Anchorboy (18 page)

“Everything is great, thanks so much!” I replied. A more honest conversation would have gone something like this:

“Did you just take a dump in my toilet and then clean your ass in my sink?”

“Why, yes, I sure did; thanks for the opportunity to do that!”

The old man was insistent that he have the chance to show
me some of his most “valuable” baseball caps, including a vintage Labatt Lite cap. I patiently listened while he informed me about the ups and downs of the vintage baseball cap industry in our country, all the while feeling like a guy who had just had sex in an ugly girl’s apartment, wondering afterward how long he would have to stay without appearing to be rude. The answer was approximately ten minutes.

At one point I considered getting the guy’s contact information so I could pitch a reality show like
Pawn Stars
that would involve only vintage baseball caps, but I realized I couldn’t maintain a work relationship with someone I’d met only to relieve myself in his toilet.

“How did you meet this guy?” people would ask.

“Shat in his toilet,” I’d reply.

The old man insisted on walking me down the two flights of stairs to the back patio of the building, where the two younger men were still sitting, nursing their beers, probably wondering if I had just been raped and at the same time not caring much.

“I want that baseball cap!” proclaimed the old man. He had earned it. I trotted back over to the show site and dug through the supply trailer until I found a red TSN cap to exchange for the man’s hospitality. I ran back to the apartment building and handed it over. “Maybe I can get a shirt later too. I’ll come by the show later.” That sounded like trouble. I tried to appeal to him to drop it, but it was a bit difficult at this point.

Later, after the very successful show had been completed and we were seated at a tent signing autographs that we hoped would end up on beer fridges all over town, the old man kept popping his head around the corner like some sort of comic book villain. “Still waiting for that T-shirt!” he’d yell loud enough for everyone to hear, progressively drunker and drunker as the sun faded past the horizon and day turned to night. Our marketing manager, Tiffany De Groote, started to wonder why this old man was hanging around
our tent the entire night and what exactly he meant when he told her, “Jay promised me a T-shirt!” I had to fess up about pooping in his apartment to her and the rest of the crew, much to their amusement and my embarrassment.

In the end, age and fatigue and a surprisingly long autograph line proved to be too much for the old man to handle, and he eventually slinked back across the road to his hats and beers. I wondered how often his family came to visit him, and if they ever dared make their way into his abode at all. I hoped that some way, somehow, I had made his day by shitting in his home, and I look forward to the day when I run into someone in New Brunswick who says, “Aren’t you Jay Onrait?”

“Yes?”

“You crapped in my grandpa’s toilet once!”

I
KNEW THERE WAS NO
way we’d be able to replicate the Vancouver
Olympic Morning
show at the London Games in 2012. In Vancouver, we were broadcasting at a time when there weren’t actually live events going on. The whole point of our Vancouver show was to set up the events of the day ahead, recap the events of the day before, and shamelessly promote CTV personalities in a way that hadn’t been done before or since. But in London, thanks to the time change, the day’s events would have already begun at 6:00 a.m. EST. Suddenly, instead of waking up to us talking to drunks on Robson Street, you would be waking up to actual athletes competing in Olympic events. The Olympics! On CTV!

That meant there was little chance of rounding up the old
Olympic Morning
gang for one more go-round, not to mention the fact that CTV had made it very clear to everyone at the network that the budget would be severely scaled back from Vancouver to London. I was unsure as to whether I would be going to London at all. Okay, that’s a lie. I assumed that after all the positive feedback
the network had received for my Vancouver gig they would find
something
for me to do in London, but just like with
The Week That Was
, I was about to have my heart broken.

About a half-year before the Games started, we received our Olympic assignments. Mark Milliere called me at home on the day of the announcement to reveal that Dan and I would be hosting
Olympic Morning
on TSN. I was initially delighted! Then I remembered the hard truth about our coverage of the London Games; TSN hosts wouldn’t be heading to London, they’d be going to Scarborough. Dan and I would be hosting from a makeshift studio at TSN in Toronto. Several play-by-play broadcasters would be calling the Games off monitors in Toronto as well. Again, this was made apparent to all of us and was not unprecedented by any stretch. The CBC had employed such a method successfully during their coverage of the Games in Turin and Beijing.

However, despite the fact that TSN was by far the most successful cable channel in the history of this country, I could not shake the unmistakable feeling that I was being demoted.

They had decided to put my friend Dave Randorf and former Canadian Olympian Catriona Le May Doan together on the London version of
Olympic Morning
on CTV instead. I completely understood the logic. Dave was an outstanding broadcaster with a ton of hosting experience on big events, and Catriona had been one of the breakout broadcasting stars of the Vancouver Games. The entire point of putting Beverly Thomson and me together for the Vancouver Games was to fill six hours of broadcast time with a bunch of different personalities under the CTV banner when there were no actual sporting events going on. My experience reading highlights came in handy for the frequent recaps during the show, and Bev’s experience interviewing people from many different backgrounds was useful for the guests visiting the studio.

