off. I wasn’t going to touch a drop that night. It was the night before a game, and I’m disciplined that way. After Don ordered the champagne, in walked Cliff Fletcher with Boots, his wife at the time.
Cliff was frustrated because he’d lined up a big night out for the Flames. He’d booked thirty-seven seats for dinner, and thirty-nine people showed up. The Soviet system was very strict—you could not go into the restaurant with two extra people—so Boots and Cliff did the honourable thing and gave up their seats. Cliff was telling us this story, and he said, “To make matters worse, as I was leaving I bought a bottle of vodka, and I screwed up the exchange. It was six bucks and I paid sixty.”
The champagne started to flow. It turned into a complete runaway that night, a really fun night, but we all had way too many drinks for a night before a game. None of us was feeling very crisp the next day.
The coverage was not live, because of the time difference. We had to tape two openings, one for Sports Channel America and one for the CBC. Harry, Don and I could not get the name of the American network right. Every time we were supposed to say “Sports Channel,” we’d say “Super Channel.” We were so punchy we’d start laughing, and that made us screw up even more.
We didn’t manage to get it right before the first period started, so we agreed to tape the opening in the first intermission. We would still have time because, due to the tape delay, the game would not start in North America for another twenty minutes. At the end of the first period, Calgary had scored two goals, and it was time for us to tape the opening of the show. Harry went on and shamelessly declared, “I have a feeling Calgary’s going to come out flying!”
12
CRASH EDITING
I learned early on just how seriously the CBC takes its news programming.
On April 30, 1986, the second-round playoff series between the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers went to a seventh game. Edmonton had taken home the Cup the previous two years. They were the favourite and were hockey’s glamour team, with Wayne Gretzky, who at twenty-four years old had 52 goals and 163 assists for a record-setting 215 points. And they had Jari Kurri, Glenn Anderson and Paul Coffey, who were all Wayne’s age and had huge stats—68, 54 and 48 goals respectively. Add to that Mark Napier, Mark Messier, Charlie Huddy, Dave Hunter, Steve Smith, Marty McSorley and Grant Fuhr, and you have just an incredible team. Nobody on Calgary had the kind of stats the Oilers had—Dan Quinn had 30 goals and Lanny McDonald was second with 28—but they were a tough, tough team. Gary Suter, Al MacInnis, Hakan Loob, Joel Otto, Brett Hull, Doug Risebrough and Jamie Macoun beat Wayne and the boys 3–2 in the final game, and that was the end of the Oilers that year.
John Shannon thought the Oilers’ exit was a bit abrupt. He felt that the former champions deserved a proper send-off, so he elected to keep the show on past 11 o’clock Eastern time with a little video tribute to Wayne and the team. The network was livid. He caught hell for doing it and was fired by the CBC.
On May 24, the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup by eliminating Calgary in five games. That night, after the broadcast, we all went out to a bar called Three Cheers. Dave Hodge, Howie Meeker, John Davidson and Don Wittman were all there, and I had stars in my eyes. We all sat together talking hockey. I was too fascinated to leave—I stayed until 6 a.m. But I was pacing myself; I had only a few beers.
The following night, a Sunday, I was scheduled to host the 5:30 sportscast on 2 & 7. CFAC had a liberal union, so I could edit my own highlights. Nobody had computers back then, so we would load tapes into two Beta machines, which by today’s standards would be like two DVD players with record, and simply cut from one to the other. We called it crash editing. I knew I didn’t have to worry too much about the sleep deprivation, because the report on t
he Canadiens’ ouster of the Flames was going to take up roughly eight minutes of the ten minutes scheduled. That meant I needed only two minutes of material for sports. The only other big story that day was the Indianapolis 500.
All afternoon, I edited the highlights of the seventieth running of the Indy 500. Looking at the tape, the action on race day started before the race even began. Kevin Cogan was placed in the middle of the front row between Rick Mears and A.J. Foyt, and as the drivers approached the start line, Cogan swerved right, bouncing off Foyt’s car and then into the path of Mario Andretti. It caused confusion and collisions farther back, and four cars, including Cogan’s, were too damaged to continue on in the race. Foyt’s team made repairs to his car, and he was back out for the restart, which was delayed by forty-five minutes. Foyt said Cogan “had his head up his ass.”
