FROM HURTIN’ TO HUMOUR — JOHN FILION

Five things we learned from The Only Average Guy. 1. Rob Ford’s father, the great patriarch, did not attend his victory parties in 2000 and 2003. He did not canvass for his son. Acccording to what Filion learned, Doug Sr. didn’t even vote for his youngest child, and told him that. “How hurtful must that have been?” 2. In 2012, at a meeting in matriarch Diane Ford’s home, Nick Kouvalis told the family what he’d heard about Rob’s drinking and drug use, drunk driving, his unsavoury choice of friends. “I don’t believe it,” Diane said. Had the Fords heeded the warning and put Rob’s well-being first, “I don’t think he would have defied his family,” Filion said. 3. The infamous “enough to eat at home” line was not spontaneous. Ford’s wife Renata told Ford staffer Sheila Paxton she and Ford talked about it the night before. “He was trying to make a joke.” Renata said. The Fords thought it was funny, talked about tossing it out. “With no idea how that would go over,” Filion said. 4. At Christmas, Rob Ford would re-gift items he’d been given as mayor, placing them all on a table and inviting staff to pick something. Later, he handed out $50 bills, then cheques in that amount. He almost never praised staff or said thanks. Just as his father didn’t. 5. The day city council reduced Ford to a figurehead, he told his staff: “The bastards got me.” Then he put his head on the table and cried. “Great, heaving sobs,” Filion writes. “It was the only sound in the room for what seemed an unbearably long time.” As his then-aide Sheila Paxton explained it: “Nobody else cried.”