Anchorboy

by Jay Onrait

  For whatever reason, even though I knew we would alienate a large part of the audience with our shenanigans, I was utterly convinced we were taking the show in the right direction. Streaming videos on the Web was starting to take off. Soon people would have access to highlights on their tablets and phones whenever and wherever they wanted. No need to wait until 1:00 a.m. eastern time for your day’s sports highlights anymore. We needed to deliver something more, give the viewers another reason to tune in. That’s what led me to cut a Phantom of the Opera mask out of lined paper and sing “Music of the Night.”

  It was actually pretty early on in the time that Dan and I hosted the show together. You can tell by the fact that Dan has 78 percent less grey hair and looks twelve years old. We were still “figuring out the show” to a large extent, and our crew was not used to elaborate sketches being performed on what was supposed to be a traditional late-night sports highlight show.

  That evening our nightly Top 10 category was “National Anthems.” We had already done this Top 10 several times before with all the usual suspects: Carl Lewis butchering the American anthem at a Chicago Bulls–New Jersey Nets game (“uh-oh,” he famously said after his voice cracked on a high note); Dennis (K.C.) Parks turning “O Canada” into “O Tannenbaum” at the very first Las Vegas Posse game in the Canadian Football League. This time, however, our Top 10 was inspired by a recently mangled anthem: the star of a local Baltimore production of The Phantom of the Opera treating the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at an Orioles game like it was his audition for American Idol. Holding the final note for an obnoxiously long time at an obnoxiously high pitch. The crowd didn’t know whether to clap or plug their ears.

  Knowing that we would play this clip leading into my introduction of the Top 10, I decided to make use of my two years of musical theatre training in Athabasca, the home of all major musical theatre productions. I confiscated a black cloth “shawl” that our camera operators use to “colour correct” the TV cameras before every show (I don’t know what that means either). That would be my cape. Then using skills I had acquired in kindergarten, I found a piece of regular lined paper and cut out a Phantom mask with scissors. I found several Phantom masks online and tried to draw the best one I could, poking a hole in it so I would be able to see the teleprompter. I used Scotch tape to fasten it to my hair, which would result in the painful removal of the mask moments after the shot was completed. I also soon realized that I couldn’t fasten the other side of the mask to the other side of my head or it would lose its effect, so the mask sat fastened to only one side of my head like a cottage screen door that was permanently flapping in the breeze.

  I tried to remember some lines from the musical to sing for the early part of the intro. My parents had taken my sister and me to the show at the Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton, so I was somewhat familiar with the material. “Music of the niiiiiiight” and “Christine, Christine” was about the best I could come up with. Later, viewers commented that I had a nice timbre to my voice, which I really appreciated. I was no Colm Wilkinson, but it was important to get this character just right.

  The intro featured me (as the Phantom) expressing outrage at the anthem singer in Baltimore, judging him “unfit to wear my mask” and dismissing his performance outright while mentioning I was a big fan of the Philadelphia Flyers’ American Hockey League affiliate … the Phantoms.

  As Dan pointed out during the intro, this was supposed to be a sports highlight show. I thought I might receive negative feedback or be told by my bosses at TSN to leave the costumes to the experts, but to my surprise and delight I heard nothing from my bosses and nothing but praise ever since from viewers. It was a bit of a TSN Turning Point in the show for us, proof that we could let these silly little ideas we had behind the scenes come to fruition on screen, breaking up the show a bit and separating ourselves from other shows of the same genre.

  I started to branch out with Dan a bit more. Growing up in northern Alberta watching and following sports, my friends and I began to take special pride in athletes who played and excelled in sports most Canadians didn’t traditionally excel at, like Larry Walker in Major League Baseball. Every time we’d watch Larry play outfield for the Montreal Expos and later the Colorado Rockies, we’d yell “Canadian!” in a high-pitched voice. I carried that tradition over to the show when I would voice a highlight pack and yell “Canadian!” when we featured someone like Toronto-born-and-raised Joey Votto of the Cincinnati Reds or Victoria-born-and-raised Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns. I knew it was resonating when people started yelling “Canadian!” at me on the street. But now when I walk anywhere around Canada, the thing most people yell at me is “BOBROVSKY!”

  There isn’t much of a story to it. In 2010, the Philadelphia Flyers signed as their backup goaltender a twenty-two-year-old from Novokuznetsk, Russia, named Sergei Bobrovsky. The first time I heard his last name it sounded like the last name of a rogue cop on the edge from a 1970s William Friedkin–directed movie such as The French Connection. A cop who regularly got called into his sergeant’s office and told to “turn in your badge and gun!” or he would be “off the case.” That was honestly it. There was nothing else to it. So whenever Bobrovsky got some rare playing time, I would ask Producer Tim to let me read the highlight package so I could come up with a different way of describing Bobrovsky every time (“You’re an embarrassment to the force, Bobrovsky!”) For whatever reason, this may go down as the most famous thing I ever do in my career. Two seasons later, Bobrovsky was traded to Columbus and became a sensation, putting together a Vezina Trophy–winning season with the Blue Jackets and landing on the cover of video game boxes. I was subsequently given much undeserved credit for the young goaltender’s success, even though, to this day, I have still never met the man.

