Number Two (7 page)

B
ack in my days at Ryerson, in my second year of radio and television arts, I took an English class alongside a kind and beautiful student named Monita Rajpal. Monita was one of those focused and driven students who had
it
, and you just knew she was going to succeed in the industry one day. She went on to read the news for CityTV's CP24 Cable news channel, which led to a job overseas at CNN International, where she works today as one of the lead anchors for the worldwide news network out of their Hong Kong bureau. I love the rare times that I get to check in to an overseas hotel, flip on the television in my room, and see Monita, having not aged a single day, deliver the news in between episodes of
Amanpour
and
Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain
. It's always nice to see good, hard-working people succeed just as you hoped they would.

Back in second year, however, Monita was just a student like me who would take any volunteer gig that she thought could make a
difference after graduation. At that time, Monita was volunteering in the CityTV newsroom, likely fetching coffee and making copies. Then, one fateful day in December of 1995, she was tasked with recruiting other students to serve as unpaid waiters for the CityTV/MuchMusic Christmas party—a party that took place on the top floor of a bar called Montana at the corner of Richmond and John streets, right behind the City/Much building. I had zero experience as a waiter or bartender, but I was willing to take pretty much any volunteer gig offered to me. So, one Friday night I put on a pair of black trousers and a white shirt that I had ironed in my dorm room and walked to Montana for my first and only job in the hospitality industry.

A very nice but stressed-out woman was put in charge of the volunteers, and upon gathering us together when we arrived she set out to determine which of these ragtag students actually had any serving experience. I obviously had none, so they quickly decided that I would man the door and take entry tickets. This meant I would be the first person to greet such City/Much luminaries as Gord Martineau, Anne Mroczkowski, Ben Chin, and Steve Anthony—a longtime Much VJ whom I became friends with just before my time working in Toronto ended. Steve was a mile-a-minute talker with a terrific broadcast voice. Nowadays, Steve plies his trade as co-host of the CP24 breakfast show. His most notorious recent incident happened in late 2013 when, while reporting live from the Rogers Centre on an upcoming Monster Truck event, he made the inexplicable snap decision to perform a running drop kick on one of the massive tires on the Monster Truck in the background. You can actually hear his bones crack in the clip. Steve suffered a broken hip that required surgery. Every time I talk to him on the phone I just listen because I can never get a word in edgewise.

That evening back at Christmas 1996, however, Steve didn't differentiate me from the twenty-five other broadcast students on hand all trying to make valuable contacts while handing out drinks. And frankly, if I were him I would have paid more attention to the girls anyway.

Finally, after pretty much everyone else had arrived, the kingpin, City/Much boss Moses Znaimer, strolled in. He had his sister and CityTV reporter Libby on one arm and
Fashion Television
host Jeanne Beker on the other. It was a little bit like watching Hugh Hefner arrive at a party thrown at the Playboy Mansion, except instead of twenty-one-year-old surgically enhanced nude models, he was strolling in with his most trusted lieutenants. I wandered inside to help out in any way I could, mostly just making small talk and trying to flirt with Monita. After Mr. Znaimer arrived, it was time for the show—unfortunately not a band called in from his contacts at MuchMusic, which was a missed opportunity really. (I like to imagine it would have been someone cool from the early days of Canadian music video prosperity, maybe Platinum Blonde, Honeymoon Suite, or Maestro Fresh Wes—the possibilities are frankly endless). Instead, the show involved a yearly ritual utilizing the resources the network had already set in place, namely Speakers' Corner.

Speakers' Corner was a small video booth, just slightly larger than a standard telephone booth, that had been installed on the corner of the City/Much building. The idea for the booth came from its namesake in old London where Londoners could park themselves on a crate in Hyde Park and air their grievances about the current state of the British government (and the monarchy too, within reason). The original spot exists to this day, and I remember the digital team from Fox using it for a story they put together during the London Olympics when they had no rights to shoot any
actual Olympic footage in the venues and had to improvise (something Dan and I would become very familiar with at the Sochi Games in 2014).

