Anchorboy (21 page)

W
E WATCHED THE CLOSING CEREMONY
at Canada House in Trafalgar Square. I really wanted to grab scalper tickets and see Blur at Hyde Park in what was purported to be their last ever show, but I figured it didn’t make much sense for me to take off by myself and see a concert I didn’t even have tickets for. Plus, no one else was interested in going. I wasn’t too heartbroken at the time. I figured after the past three weeks it was only appropriate I go out and get drunk with the gang who had gone through all this madness with me; I didn’t want to be an anti-social weirdo. Turns out I should have been an anti-social weirdo. That night might have turned out much better than it did.

Carol, our makeup artist, was one of the most posh people I had ever met. Proper language, great taste in restaurants, and well connected. She told us of barbeques on weekends that she would attend. I imagined they featured a number of different types of cucumber salads on a beautifully decorated garden table, with plenty of society talk. She was Bill and Melinda Gates’s personal makeup artist
whenever they travelled to Europe for charity work. She had worked extensively in film and television. In fact, it seemed as if she was slumming it a bit working for a Canadian sports network during these Games. She was a lovely lady and she immediately seemed to take a shine to Dean, our camera operator, who was equally kind to her and tried to make her feel welcome. Each night we hosted the “Olympic Suppertime Spectacular,” it would be Dan and me on the desk, Dean behind the camera, and Carol in a chair nearby, ready to do makeup touch-ups whenever needed. She laughed at all our jokes and sketches. It was a great little group.

After we finished the final show on the Trafalgar Square set, the entire crew headed to Canada House. Molson representatives had been present throughout the Games, even bringing over the occasional case of beer to the set and allowing us to borrow ice from them to keep our energy drinks cold. The evening of the closing ceremony, the Molson Canadian was flowing freely and so was the red and white wine. It was a blast watching the ceremony with a room full of Canadians, no major celebrities unless you count the twins from
Property Brothers
, who were actually flooded with requests for pictures. I approached them for a picture since my mom is a fan. They had absolutely no idea who I was.

After the Spice Girls appeared on TV to what was easily the loudest ovation of the night, the crowd started to thin out a bit, and most of our crew decided to make their way across the city to attend the CTV Olympic Consortium wrap party. I stayed behind with Dan and Carol. At one point toward the end of the ceremony the three of us sat in front of a huge plasma screen watching Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend play a few Who hits. Dan excused himself to use the washroom, and I leaned over to Carol and said, “Roger Daltrey’s voice still sounds great, doesn’t it?” expecting her to wax poetic about her love of the English band. But Carol didn’t have a response. It’s not that she didn’t have anything to say about the subject
matter, she just literally did not respond. I paid it no attention, figuring she was just tired.

Thirty seconds later Carol stood up, and before I could take my eyes off the screen to see what was happening, she teetered in one spot for a half-second before tipping forward and falling flat on her face with an enormous THUMP. She did this in front of 300 people. Time stood still. I was horrified. How had I not seen how drunk she was. Did she have a concussion? Was she dead?

No time to lament past decisions. I fell down on my knees as she slowly turned over. She was awake, but barely. A crowd of horrified Canadians had gathered at that point, every one of them probably wishing they hadn’t invited the TSN people to their closing ceremony party. Thankfully, because so many athletes were on hand, plenty of trainers and sports medicine people were there too. There was also a doctor from Surrey, B.C., who was attending the Olympics with his family while volunteering at Canada House. Thankfully, Carol would get the care she needed. I know you’re reading this and thinking that the only “care” Carol needed was sleep, water, and half a bottle of Advil, but I was genuinely paranoid about the possibility she might have a concussion after that head-slam.

The doctor and two sports medicine people carefully helped her to a chair and kept her there for the next hour and a half, asking her questions about her whereabouts, who she was, whether she had someone waiting for her at home, and so on. The whole thing was pretty shocking, to be honest. I had no idea she had consumed that much alcohol. Later, during a discussion on one of our podcasts, Dan confessed to repeatedly returning to the bar to fetch her glass after glass of white wine. I joked that he was an enabler, but the truth is he was just fetching booze for everyone. The sports medicine personnel were not happy about the idea of sending Carol home alone. Dan had wandered off at this point, and I realized it was up to me to make sure Carol made it back
to her flat in Kensington safe and sound. I gamely volunteered to escort her, mostly because I felt responsible for her fall, but also because I genuinely liked Carol. She had been nothing but kind and warm to Dan, Dean, and me, and this was not the way I wanted her Olympic experience to end.

