Cornered

by Ron MacLean

  To this day, I would love to dwell more on these kinds of things, but I haven’t made time. If I could do more of anything, it would be to read more books. I remember the impact The Catcher in the Rye had on me. At the time, I thought Holden Caulfield was a lot like my mom. I’d sit in the back seat of the car and listen to her. She was a bit dark as she discussed, dissected and distilled a visit or a conversation. There was a real edge to her judgment. Not cruel—just full of details. Don’s like that too.

  I wonder if anyone has ever learned anything from something Don and I have said to each other. I hope so. If we have never given a viewer a teachable moment, that would be crushing to me. It’s always my hope and intention to impart something of value. Our intentions are always good, but then we interrupt each other and talk in short sentences, with our thoughts flying off the wall in a million directions. There’s no chance anybody outside of the two of us has a clue what we’re talking about. It’s good television, but it’s pretty much like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner—total shtick. My great ambition to teach the world something becomes a complete gong show.

  I have spent my professional life researching and getting ready for interviews. I take seriously the idea of hoping to give the listener something to take away. And it’s very humbling to realize that, no matter how much I think I know or have learned, I can’t quite trust myself to be right. I feel like I’m guessing at life. I’ll set out to achieve something positive and I’ll get absolutely nowhere—which is funny. It’s how it should be. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

  Who should we listen to? Jesus? Plato? Christopher Hitchens? We don’t know. We’re all guessing. I think it is fascinating that we go through our lives hoping that maybe the Pope or the Aga Khan has the key to unlock the secret and set us straight, or at least help us find peace. Looking for the answers, which has always been my drive in life, can be exhausting.

  Although I mostly cover hockey with the CBC, I also cover other sports, including the Commonwealth Games. In 1998, we went to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and did two hours of coverage every night. We had to link together all the sports that we were going to cover—track and field, gymnastics, swimming. My job was to provide intros and set-ups. When you do the same thing night after night, it can get very boring for the viewer, so we were always looking for an angle. Our producer, Terry Ludwick, suggested that writer Doug Toms and I go out each day with a camera and search for metaphors. One day, we had a shot of a train chugging across the landscape, much like you might see in an epic movie like Out of Africa, and I had an epiphany. The roots of it went back twelve years to 1986, when I watched the America’s Cup sailing from Perth, Australia. I didn’t know the first thing about sailing, but I got so absorbed in watching the boats on the beautiful waters of the Indian Ocean, I couldn’t go to bed. The train shot resonated even more powerfully within me. When I am on camera in front of a hockey game, sometimes I feel I get in the way of the train that is moving behind me. I had to be careful not to get in the way in Malaysia. There was such a richness of culture—Chinese, Indian, Muslim—in a wonderful, exotic setting. Few words were required. It was a very helpless and beautiful feeling to be in a place like that. We had a young editor, Trevor Pilling, who put together a montage to the Tragically Hip song “Ahead by a Century.” It was beautifully cut. Today Trevor is executive producer of HNIC. Talent will out.

  Sherali Najak was with me there, too. He is one of the finest producers I’ve ever worked with. Sherali could respond to the demands of the technical and production staffs at 100 miles an hour, but he could also spot if an individual’s blood sugar was low. His bedside manner was the greatest. Out of all the producers, he is the one that inspired me the most.

  On show days when we’re on the road, Sherali, our studio producer, Brian Spear, and I meet for breakfast at 9:00 a.m. Sherali brings a cool drink of perspective to all conversation. Brian is sharp and mischievous. He’s about 6’5” in a lanky frame. We rip life apart and share a lot of laughs. Sherali says that Christians think all Muslims are alike. He explained that there are Protestants and Catholics and Presbyterians and Anglicans, and that the Muslim faith is the same way. There are various denominations of Islam.

  One night, we were at a café in Malaysia and our audio ace, Howard Baggley, was singing a karaoke version of Bryan Adams’ “The Summer of ‘69.” Everyone was dancing, so I went over and asked a local girl to join me. She said no, and I came back to the table, deflated. Sherali laughed.