The City/Much Speakers' Corner was a more updated version, featuring a camera that accepted one dollar coins for charity. Insert that loonie and you had exactly one minute to say whatever was on your mind. Unhappy with the current government? Job prospects for young people in the country? The Toronto Maple Leafs? This was your chance to have your say. It became a very popular tourist attraction and was actually turned into its own television show that aired Friday nights on CityTV. Innovative and cheap Canadian content.

About half an hour after Znaimer arrived on the scene, we were instructed to place chairs in front of a big screen that was being set up at the front of the room for some sort of presentation. The very front row was to consist of only three chairs: one each for Mr. Znaimer, Ms. Znaimer, and Ms. Beker. Once everyone had taken their places there was a palpable buzz in the air. Everyone here clearly knew something very interesting was about to happen, except for the volunteers—who were about to get a major shock.

I discovered that evening in December 1996 that the camera in the Speakers' Corner booth was active
at all times
, not just when you inserted your loonie. Everything that was said or happened in that booth on the corner of Queen and John streets in downtown Toronto was recorded for posterity.
Everything.

The projector turned on and a title graphic appeared on the screen that said “The Best of Speakers' Corner: City/Much Christmas Party Edition.” This could be fun, I thought. I was ready to hear clip after clip of hilarious would-be comedians going off about
issues in their life using language too obscene for television. Turns out I was selling the whole operation a bit short. There weren't really any rants to be seen, other than the occasional homeless person who had decided to sleep in the booth for the night and wasn't happy about the smell in the tiny confined space. For the most part “The Best of Speakers' Corner” featured a plethora of unspeakable sex acts in a tiny, confined, and rather filthy booth.

There was no subtle way to edit these clips together. The video started with a male and female making out in the booth and then a quick cut to that same female pulling out the male's penis and going down on him. She then looked to the camera and gave a wink, which led to a rousing cheer from the crowd. We were just getting started. A quick cut to a drunken frat boy whipping out his wang and pissing all over the seat in the booth, marking his territory if you will. This led to another quick cut back to the original couple. This time the woman was on top of the man and full-on penetration could be seen as clear as day. We were being treated to (
very
) amateur pornography for Christmas. On and on it went. A woman facing directly into the camera with a giant grin on her face as she was clearly being plowed from behind by some dude in the middle of a cold, dark Toronto night. More blow jobs, some women on men, some men on men, all of them met with cheers from the crowd.

The filth just continued on from there. Even more blow jobs, more fucking, more homeless dudes and frat boys pissing. I was actually a little surprised there wasn't a clip of someone shitting. I wondered to myself if the booth had a hose hookup right next to it so it could be sprayed down every morning. Finally, the video came to an end and the screen flashed “Happy Holidays” with a picture of Ed the Sock next to it, leading to a massive cheer from the gathered employees—a job well done for another year. I was
still in a state of shock. City/Much had a reputation for being the bad boys of Canadian broadcasting, but I did not walk into the company's holiday gathering thinking we would be sitting around watching dirty movies like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who had just discovered the parental control password on their parents' cable system. Maybe this was just a company that liked to film themselves?

A few years later, when I had just returned to TSN and the concept of viral videos had begun to take shape, the company's star news anchor, Gord Martineau, was featured in a video that had been posted online, likely by a disgruntled ex-CityTV employee. In the clip, Martineau stands next to fellow longtime City anchor Anne Mroczkowski and repeatedly grabs his nuts between takes of a news update.

“I've got your news right here!” he jokes.

It was clearly all in good fun and no one in the video seemed offended whatsoever, but it definitely stripped the stately newsman façade from Martineau in my eyes, for better or for worse. Later, in the same leaked video, longtime man-on-the-street reporter Jojo Chintoh can be seen in a Toronto home waiting for an interview subject who was upstairs getting ready for the day. While he waits, the camera follows Chintoh as he snoops around the home a bit—nothing too unusual or scandalous. The problem comes when Chintoh spots the family liquor cabinet and wanting a little morning pick-me-up proceeds to twist the top off a bottle of Baileys and put a sizeable portion into his Tim Hortons coffee cup.

