Category Archives: Personal

Sports Dad and Little Girl

Many of you know that our daughter got engaged recently. The wedding will be near the end of the summer. We couldn’t be more thrilled! Amanda is actually my step-daughter. She is Barbara’s daughter from her first marriage, but she’s been a part of my life since she was 3 1/2 … and I couldn’t possibly love her more.

I’d never really seen myself as the father of a little baby. But I had always figured I would get married some day and have children, so jumping in with a child Amanda’s age seemed just about perfect. But, of course, there were challenges. She still had her father, so what would my role be?

4

In truth, I know I was a more lenient parent than Barbara really liked. As I saw it (and as we like to say in my family), I often felt that my job was to “try to keep the clubhouse loose.” Didn’t mean I wouldn’t be firm if I had to be, and when I sometimes got told “You’re not the boss of me!” I knew it wasn’t that Amanda didn’t see me as a legitimate authority or thought I was trying to replace her father. The truth was, even as young as 4 and 5, she had a pretty strong sense of herself as a person and felt that she was entitled to a role in the decisions made about her. She was just as likely to challenge her mother that way. And probably her father too.

I had grown up in a very close family. My brothers and I bonded with our father (and each other) through sports, but there was a lot more to the relationships than that. Same with Amanda and me. In her younger days, she always went to schools that were closer to her father’s neighborhood. That meant when she was staying with us, I always drove her to school in the morning on my way to work and picked her up at daycare on the way home. We had some of our best times talking to each other on those car rides together.

Still, sports would be a special part of my bond with Amanda too. She was fearless playing all sorts of games with my brothers and me at our family cottage. She was never (and still isn’t) much of a hockey fan, but Amanda loved baseball. I took her to her first Blue Jays game when she was about six years old. I have never liked to leave a game before it was over, but I was going to let her make the decisions that day. I didn’t want this to feel like a chore she had to get through.

Cottage

My family has great seats, which certainly helped, but after a few innings, Amanda said she wanted to go up to the small play area they had in the SkyDome for young kids. She played there for a while, and when she was done, I fully expected she’d want to go home. Instead, she said, “can we go back and watch the rest of the game now?”

A proud moment indeed!

Amanda always had fun at the games, and when they were over she liked to leave by climbing over the seats, rather than walking up the stairs. (An early indication, I guess, that climbing would become her favorite sport!) Barbara and I still laugh about the time when an elderly male usher admonished her with, “son, please don’t climb on the seats.”

I loved going to games with Amanda, and she was always excited when the Blue Jays won … but I couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad sometimes thinking back to the Glory Days. Over the years that Amanda and I were going to games together, even the most exciting victory tended only to make the difference between finishing, saying, 14 games behind in the standings instead of 15. She never got to see them as a contender when she was growing up, but it was so much fun for me to see how much she got into it all over again – even though she was (and still is) all the way out in Vancouver – when the Jays were finally back in playoff contention in 2015 and 2016.

Jays

Over the years, Amanda has had a couple of serious boyfriends. Barbara and I have always liked them. The first time we met Brent, it was clear to us that he was crazy about her. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen how much she’s grown as a person with him at her side. He’s a wonderful man, and they’re so clearly great together.

I promised Barbara that this story would be about Amanda, but I don’t think that I can really do it justice without saying that when we told them about Barbara’s cancer diagnosis in March, the way Amanda and Brent initially dealt with it was to grab their gloves and a ball and go outside to play catch and talk about it.

How could he not be the one for her!

Update on Inactivity

The reason I haven’t been active on this site over the past two months is that in March, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. Since then, my main job has been to help take care of her. I’m lucky that cancer has never really touched me before. I had no idea how all-encompasing the battle is.

I have had a few writing assignments during that time, and they have proven to be a welcome distraction. I was glad when the New York Times took an interest in this one. It’s something regular readers of the stories on my web site may recognize, as it combines information from a couple of stories I’ve posted before. The link is immediately below.

A Bit of a Heartbreak

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone … but we’re talking baseball today. Pitchers and catchers have reported to spring training, so no matter what the groundhog said (and, around these parts, I’ve always wondered why six more weeks of winter isn’t an early end) we know that summer can’t be too far away.

