This probably would have been more timely a year ago, on the 40th anniversary of the events described and with the 2025 Blue Jays on their incredible playoff run. But, with my newest release, The Mammoth Book of Hockey Trivia now on the shelves (if you want to spend an enjoyable hour geeking out on hockey history, you can check out this clip from the Hockey Time Machine or this one from Echo of the Whistle), I figured this was an appropriate time to look back at how I got here.

As I’m happy to tell people, hockey has become my professional life, but baseball and the Blue Jays have been my true sports obsession for nearly 50 years. During my last two years of high school, and throughout my three years at Trent University in Peterborough, I had a summer job (it actually stretched from April to October) on the Blue Jays ground crew. This was from 1981 through 1985, in the original “Worst to First” years in team history. I hadn’t been a good baseball player as a boy, and didn’t really get into the sport until the birth of the Blue Jays in 1977.

As I wrote on this site many years ago (Matty and Me), it was the Blue Jays and Superstar Baseball, a board game my brothers and I bought at Christmas in 1978, plus the book Big Time Baseball by Maury Allen, that our mother bought us in 1979, that really turned me on to baseball history and fostered my love of the game. Between that and my discovery of The New York Times on microfilm in the basement of the Bata Library in my second year at Trent in 1983 — which I wrote about in my very first post on this web site back in 2014 (How It All Started for Me) — the seeds were planted. Also, the fact that in university I discovered I liked researching and writing essays more than I like memorizing lecture notes and assigned readings for exams, played a big part.

I graduated from Trent in the spring of 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Studies. (They explained to us how Political Studies differed from Political Science, but I don’t remember anymore.) Most politics majors LOVED politics, but I just found that I’d done pretty well in the intro course in first year, and stuck with it. Even so, once I’d graduated, I wrote many letters to local, provincial and federal politicians from Toronto looking for research/writing jobs on their staffs. I got a lot of we’ll-keep-your-name-on-file replies, until I thought, “I don’t want to do that anyway. I want to do something in sports.”

Earlier in my days at Trent, I’d begun thinking a little bit about radio. I don’t think the campus station had a sportscaster, because I remember when I talked to someone about my interest, the response was along the lines of, “Well, I guess you could program something involving the theme from Chariots of Fire.” But that wasn’t what I had in mind. So — though I don’t remember anymore the hows and whys of it — I contacted CHEX Radio. I probably spoke with Gordon Gibb, and he either put me in touch with, or invited me in one morning to “job shadow” Peterborough radio sports legend Gary Dalliday.

I don’t remember much about that morning, but Gary and I chatted and he had some sort of wire service copy about the first radio broadcast of the World Series having taken place in 1921. (Perhaps this was October of 1983 or 1984, though I don’t remember it being so early in the school year.) Obviously there weren’t a lot of details, because Gary wondered who the teams playing that year had been. “The Giants and the Yankees,” I said (though I didn’t remember at the time which team had won that year. “They played each other in 1921, 1922 and 1923.” Gary glared at me like I had two heads or something. But he grabbed a sports almanac off his book shelf, looked it up … and I was right. (Which I knew I was!) I honestly don’t remember any more of that morning, but I think I must have made an impression on him.

So, now we jump ahead to the late summer of 1985. The Blue Jays (though it would get tight!) were en route to their first American League East Division championship, and I had an idea. I would write a flashback feature that would highlight the greatest moments in World Series history for every day in October. It would be great background stuff as the Blue Jays won their way to a championship. And I knew who to approach about getting it on the air.

All these years later, I have a memory of writing one sample script while staying with my girlfriend in Peterborough who was still going to Trent. But I might not have done it that way, because I also remember showing what I was working on to Wayne Parrish of The Toronto Star, who was my favourite sportswriter at the time. (I still may have written that first piece at Maggie’s, and might have shown something to Wayne after I’d gotten the gig.) Anyway, I pitched my idea to Gord (Gary would record them for broadcast) and said, “You can have it for free in exchange for a letter of reference and my right to sell it to anyone else I can.”

They went for it! And I managed to sell the text of the broadcasts to The Toronto Sun. (I think they might have paid me $100.) Without being able to hear the broadcasts in Peterborough (they did make me a tape of them), it was great to be able to read the stories in The Sun … and a thrill to walk around the ballpark at the end of the season and throughout the American League Championship Series and have people say, “I saw your story in the paper today.”

Later that fall, I pitched Gordon Gibb on a daily flashback feature we called The Sports Calendar. One event for every day of the year. I wrote dozens of letters to radio stations across Canada, and though no one else bought it, the research and writing of it led to more connections and to more opportunities, then to my first book (Hockey Night in the Dominion of Canada), and basically — with plenty of thanks to being a part of Dan Diamond and Associates, consulting publisher to the NHL for two decades, and Barbara’s connections in children’s publishing — a career as a writer.

I turned 22 years old late in October of 1985. I’ll be 63 next week.

Hard to believe I’ve been at it so long.