No. 205: BOB McCOWN I / The Sun King of Toronto Drive Time fed me the perfect set-up. He didn't appreciate the punchline, but seriously, who could resist?

Wisecracks were encouraged on The Fan 590's flagship show back in the day ... unless they came at the host's expense.

A brief callback to begin.

I was somewhat remiss in last week’s entry, my tribute to a tremendous actor. Check out No. 204: DABNEY COLEMAN / He was greatest heel in modern cinema history, so of course he was perfectly cast as a sportswriter.

I wrote at length about Coleman in the title role in The “Slap” Maxwell Story, a critically acclaimed and virtually forgotten series going back to the late 80s. When I penned this love letter, I forgot to mention my personal connection to the actor and the show. The connection is as flimsy as silk, but no matter.

One of the great touches in the series was the Slapper’s taste in fashion or lack thereof. He dressed as if he were a principal in a community theatre production of The Front Page. With his fedora and his requisite stogie, he was meta-hacky. And whenever he read aloud his ripe copy in regular exercises of self-congratulation, it was a piece with his wardrobe—what he considered beautiful was hopelessly over the top.

On a trip to Los Angeles, I managed to get a souvenir from the show at a Hollywood memorabilia store: a necktie from the wardrobe of The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story. According to the tag, it was worn by Dabney Coleman, but no further information is provided, no episode mentioned. Price tag: $19.

Now, well-meaning friends have expressed doubts about its authenticity. My reply rides on simple logic: If you were going to perpetrate a fraud and pass off an item as Hollywood show-worn, wouldn’t you claim that the tie had been worn by a cast member in a classic, say The Sting?  The association with The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story wouldn’t have added one thin dime to the value of the accessory. Expert authentication have would cost more than the article itself. This wasn’t Archie Bunker’s armchair we’re talking about, nothing bound for the Smithsonian. Yeah, the pretty humble origin story is so obscure that any lie of its history would seem more improbable than the truth. Why would you make that up?

And what’s more, if you watch episodes of the series on YouTube you can see this is precisely the type of tie Coleman as Slap wore in every scene. Again, this show has been out of circulation for decades and wasn’t much seen back in the day—who would know what type of tie Slap Maxwell wore? Okay, who besides me who watched every available episode at the Paley Center back in the day?

Oh, and while I’m going on about Dabney Coleman, check out this clip from Drexell’s Class, a Coleman vehicle a few years after The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story. This sequence features the actor along with Tupac, Digital Underground and my good friend and one-time meal ticket Jason Priestley. Jason doesn’t show until the two-minute mark, but hang in—trying to buck typecasting as a pretty boy, Jason took on the role of a janitor—I can only presume my other buddy Donal Logue wasn’t available.¹

Okay, today’s missive about real-life characters in the sporting media, those as insufferable as Slap Maxwell.

---

BACK in high-school days in the 1970s I used to listen to Dick Beddoes who hosted a phone-in show on CKFH 1430. By day Beddoes was the erudite and more than occasionally over-wrought sports columnist with the Globe and Mail; by nights he fielded calls and cracked wise on Hockey Hotline. Beddoes’s radio persona was at odds with his print one. In the sports section, he sometimes staked out higher moral ground, particularly re racism in sports—I remember him taking up the cause of Harry Jerome, a champion sprinter from Vancouver who was frequently at odds with the lily-white officials who ran the Canadian track team. On the air, though, he brought it down to Joe Sixpack level, at one with his audience, and, more often than not, played it for laughs.

I searched for a photo of a fedora-free Beddoes—the man must have worn a lid to bed.

Beddoes was my first sportswriting hero and he figures large in my Audible Original memoir, the one that gave this SubStack its unwieldy name. In the first chapter of that memoir, I described how I first met Beddoes in a vegetarian restaurant, The Groaning Board, and came away with an autographed napkin and advice about a sportswriting career that I took as gospel. In the last chapter of the audiobook, I recount a trial by ordeal: working with a half-hearted effort Beddoes had submitted weeks late to a magazine where I held down a junior editing job. A warning for sportswriters: Don’t meet your heroes, because you just might have to rewrite their copy. Have a look at this entry from September of 2022, early days in this SubStack, No. 14: DICK BEDDOES / I'm not apologizing for my boyhood sportswriting hero, just empathizing for a broken guy. (I’ve taken the paywall down on the Beddoes story today. The first 180 or so entries in the archive require at least a trial paid subscription to access.)

