SIMMONS: The death of the great Canadian sports columnist

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Every day growing up in Toronto, two newspapers would be delivered to our house and the six of us would scrap over who got which section first.

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My father and I were the only sports fans — so I always got second choice.

If he was reading the Toronto Star, I got to read the Toronto Telegram. If he started with the Telegram — because in his words, they had better football writers — I got the Star.

Either way, I didn’t care. A newspaper was just part of our daily existence, like eating breakfast, like ball hockey on the driveway, like Flintstones at lunch time every single day.

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Two things I devoured every single morning: A bowl of cereal and the search for the columnists in the newspaper.

There was Milt Dunnell in the Star and later Jim Proudfoot and later than that, Wayne Parrish. They wrote columns you couldn’t miss. In the case of Dunnell and Proudfoot, I devoured their columns, always starting at the bottom where they wrote a few notes that consumed me daily.

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It was no different with Trent Frayne writing in the Telegram, except he didn’t use the bottom of his column for notes. Frayne was a master story teller, who went from the Telegram to the Sun to the Globe and Mail, to Maclean’s Magazine.

And if somehow a Globe wound up in your house, you could read Neil’s father, Scott Young writing on the Leafs or Dick Beddoes making you laugh with almost everything he wrote and later Allen Abel, for a brief run writing perhaps the most memorable sports columns in Canadian history.

Toronto was a haven for columnists in those days — Dunnell, Proudfoot, Young, Frayne, Beddoes, the syndicated Jim Coleman, the hockey and soccer specialist, George Gross: What a place to be a kid who loved newspapers and maybe more than that, loved sports columns, not knowing then that this would be my profession one day.

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I remember phoning home in second year university and telling me father I wanted to be a sports writer. He loved sports and loved reading about sports but didn’t love the idea of me being a sports writer.

“Are you prepared to be poor?” he asked me after a long silence.

I was too idealistic at the time to know better. Finances didn’t factor into my decision. Journalism is a labour of love. It’s never been a pay by the hour job. It’s a job that requires passion and curiosity and the ability to turn out 700 words against the clock with a deadline ticking and time always running out.

When I got my first full-time job at the Calgary Herald in 1979 I couldn’t wait to get started and I couldn’t wait for the time I would become a columnist. That was my goal. The wife of a veteran sports writer at the Herald laughed when I told her what I wanted to do with my life.

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“Everyone wants to be a columnist,” she said. “Nobody ever gets there.”

In 1982, at the age of 25, I became a columnist at the Herald.

The best part of getting the job other than the obvious was who you were working alongside. If I went to Vancouver, I got to meet Jim Taylor and James Lawton and Archie McDonald. If I went to Edmonton, there was Terry Jones and Cam Cole, the best 1-2 punch in Canadian column writing.

In Montreal, there was the brilliant Michael Farber and Red Fisher, and a long list of giant French Canadian sports columnists like Rejean Tremblay and Bert Raymond.

In Winnipeg, there was Jack Matheson and Hal Sigurdson.

In Regina, Bob Hughes. In Ottawa, Eddie McCabe and later Earl McRae.

Every time I walked into a press box, at whatever event, in whichever city, there was a legend standing near me – and I couldn’t believe how accepting they were of this young guy who was right beside them.

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Many of them became friends over the years, but there was nothing quite like Grey Cup Week. There would be a columnist or two from every major city in Canada, a murderers row of sports writers, to hang with, to watch, to listen to, to learn from.

The business has certainly changed in my 45 years of work. Most people I know don’t get papers delivered anymore. Most kids I know — age 40 and under, like mine — don’t buy newspapers or even read them. They don’t devour them with our breakfast the way we did as kids and still do as adults.

And the great Canadian tradition of legendary sports columnists has all but dried up.

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There are no daily columnists in Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton writing sports anymore. There are just a few sports writers at the Montreal Gazette and no daily column writers in Ottawa or Regina. Only Winnipeg seems to be staying to the old model.

I went to an event once with Parrish writing for the Star and Farber for the Gazette and Taylor from Vancouver and Reggie Tremblay for Journal du Montreal and Jones and Cole in from Edmonton and, if you ever want to feel like the dumbest kid in the class, hang around with that group.

Today, we have Cathal Kelly at the Globe and Dave Feschuk at the Star and, as good as they may be, they don’t seem like lifetime legends to me, the way Dunnell and Frayne and Young did back in another era.

I miss my seeing my old friends — so many now gone, like close pals Jim Hunt and Frank Orr — and more than that I miss picking up papers every morning across Canada and immediately searching for the sports column. It was a such a rich part of Canadian heritage and tradition.

Like too many things, gone with the times, not necessarily for the best.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

twitter.com/simmonssteve

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