No. 26: A REPORTER NAMED "BOB" / Don't turn your back on colleagues in need ... but make sure they get it down right

A chapter that didn't make the Audible Original project

This was a chapter that I wrote for my Audible Original, the project that gave its name and spirit to this Substack. I had to drop it during the recording of How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying), which I beseech you to check out by clicking on the link, reading the blurbs and listening to the free sample.

I didn’t use this chapter for two reasons: 1. I was running ridiculously long in the studio; 2. This story works better in print or when I’m sitting in front of you and have a visual in my hand. This yarn and its five megaton payoff will work here on Substack because of hard evidence in screenshots.

When sportswriters hang out and there’s a single newbie loitering, I’m always obliged to retell this story—I actually was obliged to do this a week back after the celebration of the life and times of reporter Frank Orr at the Hockey Hall of Fame. Guaranteed for a laugh.

And the usual advisory stuff: Your likes, comments and shares are thoroughly appreciated and please hit the subscribe button—it’s free so it’s worth every penny.

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I WAS sitting at the bar at the Clocktower, then my local in Ottawa’s Glebe neighbourhood, and chatting with the bartender who regarded me as one of his platinum customers. At the same time, I was doodling on napkin after napkin, such is my habit, whatever came into my head, as if these were thin paper thought bubbles.

I had been in place for over an hour, all through the last two periods of a game between the Ottawa Senators and the New York Islanders—a TV over the bar had the game on but with the sound off, thankfully.  Even though the fan base in Ottawa was fairly rabid back in ’02, no one asked for the volume to be turned up. It was a mid-week, mid-winter game against a not quite middle-of-the-pack team, and as such signified nothing much. Just another game filling out the schedule.

There was, however, one point of interest, one that would pass for a storyline: This was the first time the Senators would be skating in a game against their former captain, Alexei Yashin, whose leadership skills were outstripped by his wholly mercenary attitude. At one point, Yashin sat out an entire season in attempt to force the Senators to either trade him or cough up eight figures or so. When it all became too messy Ottawa management traded him to the Islanders where he signed a long-term deal for 90-million bucks, enough to keep his girlfriend Carol Alt in the luxury she was accustomed to even after the meter had run out on her run as a supermodel.

I was thankful that I wasn’t at the game. Those on press row always considered Long Island as one of the worst stops on the circuit: no getting to Manhattan after a game, no creature comforts near the arena in Uniondale and a barely two-star hotel the other side of the parking lot was the only option. For sure whatever morning flight from Kennedy or LaGuardia was going to make for a sleepless night, a too-early wake-up call and a clusterfuck at check-in.

However, I wasn’t thankful that I wasn’t at risk of drawing the shitty assignment. In fact, I was in the blackest of moods. At a point when I was banished from the Bugle’s sports department, a casualty in management’s attempt to systematically bust the unions at papers across the chain back in the fall of 2001. Yeah, the other disaster.

The game wore on in the background and I really didn’t watch it closely. Actually, I hardly watched it at all. A student of the human condition, I observed the fauna around me, eavesdropped on conversations but mostly minded my own business. I looked up from my doodles only occasionally to check the score. The bartender was tracking the action, though, and he tried to engage me in conversation about this player or that—he knew that I worked for the Bugle, just not that I was exiled from the sports department. I shrugged and whatever-ed. With about a minute to go and the game tied 2-all, my cell rang and I did the polite thing by excusing myself, leaving the bar area and taking the personal call outside. I was back in no time at all.

Upon my return and the game winding up a tie, the bartender again tried to make small talk about the Senators.

 “I know exactly what tomorrow’s sports section of the tabloid will look like,” I said.

This seemed like no stretch to the bartender.

“Well, it’s going to be the Senators game that’s the first page,” he said. “I mean they’re the only show in town.”

I raised the stakes and piqued his interest.

“No, I can tell you what the first sentence of the story of the game is going to be,” I said. “Word for word.”

That got a “Yeah, right” from him. I had him hooked.

