Anchorboy (4 page)

They never mention the time I shit in front of them, either, and I’m grateful for that, too.

M
Y FIRST DAY AS AN
intern with TSN was in January of 1996. I frankly couldn’t believe I was standing in the newsroom where legends of the Canadian sports broadcasting industry like Dave Hodge and Jim Van Horne plied their trade. I had beaten out a number of other broadcasting students across the country and was given a tidy $1,000 toward my education as well as a four-month work placement at Canada’s Sports Leader. Needless to say I was determined to get that internship. What sealed the deal for me was my experience volunteering at ITV two years previously. It made me realize that every effort you make trying to gain experience in this business can pay off in some way.

Our current show producer, the now famous Producer Tim, and I were the only two interns brought in to the
Sportsdesk
newsroom in January of 1996, so I guess it makes perfect sense that our fates have been tied together. We worked on “the Row”: a row of work pods where all the show’s writers sat side by side, watching games, writing down everything that happened, and writing the highlights.

It’s safe to say that probably 80 percent of the employees currently working on the television side at TSN started on the Row. It’s the place where we find out if aspiring broadcasters can handle the pace of production.

I started my internship right after the holiday season sometime in early January 1996. I was twenty-one years old at the time, and I had already arrived at the place where I wanted to spend the entirety of my working life.

That’s when I first encountered Mark Milliere.

When it all comes down to it, I owe my career to the man. He is a hugely successful broadcast executive and one of the most distinctive voices in the network’s history. And I really mean
distinctive voice
. No one
speaks
quite like Mark. I can honestly say that everyone who works at TSN tries to do an impression of his hushed delivery at one point or another during their tenure. If I could describe it I would say imagine a combination of indifference, sarcasm, and quiet tones combined with a voice one register lower than Bubbles from
Trailer Park Boys
. I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone who speaks quite like him. I had several
bosses
at TSN but ultimately I answered to Mark, I negotiated my contracts with Mark, and Mark protected me from the higher-ups at CTV when they got mad at me for mentioning on air how bad I thought the show
Pan Am
was. Mark has probably saved my ass more times than he’d like to mention or remember.

Mark also had the power to fire me, and I always imagined that’s how my tenure with the network would end one day. One of our online producers at TSN.ca, who would like to remain nameless, imagines Mark would get a kick out of firing people using knockknock jokes:

“Hey, Jay,” he would come up to me and say.

“Yes, Mark?” I would reply.

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“You’re fired.”

Something succinct like that. Mark is a man of few words.

These days Mark’s title is executive vice-president of production, and he is basically in charge of the entire on-air look of the network and all the shows, but when I started back in 1996 Mark was one of several producers on
Sportsdesk
. He produced the 6:30 edition of the show, which was hosted by Jim Van Horne at the time. I met him on my first day at the network, or should I say, I was
ignored
by him on my first day at the network.

Wearing what was probably a T-shirt that featured a box of Trix on it or maybe the Brillo logo, I tentatively approached Mark, who was sitting at his regular desk in the middle of the newsroom typing away on the computer.

Gwen, the newsroom assistant, had already told me to ask Mark what my first task would be. Also known as “the first day of the rest of my life” (cue the
Perfect Strangers
theme).

“Hi, Mark!” I said cheerfully. “My name is Jay. I’m the new intern from Ryerson. Anything I can help you with to get started?” I was pretty good at introductions, even then.

Silence.

Not just silence, but a complete lack of acknowledgement. Mark was completely ignoring me. Not saying “Just hold on a sec, I’ll be right with you” or “Hey, man, come back in five minutes.”

It was literally as if I weren’t standing there at all. I might as well have been invisible.

Jim Van Horne was sitting in the desk next to Mark typing away as well. I looked over to him for something, anything, but he didn’t look up, either, nor did the person sitting on the other side of Mark.

It was as if I were in one of those movies where I die and then come back as a ghost, and I’m trying to get people to pay attention to me for several scenes. Later, I finally realize I’m dead and that I
have to help my former fiancée meet a new man and move on with her life, or something like that. You know the film. It stars me and Ricky Gervais and Whoopi Goldberg and probably features a dog as the only character in the film that can see or hear me.

Finally, after what seemed like five minutes of standing next to this man looking like a complete idiot, I sheepishly wandered back to the Row, where all the show’s writers sat and watched games. Given that it was an afternoon in the middle of winter, there were likely no live sports to watch, so I chatted away with everyone else, including Tim, not yet Producer Tim, still an intern like me. Tim had arrived earlier than me and had also been stonewalled by Mark, which made me feel slightly better but still very confused. Is it possible that I might be ignored by this guy for the entirety of my four-month internship? Was it my responsibility to hit him across the head to get his attention? My head was filled with anxiety when I was suddenly awakened from my daydream by a very distinct voice.

“Jay!” said Mark in about the loudest voice level I’ve heard from him before or since.

I spun around. He was talking to me!
He was talking to me!