It took us a while to hail a cab since it was the night of the closing ceremony, but we finally flagged one down and Carol managed to slur her address coherently enough for the driver to understand. The entire ride consisted of me answering the same three questions over and over:

“Did any of the other crew see what happened?” [No.]

“Will you tell anyone?” [No.]

“I swear on the Holy Bible this has never happened before. Do you believe me?” [No. But I will gladly say yes if you stop asking the same three questions.]

As we drove through the streets on my final night in London, I couldn’t help but think this was probably an appropriate way for my Olympic experience to end. I had complained about my role, not getting what I thought I deserved, and in the end I got exactly what I deserved: escorting the drunkest woman in the drunkest city on the planet back to her flat with absolutely no chance of sex as a reward. Karma is a bitch.

When we finally arrived at Carol’s flat, I asked the driver if he would mind waiting a few minutes so I could escort her up the steps to her door. He agreed and we began to exit the cab, at which point I realized Carol couldn’t walk on her own. She draped her arm around my shoulder, and I basically dragged her across her quiet Kensington side street to her front door. She managed to find her keys, but once we were inside she informed me there was no elevator. “Which floor are you on?” I asked.

“Free,” she replied. I guess that meant three. This was going to be a challenge.

Have you ever dragged a lifeless body up two flights of stairs? I don’t recommend it, but that was the task in front of me that night.

“I’m fine. Honestly!” pleaded Carol.

Good luck. The woman couldn’t even climb a stepladder by herself much less navigate two flights. She once again draped her arm around me, and I pulled her up the creaky, old steps. The building was very old and the stairway was very narrow, making it very likely the toughest workout I had experienced in three years.

Step by step we made our climb, Carol continuing to ask the same three questions the entire time, genuinely fearful she had somehow done damage to her career. The only damage she was doing was to my back.

Finally, we made it to her front door. Wobbly, barely holding her up, exhausted, sweating out the alcohol I had consumed, but we had made it. She teetered beside me as she once again fumbled with her purse in search of the key to her door. At that moment, she stopped and looked up at me with puppy dog eyes. I expected her to begin a long, rambling, and incoherent speech about how grateful she was that I had taken her all this way and made sure she was safe. How I was a true gentleman for following through and putting her safety ahead of my enjoyment on this final evening in one of the world’s great cities. I looked into her eyes. She opened her mouth and said, “I wish Dean were here.”

The next day as I went to check out of the hotel, I knew I still had the matter of the vomit-stained sheets and mattress bill to settle up. One hundred and twenty pounds worth. Wandering through the
hotel lobby, I managed to track down the hotel manager, the one who’d sent me the third and final letter.

It had been a full two weeks since the incident, two weeks of the Olympic Games, two weeks of late nights in the hotel bar, where the bartenders and waitresses knew us by name. Where the concept of ordering a “double double” became a nightly normalcy—a “double double” in this case being four shots of gin, a splash of delicious English tonic, and a squeeze of lime. Two weeks of us unwinding in the pit of the hotel on a nightly basis and charging a good chunk of the bills back to our own rooms. It took a moment to jog his memory.

He printed out my room charges and soon remembered who I was: “There’s nothing I can do for you, sir; the mattress and sheets were damaged.”

“Take a closer look at the bill,” I said.

He took a closer look at the grand total of my debauchery, of our mark on the city of London, of a wonderful trip and a wonderful life experience, and his eyebrows raised.

“We’ll drop the charges; have a nice trip.”

E
NOTECA
D
RAGO IN
B
EVERLY
H
ILLS
isn’t exactly the kind of place the paparazzi camp out in front of every day. I’m sure at one point the Italian restaurant was an L.A. hot spot, especially right after
Rocky IV
was released (I can only assume the establishment was named after the Russian arch-nemesis in that film, played by Dolph Lundgren). However, on this Monday night in early July of 2013, it was practically empty, save for a gathering of new employees of Fox Sports 1.

When Fox executives had first contacted me almost exactly a year previously, I wasn’t exactly thinking about a move south, I was thinking about coming home. Our time at the London Olympics was swiftly coming to a close, we had caused a bit of trouble—or should I say
I
had caused a bit of trouble with my various shenanigans, including my skin-tight full-body Union Jack unitard—and I was now eager to return home and resume another year of the Kraft Celebration Tour, an event where I could get on stage with Dan in front of thousands of adoring
SportsCentre
fans and sing songs while spending nights in small-town bars across the country having too many shots and generally having a great time.

