No. 14: DICK BEDDOES / I'm not apologizing for my boyhood sportswriting hero, just empathizing for a broken guy. He should have been better, but years later I recognize I should have been too.

Maybe, just maybe, I was too harsh in my portrayal of a Canadian sportswriting legend in my Audible Original. That's the takeaway from a story I was sure I had lost.

In my Audible Original from which this Substack newsletter appropriates its name, I dwell on one of my boyhood sportswriting heroes, Dick Beddoes, who verbal gymnastics somersaulted off the pages of the Globe and Mail for a great big chunk of the 60s and the entirety of the 70s.

(Above, Mr. B in his usual resplendent form & a representative sample of his wit and wisdom.)

In the first chapter of the Audible Original, I recount how I met Beddoes in a vegetarian restaurant, the Groaning Board in the mid-70s. I was a teenager dreaming of writing for a newspaper someday, although even as a high-schooler I put a hard ceiling on my ambitions and never imagined that I’d ever columnize and so niftily corkscrew copy like he did seemingly effortlessly on a daily basis. “Worship” would not have been too strong a word and when we met I came away with an autograph…