On occasion I worked up the temerity to phone in to Hockey Hotline, maybe to celebrate the occasional victory by the home team, more often to lament the Leafs’ fading hopes. I was always at the ready to mention how we had met and to express my gratitude for his graciously indulging this starry-eyed fanboy. Sadly, I never had the dumb luck to get through to speak to Beddoes; in fact, I never even managed to speak to a producer who screened calls to sort out cranks from live wires. Every time I dialed up, I got a busy signal.

Yeah, if you’re a regular reader of this SubStack, you knew it had be so.

But today, I’m not writing about sportswriting, but rather about sports-talk radio, Beddoes’s other revenue stream in his salad days.

---

HOCKEY Hotline was the 70s, a more innocent time than the 90s, when sports-talk radio stations sprouted up in major markets and Bob McCown took the format to another level in Toronto on The Fan 590. The market couldn’t have been better for the station back in the early 90s: the Blue Jays winning two World Series and setting major-league attendance records, selling out the Dome for the season in advance of Opening Day; the Leafs not quite a champion but a relevant team for the first time in a generation.

The Fan had an array of talent—most notably, a newbie named Dan Shulman would wind up calling hoops and major league baseball on ESPN. Still, McCown (a.k.a. the Bobcat) was The Fan’s rock star, the Sun King of Drive Time, and if you didn’t know it, he was bound to inform you of the fact and remind you at the top of every hour. Arrogance was his shtik. He didn’t make any effort to ingratiate himself to his listeners. To his mind or at least the way he played it, he was doing them a favour by holding down the highest-paying job in the Toronto radio market.

McCown’s m.o. was a curious one: His program was dedicated to sports, yet he strangely little interest in talking to athletes, not even marquee names. Actually sweating for a living virtually disqualified you from the guest list. He presumed jocks knew little of the world beyond their game and made for bad radio. He was far more interested in talking to the executive class and other media, who knew the drill. Big muckety-mucks like himself.

Another counter-intuitive trademark:  While he talked with avowed authority about games and teams, he didn’t go to events. He was an insider who never went inside an arena or stadium. I never saw him at a game or a venue. I put it down to bone laziness—he’d rather do his reporting watching TV or picking up morning paper. It might have been something more than that, though. A decade or so into his reign on The Fan McCown admitted to having anxiety issues. Some people would shudder in front of a live mic, but that was McCown’s comfort zone—for him it was fear of crowds. I might sound hard-hearted, but I didn’t completely buy it when he first floated his phobia on air. He made it sound like the onerous burden of his celebrity, the dark side of stardom. He made an unlikely Garbo.

To separate himself from the masses, McCown took refuge on the Bridal Path, the tony neighbourhood in the city’s north end. He didn’t draw up plans for his Xanadu, but rather bought a home previously owned by the Maple Leafs’ star Doug Gilmour, who was going through a distressed financial restructuring necessary after a divorce.

Style-wise, McCown wasn’t flashy or vain—he was no fashion plate like Beddoes and had no particular interest in baubles. McCown’s one trademark in fashion was his opaque sunglasses, which he wore everywhere, even in a dimly lit studio. He claimed to be hyper-sensitive to light. I never bought it.

While his image and personal history might have been a work, McCown’s arrogance was authentic. Yet like many in that personality category, he also possessed a neediness. It wasn’t enough to win the ratings periods and draw the biggest paycheque—he had to surround himself with sycophants who as regular guests would express their fealty to him not just on air but also when the mics were turned off. Simple gratitude and loyalty were not enough.

Jim Hunt, a.k.a. Shaky, was McCown’s first on-air sidekick and in every way a counterpoint to the host. He had been a newspaperman going back to the 50s and bore witness to major sporting events of every stripe. The press box, sidelines and locker rooms were his comfort zones. And he liked other people and was eminently likeable. Shaky was a comic figure akin to Fool in King Lear. McCown would claim to know all and Shaky would posit that, given it was sports they were talking about, there’s no knowing anything.  

