Anchorboy

by Jay Onrait

  I realize that if you’ve never worked in the television broadcasting industry the term “pulling cable”, may sound like slang for gay sex. I can assure you that no gay sex occurred between Rod and me—though, let’s be honest, I would have done anything for a chance at an on-air gig. Pulling cable is really just keeping a hold on the cables that the camera and microphone might be attached to so no one trips and dies. In the case of field journalism, a cable puller is rarely required because the camera is powered by a battery, but that didn’t stop me from pretending my presence at Leafs practices was necessary.

  I’d show up at the Gardens wearing one of two blazers I had purchased from International Clothiers. Both jackets had been purchased for a total of $99 and were made of fabric that could best be described as “likely flammable.” After pulling cable for Rod or Lisa while they gathered story clips from players and shot their own stand-up for the story (the part of the story when the reporter literally stands up and talks into the camera, usually at the end), Rod would then hand the microphone over to me and allow me to basically say what he had just said. Albeit wearing a much, much cheaper jacket.

  The first couple of times were terrifying, and like all rookie reporters I would make the mistake of memorizing what I was going to say instead of simply making sure I knew my key talking points and trying to articulate them. Still, after a few trips to the Gardens and the SkyDome with Rod, I started to get more comfortable.

  I had ordered a horribly written book by two aspiring sports broadcasters titled, appropriately, How to Make It in Sports Broadcasting. I say it was a “book,” but it was really about as thick as a leaflet when it arrived at my door at 182 Mutual Street in Toronto sometime in the fall of 1997. But I did take one important aspect from the “book,” which I likely finished during one prolonged bowel movement: In the television broadcasting industry, a person’s demo tape should be no longer than five minutes, the first minute consisting of a montage of fifteen-second stand-ups and desk reads, ideally two of each to get to the minute mark. The opening montage served to remind everyone that television was, in the end, a visual medium. No sense in presenting your brilliant two-minute story right off the top if the news director you were applying to didn’t like the way you looked. The opening montage allowed news directors to see what you looked like on camera and hear your voice; if they liked what they saw or heard, then they could continue to watch and see if you were a good storyteller. If they didn’t like the way you looked or sounded, no amount of storytelling brilliance was going to get you that job.

  So I continued to try to get my “reps” in following Rod and Lisa and Susan around town. I remember once I was sent, alone, to Maple Leaf Gardens to interview then Leafs-owner Steve Stavro about the hiring of Ken Dryden as new Leafs president. In addition to being one of the greatest goaltenders to have ever played in the National Hockey League, Mr. Dryden has a reputation for being a tinge long-winded when he speaks in public. This day would be no exception. As Mr. Dryden went on and on about “completing his career” by “helping the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup,” I thought about writing a commercial spoof for Saturday Night Live called the “Ken Dryden Sleep Inducer,” which would simply have been a small playback machine with a speaker that spoke to you in Ken’s dulcet tones until you were lulled into a peaceful slumber. Listening to Ken Dryden speak in public is a little like listening to Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

  When Mr. Dryden had finished speaking and answering questions, a scrum of reporters gathered around Mr. Stavro to ask him about the hiring of Ken Dryden. I was first up. Or rather, I blurted my question out like an idiot before anyone with real credentials would get a chance to do so. And I began my question by addressing the Leafs owner and multi-millionaire at the top of my lungs:

  “STEVE …” I started.

  My camera operator, Tim Moses, a veteran of thousands and thousands of sports shoots, tapped me on the shoulder and in front of the entire Toronto media at the time corrected me:

  “MISSSSTER Stavro.”

  I was humiliated. What a douche I am, I thought. I recovered quickly and likely asked him how soon he expected to break their Stanley Cup jinx. Two years? Three years? Surely it wouldn’t take more than five. This was 1996.