Still, the baseball news is sad for Canadian fans. After 36 years at the microphone for Toronto Blue Jays baseball on radio, Jerry Howarth announced his retirement yesterday. His health has not been great in recent years, and he just didn’t feel his voice could hold up over the long season anymore.

Thanks

Jerry didn’t have the “classic pipes” of a sports broadcaster, but he had a passion for baseball and wonderful way of telling stories. He always made the listener feel like they were part of every game he was calling. “Hello, friends.”

I was not a baseball fan before Toronto got its team in 1977. Tom Cheek, and later Jerry Howarth (he joined the team in 1981) certainly did their part to spread the Gospel of the Blue Jays to my brothers and me. My parents had loved the minor-league baseball Maple Leafs and we quickly came to love the Blue Jays in my family. All those 100-loss seasons in the early days didn’t dampen our enthusiasm at all. It was fun (and inexpensive!) to take in a game at the ballpark – even if Exhibition Stadium wasn’t much of a ballpark. Even in those early days, you could find a radio tuned into the game in almost every room in our house.

It’s funny, but here in Owen Sound, I can usually get the games on my car radio from anywhere in town … until I turn onto my own block. Can’t get the games on the radio in the house at all. So, I watch on television. I’m not the first to say this, but baseball is a perfect game for radio … and I haven’t been able to listen to Jerry as much as I’d have liked to in recent years. Now, I won’t get that chance anymore.

Tom
My father took this picture of the Blue Jays’ first broadcasting duo, Early Wynn and Tom Cheek, at a spring training game against the Phillies in Clearwater, Florida, in March of 1980.

It seems that no one has anything but nice things to say about Jerry Howarth. He’s widely regarded as a lovely person. I haven’t had a lot of experiences with him, but the ones that I’ve had certainly confirm that.

When I worked for the Blue Jays ground crew from 1981 to 1985, I always tried to hang around Tom and Jerry as much as I could get away with when they were on the field before games. I loved to listen to them telling stories. A few years later (it must have been the summer of 1987), when I was working for a small company called Digital Media, I was able to arrange for us to get the occasional press pass. The very first time I was on the field as a “reporter,” I re-introduced myself to Jerry. I doubt that he really remembered me, but he immediately marched me up to Jesse Barfield and set up a quick interview for us. He certainly didn’t have to do that, but that’s the kind of person Jerry Howarth is.

In 2001, when we published The Toronto Blue Jays Official 25th Anniversary Commemorative Book, I had a chance to be in the radio broadcast booth during a game to talk about the book. It was a thrill to be on the air with Tom Cheek, but I remember that when I was done, Jerry asked me quietly about my favourite parts of the book. I told him that while the Pennant-Winning and World Series years of 1985 to 1993 had, of course, been fun, my favourite story was something smaller. It came under the category titled “Oddities and Others” and was the story of the final game of the 1982 season.

Jesse

Until the baseball strike of 1981, even a diehard fan like me knew that the Blue Jays were terrible. Still, the team played better in the second half of 1981 and, with players like Willie Upshaw and Damaso Garcia, the outfield of George Bell, Jesse Barfield, and Lloyd Moseby, and platoon partners Rance Mulliniks and Garth Iorg and Ernie Whitt and Buck Martinez, we finally got a glimpse of the future in 1982. The team was 44–37 in the second half, and with a series-sweeping win over expansion cousins Seattle on the final day of the season, the Blue Jays  finished with nine wins in their last 12 games to escape last place for the first time in franchise history … sort of.

With a record of 78–84 in 1982, the Jay actually finished tied for sixth with Cleveland in the seven-team American League East. I can remember fans chanting “We’re Number Six!” in the stands after the game, and “Bring on the Indians!” knowing that we would beat them in this theoretically tiebreaking playoff and escape last place for real.

Attendance was only 19,064 (in my memory, the crowd was bigger … but not much) yet everyone stuck around to the end. When Jim Clancy finished up his complete-game victory, he was cheered off the field and threw his hat and his glove into the seats. Alfredo Griffin brought a bag of balls out of the dugout, and he and his teammates began tossing them to the fans too.