  We were having fun. Our show repeated over and over in the morning the next day, so if we made a mistake we would have to fix it before it ran incorrectly another ten times. Eventually we realized it was a lot easier to create a segment where we simply acknowledged those mistakes. It would save us time and effort and potentially deliver a few laughs. That’s how our “Ya Blew It!” segment was born, where we simply list our errors at the end of the show and apologize for them. We called it “Ya Blew It!” as a tribute to two of our comedy heroes, Tim and Eric. Tim Heidecker used the line during one of their sketches on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! It seemed like the perfect title.

  People started to take notice of what Dan and I were doing, and we gained a little bit of a following. Mark Milliere’s idea was that because our late-night show repeated several times in the morning, kids would grow up watching us and continue to watch us as they got older, presumably ending up by tuning in at college when they returned from the bar late at night. It worked. We started to get people coming up to us on the streets telling us we were a major part of their childhood. Working with Dan was easy and fun. It didn’t feel like work. It still doesn’t.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fear the Beard

  AT ONE POINT DURING THE first couple of years Dan and I hosted the show together, I decided it would be a good idea for me to try to wear a beard on air.

  The list of on-air television personalities with beards is surprisingly small: Wolf Blitzer, Charley Steiner, the Most Interesting Man in the World, and so on. I could always grow a nice beard and mustache, and I thought it might be another way to set myself apart, or maybe I was just bored. Either way, I wanted to give the beard a shot. I had taken a week-long vacation and returned to work with a somewhat healthy growth on my face that might best be described as “George Michael in the ‘Faith’ era.”

  My idea was simple: I had to host an 8:00 p.m. EST update on TSN, I would have the beard on during the update, and if the producer at the time or anyone else thought it looked horrible I would just shave it off. I brought my razor and shave cream with me to the network that night, so I was ready for the worst. I hosted the update, and while I didn’t look bad I also needed a
few more days of growth to really let it fill in and look acceptable. The producer at the time, Mark Blimke, sat down beside me after the update and we both agreed I should shave it off. Just as I was about to leave for the washroom, the newsroom phone rang and someone called out, “Jay, it’s for you.”

  I picked up the phone at my desk.

  “Jay, it’s Phil King.”

  Phil King was the president of TSN at the time.

  “Uh, hey, Phil,” I replied. This was highly unusual. No network president had ever called in to the newsroom before at any point during my time there as a writer or a broadcaster. Newsroom and on-air issues fell under the domain of the vice-president of production.

  “What’s going on with your face there?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know, just tried to grow a bit of a beard but I don’t think it looked very good. I was just heading to the bathroom to shave it off.”

  “I saw it. I think shaving it off is a really good idea. Have a great night, Jay.”

  He has never called the newsroom since.

  Embarrassing as that was, it paled in comparison to the time Marek Malik threatened to kill me.

  About three or four years into our run on SportsCentre I was reading a set of basketball highlights when I saw on the script “MAREK MALIK AND HIS SON COURTSIDE.” Malik was a defenceman for the New York Rangers at the time, and he had taken his son to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. In the greatest act of stupidity in my short life (and that’s saying something), upon seeing a shot of Malik and his red-haired son on our studio monitor I blurted out on live television, “There’s Marek Malik and his red-headed stepchild!” Not funny, not smart, and overall just ill-advised. I nonetheless waved off suggestions from Tim and Dan that we re-record the segment for our morning reruns, thinking that Malik himself would never see it and no one would care anyway.

  The next day I awoke to an e-mail from our senior producer. Turns out the Rangers watched our show in the dressing room before the morning skate at Madison Square Garden. In fact, it turned out that pretty much every team in the league watched us before their morning skate. The idea that my words were not accountable was suddenly thrown in my face. The producer informed me that Malik had heard what I said and was “extremely upset” and was “threatening to do something about it.” This was of deep concern to me. I didn’t have Dominique Bosshart around to protect me now.

  Luckily, the aforementioned Pierre McGuire knew Malik and was able to contact him and convince him not to come after me like Liam Neeson in Taken. I basically avoided a well-deserved beat-down for my stupidity because I have good friends in the business who look out for me on occasion. Lesson learned. You never know who is watching.

  Sometime around 2004 I was asked if I might be interested in hosting the Red Bull Crashed Ice event in Quebec City. If you’re not familiar with the event, it can basically be boiled down to “roller derby on ice skates down a steep hill.” Only the most insane thrill-seekers choose to participate. Red Bull has achieved tremendous success with these extreme sports events, and Crashed Ice was sort of the pinnacle. It had appeared on another network before, but this year TSN was picking up the broadcast and wanted me to go to Quebec City to serve as host and give the play-by-play alongside future Hockey Night in Canada fixture P.J. Stock. We arrived on a Friday in the middle of January when Quebec was absolutely freezing cold. The event was scheduled to take place on NHL All-Star Weekend.

  Red Bull had apparently approved of my involvement, thinking that somehow my slightly bizarre style fit with their slightly bizarre “sports” event. Not surprisingly, the city was frozen that weekend, and soon after I arrived, upon realizing that my laceless John Varvatos Chuck Taylors might not have the warmth and grip necessary to navigate the streets of downtown Quebec, I ducked into a footwear store, picked out a big pair of Sorels, and charged them to the network.