“Here’s a proposition,” I said. “My twenty bucks to your free beer tomorrow. I’ll write down the first sentence of the story on the first page of the sports section in the …”

And here I mentioned the name of the tabloid in town and the bartender knew the tabloid was the newspaper I didn’t work for. He knew it was the newspaper that was my employers’ hated competition. I could see the wheels turning—it couldn’t be inside information.

This intrigued him—zero risk. He had seen dozens of sucker bar bets over the years. This surely had to be one. Still, what’s the harm? He figured it was a chance to win a double saw at the risk of a comped beer. He could hide it as spillage. He just wanted to sort out the terms.

“You’re saying word for word?”

I mean, it sounded impossible.

I wrote down a sentence on a napkin and handed it to him. It read:

It only figures that after so many contract impasses that the Senators’ first meeting with Alexei Yashin would wind up in a stalemate.

The bartender looked at it.

“Seriously?” he said.

It was, after all, not your standard-issue lede for the town’s tabloid, a grade, maybe two grades above the usual reading level. A little twisty sentence structure. A play on words. Kinda artful, really.

“Verbatim,” I said. “If they add so much as a comma in there, it’s a double sawbuck for you.”

Hands were shaken.

I wrote the sentence down again on another napkin and had the bartender initial it. Given the stakes there was no need to get it notarized.

The following afternoon at happy hour I came into the bar with a copy of the tabloid in my hand. I could tell by the bartender’s face that I didn’t need to bring in the evidence.

A screenshot of the edition that I cashed in for a free beer.

His first order of business that morning had been to check out the tabloid’s coverage of the Senators-Islanders game and there was the lead as I had written it in the bar barely a minute after the game had finished.

“How did you know?” he asked as he poured me a beer.

“I wrote it,” I said.

He didn’t believe it. He just took it as circumstantial evidence.

“How did you write something for a paper you don’t work for about a game in New York while you’re sitting at a bar in Ottawa? And another guy’s name on it? And it says right there that he’s in New York?”

So, I laid it out for him, as I’ll lay it out for you here now.

*

WHEN I took the job in Ottawa, I was assuming a job that had been held down by my buddy Roy. (Yes, this was the same Roy whom I had presumed to be the Globe’s target when the paper was headhunting for a columnist a few years before.) The city’s broadsheet hired me during the NHL training camp, as if I needed a few exhibition games to get my legs under me. I was greeted along press row with a shrug of cold shoulders, befitting an interloper. After all, I was walking into the long shadow that Roy cast. Roy, universally respected in the business. Roy beloved by all, not just a good guy but the best guy. Roy, the man of the people, who had friends who sat in the House of Parliament and friends who begged for quarters on hard-scrabble street corners. I was destined to be the guy who never could be Roy and constantly reminded of it.

I had been on the job for a month or so when I had coffee with an old-timer in our department. I mentioned that I was mystified if not troubled by the chilliness on press row. I mean, it was one thing to love Roy, but I hadn’t smited him or anything like that. I was just stepping into the breach when he went off chasing a bigger paycheck. The old-timer only then realized that I knew nothing of the established etiquette and historical protocol on the press row.

“You know that Roy used to write Bob’s ledes.”

I registered disbelief. The first sentence is the most critical in any newspaper and magazine story. It’s also the most demanding of a writer’s craft. Where to begin? Once that’s settled, everything should fall into place in short order. True of a newspaper wire-service story or the most flowery feature in the New Yorker or, for that matter, the latest cinder block of literary prose from Jonathan Franzen. And the first sentence might be not only the most critical one of a tabloid sports game story but also, more to the point, the only one that matters at all—once that first coherent thought is in place, you might as well toss all the other sentences, random thoughts and quotes into a salad bowl and toss them liberally. Pretty much anything will do.

Like any good reporter, I sought clarification.

“Let me get this right. Bob, you mean the guy who works for the competition? For the featured hockey beat guy for the tabloid on the wrong side of the tracks? The one who shows up in a bow tie on sportscasts and is there every morning on sports-talk radio.”

“Yes, Bob.”