  Meanwhile, back in the newsroom I was still working as an editorial assistant. I was kept on at the network throughout my final two school years at Ryerson. I would work nights, usually until midnight or 2:00 a.m., and then return home to an old rat-infested house I shared with my college roommates near the corner of Jarvis and Gerrard in downtown Toronto. Those of you familiar with Toronto may know the corner of Jarvis and Gerrard as the location of “Hooker Harvey’s,” a Harvey’s restaurant frequented by the ladies who walked the nearby streets of what was then Toronto’s thriving red-light district. Many a night I would return home from work at TSN, get off the subway, and be greeted on Carlton Street by a steady line of leather- and latex-clad prostitutes, who started to recognize me and couldn’t have been sweeter even though they were plainly aware I didn’t have the cash to spend an hour in their company.

  I’d get home and settle on the front porch with one of my roommates, drinking a few beers. You could see the back of Hooker Harvey’s from that porch, and we would laugh as we watched the hookers give out hand jobs behind the restaurant. This was the real definition of “pulling cable.” Guys would pull their jeans halfway down their legs, and the prostitutes would half-heartedly yank away like they were playing the slots in Vegas. If I had a nickel for every time I saw a guy get an awkward standing hand job from a lady of the night, I’d be a rich man by now. It was like having the world’s worst live sex show performed just for you every night. Life was pretty good!

  In addition to allowing me to record fake stand-ups for my demo tape, TSN was also gracious enough to let me bribe one of our editors with booze to help me put together a couple of actual stories for my demo. This merely involved taking a story that Rod or Lisa had already done, rewriting it in my own, less eloquent words, and tacking my stand-up on the end. Same clips, different voice, different reporter. The stories weren’t spectacular but the camera work was wonderful, and boy, did it look great to see me holding a TSN microphone. I still needed to do some desk work, however.

  I was terrified the first time I did a demo on the actual desk at Sportsdesk. Dennis Beram is currently the most senior show producer at TSN and the person who knows more about sports than anyone I know. He was producing all the “Sportsdesk Updates” that night, the one-minute sports package that would run at the top of every hour and still does on TSN to this day. I approached Dennis about stepping behind the desk and simply doing the exact same update Brendan Connor would have just done. The crew all reluctantly agreed to let me do it, just as all television crews reluctantly agree to work with me to this day.

  Once again, I grabbed one of my International Clothiers jackets, and with my palms sweaty and my brain running a million miles an hour, I waited as the Sportsdesk crew set up in the control room and made sure one of my co-workers was available to run the teleprompter. Thank God it took only one take. I made it through an all-important Milwaukee Brewers highlight package, smiled at the end, and signed off. After it was over Dennis came up to me and said, “That was pretty good!” It wasn’t an encouraging, nurturing “pretty good” like my mom would have given me. It was an “I can’t believe that was pretty good ‘pretty good.’” Coming from someone like Dennis, who held all sports anchors to very high standards, it was the greatest compliment I could have received. I ended up doing a couple more demos on the desk, and suddenly with my stand-ups, fake stories, and one-minute updates I had plenty of material to put together a respectable demo tape. The question was: Would there be a job for me when it was all done?

  CHAPTER 9

  I Wear the Pants

  AFTER TWO YEARS OF WORK at TSN and following the completion of my degree at Ryerson, I, like a lot of kids my age, backpacked through Europe with my best friend.
Although backpacking was the experience of a lifetime, three months of wearing the same pants is not something I would recommend. I literally wore the same pair of beige corduroys for ninety straight days, washing them perhaps three times. Looking back, I can’t believe I was wondering why I wasn’t getting more action. I did manage to make it to Wimbledon for a glorious day of tennis before returning home completely broke. Beyond broke, actually. I had to borrow funds from my parents just to make it home. Upon my arrival back in North America, I burned the pants. I’m surprised they didn’t start themselves on fire as I walked around Europe with those dirty fibres rubbing together.