“Would you ever consider coming to work in the United States?” they had asked.

I
had
considered it, years ago, when I was first starting out. In fact, just before I got that first on-air job in Saskatoon in 1998 I was offered another on-air job, in a
tiny
Oregon town for a tiny ABC affiliate that had just hired a brand new news director who probably wasn’t much older than me. I had seen an online ad on tvspy.com for a weekend sports anchor position, and I mailed them a demo tape, hoping perhaps they might like me so much they would consider going through the trouble of hiring immigration lawyers and getting me a U.S. work visa. The young news director did indeed like my tape, and he called to offer me a job. I was elated until I asked him about that U.S. work visa.

“You don’t need a U.S. work visa, right?” was his reply.

“Pretty sure I do,” I sheepishly said.

“Oh, okay. Let me look into it and call you right back,” he said.

I never heard from him again.

I never thought about the United States much after that, especially once Dan and I started to enjoy some real success in our own country. People would ask us about going to the States all the time, and our answer was always the same: They won’t let us be “us” down there; they stopped doing that at ESPN in the Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, and Craig Kilborn days. Now the
SportsCenter
anchors were for the most part straight-shooting professional broadcasters, not guys who dressed up like the Phantom of the Opera. Besides, we loved hockey, and ESPN was pretty much ignoring the NHL at that point. No, we reasoned, we were just fine in Canada, thanks.

Then BlackBerry started falling apart, and everything changed.

The Canadian company that made BlackBerry mobile devices was in serious trouble by 2012. So much trouble that the
Wall Street Journal
saw fit to station one of their American reporters in Toronto because they were doing so many stories about the floundering smartphone empire. That reporter turned out to be Will Connors, a Chicago native and huge sports fan who turned on the
TV one morning to catch highlights on what he thought was a carbon copy of the American
SportsCenter
(albeit with the Canadian spelling), only to be awakened by what he described as “a loopier, freer-flowing affair.” He became a regular viewer and approached TSN about doing a story in the
Wall Street Journal
about Dan and me. Will came to the studio in Scarborough to watch a live show and interview us, and the story came out a few weeks later. It was titled, “Why Can’t We Have Canada’s ‘
SportsCentre
’?”

Careful what you wish for.

Around that same time, Fox Sports executives had decided to mount their own challenge to ESPN. NBC and CBS had recently launched their own brand new sports networks. Turns out sports television in 2012 was a very hot commodity. With cable companies fighting illegal online pirating and streaming, sports kept people paying for their cable bills by virtue of the fact that sports television was just about the only form of the medium that was “DVR proof.” Sports are meant to be seen live. Sure you can DVR your favourite game and watch it later, but in this day and age of social media and smartphones, the chances of keeping the result from being spoiled for you is pretty slim. Not to mention the fact that sports are also always better on a big screen. You might not mind tearing through five seasons of
The Wire
on your laptop or tablet, but sports are always more fun to watch with others, on a big screen, with plenty of food and drink at the ready. Suddenly sports leagues were cashing in from major competition among the networks for rights fees to show the biggest live games, and now Fox wanted in, and they wanted to be different.

Fox had made the decision to do something slightly more unconventional than your standard two guys (or girls) in suits highlight show, and just as they had made the decision to do so, one of their executives picked up a copy of that day’s
Wall Street Journal
with a headline that said, “Why Can’t We Have Canada’s ‘
SportsCentre
’?”

The courtship lasted about a year. Fox started recording our show out of their Fox Soccer Channel studios in Vancouver, and they liked what they saw. They also heard us repeatedly reference Producer Tim and decided they wanted him as part of the package as well. Their pitch: to literally pick up our show from Toronto and move it to Los Angeles. The most appealing part might have been the time zone change. Suddenly instead of returning home at 2:30 a.m. we would be returning home at 11:30 p.m. We might even be able to go for a drink after the show.

More than the late-night drinking possibilities, Fox addressed our biggest concern about a move away from our comfort zone north of the 49th parallel: They were looking for an alternative to ESPN, and they didn’t want to change us. They wanted us to be us.

As I was wrestling with the decision, I happened upon an interview in the
Globe and Mail
with Kelly Oxford, the Edmonton-born writer who had just published a book of essays titled
Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar
(also published by HarperCollins; you’re welcome HarperCollins!). Oxford had just uprooted her family, including her husband and three children, from Calgary to Los Angeles for greater career opportunities. She described it as an extremely difficult decision, but in the end, her husband was quoted in the article as saying, “When we’re 75, living in Canada, we’ll think, why didn’t we try it? We could have just gone down there and checked it out.”