 I didn’t see this in the job description when I signed my contract with the Bugle. This never came up in the interview process. I had worked in shared space with Roy and Bob on press row for years and knew nothing about.

“It’s a tradition,” the old-timer told me.

“Like the Masters,” I said.

I thought the old-timer was pulling my leg, a bit of rookie hazing, but a day later I gave Roy a social call and he explained to me that, indeed, he had been writing Bob’s leads. Nightly. For 15 years. Since Bob was fresh out of a community-college journalism class with a solid C-minus average.  

I respected Roy too much to suggest that maybe, maybe, this amounted to a conflict of interest—one that might upset management at the broadsheet.

“You’ve seen him up in the press box.”

I had. Imagine Chris Farley in the floppiest of flop sweats but leaving his shirt on. As deadline neared, Bob looked like he had been sucked up into a tornado and spat out. He shook and grinded his teeth. You could guesstimate his blood pressure by the flush of his face. Every press box has at least one: a sportswriter who is simply crushed nightly by the filing of a report under deadline pressure. Bob was an extreme case and well-known as one in the hockey media. What I didn’t know and likewise those in the trade outside of Ottawa: Bob achieved this near-death state even though Roy was dictating the lede and bailing him out. He had a naked fear of taking dictation and re-typing it.

“Frankly, I worry about his health,” Roy told me. “I took a St John’s Ambulance course so that I can operate a defibrillator just with Bob in mind. Writing his lede isn’t a big lift. It’s really the only decent thing to do.”

Roy didn’t have to be explicit or prescriptive. If I wanted to be decent, if I wanted to be able to live with myself, then I had to help out Bob. Thus Roy passed me the torch.   

It still sounded like a prank to me—some sort of initiation—so I sought out Old Ted, a sixty-something lifer at the broadsheet who was infamous for malaprops, mixed metaphors and other risible strangulations of prose. (My favourite in his raw copy was suggesting that a team with a spate of injuries was “being held together by duck tape [sic].”) In conversation I mentioned that Roy must have been “a great mentor to young writers.” I didn’t mention Bob by name but as he was a year or two short of forty, Old Ted counted him in that number.

“Are you talking about Roy helping out Bob?” Old Ted said. “By rights Roy should have been collecting two paychecks. What a guy! Yeah, a lot of people here at the broadsheet were sad to see Roy go, but no one misses him as much as Bob. It was a day of mourning. Pretty sure over at Bob’s they had a momentary silence.”

Such was the confirmation I needed, no matter how mangled it came out.

The old escape line about solicitations for charity is operative here. How many times have we begged off by saying that we “gave at the office?” Well, as the broadsheet’s columnist and the designated Good Samaritan I was expected by my peers to give at the office nightly—to donate a lede that would be collected and appear on the front page of tabloid’s sports section.

*

I FIGURED I needed to make a splashy debut as the tabloid’s new lede writer and let Bob know that he was in good hands. That I’d have his back. Or in this case, that I’ve got his top.

The opportunity came up a couple of nights later when the Anaheim Ducks landed in Montreal to play the Canadiens—it was a regular-season game, just one of 82, and as such no big deal. It did mark a homecoming, however. Pierre Gauthier had been the Ottawa Senators’ general manager for a couple of years but resigned the position in the summer of ’98 to take a presumably more lucrative and prestigious deal with Anaheim. Gauthier was back in his hometown of Montreal and his team was going to play there and then in Ottawa on back-to-back nights. The game in Montreal seemed like a perfect opportunity to chase down the executive who jilted the Senators and it was also an opportunity to capture what would pass for Gauthier’s personal victory lap—local guy makes good, as it were. It would well-serve readers in the capital the following morning in the run-up to Gauthier’s return to the spurned Senators’ arena.

There was nothing but dry eyes in the house that night. As sports figures go, Gauthier was nothing close to beloved and too ethereal to be reviled. He was a fussy little man, a conglomeration of quirks and affectations. He possessed a pretty good hockey mind but an unveiled sense of superiority. Worst of all, he was utterly averse to having fun. Where he happened upon a parade, he’d pray for rain.