1982

There would be bigger celebrations in the years to come, but that one always felt special to me – a treat for the real fans. I can recall Jerry smiling as I reminded him off it. I don’t know what (or if) he remembered of it personally, but he certainly seemed to appreciate the story.

Best of luck wherever the future takes you, Jerry.

Your retirement certainly marks the end of an era.

Writing and Research and The NHL Awards

A contract arrived by courier on Monday for a new hockey book for kids. This one won’t appear until the fall of 2019, but I’m awaiting another contract for two other books (updates to older projects) for adults that should be out this fall. So, after some slow times lately, at least I’ll be busy again for the next little while.

I sort of fell into writing for children, but I enjoy it. The truth is, in most cases, I don’t do anything very much different than what I write and research for adults – it’s just that the books are generally much shorter, so they don’t take nearly as long.

Books 1
The 2nd edition of The Big Book of Hockey for Kids has been out since September.
Absolute Expert: Soccer is due out in late May in time for the World Cup.

As I’ve mentioned here on occasion, I currently have seven new children’s books in stores, with one more due out in the spring. That one is somewhat different for me in that it’s about soccer, not hockey. Fortunately, since it’s for National Geographic Kids, they were much more interested in a book about the history and geography of soccer than a “how-to-play” manual … despite the title! It’s a beautiful book, and the research for it was a lot of fun. Plus, I was paired with US Soccer and MLS referee Mark Geiger, who was most helpful when I had questions. He also wrote some great personal stories that appear throughout the book.

All Six
The Original 6 series for Crabtree Books received a very nice review recently.

I think you’d be surprised at how many of the stories I’ve posted on this web site, as well as how many stories for my adult books, and how many updates and corrections to the NHL Official Guide & Record Book, have come from discoveries I’ve made while researching and writing my children’s books. For example, all the information I discovered for the story I posted last summer about Godfrey Matheson came as a result of the Chicago Blackhawks book in The Original 6 series. The genesis of today’s story comes from the New York Rangers book.

Boucher Book

Each book in The Original 6 series features a section on NHL trophy winners from those teams. Clearly, the designer who queried me had hoped to find a photograph of Frank Boucher with the Lady Byng Trophy. But it seems that no such photo exists. It turns out that until Boucher was given the original NHL prize for sportsmanship to keep in 1935 after winning it for the seventh time in eight seasons, he’d never even seen the trophy before! As for the Weber & Heilbroner Cup, it was presented to him prior to a playoff game with the Ottawa Senators at Madison Square Garden after the 1929-30 season for scoring the most points among Rangers and New York Americans players that year. (Weber & Heilbroner was a fashionable menswear chain in New York.)

Boucher newspapersThe article on the left is from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on March 24, 1930.
The cartoon on the right is from the Ottawa Journal on March 16, 1935,
shortly before Boucher won the Lady Byng Trophy for the seventh time.

It appears that until the 1960s, the practice of handing out trophies to NHL players (as opposed to just announcing who’d won them) was hit and miss. The Hart Trophy for the NHL’s most valuable player was donated to the league in 1924. It was presented to the first winner – Frank Nighbor of the Ottawa Senators – on the ice prior to the final game of the NHL playoffs on March 11, 1924. The presentation was made by Lord Julian Byng, Canada’s Governor-General at the time. Almost exactly a year later, Lady Evelyn Byng presented Nighbor with the new trophy she’d just given to the NHL.

In the following  years, it appears that sometimes the NHL trophies were presented on the ice, and sometimes at team banquets for Stanley Cup winners when those teams also boasted an individual award winner. And, obviously, based on Frank Boucher’s experience, sometimes they weren’t presented at all. But one trophy always was. Beginning in June of 1937, NHL president Frank Calder presented each winner of the rookie of the year with a trophy he bought for that player to keep. After his death in 1943, the NHL created the Frank Calder Memorial Trophy as a permanent remembrance.

Apps
Syl Apps was the NHL’s rookie of the year for 1936-37. Writing in the Toronto Star on June 14, 1937, Andy Lytle says that it was he who’d suggested the trophy idea to Frank Calder, and that Calder decided while on the train to Paris, Ontario, from his office in Montreal that because the winners would never be rookies again, they should get to keep the trophy.