“Right here!” I said, just a
touch
overenthusiastically.

“Where the hell have you been? You were supposed to start fifteen minutes ago.”

Was this a joke? Was someone playing a joke on the new guy? I stared at Mark, who had the stone-faced expression of an angry parent. No, this was clearly not a joke.

“I’ve … I’ve been here the entire time. I came up to say hi to you fifteen minutes ago. Do you remember?”

Mark not only didn’t remember he didn’t care. “I need you to watch ABC news feeds for anything we might want to use in our “News and Notes” segment. Can you do that?” he asked.

I had watched news feeds while volunteering at ITV, so this was
actually a job skill I had already acquired: watching TV. Truthfully, I had been preparing for this job my entire life.

“No problem, Mark.”

He turned away again.

That would be all I would see or hear from Mark for the next three hours, right up until 6:00.

At that time we were still recording our stories, highlights, and features on Beta tape. This may seem archaic, but Beta was the format of choice for years in broadcast news because of the quality of the picture. So instead of having all the video exist on a hard drive as it does today, we would have multiple tapes for each show. By the time 6:00 p.m. rolled around, we were a half-hour to showtime. In a normal newsroom all the tapes that would be used in that show would mostly be gone, either already handed in to master control for playback or in use by one of our editors, perhaps putting the finishing touches on our lead item. Mark worked a bit differently.

I started to notice that every single day, right around 6:00,
almost all
of the tapes would still be sitting on a table near Mark’s desk, waiting to be assigned. This was different from other editions of
Sportsdesk
that I would work on, where the tapes would be assigned much earlier, like at the beginning of our shift, so we knew what we were actually supposed to be doing. Mark’s was the only show where a half-hour before we were scheduled to go live across the country most of the items in the show had not been assigned yet and a large stack of tapes sat next to his desk, unclaimed. I wondered about this but decided it was above my pay grade (my pay being nothing), and therefore I shouldn’t worry about it. I began to realize that Mark thrived on chaos. When the clock struck six, it was as if an alarm bell went off in Mark’s head. Suddenly, he would jump out of his chair and begin to assign stories and items in the show to people in a seemingly random fashion, throwing the Beta tapes at us like footballs. It
was never boring. The shows were always great and every tape made it to air. It was his way of operating, and it worked for him.

Now he’s in charge of TSN’s network content, and that’s working out pretty well for him, too. Unfortunately for Mark, he was also in charge of my show. But fortunately for me and Dan, he always supported it. The fact that I worked for him all those years ago as an intern and then as a story editor convinced him to trust me when, years later, I would come up with ideas like having one of our own writers get slapped by Dan on live television. I never fully appreciated all the freedom Mark gave me to be creative until I went to work for someone else. You need to have someone who has your back in this business, and Mark always did.

I
T WASN’T LONG AFTER
I joined TSN as a writer back in 1996 that I started to realize that professional wrestling wasn’t dead.

In the popular culture of the day, pro wrestling was indeed dead, about as uncool as an entertainment genre could be at the time. The stars of the ’80s, like Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik, were getting older, and those of us who had grown up in wrestling’s incredible nadir surrounding the first three WrestleManias had now also gotten older. Too old to continue watching men throw each other around in a ring and brandish their considerable freestyle skills on the microphone. For me at the time, the concept of watching wrestling was as ridiculous as the concept of playing with the Star Wars action figures I had collected as a kid. Sure, I would have enjoyed the tugging on my heartstrings of nostalgia for a moment, but ultimately, I was a grown-up, and watching wrestling was supposed to be for kids.

How naïve I was.

Soon after being brought into the network as an intern I met
Steve Argintaru, who rose through the ranks to the position he holds as of this writing: executive producer of
SportsCentre
. Steve is a smart, hard-working guy and a talented broadcaster, but it became very clear to me very quickly that as much as he loved professional sports, his true passion was professional wrestling.

Steve was a few years older than me and seemed like a nice and normal guy, so imagine my shock when he told me that in his spare time he was a freelance photographer for
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
, a trade magazine that peaked in popularity during the ’80s by ranking the wrestlers and tag teams of the era in top-ten formats, regardless of organizational affiliation. I was under the impression that
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
had probably folded years ago, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, Steve wasn’t the only wrestling fan in the
Sportsdesk
newsroom; it turned out that the people in the newsroom were a great example of a sports nerd microculture, and that to many of them wrestling was still a fun way to kill an hour or two on a weekend.

Soon after I arrived at TSN, wrestling experienced a comeback with the likes of The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin leading the way, and I’m sure Steve felt vindicated for sticking with his beloved men in tights, as he should have. It was the first time I began to really feel at home in a television newsroom, a place where nerds thrive and jocks can sometimes feel left out. The newsroom is almost the opposite of a pro sports dressing room: Suddenly no one cares about their prowess on the ice or the court. They’re more curious whether anybody watched the previous Sunday’s episode of
Game of Thrones
after catching that double overtime between the Hawks and Celtics.