Foyt took the lead on the restart, but Mears took over. After ninety-five laps, a failed transmission linkage on Foyt’s car forced him to pull out from the race.
Meanwhile, Rick Mears continued to lead. With twenty laps to go, Gordon Johncock took the lead. With a few laps left, Mears caught up, and with one lap remaining the cars were side by side. Johncock held off Mears to win by 0.16 seconds, which at that time was the closest finish ever. Considering how tired I was, it was a nice piece.
The sports started at 5:45 p.m., so at about 5:35, I decided to take one last look at my highlight package. This time, I noticed a graphic in the upper right-hand corner of the screen that said Indianapolis 500, 1982—and this was 1986. I thought, “Now, why would it say that?”
I checked and found out that the Indy 500, scheduled to be run on May 25, had been rained out. (They tried again the next day, with no luck, and finally ran the race on May 31.) In its place, ABC had aired a rerun of the 1982 race. I had edited the highlights of a four-year-old race!
With six minutes to go, I grabbed a feature off The George Michael Sports Machine, a syndicated sports show that CFAC subscribed to. The studio director began counting down to an empty chair. I managed to get the story loaded, then leapt across the room and landed at the sports desk in the nick of time. I had come very close to joining John Shannon on the unemployment line.
13
GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE
You always hear a lot of sports stories where people feel they were destined to become something. Mine isn’t one of them. When I was young, I was really interested in Hockey Night in Canada, and for my eleventh Christmas my dad gave me a Hockey Night in Canada historical double record album set that I loved. But so did millions of other boys my age. My story is simple. I lucked out.
In addition to his role as host of HNIC, Dave Hodge accepted a job at CKNW Radio in Vancouver in 1986–87. It was a full-time position, but CBC wanted him to continue hosting Hockey Night on Saturday nights. He gave the CBC just one condition: whenever Vancouver had a Saturday night home date, he’d host from there instead of flying to Toronto.
There were ten Saturday nights in the 1986–87 season when Dave would be working in Vancouver, and the CBC needed a guy in Toronto to fill in. Dave had hosted the Leafs’ Wednesday night telecasts on CHCH-TV in Hamilton, and he’d given that up, so they needed the same guy to be their studio host.
John Shannon, the producer for Hockey Night in Canada in Calgary, suggested I phone Don Wallace, the executive producer of HNIC to let him know I was interested. “You should try to get your foot in the door,” he said.
The front-runners to replace Dave Hodge were Brian McFarlane and Brian Williams. But on a tip from a producer named Jim Hough, Wallace agreed to give me a shot. Hough’s argument was “Ron’s twenty-six, just like Dave Hodge was when he started. I’ve worked with him. He’s solid. And rather than try to replace a legend with either of two guys who are so well known, you’re probably better off to take a young guy. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back to Williams or McFarlane.”
It was the same principle that hurt Dan Rather when he replaced Walter Cronkite. On the other hand, if the CBC were to use some flunky or lackey for a couple of years, just to show how bad it could get, then Brian Williams had a much better chance to replace Hodge.
This was all shaking down at the end of September that year. The hockey season was a week away, so they were in a bind. I got the job.
Of course, it meant I would have to move to Toronto.
I went home and talked to Cari. We took a long walk around the neighbourhood. She had already given up a great job in Red Deer so that I could take the job in Calgary, and would now have to do it again. I didn’t want to leave Calgary either. I loved working at CFAC. The job that the CBC was offering was just part time, and I’d also work part time at CHCH in Hamilton. The combined salary was $41,000. This was the same money I was making in Calgary, but the cost of living would be a lot higher in Toronto—for one thing, there’s no sales tax in Alberta. We were going to be broke.
“Then why go?” Cari asked.
I said, “Because I think that if I don’t, someday I will be watching Hockey Night in Canada and will wonder, ‘What if I had gone to do those ten games? Could I have parlayed that into a career?’” She understood, and we both agreed I’d give it a shot.
Cari and I packed up and we moved east. I went ahead because I had two games to host on October 10 and 14. It all came together bang, bang, bang.