This was the first viral video news scandal I can remember, and it didn't result in any of the offending parties getting fired,
but it did serve as a reminder that as long as your microphone is on and a camera is pointed toward you, you have to really watch what you say and do in this industry. And you have to treat people well, especially the people responsible for editing the holiday filth reel.

W
hen I arrived in Saskatoon in the fall of 1999 for my first job at Global Television, I felt ill-prepared for the task at hand. On-air presentation? I was barely adequate. Luckily, I hosted my first show on a Saturday afternoon when the only people watching were a bunch of seniors gathered around a television set in an extended-care home. The first broadcast went well enough, the second even better, and from there I got into a decent rhythm.

As sports director, I was expected to run a department that included three additional people: my co-anchor on
Sportsline
, our weekend solo anchor, and an intern from a broadcasting school, who would likely do as many interviews and file as many reports as anyone because, hey, it's Canadian TV and free labour was what made it all work. All three individuals in these roles were older than me and yet somehow I was expected to supervise them. I'd barely gotten my feet wet in the industry and already I was required to
correct writing mistakes, assign stories, and tell guys when I thought their on-air performance was lacking—even though I was clearly no expert. It was something I was never completely comfortable with, but the guys in the department were so laid back they made it easier. I mentioned Derek Bidwell, my co-anchor on
Sportsline
,
in
Anchorboy
,
and R.J. Broadhead, who was the weekend anchor. Both guys were easy to get along with and true professionals (Bidwell is laughing reading this because no one in his life has ever called him a true professional). I didn't socialize with either of them too much, however, because I didn't think it was my place. I quickly realized how difficult it was to be a young boss with colleagues your own age or older—people you would normally hang around with but who were suddenly off-limits because you had crossed over to management. This is especially true of interns, who are supposed to be learning from you and taking guidance. But for whatever reason I hit it off with our intern that year in Saskatoon, and it had nothing to do with his looks—which are hideous.

Reid Wilkins was born just a few months before me in 1974 and grew up much like I did in a small Alberta town about an hour from Edmonton called Evansberg. Reid's dad was principal at the local school, and the family lived on an acreage about ten minutes outside of town. He was the school valedictorian, so obviously much smarter than I was, but he also loved sci-fi and comics and all the things I liked. Like me, Reid went to the University of Alberta after high school, but unlike me he actually completed his degree. Then, while working at an Edmonton Blockbuster Video, he decided his lifelong love of the Edmonton Eskimos, Montreal Canadiens, and Montreal Expos was a great reason to dive into the broadcasting business. He enrolled in the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology School of Broadcasting and a year later successfully nabbed an internship at my station, just a few months after I arrived.

We hit it off right away, often spending afternoons in the office doing a rather diabolical Chris Cuthbert impression where Cuthbert, one of our favourite broadcasters, had actually turned into a violent sociopath and was now verbally abusing his colour commentator John Davidson in the broadcast booth. Cuthbert's voice always had to be very high pitched to exaggerate the slightly higher octave his voice took while calling the CFL or NHL.

CHRIS: Well, JD, it looks like the Leafs' defence is easy to penetrate, just as your home will be easy for me to penetrate when I invade it tonight and steal all of your possessions!

JD: Chris, why are you saying this? Why are you saying this on-air to me? This is totally unprofessional!

CHRIS: J . . . D . . . you disappoint me.

This could go on and on for hours. I would be in tears most afternoons talking about Cuthbert the psycho and John Davidson, the sad mensch who had to sit there and take his abuse. People around us trying to work in the newsroom would often shoot us looks like: “What the hell is wrong with you two?” But hey, we were on a roll!

After a year in Saskatoon I made my way to Winnipeg to host a morning breakfast show, while Reid stayed behind to finish his internship and eventually land a job as a sportscaster in Lloydminster, Alberta—or Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, depending on how you looked at the map. “Canada's Border City” was split pretty much down the middle by two provincial lines, and their small CBC station saw many future broadcasting stars pass through on their way to bigger things. Reid was thrilled to get the job, and I was thrilled for him.

