How it started ... and how it's going

When one of the absolute legends of a sport you cover wants to know what got you in the same room together ... well, you better have a good answer. Here's mine.

Photo by weston m on Unsplash

It was sometime in 1994, early in my time at the Ottawa Sun, that I found myself seated in the office at the Minto Skating Club, which was then located on Lancaster Road (in the aptly named Minto Skating Centre).

Seated across from me was a silver-haired gentleman (and I use that term ‘gentleman’ in every sense of the word) named Donald Jackson. Yes, THAT Donald Jackson. Don, as he likes to be called, was the executive director of skating at Minto at the time, and it was my first chance (and extreme pleasure) to meet and chat with someone who is absolute royalty in Canadian skating to this day (he and his charming wife, Barb, have become friends of mine over the years). And somewhere along the way, after he ascertained that I knew a thing or two about the sport, he asked me this question: “How did you get involved with figure skating? Did you used to skate?”

The second part is an easy answer … and it’s a hard no. My specialty combination would be the double klutz followed by the single splat. And even then, I might be giving myself a little too much credit. As to how I got involved in covering the sport … well, here’s a much more detailed version of the answer I gave at the time.

Let’s take you waaaay back to the twenty something days of my life, when I had first decided he wanted to be a sportswriter. In my mind, it was the perfect way to marry being involved in sports (I sure as hell wasn’t athletic) and writing, something I felt I had a bit of a gift for and, quite frankly, just enjoyed doing (which, as I explained in my intro to this Substack, is kind of why I am here today).

If you asked me back then which sports I’d be most excited to write about, you would probably have heard the words football (I’ve been a huge fan since I was a kid) and hockey (hey, I am Canadian, right?) right off the hop. Maybe some basketball. The Olympics always fascinated me. And that would probably be the list.

Figure skating? Hey, it was fun to watch during the Olympics.

There was indeed plenty of football and hockey and basketball during my first job in journalism at the St. Thomas Times-Journal in southwestern Ontario. The summer months were filled with plenty of baseball, fastpitch and soccer, a sport I grew to appreciate more and more over time (when you’ve seen it played at an elite level, you’ll get what I’m saying. The Under-20 World Cup, which I covered at the Ottawa Sun back in 2007, remains one of my favourite things I’ve been a part of to this day).

However, as sports editor at the paper, which I was for all but the first year of my time in St. Thomas, you get asked to dip your toes into all kinds of unfamiliar waters. It’s the nature of the beast at a small town paper and you have a sports staff of two (which would be a luxury these days, to be honest, but that’s a sorry story for another day). And you get calls with ‘story ideas’ from many people … so many people. And among those folks are a group some like to call ‘skater moms’ (it’s not always meant in a positive way, but the vast majority of them are good, well-intentioned people). The thing you always have to remember, though, is this: these are people who are extremely proud of their child’s achievement. From your wide purview as a sports editor, what they have to tell you might seem like small potatoes. But it surely isn’t to them, so you’re patient, you listen, and you give them whatever mention you can in the paper. That was the job, as I saw it.

Few of those ‘skater moms,’ however, were as persistent as Rosemary Ball, when the subject was her two daughters Stacey and Sherry. She always believed they were on the road to big things and, as it turned out, she was right. Stacey would go on to win a bronze medal at the 1991 Canadian championships in Saskatoon with Jean-Michel Bombardier (yes, he’s Fiona’s dad). And Sherry would make it all the way to the 1992 Albertville Olympics with Kris Wirtz (as fun a guy as you’ll meet in this sport), after they placed third at nationals earlier that year in Moncton, N.B..

But back to how this relates to me. As it turned out, 1991 Skate Canada International was held up the road from St. Thomas in the old London Gardens, which was in a plaza located right next door to a Loblaws grocery store just off Highway 401 (this led to one of my all-time favourite hockey quotes, by Bert Templeton when he was coaching the OHL’s North Bay Centennials. Asked about playing at the Gardens by a local scribe, he cracked that it was the only place where you could ‘pick up two easy points and your groceries on the same night.’ But I digress).

If you’re among those who were in the building, you’ll remember it as the event in which the creaky old Gardens filled up with fog on rainy late October nights, which led to breaks in which skaters had to circle the ice furiously to get rid of the offending clouds. Quite the impression at my first major skating event, I have to say. Let’s just say it’s hardly standard procedure at these things.