  Back in Canada, I suddenly had no job and no place to live, so I travelled across the country by car to visit my parents at their new home of Kelowna, B.C., where they had chosen to retire. Instead of going straight to Kelowna I thought I would fly to Regina, visit my grandfather, and then rent a car and travel west, visiting every single TV station along the way. I was hoping to meet a ton of news directors and drum up some interest in me. I concentrated my search in western Canada because I knew the terrain, and the cities and stations were very familiar to me. After a couple of days of driving and meeting and greeting, I came upon Lethbridge, Alberta, fourth-largest city in Wild Rose Country. Following a quick visit at the Global TV station in town, I made my way to the CTV station and was greeted not by the news director but the nighttime news producer, who couldn’t have been nicer about a total stranger and gangly idiot interrupting her workday. She told me the same thing everyone along the trip had told me: NO jobs to be had at her station.

  But she did offer me hope …

  She mentioned that six months previously, her main sports anchor had left Lethbridge to take a similar job at Global Television in Saskatoon. However, his fiancée had stayed behind in Lethbridge. The sportscaster was not happy being away from his lady love and had been making noise about wanting to return home. The nighttime news producer surmised that there would therefore be a job open at Global Saskatoon within a few weeks, and if I was smart I would contact the news director there. I never got the name of that nighttime news producer, but I wish I had. She essentially jumpstarted my career without knowing it.

  The next day I was on the phone to Global Saskatoon and their longtime news director Lisa Ford, who had earned the nickname “Lita Ford” because, well, she basically looked the way you would have imagined the former member of the Runaways would look like twenty years after “Kiss Me Deadly.” I mean that in the best way possible. Leather jackets, long blonde hair, boots. She was awesome. I chatted with her over the phone briefly, and she told me to send her my demo tape and she would get back to me.

  I went to visit my parents for a week, during which time I was in constant contact with Lisa. I don’t know if I have ever been more determined to land a job in my entire life. The entire situation was perfect. Saskatoon was a city I’d been to many times before. There was a major junior hockey team (the Blades), and the University of Saskatchewan had some of the best athletic programs in the country. The junior football team had an especially storied reputation, and the city actually rallied around them and the other U of S sports programs. What really made the job special was the fact that they were still producing a local Sportsline highlight show right after the late news. Instead of having little more than four or five minutes to fill during the local newscast, I would be responsible for co-hosting and helping to produce a half-hour nightly highlight show. The perfect training ground for a future TSN anchor. Not getting this job would be devastating.

  I returned to Toronto, where I still had no place to live. Luckily the house right behind Hooker Harvey’s where I’d lived my last two years at Ryerson was still occupied by my best friends from school, and there was plenty of room and plenty of old, disgusting couches in the basement for me to crash on. TSN had generously agreed to bring me back on as a freelance editorial assistant. I could easily have picked up my life right where it had left off, late-night hand job shows and all, but I was now obsessed with landing that job in Saskatoon and getting my on-air career started.

  Two weeks later I got the call. Lisa wanted to hire me as the new sports director at Global Saskatoon. As it turned out, not only was one of her sportscasters returning to Lethbridge, another one was leaving to take a job at CTV in Ottawa. That meant there were two jobs to be filled, including the person who would be in charge of the department. In the wake of Sportsnet launching that fall and The Score having been on the air for a couple years, Lisa had been experiencing frequent turnover in the sports department, as more and more anchors had been treating Saskatoon as a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I planned to treat Saskatoon as a pit stop on the way to bigger and better things. She hoped that by handing me a job that was over my head I would grow into it and, more importantly, stick around for a little while. Like for five years. I had no problem with this idea. I had two weeks to pack up the few clothes I had, book a flight, and start my new job.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’m on TV!

  I WAS HAPPY TO HAVE landed my first real on-air broadcasting job in a city of 200,000 people and not 20,000 people. Instead of me finding an apartment in Saskatoon right away, my parents arranged for me to rent a room with my great uncle Reg, whom I had visited once in Florida but never really spent much time with. In hindsight it was like the set-up for an ’80s sitcom or a Bravo reality show: Young hotshot sportscaster moves in with seventy-year-old retired model plane enthusiast and hilarity ensues. Like a multi-generational The Odd Couple.