Obviously as I struggled with the very same decision, these words struck a chord, not to mention the fact that the winter of 2012 was
really friggin’ cold
.

When we announced that we were leaving, the outpouring of support, despair, and anger was fairly overwhelming. To some we were sellouts, chasing American cash and glory like so many opportunistic Canadians before us. To others we were abandoning a legion of loyal viewers who had grown up with us, just as Mark
Milliere had said they would all those years ago when he first put us on in the morning. Then there were those who were just happy for us to get the opportunity to ply our trade to a wider audience. We even got a tweet from the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, complete with a picture of the three of us together at the 2012 Grey Cup, calling our move “The Worst Play of the Day” but wishing us well.

As I have detailed in this book, this job is all about moving from place to place, never getting complacent, always moving onward and upward for that new challenge. I had honestly thought those days were behind me. I was ready to settle in for another solid decade of fun at TSN with Dan.

Then I remembered how excited I was to get that first job in Saskatoon in ’98. I had so much doubt about leaving Toronto back then. I had just as much doubt about leaving Toronto now. But in a way, that’s what made it so appealing: the uncertainty. I didn’t get in this business to play it safe. I could have stayed in Athabasca at the drugstore if I had wanted that.

Two months after it was announced we were leaving (which may have been the longest goodbye in Canadian television history), Dan, Producer Tim, and I joined our fellow new employees of Fox Sports 1 at Enoteca Drago for dinner and a bit of a meet and greet.

Fox had been incredibly good to us to that point, putting us up in temporary housing right by the beach in Santa Monica and assigning someone to practically hold my hand and take me to the DMV to get my California driver’s licence. I was happy to meet my new colleagues, but I was dreading what the night was about to bring. I had sworn to another fellow Canadian import, Julie Stewart-Binks, a Toronto girl who had recently been hired by FS1 from CTV Regina, that if our new bosses asked us to get up in front of everyone and introduce ourselves like we were at summer camp, I would walk out of there. Just get up and walk out of the restaurant.
I could not bear the idea of having to stand up and bare my soul like it was some sort of AA meeting. I would rather have someone rip my eyelashes out.

But sure enough, after a round of appetizers and some small talk among my fellow diners, my new boss, Scott Ackerson, got up and announced that we would indeed be going around the room one by one to introduce ourselves and bare our souls like it was some sort of AA meeting. He was standing right at the door. There was no chance of sneaking away unnoticed. I was trapped, and my biggest nightmare was about to come to fruition.

Thankfully I didn’t have to go first. Some of my fellow on-air personalities from our new show
Fox Sports Live
as well as our new producers were up first. Included in this group was former NBA defensive player of the year Gary Payton, who informed us he had recently been divorced and would not be getting married again. I laughed because I was just months away from getting married for the second time, something I once swore I would never do again. Next up was fellow FS1 panelist and recently retired U.S. tennis star Andy Roddick, an athlete I once called out on-air for his treatment of referees and umpires during matches. I thought he would be a pretentious jerk. Turns out he was just the opposite. The second I shook his hand, I thought the same thing I once thought with Jon Ljungberg: “I will get along with this person. This person and I will be friends.” He was hilarious and totally self-deprecating, talking about spending his career as “Federer’s bitch” and wearing hats to cover up bald spots.

Another fellow FS1 panelist, Donovan McNabb, treated the event like he was giving a speech to a Fortune 500 company, speaking eloquently about becoming a team and battling the competition. He spoke clearly and confidently, and I felt like running a marathon when he was done. I was feeling good about the new panel on our show, but there were only a few more employees before I would have to get up and tell the entire room about myself.

Earlier in the day, when I was discussing the possibility of this very moment with Dan, he made a suggestion that I say something outlandish. He was joking, but I was desperate, and I
did
do something pretty outlandish that day. My turn was up. I swallowed another forkful of arugula salad, stood up, and spoke.

“I told Julie Stewart-Binks that if I had to get up and speak at this dinner, I would walk out of this fucking room.”

Uproarious laughter.

“The only reason I didn’t is because Scott is standing at the door.”

Uproarious laughter continues. And then …

“I love being on television, but I hate speaking in front of people. I am a sports anchor—I’m really only comfortable in front of the camera.”

I looked over at Dan. Then I paused, looked up, and addressed the entire room:

“So I masturbated several times today so I would feel relaxed and comfortable.”

The room practically keeled over.

And so begins the next step of the journey.