  The event itself was an absolute blast. Hundreds of men and women had shown up from all over the world to participate. They would fly down the custom-made track in groups of four, bumping and shoving each other along the way but mostly just trying to stay upright. P.J. decided to try out the track himself and found it a humbling experience, falling flat on his stomach after the first steep decline past the starting gate. Not that I’m calling him out or anything, as I conveniently “forgot my skates” and didn’t make a run down the track at all. I feared I would lose my footing and go crashing into a pop-up poutine shack, scalding my pasty skin with hot gravy and cheese curds.

  Red Bull Crashed Ice was another example of my not handling stress well. It was our first year hosting the event, and although everyone working was highly experienced in live mobile production, it wasn’t a wholly TSN-produced event, so many issues were out of the hands of my show producer and director. Instead of having our own camera operators set up along the track, every network broadcasting the event was taking shots from the same group of camera operators, a clever cost-saving device to be sure, but it left us at the mercy of the one crew who was set up on the track.

  Communication was also a bit of a nightmare. Trying to talk to my producer over my headset was problematic at best, but the worst part was that the skaters were all wearing identical jerseys, making it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Suddenly, I had great sympathy for Bob Cole’s inability to remember names of players in his advanced age. This was my first shot at TV play-by-play, and I was up against it in a big way. I started to act petulant, demanding more communication from the producer in the truck and asking for changes to the jerseys. My complaints fell on deaf ears for the most part. These guys didn’t have time to address my concerns at this point. The race was about to start, and we were showing it on television no matter how difficult it would be for me to do my job.

  I started to get a bit depressed and sullen, returning to my room at the Hotel 71 to take a long hot shower and contemplate whether I’d get fired if I hopped on a plane and hightailed it out of there. It was at that point that I e-mailed Dan.

  Just as Mike Keenan had managed to calm my nerves by uttering the words “Park it” a couple of years previously at the NHL Network, Dan seemed to understand just what to say.

  “No matter how stressful the situation, losing your temper or freaking out about it isn’t going to make it better. It’s going to make it worse. It’s Red Bull Crashed Ice, not the Stanley Cup Final. Just go out and have fun. If you make mistakes, you make mistakes. Who cares?”

  The thing was, I cared. I still didn’t know exactly which direction my career was going to go at that point. In my mind there was still a chance TSN would see me host Red Bull Crashed Ice, be completely dazzled at my play-calling ability, and beg to send me to the odd Thursday night NHL game between the Panthers and Blue Jackets. This was never in the cards, but in my mind I still felt like I was actually auditioning. Still, Dan’s words soothed my frayed nerves somewhat, and I was able to get through the broadcast with a lot of help from P.J., who clearly had a ton of talent. Yet I could never shake the feeling that the producer and director who had been assigned to the event would forever see me as something I never, ever wanted to be seen as: high-maintenance talent.

  Thanks to a heavy dose of Catholic guilt running through my veins, any outburst on set during a broadcast is immediately followed by deep regret between my two ears. Dan has formulated a pretty impressive way to calm me down in those moments when he’s the one sitting next to me and he sees me about to go off like vintage Bill O’Reilly: He distracts me like a small child. Like the small child I still am in a lot of ways. He’s got experience at this kind of thing because he’s a father, the father of two infant daughters. So when he sees me start to go off the deep end, instead of muttering “Park it,” he distracts me by bringing up something completely unrelated:

  JAY: I can’t believe I fucked up those Marlins highlights. Goddammit!

  DAN: Did you see Walking Dead the other night? What a show!

  And then I start to laugh. It works every time.
>
  The truth is that in this business, for what I do every day, so much rides on your getting along with your co-anchor. We are asking a lot for people to sit and watch us on television when they could get the same highlights on the Internet. If the chemistry between the two anchors is bad, or worse, if the two anchors clearly do not like each other, absolutely no one is going to want to watch. Remember when they paired Dan Rather with Connie Chung on the CBS Evening News? Neither do I. There is no “train wreck factor” to watching local or national news or sports anchors who do not like each other. Viewers will just turn away. Trying to get along with someone at work whom you don’t like is difficult enough. Trying to do that while pretending to like the person in front of thousands and thousands of people is truly daunting. I’ve always believed the audience can see right through it.

  That’s what makes working with Dan such a treat. It really is just like hanging out with your pal and chatting about sports. Your cheap, lovable pal who is obsessed with sunflower seeds.

  Dan is also a dealmaker. We had filled in for our good friend James Cybulski on his afternoon show on TSN Radio in Toronto a few times and enjoyed it. We filled in for an entire week once, acting like our usual immature selves until the day Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke died unexpectedly in a training session. The news got out seconds after our radio show started, so we were forced to spend the first two hours of the show discussing it and interviewing people connected with her, including CTV’s own Brian Williams. Rob Gray, who was program director of TSN Radio, was impressed that we could actually handle ourselves in a serious news situation, and I think we managed to gain a modicum of respect from him.