  Uncle Reg was a widower who had a nice bungalow about a ten-minute drive from the TV station. I had my own room and my own bathroom for the bargain price of about $300 a month. I was more than happy to stay with him, and we hit it off right away. Reg was long retired from working at General Motors, and when he wasn’t working on model airplanes in his basement and terrorizing the waitresses at the local Zellers diner, he was probably having a nice long nap. He was also a natural-born jokester, and I think he genuinely enjoyed having the company after having been alone for at least a decade at that point. His wife, my auntie Joyce, had died relatively young. He had a large mirror hanging in his entranceway, and I used to love to pretend to fix my hair for about ten minutes before I left for work every day, much to his disgust. He would retaliate by draping a towel over said mirror for me to witness when I arrived home. Just a couple of frat boys we were.

  About a month into my job, my new co-anchor on Sportsline at Global Saskatoon, Derek Bidwell, told me he was having a Halloween party and invited me along.

  Derek was a classic life-of-the-party guy, the one in the middle of the room good-naturedly making fun of everyone and making them laugh. He was born and raised in Saskatoon and had played for the Hilltops Junior Football Team. It seemed like the entire town showed up for the party at the bungalow near downtown that he was renting with a couple of his buddies. Derek dressed as a wizard or something and wore this long robe—it was a little like something you’d imagine Hugh Hefner wearing at the Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion. The party was a blast until everyone in the living room heard a massively loud THUMP and looked down the stairs into the basement to see Derek sprawled on the floor in significant pain. He was attempting to head downstairs to get more beer when he tripped over his flowing robes and went tumbling down to a likely concussion. He was off work for several days. I’m pretty sure he’s recovered, though with Derek it’s sometimes hard to tell. He will enjoy that joke.

  I had brought along my favourite booze mix from university: beers and tequila. Back at Ryerson it was my drink combo of choice. I genuinely always loved the taste of tequila even before we all started drinking good tequila. For Derek’s party I thought I’d bring tequila for everyone and get the party going, but the party was already going when I got there, and for some strange reason no one was that interested in drinking the tequila except me. I had even brought along salt and limes in a little Ziplo
c bag. It was all a little “Anal Retentive Fisherman” of me. It goes without saying that I had way more than my share of tequila that night.

  I remember taking a cab home, and as the driver pulled up to Uncle Reg’s mid-century bungalow, I puked all over the backseat. I am still amazed that I remembered the address in that state. The cabbie was obviously furious. I threw one twenty at him for the cab ride and another for his trouble, and by “his trouble” I mean my vomit. Somehow I managed to stumble into the front door. Once inside I tried desperately not to wake Uncle Reg, who was scheduled to begin the drive to his winter home in Florida the next day on November 1, the same trip he made every year. Once I had started vomiting beer and tequila, my stomach was not about to stop until all the offensive residue had been purged from my body. I puked violently and loudly throughout the night, relieved that I did indeed have my own bathroom and was not sharing one with Uncle Reg. My great uncle was a sound sleeper, and I peeked in on him a few times to make sure I hadn’t awakened him with my juvenile antics. I finally got to sleep around 4:00 or so.

  The next day I was scheduled to host Sportsline at 11:00 p.m. For the average hangover it’s reasonable to assume that by 11:00 p.m. you should be somewhat recovered and perhaps ready to go out and accomplish whatever task is in front of you, but on this particular day the booze had hit me harder than usual. After dragging myself into the shower and throwing on a suit, I went into the TV station and spent a good portion of the day sleeping on the couch in Lisa Ford’s office. I felt like absolute death, and it wasn’t getting any better as show time approached. To this day, I have never been that hungover in my entire life. Somehow I managed to finish writing all my scripts and even edit my own highlights, but this was interrupted by frequent trips to the washroom to vomit and to wish death upon myself.