Gauthier had a couple of nicknames: “The Ghost” was a nice play on both his surname and his near-invisibility; my personal favourite, “Birdseed,” mocked the 126-pound executive’s diet, which seemed limited to organic fruit and free-trade millet in portions too small to sustain a parakeet.

At the Senators’ morning practice Bob let me know that he was planning to go to Montreal that afternoon to try to chase down Gauthier and I let him know that I had that in my calendar as well. I lost the coin flip—I drove and Bob was going to file for mileage like he had. En route and on arrival, I never mentioned my intention to extend a helping hand.

When Bob and I arrived at the arena, we tried to track down Gauthier but had no luck—there wasn’t the faintest whiff of dried apricots nor a trail of raw cashew pieces. We asked the Ducks media-relations guy, but he volunteered nothing. Long-time staffers up in the media dining room hadn’t seen him, which stood to reason—he couldn’t bear the smell the Canadiens’ famous hot dogs and smoked meat sandwiches. I took laps of the concourse before the game and during the first intermission, thinking that, maybe if Gauthier were sitting in the seats with, say, a scout from the Ducks, he’d being taking a bathroom break between periods. Again, no luck.

The Habs’ press secretary made a point of sitting Bob and me in neighbouring seats in the press box—all out-of-towners get that treatment. I had a panoramic view of the game and a tight close-up of Bob’s anguish. By the second intermission, Bob was in a panic. Coming up with a lede with a boost from a co-operative GM would have been hard enough, but he had no idea. He perched over his keyboard as if ready to type but was effectively frozen in place.

“I need a lede,” he said finally.

“The Ghost was nowhere to be seen in his old haunts last night,” I said, looking forward, avoiding any eye contact with Bob.

“Good,” Bob said. “Real good.”

And that’s how it appeared in the tabloid the next morning.

The torch had been passed to me, now mine to hold high.

*

SO IT would be for several years. Nightly I played the role of Androcles, plucking the thorn from the tabloid lion’s paw. Nightly I took a certain pride in Bob’s leads. Once at a Habs game, I was sitting beside Bob when the Journal de Montreal’s Bert Raymond (who did not know about our writing arrangement) showered him with praise for a snappy one-liner atop his story in the tabloid that day. Once Bob’s admirer was safely out of earshot I said something like, “I’m blushing.” Happened at least a couple of times.

Occasionally, Bob would acknowledge my contribution to his body of work. Make that, very occasionally. Really, only one comes to mind.

Bob was pretty much a writer of game stories and a purveyor of rumours, straight news with regular forays into speculative fiction. Once, though, he turned his attention to something in my wheelhouse: the writing of a feature, in this case a profile of Steve Yzerman, who grew up in Ottawa before going on to Detroit where he became the longest-serving captain in NHL history. Bob had arranged with an exclusive audience with Yzerman’s in the legend’s home in suburban Bloomfield Hills, where most of the well-to-do Red Wings settled down. At the time, Yzerman was coming off the surgical rebuilding of a balky knee and there seemed a high degree of probability that he would never step on the ice for anything more than the retirement of his number. During his uncertain recovery, what stretched from spring to summer to fall and well into winter, he was granting no interviews and asking that at this time everyone respect his privacy, particularly the jackals in the media.

While Bob knew Yzerman well enough, he was entering terra incognita with the assignment: its 2,000 words would with a couple of photos fill up a two-page spread. The nightly challenge for Bob was where to begin, but with the Yzerman profile the challenges were manifold—where-to-begin would be followed by where-to-go-next and, throughout, what-does-it-all-mean.

When I was having coffee with Bob, he told me how thrilled he was with the assignment—that he was getting a leg-up on a rival in the tabloid’s sports department, that his feature would run in every paper in the chain, that its success would likely open up new career opportunities for him. I had a sense that Bob was trying to convey the idea that only my very best would do this time out, but then he threw me a curveball that broke a foot over the plate.

“I’m going to write this one,” he said.