  “Ron, don’t take it to heart. She could not dance with you because she is Muslim and you are Christian. That just can’t happen.”

  I love the guy. He has a warped sense of mischief, but a profound sense of love.

  In the late nineties, Kelly Hrudey was hired as an analyst on Hockey Night in Canada. He would work alternate nights during the playoffs, between Don’s appearances. Kelly is a charming guy and was garnering good feedback. His manner was a nice contrast to Don’s rock’em, sock’em style. And so there was a big write-up about him in the National Post.

  Don Cherry came in after this big article and talked about it on Coach’s Corner. He said, “Well, I see Kelly got a great write-up in the paper today, and I have to admit, he’s doing a good job. He’s doing a real good job. I was watching him last night. You know, Ron, I’ll have to say, he’s a sharp dresser. And I couldn’t believe that a guy who spent all that time down there in La La Land could actually be a good dresser. But I said to Rose, ‘Rose, mark my words, there is going to remain one sharp-dressed guy in Hockey Night in Canada, and that’ll remain me.’ And I’m going to my closet, and folks, I promise you, I will have a few beauties for the third round of the playoffs. No doubt about it.”

  At that point, the producers put up a picture of Kelly in his Armani suit from the night before.

  Don said, “There you go. You see what I mean? What a good-looking guy. He looks like Kurt Russell, doesn’t he? The movie star.” Then they showed another picture of Kelly in his Hugo Boss suit. Don said, “There’s another beauty. Imagine, folks—I mean, don’t get me wrong, but all that time down there in the sun in Hollywood, it could ruin a guy. I mean, not too many guys come out of Hollywood dressing well.”

  Then they showed a third picture of Kelly, an old one from the late eighties. He was wearing an oversized purple suit with silver flecks and broad shoulders. Don said, “Oh, Kelly, me boy, I knew … I knew Lotus Land would catch up with you eventually. See, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, Ron. A lot of people out there in L.A., that’s how they dress. Kelly, for your folks in Alberta, that’s embarrassing. Not becoming at all.”

  And I looked at Grapes and said, “Clearly, Don, you were suffering premature jacket elation.”

  EPILOGUE

  I’m not super-fit, but I’m in good enough shape. I go to the gym two or three times a week, where I do ninety minutes of weight training. I rotate through different exercises under the supervision of a trainer named Karen Finnell. And I play hockey—beer league, twice a week. I play for the Coyotes on Mondays and the Black and Whites on Wednesdays. I’ve played with the same guys for years. We’re tight.

  Sometimes after games, we go for beers and I get on my high horse and start arguing about pride, talking about how it’s wrong to be proud, that you have to be grateful instead. Angus Brimacombe, who is one of my buddies, says, “Always a cause, eh, Ron? Always a cause.” I look forward to those beer-league games more than I do Hockey Night in Canada.

  I’m a little bit careless, a little bit reckless. I go too far sometimes. I’ll ski too fast, play hockey too hard, drink too much. I don’t eat well. Okay, I eat very badly—a lot of cheeseburgers, chocolate and beer.

  I never envision myself anywhere but where I am at the moment. That means I can’t picture myself at sixty or seventy years of age. I’m glad to have made it to fifty. It’s a crazy thing, but my mom once told me that she went to a fortune teller and the fortune teller told her, “You’ll have a child,
and he’ll die young.” That stuck with me. It was not something that I obsessed about, but I’ve given it a passing thought on my birthdays.

  I remember sitting in front of the cake on my fortieth birthday, ready to blow out the candles, and thinking, “I won’t see fifty.” This was a fortune teller at a fair, for God’s sake! Geez, Mom. Why would you tell me that? I think she did it because I refused to wear my bike helmet. She was a worrier, as all moms are. I have a team photo from when I was seven years old in Whitehorse. I’m the scrawny-looking kid, the only one wearing a mouthguard.

  Now that I’m fifty, I have started to realize that I don’t have many options left. I could open a coffee stand or a bed and breakfast. I always thought that when I was done in broadcasting, I’d set up a cool little bar on the beach in the Caribbean and call it The Wherewithal, after the Tragically Hip song that goes, “I’ve always loved that guy / And he’s not on TV anymore … / He had the wherewithal.” I’m not too sure Cari would go for that one.