On the advice of Don Wallace, who lived in Oakville, I picked out a little place in a neighbourhood called Bronte. It was a beautiful little spot. When I first saw it on Thanksgiving weekend, it looked like Shangri-la. Paradise. For me, a kid from Red Deer, it was practically the Caribbean. It was a sunny day, and the blue sky reflected off a beautiful deep blue marina. There was even a little bit of beach. I called Cari and told her it was ridiculously pretty.
I flew home so that Cari and I could drive across the country together. I am not a car guy, but I had a new black 1986 Thunderbird that I really liked—it had a nice look. My first car was a Dodge—a big, black Polara with a push-button transmission that I’d paid $200 for with money I’d saved working at a Gulf gas station and car wash. It was huge—a big boat of a car. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I was at a farm party near Delburne and parked it next to a swamp. It was raining, so the ground was not as solid as I’d thought it was. The Polara slid down a muddy embankment and sank into the swamp on the LaGrange family’s ranch, where I’d left it. It’s probably still there.
My next car was a white Dodge Coronet that I bought because that model and colour was all the rage with the police, especially the NYPD. It almost met a disastrous end as well. One night my best friend, Todd Swanson, dropped me off at home and we saw the Coronet parked up on the boulevard. I was surprised that I had parked it there. I thought, “Geez, Ron, what were you thinking?” And then we realized the back end was crunched. Todd noticed droplets of oil leading down the road and said, “Let’s follow it.” The trail ended only seven or eight doors down. I knew that there was a kid about my age who lived at that house, and I suddenly felt bad for the guy. I started thinking that I probably couldn’t cobble together the money to fix the car, but maybe it was still drivable. But Todd, my buddy who had done the detective work, was ready to grab the guy and beat a confession out of him. So now I was in a bind. Should I call the police and get the insurance money? Or tell Todd to forget it? He was so pleased with himself for having done such a great job of sleuthing that I had to go with my best buddy. We called the police, they caught the kid, and my car was hauled to a garage and repaired.
My first new car was a 1981 Honda Accord. I got nicked for speeding in that car a few times. It wasn’t as if I was tearing all over the place. I just had a lead foot when I wasn’t paying attention. I’d be listening to something on the radio, because I was so into radio. When I got that absorbed, it led to trouble. And that’s what happened to Cari and me as we toured across Canada in the Thunderbird.
I am not the best morning person, so we’d stopped for breakfast at Tim Hortons. Back in the car, I t
urned on the cruise control at a safe 110 kilometres an hour and, thanks to Timmy’s donuts and coffee, I began to wake up. We were about seven hours northwest of Oakville, and Cari and I were talking about Blind River, which was to our right. I said to her, “Hey, Bug, do you know how to tell where the water is the deepest?” I’m not a fisherman, and I don’t know why the hell I was making idle conversation at 9 a.m., but she feigned interest. And, feeling like David Suzuki, I turned and pointed to the river and said, “Wherever the land enters the water at the steepest is where the water is deepest. The topography of the land will give you an indication whether it’s gradual or shallow.”
I turned back to the windshield, and the glare from the bright sun in the eastern sky made me squint. I saw a car up ahead, parked in the middle of the highway. At that point, I had about a hundred yards to stop. I hit the brakes as hard as I could and continued to do everything you shouldn’t do. I veered into the oncoming lane to try and avoid it. I might have cleared the car, but it turned left into me. It was a slow impact. The front of my car was crunched. I’d run into Sandra Tonelli, or she’d run into me. Sandra was a cousin of John Tonelli, the big winger who played for the Islanders and then the Calgary Flames.
The long and short of it is that, when I got to Oakville, the insurance company dropped me. I was twenty-five and had had too many demerits. I had to hire a lawyer to get off a careless-driving charge. I probably shouldn’t have told the officer at the scene that I’d been pointing at the river before the collision.
Our car limped into town, and it was an overcast day, so the winds had shifted. All the emissions from the Petro-Canada plant in Burlington and the steel refineries in Hamilton had gathered over the area. It looked like something out of a dystopian movie like Twelve Monkeys. We were driving into the abyss. The smell was worse.