It seemed an unlikely moment to take off the training wheels, but so be it. Off Bob went to Detroit with the expressed purpose of the making of his reputation as a capital-W writer. My act as his Cyrano was up and Bob was going to speak his own heart in his love letter to an unlikely Roxanne, Steve Yzerman.

“Godspeed, my boy,” I said. “Can’t wait to read it in the town tabloid.”

A week or so later, Bob corralled me.

“I got to show you something,” he said.

Like a father opening his wallet to show you pictures of his newborn, Bob proudly opened his laptop with his Yzerman feature in draft form on the screen.

I read the first few lines and swallowed hard.

“Is this how it’s going to run?” I asked.

“I haven’t sent it yet,” he said. “It’s real good, isn’t it? Real feature-y, right?”

Only by volume, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

“You don’t mind making a suggestion, do you?”

 “Sure.”

 I cleared my throat.

“Well, the lede,” I began. “The lede is mostly about how Yzerman pulls up in his Mercedes and picks you up at the Marriott. From there you go on the drive out to Bloomfield and we see what his house looks like. And you spell out that this is an exclusive to the tabloid.”

“Yeah, great isn’t it?” Bob said, beaming.

How to be diplomatic?

“Well, it reads, don’t get me wrong. But it’s sorta lifestyle-y, isn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it could be anytime, couldn’t it? It could be him at age 30 or him in retirement. There’s no time pegged to it and, worse, there’s no tension.”

A look of puzzlement creased Bob’s face. I had to be even more explicit.

“Yzerman thought his career might be over. At the same time, he was on the radar for the 2002 Olympics, right? A chance to make good, given that he was on Canadian teams that lost in the World Cup of Hockey …”

In 1996.

“… and at the Olympics in Nagano …”

In 1998.

“So, it was either walking away from the game or sucking up a lot of pain to play in the Olympics and take another shot at the Stanley Cup. There’s your timing and there’s your tension.”

I scanned down into Bob’s draft and saw a single late mention of Yzerman’s waiting for a phone call from the management of the Canadian Olympic team. I asked Bob a couple of questions and filled in some background material. At that point, I opened my laptop and started to type.

“Steve Yzerman knew the call was coming. He didn’t know what he could say. He didn’t even know if he could pick up the phone.”  

This time I didn’t just offer Bob a lead. In fact, I wrote the first 400 words of the Yzerman feature. Not rewriting, but in fact writing from scratch. The opening was suspenseful—hard-boiled, after a fashion. Yzerman has ever been a private guy and extra-cautious when talking to the media, but with this piece I had him owning up to an existential despair. The brave captain’s feared but one thing—that it was over.

I didn’t torque up the vocabulary or anything to my usual shades of mauve, but otherwise I wrote the piece as if it were my name attached to it.

When the story appeared, Bob received congratulations around the press box, the usual thing, and I allowed myself a smile when I made eye contact with him, trying to break him up. This time, though, with the Yzerman piece, Bob was taking an unusual and unprecedented degree of pride of ownership. And he bragged on how it was given a lot of play in the chain’s papers in bigger markets than Ottawa.

It was all a bit much, but I let it slide.

Months passed and then one day Bob entered the media lunchroom at the rink like he had won a lottery.

“You won’t believe it, I’m a finalist for the Earl Award. For that Yzerman story I wrote last fall.”

(I’m subbing in ‘the Earl Award’ for the actual name of the tabloid’s in-house prize on the advice of my lawyer. Using the copyrighted name without the approval of the tab’s management would likely lead to an excruciating litigation.)

I’ll admit: It stung when Bob said—and I quote—“the Yzerman story I wrote.” If the judges had read Bob’s original draft of the story, the one with Steve Yzerman chauffeuring him around, then Bob wouldn’t have been a finalist for the Earl or any other award. That didn’t cross his mind. It bugged me for the rest of the evening but in time it mostly passed.

A couple of months later when the Red Wings and Yzerman were in the news again, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard anything more about Bob’s nominated “work.” It would have been around the time of the tabloid chain’s big gala night. So, I followed up.