  Do I sound pretentious? Oh God, I hate pretense. I also hate the thought that anyone would put me on a pedestal because of my job. I am on TV, which means I do my job in front of millions, but it’s still just a job. If you are going to judge me, do it on the basis of the way I treat people. I used to really get into it with my mom and dad. They never liked it when I got controversial, because, God forbid, I might lose my job. And, more than once, I’ve come close. I’ve always thought, “So what?”

  When I refereed in the OHA, I had a supervisor by the name of Bob Morley who would always say to me, “Ron, you need to do something about the length of your sweater. You look like Fred Flintstone out there.” Because I was on television too, I’d sign autographs in the lobby between periods. Sometimes the fans would get mad at a call and they’d fire the autographed papers onto the ice at me. A lot of humility comes with that job.

  When Cari and I first arrived in Ontario in 1986, I was called in to ref a game between Brock University and Ryerson. The game was at St. Mike’s Arena in Toronto. Brock was, hands down, the better team. The Badgers were coached successfully for a long time by Mike Pelino. In the third period, they were leading by five goals, but they could easily have led by fifty. There were about eight minutes to go when a Brock player crosschecked a Ryerson player at the blue line. The Ryerson Rams were embarrassed about the score. They were edgy and about to turn nasty. So I called over a couple of players from Brock. I was going to use my abundant charm to keep the peace.

  I said, “Now look, fellas, chances are I will call something marginal against you guys here in the next few minutes. I want to do it just to keep this thing under control. It will put the Ryerson team on the power play and they’ll be happy. It will stop them from worrying about revenge. Be forewarned, if I call something chintzy, it’s just to sidetrack them.”

  A minute later, I called interference off a faceoff, and Brock went ballistic. They climbed all over me. The players were in my face, calling me every name in the book. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” It turned out the guy I called the penalty on was in the running for the award for the most sportsmanlike player in the league, so he couldn’t afford the penalty minutes.

  Here I’d been telling myself, “I am going to do something that is in their best interest.” And they said, “Screw you.” And not for the first time, nor the last, I walked away thinking, “Ron, you pompous ass.”

  In September 2006, I refereed the final two periods and overtime of the Buffalo Sabres’ 4–3 pre-season win over the Pittsburgh Penguins. The other referee was Steve Walkom, who at the time was the NHL’s director of officiating. We took over for Kevin Pollock and Chris Rooney, who refereed the first period.

  After a few minutes, Walkom remarked, “It’s too fast!” And I remember thinking that it wasn’t fast at all. I’d been a solo referee for twenty-three years, and now I only had to worry about eighty feet. There was speed in the tight confines of the corners, but worrying about that was negligible because I was covering only half of the ice.

  Pittsburgh veteran John LeClair amazed me. Daniel Briere, Sidney Crosby and Max Afinogenov didn’t wow me the way LeClair did. I expected they would be as fast as they were. But he was just months away from being out of hockey, retiring because he supposedly couldn’t keep up, and he was so fast! I called a chintzy penalty on him in the last minute. Later, I said to Craig MacTavish, “You know, John LeClair just blew my socks off with his speed coming down the wing!” And he said, “Yeah, Ron, but he has a bad back, so he might only be able to do that one in every ten games, and that’s why he’s going [retiring].”

  I did find it was hard to stay out of the way, but beyond that, honestly, it was no different than refereeing a Junior C game. I don’t mean a horrible insult to the NHL, and it is not conceit. I just mean that art is the same whether you’re teaching at Harvard or teaching at Joseph Welsh Elementary in Red Deer. All the things I feel about broadcasting—let your guest be the star, look for those teachable moments—are the same in the art of refereeing. It didn’t feel at all like it was a step up. Even though Steve Walkom and the cameras tried to tell me it was.