The earliest reference I’ve  found in newspapers to a modern NHL Awards ceremony dates to April of 1967, although the stories for that year refer to it as “the annual awards luncheon” so it must have been going on for a few years by then. (There had been an NHL luncheon or dinner associated with the NHL All-Star Game pretty much since its beginning in 1947, and a postseason luncheon since at least 1963. Hockey Hall of Fame inductees were announced at the 1963 luncheon, but there appears not to have been any trophy presentations.)

Trophies 1932_1968
This photograph of Charlie Gardner receiving the Vezina Trophy (minus its elaborate base) appeared in several newspapers following the presentation to him on March 29, 1932.
The AP Wirephoto on the right is from the 1969 NHL Award Luncheon.

During the 1970s, the NHL Awards ceremony changed from a luncheon held during the Stanley Cup Final to a dinner held after the playoffs were over. The NHL Awards were aired on live television for the first time in 1984.

Season’s Greetings

From the Vancouver Daily World, on Tuesday, December 24, 1912…

Xmas 2017

Who knows how “Extra” becomes “Wuxtry”? And, personally – not to be sexist or racist in this day and age! – I wish All Good Sportsmen AND Sportswomen a Merry Christmas, a belated Happy Hanukkah, or best wishes for any holiday you celebrate at this time of year.

Thank you to everyone who takes a few minutes once a week or so to read these stories, and especially to those who offer comments; either by email or Facebook, or directly on the site.

All the best to everyone in 2018.

Leon’s Revenge!

I’ve written before about how Canadian Football runs deep in my family. I’d say the Argos, much more than the Maple Leafs, were my first favorite team. I saw my first Leafs game in December of 1970 when I was seven years old. They were only 3 1/2 years removed from their last Stanley Cup victory. I was 3 1/2 when that happened … and I have absolutely no memory of it. It’s ancient history to me. I saw my first Argos game a few months later, in the summer of 1971. They had not won the Grey Cup since 1952 and were coming off pretty close to two decades of misery. But I had no idea about that either. It was also ancient history.

In my first season of Argos fandom, the team went 10-4 and won the East Division … only to lose the Grey Cup to Calgary. Leon McQuay’s fumble wasn’t the only reason they lost that game, but perhaps the 109-yard fumble return for a touchdown that was the key to this year’s Argonauts victory over the Stampeders was Leon’s revenge!

Leon

I am certainly not the Argos fan that I once was. I worshiped Joe Theismann when I was young. I had his Quarterbacking book and tried to run the plays he diagramed with my brother David. It was tough to do with just the two of us! Jonathan was never much of a football fan, but he did have an inflatable Argos souvenir player we used to call Leon. We all played a little too rough with Leon, and the seams in his ankle gave way. My father would try to patch him for us, but our Leon always had a slow leak, which made him look kind of sad.

In my second season of Argos fandom in 1972, Joe Theismann broke his ankle. (It’s a much less famous injury than his career-ender with the Washington Redskins in 1985.) I broke my wrist around the same time. No, I was not trying to emulate my hero … but I did get to meet him at a game a week or two later. Theismann hobbled by my father and me on his crutches as the rest of the team was making its way to the field to start the game. I was too shy, but my father asked him to sign my cast.

“Well, kid,” said Theismann, “signing casts isn’t exactly my bag…” But he was smiling when he said it, and he did sign it for me. I kept it until it virtually crumbled into dust!

Parade
Toronto Star coverage of the 1983 Grey Cup Parade.

For a while after the Blue Jays came to town, we held on to our Argos season tickets, but like many in Toronto, our family’s football loyalty faded. I’ve always continued to follow the team, and we’ve often (though we didn’t this year) made it a point to at least attend any home playoff games. But really, my last great Argos enthusiasm dates back to 1983.

The year before, Toronto had hosted the 1982 Grey Cup. On either the Friday night or the Saturday before the game, my friends and I (all in first year at university at the time) headed downtown on the subway. Someone had told one of us there was a better chance of getting into the best parties if you were well dressed, so we were all in suits and ties … but I don’t recall us getting into any place special.

Win
The Argos celebrate after a thrilling 27-24 come-from-behind
victory over Calgary on a snowy evening in Ottawa.