In the 90s, it was considered a score for a sportswriter to land one of the two other seats on a panel in McCown’s studio. The scribe would have to get clearance from the editor by claiming that appearing on The Fan would promote the newspaper and drive readership. The scribe would usually leave out any mention of a generous appearance fee. And when that scribe mentioned McCown and his show in a column, one hand would be washing the other, all but guarantee more invitations to sit in.

I only made a few appearances on McCown’s show and I never took a dime for it—never bothered asking for and filling out the standard form for payment. I’m not staking a higher ground here. I thought it was no big deal to drop in after work when there wasn’t a conflict with a game that night. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experiences, save for my last two turns in the studio with McCown. Actually, I didn’t enjoy them either, but at least I took away a sense of satisfaction.

My penultimate appearance on his show goes back to the spring of 1996, the day after a seismic event in the hockey world: the Los Angeles Kings trading Wayne Gretzky to the St Louis Blues. I had only done a few shots on the show previously. I only got a call from McCown’s producer because of the seemingly picayune fact that I had spoken to Gretzky the night the trade went down, his agent Mike Barnett handing him the phone in the back of a limo en route to the airport.

McCown styled himself as the slaughterer of sacred cows and no one was more sacred than St Wayne, who owned five Stanley Cup rings and virtually all the scoring records that mattered. Ever the contrarian, the host had to rip the Kings and the Blues—both teams lost in the trade—and anyone with even a tenuous connection to the trade—fire the GMs and commence total house-cleanings. And then as the climax: McCown aimed his dart gun at Gretzky himself. The host looked to me to indict No. 99.

“Gare Joyce, tell me … could Wayne Gretzky possibly think by his simple addition to the St Louis Blues line-up, he single-handedly elevates a mediocre team to the status of a legitimate Stanley Cup contender, even a Cup favourite? Could anyone have an ego that big?”

Of course, I couldn’t resist.

“With an ego that big, he should have gone into sports-talk radio.”

Jim Hunt and Damien collapsed into laughter and the next 30 seconds would have been dead air, but for their knee slaps, snorts and guffaws. In terms of sustained laughter, it was certainly unprecedented with the station’s history, probably up there with Ed Ames throwing a hatchet into a cowboy’s crotch on the Tonight Show.

I wasn’t lost in the moment—I knew I was biting the hand that was feeding me. Still, it was offered up in good humour, no malice intended. No matter, McCown didn’t join in the laughter. Instead, he glared at me. He could dish it out with anybody and nobody was spared from knocking … ‘cept himself.

McCown didn’t ask me another question or even mention my name the rest of the show—coming out of all subsequent news and commercial breaks, McCown said something to the effect, “I’m joined in the studio by Shaky Hunt, the Star’s Damien Cox and some other guy.” And whenever I tried to pipe up and throw in my two cents, McCown cut me off. If I had persisted, I’m sure someone in the booth would have killed my mic. I’m surprised that the aggrieved host didn’t call security to have me escorted out of the building and deposited on the curb.

While I was at the Globe, I was never invited back, not in studio, not even a phoner. Ditto during five years at the Ottawa Citizen. Ditto in the eight years I put in with ESPN.

A couple of times a piece that I wrote or a story that I broke would be kicked around on air, but my name wouldn’t be raised and opinions of folks chasing the story would be solicited. The man could hold a grudge like it was collecting compound interest.

But like I said, the crack about McCown’s ego was my penultimate appearance on his show. My final time in the studio with McCown would be fifteen years later. That will play out in rich detail in tomorrow’s missive in this space.

Thanks for reading.

1. My friend Donal played a janitor with criminal ambitions in the great, but sadly under-appreciated Knights of Prosperity. (Worth watching if only because 1. Mick Jagger has a cameo, as it’s his swank Manhattan that the titular Knights hope to knock over; 2. David Letterman and Jagger were part of the production team.) In another SubStack, I’ve been writing a YA novel in serial for. The plot line: A young wannabe stand-up comic is a fan and later a saviour of a walking-trainwreck actor who had played a janitor in The Fabulous Freshmen, a series that faintly resembles Saved by the Bell. Check out Catch a Falling Star, which is linked here. The first 11 chapters or so are available now and others follow weekly.