Fun and Games: My 40 Years Writing Sports - Softcover

Perkin, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 177041312X ISBN 13: 9781770413122

Publisher: ECW Press, 2016

Synopsis

"Covering many of the biggest names and greatest events in sports, it's a wonderful collection of yarns and reminiscences, told in Perk's inimitable style." -- Postmedia

"Few can spin a yarn with the wit and clever turns of phrase that Perky can." -- Shi Davidi, Sportsnet

After forty years of encountering a myriad of athletes, fans, team managers, and owners, Perkins offers unique observations on the Blue Jays and Raptors, fifty-eight major championships' worth of golf, ten Olympic Games, football, hockey, boxing, horse racing, and more

Dave Perkins was once told by a bluntly helpful university admissions officer: "You don't have the looks for TV or the voice for radio. You should go into print." Which he did, first at the Globe and Mail, and then for thirty-six well-traveled years at the Toronto Star.

In Fun and Games, Perkins recounts hysterical, revealing, and sometimes embarrassing personal stories from almost every sport and many major championships. Learn why Tiger Woods asked Perkins if he was nuts, why he detected Forrest Gump in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and why Super Bowl week is the worst week of the year. Perkins exposes the mistakes he made in both thought and word -- once, when intending to type "the shot ran down the goalie's leg," he used an "i" instead of an "o" -- and to this day, he has never found a sacred cow that didn't deserve a barbecue.

"Anyone who has ever spoken to Dave Perkins, or read Dave Perkins, remembers his voice. This book is a delightful way to experience it all again, through the wise funny man's eyes." -- Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star sports columnist

About this title

About the Author

Dave Perkins wrote about sports and the people who played them for 40 years. He lives in Toronto and shows up on Bob McCown's national radio show when the host needs to be straightened out. Brian Williams is an iconic sportscaster, known for his work on CBC, CTV, and TSN, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

From the Back Cover

Find out what it's like to have "the best job in town"

Dave Perkins was once told by a bluntly helpful university admissions officer: "You don't have the looks for TV or the voice for radio. You should go into print." Which he did, first at the Globe and Mail, and then for 36 well-travelled years at the Toronto Star.

In Fun and Games, Perkins recounts hysterical, revealing, and sometimes embarrassing personal stories from almost every sport and many major championships. After 40 years of encountering a myriad of athletes, fans, team managers, and owners, Perkins offers unique observations on the Blue Jays and Raptors, 58 major championships' worth of golf, 10 Olympic Games, football, hockey, boxing, horse racing, and more.

Learn why Tiger Woods asked Perkins if he was nuts, why he detected Forrest Gump in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and why Super Bowl week is the worst week of the year. Perkins exposes the mistakes he made in both thought and word -- once, when intending to type "the shot ran down the goalie's leg," he used an "i" instead of an "o" -- and to this day, he has never found a sacred cow that didn't deserve a barbecue.

From the Inside Flap

Find out what it's like to have "the best job in town"

Dave Perkins was once told by a bluntly helpful university admissions officer: "You don't have the looks for TV or the voice for radio. You should go into print." Which he did, first at the Globe and Mail, and then for 36 well-travelled years at the Toronto Star.

In Fun and Games, Perkins recounts hysterical, revealing, and sometimes embarrassing personal stories from almost every sport and many major championships. After 40 years of encountering a myriad of athletes, fans, team managers, and owners, Perkins offers unique observations on the Blue Jays and Raptors, 58 major championships' worth of golf, 10 Olympic Games, football, hockey, boxing, horse racing, and more.

Learn why Tiger Woods asked Perkins if he was nuts, why he detected Forrest Gump in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and why Super Bowl week is the worst week of the year. Perkins exposes the mistakes he made in both thought and word -- once, when intending to type "the shot ran down the goalie's leg," he used an "i" instead of an "o" -- and to this day, he has never found a sacred cow that didn't deserve a barbecue.

Excerpt. İ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The gentleman said right up front that he didn’t wish me to die, at least not at any time soon. What he hoped for, he said, was that my children got rectal cancer and died, painfully, in front of me. That would serve me right, he was implying, for saying something he did not appreciate about his favourite hockey team.

Well, I thought, as long as the punishment fits the crime.