The Argos lost to Edmonton that year (the last of five straight for that great dynasty), but the next year, Toronto returned to the Grey Cup and defeated the B.C. Lions in Vancouver. This was the first time in my memory that my hometown team had won a championship. Given how long it had taken the Argos since their last Grey Cup, how poor the Leafs had become, and how relatively little the Blue Jays had accomplished yet, I had no idea if I’d ever see one again! So, I did everything you’re supposed to do to celebrate. I went out to the airport to welcome the team home (there was a pretty big crowd there!) and I went to the championship parade. It was all a lot of fun, but I guess the excitement didn’t really last for me.

Rally
The weather was much nicer yesterday for the Grey Cup rally at City Hall in Toronto.

The Argos were founded in 1874, which makes them the oldest team in North American professional sports. It’s a shame to see how far out of favor Canadian football has fallen in the country’s largest city. I hope this year’s championship gives the team a real boost … but I know I’m not the only one who has his doubts about that.

Remembering Roy

I wasn’t going to write about Roy Halladay. After all the tributes to him I’ve read since his death was confirmed late Tuesday afternoon, I didn’t really think I had anything to say. I’d already had a story in mind for today, but it didn’t feel right to write about something and not to mention Halladay at all. Or to just tack on a word of condolence to a different story. So, allow me a few moments to share some thoughts.

As many of you know, my entire family has been huge Blue Jays fans from the very beginning. We’ve had seasons tickets since the moment they went on sale prior to the first season in 1977. I worked on the ground crew for five years from 1981 to 1985 when the team literally went from worst to first, and although I don’t get to more than a game or two most seasons these days, I still watch or listen almost every day. The Blue Jays have meant a lot to me over the years. Probably more than they should.

Strange thing is, I’ve never been a “favourite player” type of guy. I like the team; I like the game; I like being a fan … but I’ve never had a jersey for the Blue Jays or the Maple Leafs with a name and a number on the back. That’s just not me. If forced to pick, I’d agree with the general consensus that Roberto Alomar was the best Blue Jay ever. But my own personal favourite would be a toss up between Dave Stieb and Roy Halladay. I do like good pitching.

Me
Roy Halladay posed for this picture with me at Spring Training circa 2006.

I was there on the final day of the 1998 season when Halladay had a no-hitter broken up with two out in the ninth inning of his second career start. (I read in a newspaper yesterday that it was a perfect game, but although Halladay hadn’t walked anyone, second baseman Felipe Crespo had made an error in the fifth inning to allow a baserunner.) It was an exciting game, but I can’t honestly say that I felt like I was watching the birth of baseball’s next great pitcher.

And, indeed, Halladay struggled until pitching coach Mel Queen famously helped him to overhaul his mechanics and his mental approach to the game when he was sent back to the minors after spring training in 2001. When Halladay returned to Toronto that July, he struggled briefly … and then was brilliant. He had only a 5-3 record that season, but his 3.16 ERA was impressive and I remember clearly believing that he should have won at least eight games, not just five.

From then on, Halladay was the player I wanted to see. I admired his skill, and I admired his dedication. If I didn’t have access to our family’s season tickets (and we were sharing them around pretty widely by those years), I’d still happily pay for a cheap seat to get into the park when Halladay was pitching.

Ball
My mother-in-law had the picture reproduced on a ball, which Halladay signed the next year.

I remember late in the 2003 season. The Jays weren’t horrible that year, but were hopelessly behind the Yankees and Red Sox (as they always were in those day!) and not in contention for the wild card either. Now a Cy Young favourite, Halladay had won his 20th and 21st games on the road, and was pitching back at home on a Monday night, September 23. I wanted to be there to see him win his 22nd game and set a new team record. I took our daughter Amanda and bought a pair of seats, the two of us sitting among a fairly sparse crowd of just under 23,000 people in the 50,000-seat stadium.

There had a been a bit of bad blood recently between the Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Devils Rays, and – apparently – warnings had been issued to both teams before the game, although no one had told Halladay. In the sixth inning, after giving up a lead-off homer to put the Jays down 1-0, followed by a single, the third batter was hit by pitch … and Halladay was ejected. The crowd was pretty angry. I was incensed!