Actually, the hook for me was this. I had come to the event to cover Stacey Ball and her partner, and watched them rise from fifth after the short program to the top of the podium. And to hear journalists who knew much more about the sport (which was everyone at the time) say things like “this just doesn’t happen very often” … let’s just say I knew I’d witnessed something a little special (remember, this was in the era of the old 6.0 judging system, when young, aspiring skaters were often told “you have to wait your turn,” which I always thought was a little silly). And best of all, it had a very big local angle to it. For a small-town newspaper guy like me, it was — to riff off a certain well-known sitcom line — gold, Robbie, gold.

(I should also mention here that the girls’ father, Art, suggested I interview Sherry and Kris at in London “for future use.” Yes, this dad really did know something)

It also led me to ask my managing editor at the time if they’d send me to Moncton for the Canadian championships. My pitch was simply this: St. Thomas to that point had never produced an Olympian in any sport, summer or winter. And I had a hunch this was going to be the first, a historic moment in local sport. Fortunately for me and our readers, I was there to report on it. Only it was Sherry, the younger of two Ball sisters, who earned that ticket. It was through that event, and Skate Canada in London, that I started to get hooked on this wild and crazy sport. Not just because it produced some great local stories, but because the atmosphere was so … electric. You have to be in the middle of a raucous standing ovation, to see something that literally brings people out of their seats, to know what I mean, but you just feel it, and you know it when it happens. And it’s so gosh darn invigorating. There truly is nothing like it.

The clincher for me came a year later … ironically in Hamilton, the city I now call home (and which is the inspiration for the title of this Substack. You live in Hamilton, you’re from “the Hammer”). The 1993 Canadian figure skating championships were truly an amazing sight to see, with the building then known as Copps Coliseum filled with 17,000-plus fans every night. This was boom time for the sport, and I have to say it was loud, VERY loud. It was almost comical seeing young fans streaming down the aisles of the arena to toss flowers on the ice every time Kurt Browning or Elvis Stojko skated (and watching the little flower retrievers gathering the mounds of them up).

While the days of those crowds at skating events in Canada have gone away, this guy still hasn’t. Thirty years later, I’m still at it, chronicling a sport with athletes that I greatly admire who are even better people. The Ottawa Sun gave me a wide enough platform to expand my time covering the sport and, I like to think, brought a different audience to their paper. It was good all the way around. It got me to five World Championships (1996 in Edmonton, my first Worlds, and 2001 in Vancouver will always hold a fond place inside me). I’ve been to 28 Canadian championships by my count, and dozens of other national and international events (since 2007, International Figure Skating Magazine was my ticket to a lot of these events but, as I’ve mentioned previously, that publication met its demise when its owner and publisher Susan Russell, also a dear friend, passed away sadly and suddenly at the end of February).

And I have to say it’s the people that keep me coming back for more. Many of my favourite interviews over the years come from this sport (I won’t even try to list them, I’m sure I’d forget someone) and while you’re always enamoured with the biggest stars in any sport you cover, it’s often the others that produce the most memorable moments.

Well, like this one …

As it turns out, it’s another Hamilton story. At the 1998 Canadian championships, an Ottawa ice dance team I covered a lot (Kristy Balkwill and Darryl Van Luven) had a mishap on the ice and couldn’t finish their skate. Kristy had to be helped off the ice (she had torn ligaments in her knee, as it turned out) and was sent to the hospital. Needless to say, there were no quotes forthcoming from her that night … or so I thought.

Probably an hour after the event, everyone in the media centre was packing up for the night and out of the corner of my eye, I see Kristy hobbling into the room on crutches, determined to fulfill what she felt were her media obligations (they certainly weren’t mine). I was astonished, to say the least, and didn’t have the heart to tell her that the paper’s deadline had passed for the night. But we still did an interview, and it made for a nice little story the next day. When I think back to that night (and I still shake my head when I do), it doesn’t surprise me that she has become a highly successful lawyer and has served on Skate Canada’s board of directors. She has that kind of character and determination.

It’s these kind of stories (and people) that keep an old sportswriter wanting to … hammer that keyboard. Even if he has to do it in his own little space now.

So yes, there is more to come. And here’s hoping you’ll join me for the ride and choose to support my work as a subscriber.