About six years later, both of our fortunes had changed, and not necessarily for the better.

I had just walked out on my first wife and triggered a divorce. Things had been bad between us for some time, and I just couldn't go on living like a miserable jerk all the time. So I found an apartment in Toronto's Kensington Market and filled it with my friends' old IKEA Poang chairs so I had something to sit on. Job-wise things were great. After a couple of years working together at TSN, Dan and I were really hitting our stride as an anchor team. Great things were in the cards professionally, but my personal life was a complete shit show. I was making way more than my wife, and I knew I was about to take a major financial kick to the balls. Aside from that, I was depressed about the end of my marriage. My parents have been happily married almost their whole lives, and I struggled to understand why I couldn't get things to work out with my own marriage. We had been so happy at the beginning, but then we moved to Toronto and everything changed. After the separation, I started seeing other women, which for most guys would have been enough to cheer them up, but I was still down in the dumps and needed a pick-me-up.

Meanwhile, Reid was doing even worse. The initial joy and excitement of getting that first job in Lloydminster had worn off, and that's because Reid was
still
there. By now he was running the sports department at CBC Lloydminster, but with all due respect to the good folks who have made Canada's Border City their home, most young broadcasters working at that station soon moved on to greener pastures. For whatever reason, though, this was not the case for my friend Reid. He had applied for several jobs, only to fall just short each and every time. Reid was tired of living in Lloydminster, missing his friends and family back in Edmonton. He was also beginning to wonder if he really had a future in the broadcast business, or if he should just use his outstanding intellect for greater monetary gain somewhere else.

These two similar dips in our life trajectories got us to talking on the phone one day. We both had some vacation time banked, and we had always talked about doing a classic baseball road trip—driving from stadium to stadium, watching game after game, drinking tons of beers, and eating way too many hotdogs for any healthy human. Now that I was no longer married, I was free to hit the open road with my buddy, so we planned the trip for early in the 2007 season.

We decided to concentrate the trip on the East Coast. There were so many potential trips we could have done in the Midwest and out West—Wrigley Field in Chicago beckoned, as did the beautiful and much lauded Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. But we only had a week and we wanted to take in the maximum number of ballparks possible. Besides, by sticking to the East Coast, we would also be able to hit the two most famous sports halls of fame in America: the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland.

DAY ONE

To get from game to game, we decided on my 2005 Nissan X-Trail, a vehicle that my wife liked to call a “soccer-Mom car.” “Any vehicle that comes in champagne should not be driven by a man,” she said. Mine was black, but it still wasn't very cool. Still, it was a comfortable ride and it had a six-disc CD changer, which was still somewhat revolutionary in the days before MP3s and then streaming took over and changed the way we listened to music. We actually brought CDs on the trip. We decided to allow ourselves five each, taking into account that we were possibly trying to introduce each other to some new bands.

One of the things that used to make me laugh the most about
Reid when I first met him back in Saskatoon was his unabashed love of the English hair-metal titans Def Leppard. Growing up as we did in the '80s, Leppard was just about the biggest band in the entire world. Their first album,
High 'n' Dry
, made them stars, their second,
Pyromania
,
made them bigger stars. And then they took a long hiatus following a tragic accident in which drummer Rick Allen lost an arm, then learned to drum again while in hospital using a revolutionary computer foot-pedal system. Once Rick had the technique down, they went back into the studio and recorded their third album,
Hysteria
,
which made them total megastars. The album ended up being one of the biggest sellers of all time and spawned a myriad of hit singles that dominated rock
and
Top 40 radio throughout 1989. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was into Def Leppard that year. They filled stadiums around the world multiple times over. Then they took another unexplained four-year hiatus before returning with
Euphoria
in 1993, featuring perhaps the worst follow-up single to a megaselling album ever, “Let's Get Rocked
.
”
As I heard the song and watched the horrible computer-animated video for the first time at the young age of nineteen, I just knew it. “It's over,” I told myself. They were done being a megaband and would continue on for the next couple of decades as a nostalgia act, alongside groups like Kiss, Poison, and Cinderella.