“Bob, how did the Stevie Y story do in the Earl Awards?” I asked.

Quoth he: “We lost.”   

*

THE THANKLESSNESS of my tasked role I mostly kept to myself, but my collegiality became known in the ranks in the Ottawa media. It earned me a degree of respect—I mean, I was no Roy or anything, but who was? I settled for just being thought of a good-hearted slug, though I was uncomfortable with an unexpected consequence of this: In time, others looked at me for a bit of “coaching” on deadline. I reached my breaking point on a Canadian Thanksgiving Sunday.

As holidays go, the Canadian Thanksgiving is to American Thanksgiving like rough-hewn pyrite to 21-karat gold. It’s barely marked a holiday at all—if it were, nobody would have given a thought of scheduling an afternoon game with the New Jersey Devils visiting Ottawa. There was not a thing at all festive or worthy of celebrating in this match-up. The late 90s and early ‘2000s were undisputedly the NHL’s dreariest era—goal scoring was achieving record low points and, worse, the game seemed to reward the teams that played the most conservative style. The Devils were the defining outfit in these almost entertainment-bereft times and would wind up winning three Stanley Cups while generally anaesthetizing devout fans of the game. The Senators were an emerging organization and pretty much stole their organizational playbook from the Devils.

You too can build a contender on a small budget. Simply surgically extract all joy from the game.

The game as it played out lived down to expectations. The final score, 2-2, was misleading. The numbers suggested there was more action than there actually was …

To create the illusion of action, the crew that compiled statistics at Senators games routinely inflated the numbers of shots on goal. By the numbers they posted on the scoreboard New Jersey outshot the Senators 33-30 through 60 minutes. For my own sake, I routinely kept a running count of scoring chances and was fairly generous in what qualified as such. At the end of the 60 minutes, I had counted nine scoring chances. Between the two teams. Every six minutes or so of time running on the clock, you’d witness a shot that might go in the back of the net. In other words, soccer on blades, the Ice Capades mashed up with Waiting for Godot. The goalies this day hardly distinguished themselves, no matter what the final score and the league’s official stats might have said.

This early October lilt between New Jersey and Ottawa happened to coincide with the advent of a new addition to the NHL rulebook that season. For decades a NHL regular-season game could after finish in a tie after 60 minutes. The old saying about a tie’s equivalence to kissing your sister was wholly operative. In the 90s, the league instituted a five-minute overtime period, a token effort to break the gridlock that only rarely affected the outcome. Then the league decided the fewer the players involved, the better the chance of breaking up a tie, so the teams would be limited to four skaters aside for the five minutes. Anything that might relax the ever-tightening of sphincters. This wound up being the first occasion for folks in Ottawa to bear witness to a four-on-four overtime.

The record book will show that New Jersey registered two shots on goal to Ottawa’s one in the five-minute overtime but nonetheless the mere novelty of it passed for entertainment.

My column focused on the scorer of one of the home team’s goals, him being the proceeds of a controversial off-season trade. I left plenty of room for the broadsheet’s beat writer to play through and write a straight game story, the blow-by-blow. I could see this poor soul, a man who basically checked any original thoughts the moment he punched the clock, was stymied, sitting frozen over his keyboard.

I had passed on a lede to Bob and he transcribed it faithfully, but then I was approached by a fellah known as Sarge, the second banana to Bob at the tabloid. Sarge evoked Marty York in a downmarket sort of way—where Marty’s act was the house contrarian and firestarter, Sarge was a booster for the home team, an unabashed or possibly oblivious knucklehead and the voice of the fan. When the playoffs started, he’d dye his hair team colours and wear the home sweater up in press row.

“Hey if you did it for him, why don’t you do me one too?” Sarge said as only he could.

“Okay, what do you have in mind, Sarge? What do you want to say?”

“Yeah, well, like, for 60 minutes the fans are, like, getting ripped off—I mean they’re spending hundreds of dollars on tickets and it’s really boring, you know. But then, you know, the overtime is crazy with shit breaking out all over the ice, couple of breakaways and it kinda made it worthwhile, but what do I know?”

