THE AFTERLIFE
Hockey journalist finds life after the game that provides his ‘most meaningful work’
Howard Berger, the one-time Maple Leafs beat reporter, was telling a story about his new life outside the sports business.
At the drugstore not long ago an acquaintance asked him how he’d been occupying his time. Berger, who hasn’t filed a report to air on Toronto radio since 2011, explained that he had recently made a career transition. He’s been working as a funeral director’s assistant at a mortuary.
“(The acquaintance) looked at me and said, ‘That’s got to be awfully depress- ing,’ ” Berger said. “And you can understand that reaction, because when you think of funerals, you think of death. The concept of death, for most people, is depressing, even though it’s as much a part of life as being born.”
But Berger doesn’t see his job in the same grim light.
“So I looked at her and I said, ‘I understand where you may be coming from, but it’s the most delightful, most meaningful work I’ve ever done in my life,’” he said. “She said, ‘Delightful work, carrying around dead bodies …’ ”
And so goes the typical skepticism. Berger, who began work at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel on Steeles Avenue in November, has come to accept there exists a percentage of society who find it hard to believe a job at a funeral home is the road to personal fulfilment. To which he shrugs. As a man who spent the bulk of his adult life covering a star-crossed NHL team whose considerable ineptitude frequently made it an NHL punchline, you could say he is accustomed to folks making jokes about what he does for a living.
“If you want to be flippant, I guess people could say covering the Leafs after the (2004-05) lockout got me affiliated with the concept of death,” said Berger, 59, speaking of a stretch in which the Maple Leafs missed the playoffs 10 of 11 years.
“I don’t like to make light of it. But we did enough post-mortems on hockey seasons that it was a natural progression to this job.”
Berger, of course, was well-known to many Maple Leaf fans during the 17 years he spent covering the bulk of the team’s games, home and away, for the radio station now known as Sportsnet 590 The FAN. Along the way Berger also wrote for three of Toronto’s four daily newspapers, ghostwrote the autobiography of late Blue Jays broadcaster Tom Cheek, and penned a book about travelling with the Maple Leafs in the 48-game season that came after the 1994-95 lockout.
He was, in the words of Pat Park, the Maple Leafs director of media relations until 2014, a “dogged reporter.” He was also, as the job sometimes demands, an occasional pain in Park’s keister.
“Whenever security called and said there was a reporter out in the back area where he wasn’t supposed to be, I always had a gut feeling it was Howard. And it usually was,” Park said in a recent interview. “Because he would go to any extent to get a story, or get a quote. There wasn’t much you could do to control Howard and where he was going to be. Because he was dead set on getting a quote, whether it was from Mats Sundin or Tie Domi or Tomas Kaberle …”
The tumultuous media busi- ness, especially its radio arm, is notoriously fickle. And so after Berger was fired from The FAN in June of 2011, he struggled to find work as a reporter. For a while he tried monetizing his still-active blog, an endeavour that landed him in federal tax court after authorities disputed the combined $64,406 in business losses he claimed in 2011 and 2012 after he continued travelling on the road with the Maple Leafs. Berger, as it happened, won his tax appeal but soon halted his blog-related travel. And while he continued writing, a media gig proved elusive.
“No regrets. Wonderful time. I worked for great people. They let me be me,” said Berger, a divorced father of two, speaking of his sports-journalism run. “The end wasn’t pleasant, but to this day I’m friends with the guy who let me go, (former FAN manager) Don Kollins. No hard feelings. It was a business decision.”
Kolins, for his part, is among those who find some measure of humour in Berger’s postradio calling.
“I have to say I’m a little surprised,” Kollins wrote in a Twitter message. “Working with Howard, I never got he sense he was a ‘mourning’ guy.”
Berger, sitting in one of the chapel’s comfortable family rooms on a recent afternoon, said he finds his new occupation compelling because there are “no do-overs.” On any given day his on-the-job to-do list can include a number of solemn tasks. He might drive a hearse — a “coach” in the industry parlance — to pick up a body from a hospital or a retirement home or a residence. He might guide a group of pall bearers to a windblown gravesite. If it’s another day on the job for him, he has come to understand it’s often a seismic moment of grief for those he’s helping to serve.
“You’re going to see people in some of their most difficult hours,” Berger said. “And we only get one chance. It has to be done right. Whereas, I would put a Leaf report together in the studio, and if I didn’t like something I could erase it and start again. Human beings make mistakes in any given situation, but here, we can’t do it.”
It’s a long way from staking out the dressing-room exits to procure a soundbite from an escaping Maple Leaf. But as Park was saying the other day: “Howard seems to be taking to it,” even if some days are heavi- er than others.
“The hardest thing I’ve had to do so far, I had to pick up a stillborn child at the hospital. This poor little thing was wrapped up in a small sheet. You could fit it in both palms of your hands … It was a very quiet ride,” Berger said. “That is the most and the least appealing part of the job. Most appealing because you can apply your skills as a human being and feel like you’re helping people. Least appealing because what fundamentally decent person wants to see someone else grieving? There’s that sort of paradox to it. That’s the powerful part of it … You’re guiding the deceased to his or her final resting place. It’s a terrific honour. It can be extremely moving. But ultimately you’re there for the living. Funerals are for the living.”