But Reid had taken an entirely different view. While I was listening to Radiohead's
OK Computer
and Fatboy Slim's
You've Come a Long Way, Baby
in 1999, Reid was acting like the past ten years had never happened—for him, Leppard was still on top of the music world. He waited for every new Leppard effort like he was a thirteen-year-old waiting for the Backstreet Boys to release their new chart topper. I thought he was joking at first, pretending to be into such an unfashionable band simply to be ironic, but he was
absolutely serious
about his love for Def Leppard.

So when Reid showed up for our road trip, I wasn't at all surprised that he'd made sure to bring
Vault: Def Leppard Greatest Hits
, along with a few other staples of classic rock, like
Van Halen's Greatest Hits
,
and a future classic,
Queens of the Stone Age
.
I predictably gravitated toward indie rock that I hoped might pique his interest in some newer music, though in the end the album of mine he ended up liking the best was Weezer's
Pinkerton
, an initially maligned follow-up to the band's debut album that effectively ended their careers before becoming a classic in hindsight and reviving the band's fortunes years later.

With our CDs loaded in the six-disc changer, we were ready to hit the open road. We crossed the border at Niagara Falls, drove through Buffalo as fast as humanly possibly (sorry, Buffalo), and began to make our way east toward Cooperstown for our first stop: the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I honestly don't know what I was expecting when we pulled into Cooperstown on a surprisingly poorly marked road that afternoon. I guess I was picturing a charming little town in the middle of upstate New York with a beautiful shrine to America's Pastime. For the most part that's what I got, though I couldn't quite believe how different baseball's approach was compared with hockey. Hockey historians have famously argued about the birthplace of Canada's favourite game. Did the first stick and puck action take place in the Maritimes? Ontario? Quebec? It seemed the easiest and most logical solution to situate the Hockey Hall of Fame in neutral territory—Toronto's downtown—where it has thrived for the most part in an old bank building close to the Air Canada Centre, home of the Maple Leafs. Cooperstown has history on its side, because
all
baseball historians acknowledge it as the birthplace of the sport.
The town is literally centred around the Hall of Fame—and pretty much nothing else. There is really nothing else to do there. The entire town is even more remote than you might expect. But the Hall was really spectacular and set up beautifully.

The thing I remember most distinctly was the newest display in the Hall at that time: Curt Schilling's bloody sock. Schilling, a talented veteran pitcher who had joined the Boston Red Sox as Boston attempted to finally break the Curse of the Bambino and win their first World Series in eighty-six years, had torn a tendon in his right ankle earlier in the 2004 post-season. In any other situation a pitcher with such an injury would be out of the lineup for a while, but Schilling refused to sit, and after having doctors suture his torn tendon he took the mound in Game Six of the American League Championship Series in one of the most memorable relief-pitching appearances in history. The Fox TV cameras kept cutting to Schilling's ankle just above his right cleat where blood appeared to be leaking out and staining his sock. The Red Sox went on to win the ALCS after being down 3-0 to the Yankees and then went on to the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals, where the same scenario repeated itself for the cameras as the gutsy veteran Schilling started Game Two.

Legend had it that the ALCS bloody sock was thrown in the trash at Yankee Stadium, but the World Series Game Two bloody sock was immediately donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame after Boston won the World Series and finally exorcised their demons. Our visit to Cooperstown was just a couple of years after that happened so the whole scenario was still fresh in our minds, and everyone who visited the Hall that day gathered around the glass case to admire the sock. Pretty hilarious to think about all of us gathering around a display case to admire a sock, but that's what makes the Hall so great: real baseball fans gathering together to see little pieces of history in person.

Sadly, not even ten years later in 2014, Schilling was broke—the victim of some bad investments—and decided to auction off the sock to pay his creditors. I suppose we were lucky to see that bloody rag when we did. When the sock did sell it went for almost a hundred grand! A little piece of baseball history gone to the highest bidder, and we had been there to see it.