I met more nerds in the TSN
Sportsdesk
newsroom in the early ‘90s, but these nerds were not interested in wrestling—they were too high-minded for that. These nerds were into music. They were into music as much as they were into sports! They were just like me!
In fact, they were better nerds than me. Way better. Now at work on
Sportsdesk
in between innings of my Cubs–Cardinals afternoon game, I suddenly found myself chatting with my fellow writers about whether Len would be more than just a one-hit wonder (they weren’t; it didn’t take a nerd to figure that out).

One of the reasons I enjoy the writing of Chuck Klosterman so much is that I feel like we have such similar backgrounds. Chuck grew up in rural North Dakota, loved hair metal bands growing up (he even wrote a book about them called
Fargo Rock City
), and most importantly, he actually played sports in high school like I did. There was a simple reason why Chuck played sports and didn’t just watch them like most nerds. When you grow up in a small town there are fewer kids competing to be on the local sports teams, and you get opportunities that city kids might not get. That was certainly the case for me, though I was also lucky to be tall and semi-athletic (notice I said “semi-athletic”), so I was able to play hockey and volleyball and even basketball, a sport I loved to watch but didn’t love to play. When you are over six-foot-five in a town of fewer than 2,000 people, there is a very good chance you will be playing on the high school basketball team. I’m glad there wasn’t a football team for me to try out for. I would have likely ended up with some sort of severe injury.

If you’re familiar with Klosterman’s work you know he is almost as comfortable writing about sports as he is about music and pop culture. Sports and music pretty comfortably fall under the banner of pop culture these days because they’re all about entertainment, and if you’re even younger than Chuck and me,
then you are probably even more comfortable combining everything under that banner because all your information, music, and possibly even television and movies are coming from one place: the Internet. It’s safe to say that Klosterman could be classified as a nerd. He looks like a nerd. He certainly
sounds
like a nerd. And he writes with nerd-like obsession about subjects he is passionate about. That’s my message to you aspiring sports broadcasters and journalists out there: Embrace your nerd-dom. The best way to prepare yourself to stay employed through the ever-changing ways we deliver information to the public is to
be
a nerd: someone who is so vastly knowledgeable about a subject that he or she transcends all the mediums it might be delivered through. The medium is no longer the message, the message is the message! Suck it, Marshall McLuhan.

So when I arrive at a newsroom for work, the first subject of conversation will likely be the games we are watching on the monitors. Some guys might talk about fantasy pools they’re currently in; others might talk about sports news they heard about that day that is now seven hours old, practically ancient history by modern media standards. Then talk inevitably moves to television and which shows we’re watching, because every single person in that newsroom isn’t just a sports television nerd, they’re a television nerd,
period
. Shows like
The Wire
and
Game of Thrones
are held in particularly high regard because, being as obsessive as we are about the medium, we seek out only the very best from it. Not to mention the fact that once one group in the newsroom starts watching a show you can’t fall behind, because that group will inevitably want to discuss said show at work the next day, and there’s an excellent chance those shows will be spoiled for you if you haven’t watched them.

Then there’s movie talk: Producer Tim is a particularly big fan of discussing the latest Hollywood blockbusters. He is a moderate Michael Bay apologist, which is still completely unacceptable to me
to this day. Finally, talk often drifts to music with certain people in the room, the music nerds. The sports nerds who unwind after a day of watching three baseball games by putting My Morning Jacket’s
It Still Moves
on their Bose Wave music player while they finish off the last beer of the day. I tend to gravitate toward these nerds in the newsroom, and they tend to be the people I attend concerts with, just as they are also likely the people I would attend an afternoon Blue Jays game with. Nerds are nerds are nerds. The people running the Canadian television sports networks are some of the biggest nerds in the world. I should know, because I work for them, and they speak my language.

So if you’re the kind of person who thinks you might want to become a sports broadcaster, here’s a tip: Lock yourself in your room with your TV or iPad or computer and about six or seven great sports books about subjects that interest you, and just start devouring knowledge like an ancient Greek philosopher. Jump on YouTube and check out clips of games you’ve heard about but never seen. Watch as much sports as you possibly can without alienating friends and family. Heck, invite your friends and family over to watch sports. Don’t forget to make nachos. Every single day, read every single sports writer whom you respect and admire, and even some of the ones you don’t admire. And maybe even start a blog and a Twitter account and start writing yourself.

I still maintain that the ability to write well is the single most important tool that will help you succeed in this business. In the past you didn’t have many outlets to allow you to practise writing in a professional style. Now with every great sports writer published online, you can follow your favourites and try to develop your own style, maybe even get some feedback along the way. The next generation of sports broadcasters and journalists will be much more informed than we were, thanks to the wealth of knowledge available to them, literally, at their fingertips. By the way, you realize
what I’m saying here, right? I’m telling you that the way to succeed in my business is to just watch sports. That’s it. Could anything be more simple and awesome than that?