“I don’t know where it came from,” Halladay said after the game. “But in … a 1-0 game and a man on base, that run is important to me. I’m just trying to get out of the inning, I can’t see why they would think I’m trying to hit someone.”

To make matters worse, reliever Dan Reichert (who?!?) promptly gave up a walk and two straight hits to allow both of Halladay’s base-runners to score. Yet another hit put us down 5-0. The Jays lost 5-2.

“Doc’s out there trying to win a Cy Young and he gets charged with three earned runs without having the chance to get them off the field,” said Jays GM J.P. Riccardi. “Maybe common sense could have been used, you know?”

I wasn’t there when Halladay won his 22nd game on the final Saturday of the season. And, of course, he did win the Cy Young Award that year.

Such was Halladay’s skill and dedication, that almost no one in Toronto held it against him when he asked to be traded to a contender after the 2009 season. My brothers and I often joke that when anyone gets traded away, “we wish them nothing but the worst” with their new team. Not Halladay. I was pleased to watch his success in Philadelphia at a distance, and thrilled to have been watching on television when he threw a no-hitter in his first postseason appearance in 2010. He was just that good.

Celebrity deaths don’t usually affect me, but the death of Roy Halladay has been hard.

Pictures and Publicity For My Latest Book

My newest book, the Toronto Maple Leafs: The Complete Oral History is in stores now. Here are a few images from our recent launch at The Sport Gallery in Toronto’s Distillery District…

 Launch
The cover of the book, and the front entrance to The Sport Gallery.

Launch 1
My brothers and I were suitably attired!

Launch 2
The author with his proud mother.

And from my signing at Manticore Books in Orillia.

Launch 3
The front window of a very charming book store.

Launch 4
Me with many of my books, both old and new.

If you’re up for even more, you can check out the recent column by Andrew Armitage in the Owen Sound Sun-Times or my in-studio interview with Bill Murdoch on CFOS in Owen Sound. I was on with him for the full hour, which was a lot of fun for me but if that’s too much Eric Zweig for you, you can check out this much shorter phone interview on CFOS with Fred Wallace.

And if you’re in the Owen Sound area, I hope you’ll join us at The Ginger Press on Wednesday November 22 at 7 pm for some hockey-and-book talk. Should be a fun evening! There’ll also be a signing at Book Lore in Orangeville beginning at 11 am on December 2.

Launching Books With World Series Winners

Just in case I haven’t hit you over the head with it enough times already, here’s another reminder that I have a new book that just came out. Hopefully we’ll see many of you this Saturday for the Toronto launch. Others, perhaps, may be able to stop by at upcoming events in Orillia, Owen Sound, and Orangeville. (And yes, it IS an odd coincidence that everything arranged so far is in an Ontario town that begin with O.)

2017

I’ve also got some new children’s books coming out a little later this month, which will push my official book count above 40. It all began 25 years ago right about now with the publication of my first book, Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada. That capped a pretty amazing stretch of days for me and my family.

The fun began on October 24, 1992, when the Blue Jays won their first World Series … and Barbara and I made our first official appearance as a couple. (Belated happy anniversary, Greg and Anne!)

Jays

Anyone who knew my family then – and, let’s face it, knows my family now – knows we’re pretty crazy about the Blue Jays. The World Series celebration had barely subsided when, just a few days later, a box of books arrived at our family home…

92

…followed, just a few days after that, by our first launch party 25 years ago today.

Hockey Night

This time around, my teen-favourite Astros are going to game seven of the World Series against my mother’s childhood favourite Dodgers. It’s been an amazing series so far, but matter who wins, it won’t be the same for us as 1992. Still, it’ll be a fun time on Saturday. We look forward to seeing you.

Blue Monday

The World Series started last night. The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Houston Astros 3-1 in the quickest World Series contest since Game 4 in 1992 … which happens to be the first Word Series game I ever attended. Yesterday also marked 25 years since the Blue Jays wrapped up the 1992 World Series in Game 6 in Atlanta. That will tie into a story I’m planning for next week. Today, I’m using the Los Angeles victory over Houston to reminisce about my visit to Montreal during the Dodgers-Expos National League Championship Series in 1981. But first, a bit of back-story…

Blue 1
YouTube clip showing the fateful moment of impact on Blue Monday.