The last would have been a line of metaphysical inquiry that, however narrow in its focus, would have run past Don't turn your back on colleagues in need ... but make sure they get it down rightdeadline.

At that moment I could see the flickering of the 20-watt bulb hanging over the broadsheet’s beat writer’s head. He needed Sarge’s inarticulate precis to work from and he set about typing. The lede that he came up with was as filling and spicy as two slices of Wonder Bread and a dollop of Cheese Whiz.

Thank goodness for the National Hockey League’s new overtime format.

If four-on-four hockey does nothing else this year, it appears it may at least be capable of bringing out the best in the Ottawa Senators and New Jersey Devils.

As news copy goes, it wouldn’t seem to have been written so much as generated and spat out by the most rudimentary algorithm.

I turned my attention back to Sarge.

“You say that the Senators fans were not getting value for their dollar during regulation,” I said. “Try this: For 60 minutes, Senators fans thought they were getting screwed. It just took a little four-on-foreplay to loosen things up.”

The logic twisted to the nonsensical mattered not to Sarge. “Four play? Or foreplay?” he asked. “Can I say that? Can I get that by the desk?”

“You’re the tabloid’s loudest voice. Plays on words are a fine old tabloid tradition, the more risqué the better. Of course, you can say that.”

“Risqué … you mean, like, dirty?”  

Precisely so, I advised him.

“I can use it?”

“Godspeed, my son.”

Sarge thought I was hoodwinking him, so he floated the idea of a buffer.

“I’ll say that you said it up in the press box,” he said.

“Oh, you can’t do that. I do work for the competition. I don’t think your bosses or mine would be thrilled. No, you can’t ID me. I don’t want my fingerprints on it. What don’t you just attribute it to ‘the Bard of Press Row.’”

Sarge feigned understanding, gave thanks and set about typing his missive.

I thought nothing of it until the next morning when Bob called.

“Have you read Sarge’s story yet?”

I explained I always made it a point not to. Bob insisted that I should go and pick up a copy. I told him that this was probably not the best circulation drive but went down to the corner store and parted with a couple of quarters. I turned to the sports section and then realized that I should have ensured that he take down my offering as dictated. It read as follows:

From the press box came a line that pretty much summed up yesterday’s events at the Corel Centre,

“The fans probably thought they were getting screwed until the four-on-foreplay,” said Bard.

I repeat: “said Bard.”

Not “the Bard of Press Row.”

The next day at practice, one wiseacre player needled Sarge: “I read your story but one thing. Who is Bard? Is that like Bard Simpson?”

“Who’s Bard?” became an oft-repeated inside joke on press row.

Suffice it to say, that wound up being the only lede I ever wrote for Sarge, although frequently I was asked for Bard’s opinion on this or that. “What would Bard say about that?” someone would quip. It was funny enough as it stands, but one footnote makes it even more remarkable.

Go back to the start of this story. The New Jersey-Ottawa game was played in the afternoon. That meant Sarge’s story was filed at about four p.m. And that meant Sarge’s story was sitting in the system for seven hours before it was sent to the printers. That means, it never occurred to an editor, for the duration of his shift, in the tabloid’s newsroom to ask, “Who’s this guy Bard?”

---

At the Hockey Hall of Fame’s celebration of life for Frank Orr the other night, I mentioned to someone that the invitation would probably be the last time I’d get in the joint for nothing with a reserved seat in the main room. No, there’s no plaque in my future but I look forward one day to writing Bob’s acceptance speech.

---

MAILBAG: I wrote last week about former Leafs first-rounder Jeff Ware and his father, who threatened (and for all I know, tried) to use his family pull and have me fired at the Globe and Mail. One friend on Facebook noted that his son played with Jeff Ware’s brother and thought Ware pere was a decent guy. But that’s not the song a former OHL exec and now a NHL scout sang.

So maybe there’s a Part III to the hockey parenting series. Stay tuned.