Other emails, always anonymous of course, have more directly wished every possible painful death upon me, or commented freely and usually disparagingly about my appearance, background, family, thought processes, teeth, genitals (a true favourite), hair, hairline, waistline, apparel, choice of friends, immigration status, emigration status and, once, the vehicle I drove. The guy had no idea what I drove, but he just knew it was a horseshit car. Occasionally, someone would simply disagree with what I wrote without feeling the need to bear arms. Even more occasionally, they would agree with something I said. My favourite email once told me that while I was right about everything I had written that day, I still was a piece of shit. That kind of suggestion makes a guy feel . . . better?

I think back 30 years, to the time Blue Jays fans were first getting up on their hind legs and making their feelings known en masse to chroniclers. When someone or something in print displeased them, or they merely had what they thought was a better idea, they put thoughts down on paper, addressed and stamped an envelope and went to the post office to mail it. I always figured, since they went to that trouble, that I owed them a read of their thoughts. Hell, sometimes I even agreed with them. The best reader response you can get is the civil one that says, “I believe you’re mistaken and here’s why . . .” Those often seem to be the ones that feature such antiquities as correct spelling and punctuation, too.

So there you have the opposite ends of one little corner of the newspaper business, a noble but (alas) slowly dying enterprise from which I now am happily retired after 40-plus years of labour. Perhaps people, meaning readers, are dumber and more vicious now than they used to be, or perhaps it’s simply the speed and anonymity of the internet that emboldens them to make personal attacks with impunity. I have given up trying to figure it out.

I said I was happily retired and I think I truly am, although every now and then the Blue Jays do something that causes the Toronto Star to try to lure me out of my chosen idleness, at least for a day. Plus, I got into the sports-talk radio business as a kind of a poorly paid hobby, doing the minor sidekick act now and then with Bob McCown on his national radio show. I suspect McCown, who is huge within the industry, wanted me around for two reasons: one is that he seems to have fought with every other co-host and parted company with them, as they say at the racetrack; and two, he remembers when he and I played on the same high school football team nearly 50 years ago and, possibly, he suspects I know where some of the bodies are buried.

Nah, not me. I was always better at burying the lead paragraph than bodies.

I began working at the Globe and Mail in 1973 while still studying journalism at Ryerson, moved over to the Toronto Star in 1977, worked full-time there until 2010, hung around as a freelance weekly sports columnist — the dreaded columnist emeritus, we called them when it was someone else — until 2013 and then went off to do a tiny bit of teaching and have my heart attack. In my time with both papers, I did everything imaginable, starting as agate clerk, copy editor, layout man, slotman, police reporter (very briefly), assistant sports editor, racing handicapper, racing writer, baseball writer, baseball columnist, sports editor and general columnist. That is almost chronologically correct, with my two and a half years as sports editor crammed in between the end of the Blue Jays’ first period of glory, in late 1993, to the beginning of, for want of a better description, the Tiger Woods Era in mid-1996. That time as sports editor is better left undiscussed, because neither me nor the job was suited to each other. I used to say I went into the job having zero children and soon had 31 of them. To be fair, you should hear what the staffers say about my time at the tiller.

I would hesitate to call it a highlight of my time as sports columnist at the Star, but one moment stands out for mostly ridiculous reasons and centred on Hulk Hogan and professional wrestling. Now, pro wrestling is not a sport, certainly. On the other hand, it is entertainment and it is popular, from time to time, among the masses, although I would guess the mouth-breathing segment of the population would seem to be more keenly appreciative. Regardless, WrestleMania was being held at the SkyDome and Hulk Hogan was in town to beat the drums for the show. The sports columnists of Toronto’s daily newspapers were invited to some kind of function. Mr. Hogan likewise attended and part of the shtick was that in order to provide gag photographs, he would put headlocks on certain invited guests including the sports columnists, which meant this one. I reluctantly played along, although once in the vise of his arm I was astounded less by Hogan’s size than by his miserably foul breath. I have no idea if this was a one-day occurrence or if this was a weapon he used to his advantage in the ring, but Jesus, it was gruesome. I think my eyes were watering.

This was the second instance of contact with pro wrestlers I could have done without. One late night in P.J. Clarke’s, the historic watering hole on Manhattan’s Third Ave., I was tucking into bacon cheeseburgers with Tom Slater, my Star pal and fellow baseball writer. This was the late 1980s; I was still smoking cigarettes and it was still legal to smoke cigarettes in restaurants. (These days, I believe it is a capital offence even to talk about such a thing.) So there we were, at one of the little tables in Clarke’s back room and no more than two feet from another tiny table, this one occupied by a very large wrestler named the Million Dollar Man, who was billing and cooing with a very sweet young thing. The wrestler, whose legit name was Ted DiBiase, leaned over and tapped me and asked if he could take one of the cigarettes from my pack, sitting on the table. Help yourself, I told him. He lit up.