Now, in London, because of the time change things would be set
up much differently: The morning hosts for 2012 would be hosting a more traditional Olympic broadcast, telling viewers where they had been and then sending them to their next destination. For this reason I suppose it was deemed necessary to have a veteran broadcaster like Dave and an Olympian like Catriona as hosts to make those throws smooth and credible. This much I understood. But they were also telling Dan and me that we’d be doing the exact same show, only on TSN. So basically the Olympic Consortium executives were saying, “We know you can do this job on TSN, but we don’t trust you to do it on CTV, even though you just appeared on CTV in the morning during the last Games.” I felt a little like Brian Dunkleman after the first season of
American Idol
. Dunkleman co-hosted
Idol
along with Ryan Seacrest for season one, but by season two Dunkleman was gone and Seacrest began his solo quest to become the next Dick Clark.

Friends and strangers kept asking what I would be doing at the London Games. I kept lying and saying I didn’t know. I hated the thought of the looks on their faces when I told them I wouldn’t be doing
Olympic Morning
on CTV again. All of this was turning me into an angrier and more bitter brat than I already was. I approached my own boss, Mark Milliere, about my dissatisfaction. He made it clear there was very little he could do about the situation because he was not in charge of the Olympic Consortium. He did offer me an alternative, however, and I happily took it, even though it made me look like a bona fide jerk.

My colleague, Kate Beirness, had been working with us for just under two years at that point. Kate had been given a plum assignment for the Games, or so I thought: She was actually going to be in London for the duration, covering the Olympics for
SportsCentre
. A broadcast location would be selected somewhere in the city, and she would put together two five-minute highlight “hits” that would run every day during the Games. Frankly, it sounded awesome.

So after tiring of hearing me complain about my role, Mark finally called me at home and said, “We’re sending you to London instead of Kate.”

I was really, really torn. On the one hand, I was obviously elated that I would be able to attend the Games, especially on such a plum assignment. On the other hand, I felt terrible about usurping Kate this way. At least Dan would be coming along to share the blame …

“We’re only sending you, not Dan,” said Mark.

Good grief.

“Why aren’t you sending Dan?” I wondered aloud to Mark.

“Not necessary,” he replied. This translated to “We don’t feel like spending the money.”

Now I felt like a
total
douche instead of the marginal douche I’d felt like before. Their new plan was to have Dan and me host a show from 5:00 to 7:00 EST, Dan from the
SportsCentre
studios in Scarborough and me from Trafalgar Square in London. We would be linked up via satellite in a double-box format, not unlike the one Will Ferrell had enjoyed all those years ago during the 2:00 a.m. edition of
Sportsdesk
. All I knew was that I was going to be in London and not suburban Toronto for the Games, and that was good enough for me. Still, I felt like a real jackass and resented the fact that I had to stoop to this behaviour to get my ass to London.

We flew a week before the London Games were about to start. I quickly realized we very likely had the best set-up of anyone working under the Olympic Consortium banner. Our broadcast location was in Trafalgar Square in Central London, the same square that houses Canada House, the Canadian consulate in London that would be transformed into Canada Olympic House for the Games. You could literally hit it with a pitching wedge. Our actual broadcast location was a series of “sets” on a temporary scaffold occupied by us, Sky Sport Italy, Fox Digital, and CBC News Channel. The Tower of London loomed in the distance.

The Sky Sport Italy guys showed up around the same time as us, about a week before the Games. After that we didn’t see them until the very end. Like the last day of the Games. I’m not even joking. The Sky Sport Italy “set” was empty the entire two and a half weeks during the London Olympics.

No one thought to provide us with a portable toilet, so at various points during the Games, I peed into Venti Starbucks cups on the Sky Sport Italia set to relieve myself after chugging a king-size energy drink and sitting in a suit for two hours. My cup overfloweth every time. Sorry, Sky Sport Italia.

Our accommodations were more than adequate (tiny but clean rooms in a central London hotel), and more importantly, a five-minute walk from work. The hotel was located in Covent Garden, an area in the centre of the city jammed with restaurants, shops, bars, and tourists on its windy streets. I had been told we would start shooting any field reports out and around the city at approximately 2:00 p.m. local time, finishing around 5:00. That gave me a couple of hours to get ready and grab a quick dinner, write the show around 7:00 p.m., host from 10:00 to midnight, and then fix up any mistakes for the morning show segments until 12:30 a.m.

It was, in my mind, possibly the greatest Olympic broadcast schedule ever. I would be able to go out with the crew after every show, albeit not to pubs, as they all closed down at midnight. None of us understood why the pubs closed so early until we realized everyone in London started drinking at 4:00 p.m. and was pretty much obliterated by 8:00. Luckily, we discovered that in London the hotel bars are there to serve the hotel guests. If the hotel guests want to stay up and drink until 5:00 a.m. every single night, then the hotel bar will stay open until 5:00 a.m. every single night. Not surprisingly, our hotel bar was open until 5:00 a.m. every single night.