As I’ve posted on Facebook a couple of times recently, teenaged me was an Astros fan. Among my gang of friends at the time, we all quickly came to love the expansion Blue Jays. My guess is, none of us (I know I wasn’t) had been big baseball fans before the Blue Jays started in 1977 … but very soon we needed pennant contenders to follow too. I suppose we also needed a reason to boast that “my team is better than your team!”

Blue 2
In case you’re wondering, I’m the one on the right!

I can’t say that it was a conscious choice to steer clear of the American League, but our “other” teams were all in the National League. David became a Pirates fan in 1978 when they made a late run to battle the Phillies in the NL East. By 1979, they were World Series champions, and David has remained a Pirates fan to this day. Steve became a fan of the San Francisco Giants in 1978. They battled the Dodgers for the NL West that summer, but faded down the stretch. Jody and Rob were Dodgers fans because, well … the Dodgers were the Dodgers. They were the best team in the National League and I think Rob and Jody both saw themselves living in Los Angeles some day. (Jody lives in San Diego now.)

I liked the Astros. Yes, the garish, colourful uniforms were part of it, but I liked J.R. Richard. He was 6’8”, threw 100 mile per hour, and he struck out 303 batters in 1978 and 313 in 1979. The funny thing is, I don’t remember a single game I ever saw him pitch! I never saw the Astros live, and there was only one Game of the Week on television, and Houston didn’t get many of those. I must have seen him on This Week in Baseball, and I clearly remember the photograph of him holding eight baseballs in one hand.

Blue 3

By 1981, we’re all huge baseball fans, and all of us – except Pirates fan David – also like the Expos. And, of course, Montreal is a lot closer to Toronto than Houston, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. I don’t remember which of us decided we should go, but Rob’s family had connections in Montreal and he could get us tickets for Saturday and Sunday. So off we went.

We were all in Grade 13 (a foreign concept, I know, to any Americans reading this, and even to any younger Canadians) but we skipped the day of school on Friday and piled into Steve’s car. I don’t remember much about the drive, except that as we got to the end, the fact that Pie IX is pronounced like “Pee-Neuve” led to some problems getting to Olympic Stadium. But we did get there and we picked up our tickets.

I don’t think any of us ever considered getting a hotel room. Rob’s family had friends that he and Jody stayed with, and I asked a cousin-in-law of mine if Steve and I could stay with relatives she still had in Montreal. No problems for Rob and Jody, but when Steve and I showed up, it was clear this family we were staying with had only been expecting me … and they certainly weren’t prepared to feed dinner to the two of us! Steve and I found somewhere cheap nearby, then met up with Rob and Jody so – even though only Steve and Jody were actually of legal drinking age – we could go downtown and watch the Friday game in a bar.

The Dodgers and Expos had split the first two games of the series in Los Angeles. The Expos won game three in Montreal that night 4-1 on the strength of a complete game pitching performance from Steve Rogers and a three-run homer in the bottom of the sixth by light-hitting Jerry White. I do remember the excitement in the bar … but what I remember even more was our waitress throwing back the change we had left her as a tip on our first round of drinks!

Blue 4

Game 4 was on Saturday afternoon. It was close, and tense … until the Dodgers blew it open with two runs in the eighth and four in the ninth for a 7-1 victory. It was cold and dank, but for me (and I’ve been to at least one postseason game every time the Blue Jays have made the playoffs) this was still the single best fan experience I’ve ever had at a game! The joint was jumpin’, and singing along to The Happy Wanderer (“Valder-ee, Valder-ah, Valder-EEEE, Valder-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah”) was a blast! Even the loss wasn’t so bad, because now we could be at the fifth and final game on Sunday.

Only it rained on Sunday, and the game was cancelled.

We’d already skipped school on Friday, so Jody, Rob and Steve decided we should go home. I was beyond angry. I don’t think I spoke a word to any of them for the first few hours on the drive back to Toronto. So, we weren’t there for Blue Monday when Rick Monday took Steve Rogers deep in the top of the ninth to give the Dodgers a 2-1 series-winning victory. Of course I watched it all on television … but when all is said and done, I think I’m glad I wasn’t there.