  I try to catch all the games during the week. I’ll have one game on the computer and one game on the TV, and I have to resist researching, because then I’ll stop watching. And if I stop watching the game, I miss the essence, those great things that make a game dynamite. Let’s say Leafs winger Fredrik Sjostrom taps the pads of his teammate goalie James Reimer. On live television, in real time, it goes by in a heartbeat. If we catch it and replay it in super–slow motion, it can be illuminating.

  Grapes and I have a schedule. We talk on the phone every Saturday morning at 9:30. I refer to the notes I’ve made all week where I just theorize, jotting down ideas. Don makes a list of possible clips, too, and on Saturday morning we go over everything. And then I give the ideas to our producer at the CBC, Kathy Broderick, so she knows what’s on tap for the show.

  Finally, at 5 o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Don is in the building, and we look at clips and decide what is good.

  When a player needs defending, it should come from Don. Who cares what a Junior B referee has to say? I understand that. But at those times, I certainly don’t argue with him, which is, by default, my version of defending him too.

  I try to make sure the guy isn’t a jerk or a phony. But sometimes I go to bat for a guy I don’t know. I remember when Bobby Clarke phoned me, all hot because Dave Babych, a player best known for his time spent with the Winnipeg Jets and a fine NHL defenceman, sued the Philadelphia Flyers’ doctors. They had sent him back onto the ice with a bad ankle. I defended Babych’s right to do that. And Clarke said, “Ron, what are you doing? The players don’t like you for this position.”

  “I don’t care what the players think, Bobby. Let me ask you a question. Is Dave Babych a good guy?”

  And Clarke said, “Well, he’s dumb.”

  “Is he a good guy?” Clarke said, “Yeah, he’s a good guy.”

  I said, “Well, then, he deserves defence.” And Clarke got off my back. He understood that kind of dialogue.

  Glen Sather got after me recently. He phoned me and gave me a hard time because I was on Colin Campbell for not suspending one of his rookies, Derek Stepan, over a head shot. He was worried the kid would be stigmatized. I said, “Glen, me showing his cheap shot on Mike Green is good for Stepan. Now everybody will know the kid’s a little wingy. That’s good.”

  And he said, “Ah, you’re right.”

  On the air, I try to get from A to B to C as quickly as possible, but you can only prepare so much, because you have to adapt to what’s happening. So at sign-on, I start by thanking the minor hockey team that opens the show—you know, “Thank you to the Oshawa Legionaires, great job, guys …” Meantime, whatever comes up grabs my attention. Say there is a dramatic shot of Carey Price blessing himself—that means talk about Carey Price. And before that thought is done, maybe Josh Gorges does something, so time to follow him. I stay
absolutely in the moment, and most of what I thought I was going to say is lost. It’s like dancing with an expert dance partner. You have to let the pictures lead.

  One day during the 2005 Stanley Cup final in Anaheim, Grapes and I were driving from the hotel to the rink, and we were passing through a nice area with streets lined with palm trees. There was a homeless woman panhandling on the street. She looked to be in her fifties, blonde and pretty in a hippie-like way. I thought about her, so gorgeous but living a gypsy life. She reminded me of my favourite song lyric from the Eagles’ “The Last Resort,” which always made me think of my T-shirt shack/bar by the ocean. I told Don how I’d like to retire on the beach and then asked him, “What’s your favourite song lyric?”

  He said, “I like ‘Put your camel to bed.’”

  I said, “From ‘Midnight at the Oasis.’”

  He said “Yeah, because you know what’s going to happen next.”

  I love it that he still has love on the brain. Don never plans to retire.

  When I think about retirement, it usually leads to thoughts of my mortality. We all ponder it, I guess. I tell myself that when the diagnosis comes, I hope I deal with it well.

  I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution for retirement. I might end up teaching broadcasting, but I don’t plan anything and I don’t expect anything, so there is no sense starting now. Something will fall my way, and that will be that.

  Some days I daydream about doing a radio show like the one Jurgen Gothe did on CBC Radio 2 from 3 to 6 p.m. on weekdays. It was an eclectic mix of classical, jazz and some contemporary. He laced his show with anecdotes about his fondness for food, wine and locations that specialized in food and wine, like Tuscany. I liked that. It was a simple three hours of escape that I would catnap through.