The next day we rehearsed our first show from Trafalgar Square. Dean Willers, our veteran camera guy, was also serving as lighting
director, floor director, set decorator, assistant sound engineer, and continuity person. In other words, a typical Canadian television shoot. At one point Olympic Consortium executives sent us an e-mail congratulating us on the look of our shows and thanking “the crew” for their hard work. Dean really enjoyed that line. “Tell them the crew appreciates it,” he said.

That night we had managed to convince Leigh, the manager of the Maple Leaf Pub in the heart of Covent Garden, to stay open a bit later for us so we could celebrate our first broadcast. Leigh, like almost all the employees at the Maple Leaf, was Canadian. A former student from Vancouver who’d come over to Europe to travel, she had run out of money and gotten a job at the only Canadian pub in London to make ends meet, only to find herself still living in the city and still working at the pub two years later.

I had visited the Maple Leaf years earlier during the aforementioned backpacking trip of 1998. In fact, I was there on July 1, 1998, because I assumed it would be a big Canada Day party, and for once in my life I had made a correct assumption. The evening ended with the entire bar singing “Summer of ’69.” I had hoped to replicate that experience at one point during these Games for a feature story, but tonight was all about celebrating our successful first broadcast. Six of us gathered around the table drinking Sleeman beer and downing tequila shots until Leigh finally kicked us out around 3:00 a.m. In an incredible stroke of luck, the pub was just around the corner from our hotel. I managed to make it all the way back to my room, tear off my suit and shoes, and fall into bed.

About an hour later, I was awaked by the sound of someone puking. That someone was me.

I had literally woken myself up by vomiting uncontrollably all over myself and all over the bed sheets. It says something about my state of mind during that moment that I paid it no attention and immediately went back to sleep. Luckily, I was sort of propped up
on my pillow so there was no danger of choking on my own vomit like Bon Scott or John Bonham.

Deep into another slumber, I was awakened again about an hour later when I heard a loud, piercing wail that sounded like my smoke detector back home. I strained my eyes to look straight up at the ceiling: Sure enough, there was a smoke detector in my room, and I had now determined that it was somehow going off at full volume and likely waking up the entire hotel, or at the very least my entire floor. I didn’t stop to think about why my smoke detector might have been going off. I just wanted the sound to end so I could go back to sleep.

I barely managed to pull myself out of my puke-stained bed, naked except for my Calvin Klein boxer briefs, eyes straining to adjust to the light. I tried desperately to find a button that might shut off the smoke detector before the hotel manager came up to my room. The sound of the siren was so loud, so piercing, that surely other guests had started to stream out of their rooms to figure out what was going on. I quickly gave up trying to find an off button and ripped the cover off the smoke detector in hopes of taking out the battery. But after I tore out the battery the piercing wail persisted. I was at a loss. I was also still drunk and half asleep. Why wouldn’t this damn smoke detector turn off? Finally I gave up and accepted my fate: I would likely have to find another hotel after this incident. But that daunting prospect paled in comparison to the appeal of simply falling back on my sick-stained sheets and returning to a drunken slumber. I was very likely in deep trouble, but it was nothing I couldn’t put off until the light of day.

The next day I woke late for a mandatory security meeting at the International Broadcast Centre at the Olympic Park in East London. There was no time to assess the disastrous situation from the evening before. I showered the vomit off my body and gathered the sheets in a pile, surrounding the worst-stained sheets with the
ones that were still relatively clean in hopes the maid might just gather them up that way and not notice the mess I had made. I noticed a tiny vomit stain on the mattress itself but hoped the cleaning staff might not notice, as the stain was about the size of a toonie (a Canadian two-dollar coin, for all you international readers). I didn’t even have the time or the sense to replace the cover on the smoke detector. I figured the maids would replace it, so I left them a five-pound tip in hopes of them just returning the room to normal and keeping things quiet. I should have left a twenty-pound tip.

I met the rest of the crew, and as we prepared to leave for the shoot, one of our camera guys, Dave Parker, asked why I hadn’t ended up in the lobby last night.

“Why would I have ended up in the lobby?” I wondered.

“Because of the fire alarm?” said Dave with a look on his face that said, “Are you really that dumb?”

I am really that dumb.

“How could you
not
hear it? There were old people in pajamas coming down the stairwell. I grabbed my camera, came down to the lobby, and started shooting footage,” said Dave.

It all became clear. In my fall-down, puke-riddled, drunken stupor, I had mistaken an ear-splitting alarm in a massive ten-storey hotel for the sound of a regular, tiny smoke detector. That would of course explain why the alarm continued after I took the batteries out of the detector. Basically, the moral of the story is I am an idiot. Still, I laughed it off. I just hoped the maids would clean the sheets and we could all forget this incident had ever happened.