As we remember Darren Dutchyshen, it’s hard to not think of a momentous era in Canadian sports media

In September, 1997, TSN was readying for war. A new competitor was on the horizon, and network executives were hoping to suck up as much oxygen as possible before CTV Sportsnet hit the air. They called a news conference at TSN’s studios to unveil a new on-air look, a new slogan, and an overhaul of their programming. Focus groups had said they had found the network to be informative but not entertaining. TSN was preparing to let its on-air talent loosen up, be themselves.

“Sports is hard, aggressive,” declared Keith Pelley, who was then TSN’s vice-president of programming and last month became the new president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. “Our feel must be the same.” Pelley pledged the network would cater to what he referred to as the “tribal” nature of sports. “Our tribe is 18-to-49, males,” he explained. (If women found themselves watching the network, that would be fine, but they certainly wouldn’t be courted.)

To that end, Pelley announced TSN would be promoting its on-air talent more, encouraging them to share their opinions and have fun. He used the word “zany.”

“We’ve made some changes in roles to put people where we think they can best expose their personalities,” he explained. Chief among those personalities was Darren Dutchyshen, a ribald 29-year-old from small-town Saskatchewan who had impressed bosses so much during his two years with the network that they had tapped him to be co-host of the revamped flagship nighttime highlights show, Sports Desk. (It was renamed SportsCentre in 2001.)

Dutchyshen held the job for more than 26 years. Last Thursday, after TSN announced he had died – he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in the summer of 2021 – condolences flooded in from all corners of Canada’s sports world, including colleagues at the since-renamed Sportsnet, whose looming launch had helped vault him into the big chair all those decades ago.

Later that night, TSN’s supper-hour edition of SportsCentre opened with a moment of silence on a dimly lit studio, a pair of funereal flower arrangements bracketing the show’s logo on the main anchor desk. As the hour progressed, three of Dutchyshen’s former co-hosts – Rod Smith, James Duthie, and Jennifer Hedger – shared teary reminiscences, and producers played old clips of him joking around.

It was hard not to feel they were paying tribute as much to their late colleague as to a momentous era in sports media that had bound us all together for a time, fans and broadcasters, before our viewing habits changed. The shock of his death brought us up short, as though we realized we’d never taken a moment to reflect on what we’d left behind.

By the time Dutchyshen landed in the main chair, the role of late-night sports anchor was so central that the U.S. broadcast network ABC had given the green light to the hotshot movie writer Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The American President) to create Sports Night, a single-camera prime-time comedy set in a TV sports newsroom. A couple of weeks after that show debuted in the fall of 1998, CTV Sportsnet hit the air. By the following spring, Canadian viewers could tune in to at least five nightly highlight programs: Sports Desk, CTV Sportsnet’s SportsCentral, CNN’s Sports Tonight, The Score’s Headline Central, and Global’s Sportsline.

As with most TV programs, the highlight shows lived and died on whether audiences wanted to invite the main characters – which is to say the hosts – into their living rooms every night.

Last Thursday afternoon, I talked to Rick Brace, who, back in 1995, as the vice-president and general manager of TSN, was the one who hired Dutchyshen after seeing tapes of his work on ITV Edmonton’s Sports Night. The ideal host, he told me, was “someone that the audience saw as a friend, someone they could talk to, someone that wasn’t talking down to them.” Dutchyshen “wasn’t afraid to state his opinion. He would tell it like it was. And so he had great credibility with his audience.”

Nobody’s making fictional shows about sports anchors any more. Indeed, after the news of his death broke and archival clips of Dutchyshen began rolling across social media – he and his colleagues all looked so young and energetic, so big-haired and big-suited – it seemed inconceivable that anyone starting out in the business now might have his kind of career. Even among his own generation, Dutchyshen’s run was unequalled. Like Johnny Carson’s own three-decade tenure, which ended as the late-night talk-show universe was beginning to fracture, Dutchyshen’s quiet, steely possession of the co-host’s chair will be the exception.

Sports is at once more dominant than it has ever been – live sports is the only programming genre that can reliably bring together mass audiences – and at the same time a shadow of its former self, because sports programming that isn’t aired live has suffered the same fickle fate as many of the other genres.

There’s no more Sportsline, Sports Tonight, or Headline Central. (For that matter, Rogers bought The Score and rebranded it as another Sportsnet channel, so there’s no The Score, either.)

The highlight shows, which were as much the result of economic imperatives as cultural ones – they could be very cheap to produce, because broadcasters didn’t have to pay for rights to the footage – have now been supplanted by highlight posts on all of your favourite social-media platforms, lifted from the live broadcasts by hard-working crews employed by the teams and leagues, and distributed instantaneously. Nobody’s got the patience any more to wait until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. The hope is that the clips drive users to tune in to the live broadcasts – or at least, to put it in industry parlance, engage with the content in other ways. So sure, those users will probably keep scrolling – or placing bets, or chatting online with their friends – even as they watch the game. Until the algorithm serves up something more engaging.