Almost immediately, the sweet young thing desired nicotine and Ted again leaned and tapped and asked for a nail. Permission was happily granted. They enjoyed their smokes, they chatted, we chatted and drank and, a while later, came another tap and another request from Ted.

Well, enough was enough, right? Before I thought about the wisdom of my intended response, I had blurted out, “For crissakes, you’re the Million Dollar Man. Can’t you buy your own goddamn cigarettes?”

This was not entirely clever. With a few possible exceptions, pro wrestlers tend to be steroid-addled monsters of debatable intelligence. And here was I, couple of drinks in me, insulting one of them in front of his girlfriend for about 30 cents’ worth of tobacco. Ted’s eyes narrowed. He was not pleased. I suspect I realized what I had done, because I laughed nervously and pretended to be joking. If I remember correctly, Slater jumped in and helped defuse the moment by proffering his own pack of smokes. We left shortly afterward.

Other than the state of Hulk Hogan’s breath, the only thing I learned from my term as SE is that one word applies to every sports fan who is asked, in surveys and such, what he wants in his sports section. That word is MORE. As in, they want more of what they want and they don’t necessarily care what anyone else wants. I kept correspondence for years — until burning it all in a cathartic moment a while back — which made me realize what I was up against when I was fortunate enough to be sports editor of the country’s largest newspaper. There were, because I counted and filed them, 131 various written pleas for more coverage. These would come from fans, officials, executives, parents and unidentified strangers, pleading for more information, and not only on the stuff you figured, like hockey, baseball, football, basketball, horse racing etc., which we filled our pages with every day. We called this exercise, “shovelling 10 pounds of shit into a five-pound bag.”

I was being urged to devote more space to things like darts, synchronized swimming, Frisbee, martial arts, wrestling (both amateur and professional), skeet shooting, bicycle racing, car racing, motorcycle racing, snowmobile racing, skydiving, orienteering, fishing, hunting and many others. My two favourite letters were from a person outraged because we weren’t covering the fireworks events at the Canadian National Exhibition and from someone else, who I always assumed had a straight face when they were adamant that we should have sent a reporter to a chili cook-off. Why should we have covered these two? Because they were “competitions.” I was urged to give more space to sports for women, for aboriginals, for amateurs, for the disabled. Many letter writers made compelling arguments. A few made threats. A subdivision of 28 different and separate activities claimed to be “Canada’s fastest-growing sport.” Which, as most physicists and mathematicians might agree, is a neat trick.

You get the idea. It’s why I suggested my time as a sports editor should remain mostly undiscussed, although perhaps I have already failed in that regard.

Anyway, to use one of my favourite words, whatever job I held, I always considered it the best job in town at the moment. I would suggest the quarter century I spent as a sports columnist at a big, rich paper that for the most part spared no expense to do things correctly is undeniably the best job in town, at least for a newspaper stiff. Which is all I ever wanted to be, at least after I got into the business.

I tried to pay attention to the events I covered and while I’m an accomplished talker, I’m a decent listener — and look at the opportunities I had to pay attention. I got close, as the title of this tome suggests, to the greats and the ordinaries of sport over the years while covering (deep breath) 10 Olympics games, 58 golf majors, 10 Ryder and/or Presidents Cups, a dozen Super Bowls, 14 World Series, hundreds of NHL, NBA and MLB postseason games and thousands of regular-season games. Plus thousands of horse races, even a few car races. On the other hand, no tennis, except during one Olympics. Not much curling, either, although I like curling and curlers and wish I’d had more opportunity.

I took pretty good notes and I had a pretty good memory, too, and loved to both hear and tell a good story. There’s a little Rolodex somewhere in my head and before age rusts it out, I thought it might be a good idea to put down some of these yarns on paper, or on a screen somewhere or a plastic key or whatever this activity ends up being. I have a little rehearsed patter of favourite stories that I can summon on demand when asked. I have my radio-grade stories and my stories that would get me suspended from the radio. There are inclusions and omissions from both lists.

Caution, to some degree, is not uncommon. Once, speaking to Arnold Palmer after Tiger Woods had hit his fire hydrant and gone through a very public humiliation over his infidelities, I angled toward a question

Edition details

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 177041312X
• ISBN 13: 9781770413122
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336