Columnist signs off after quarter-century of sports writing
After 27 years of reporting on sports for The Sun, columnist ready for his next story
Halfway through my 25th birthday dinner, Jan. 9, 1991, as my mum was lighting candles on my cake in the kitchen, I received a phone call from Vancouver Sun assistant managing editor Shelley Fralic.
She told me gently that the series of brief, temporary contracts that had kept me employed long after my summer internship ended — I left a full-time job at the Kamloops Daily News to join The Sun — had expired and there wasn’t another one available.
It turned out all right, because I was hired back in February and began covering the Vancouver Canucks that fall.
Anyway, I hung up the phone, made a wish and blew out the candles as my parents, Janet and Neil, and brothers, Ken and Gordon, applauded.
When someone asked about the phone call, I said I’d been laid off. So this is not the first time.
But this is the first time I have asked to leave.
Our digital library shows that I have written 6,765 stories for The Vancouver Sun.
This is my final one.
With our industry challenged and layoffs threatened, I applied for a voluntary layoff.
I am proud that our union and owners found a way last month to compromise and save the jobs of a couple dozen younger and talented journalists who possess the ability and idealism necessary to carry The Sun and Province through this time of unprecedented media upheaval. Those of us who volunteered to leave were told we were each saving someone else’s job.
It’s a nice thought, but I am doing this for me.
I have spent my entire working life doing what I’ve wanted since my Grade 7 teacher at Quilchena Elementary in Richmond told me I’d make a good sportswriter. I volunteered at The Richmond Review when I was still in high school, was the only 18-yearold in my journalism program at Langara and by age 20 was working in Kamloops. I was 24 when I walked into the old Sun newsroom on South Granville on May 1, 1990.
For 27 years, I have been blessed to write sports for readers of the newspaper I delivered as a kid. To this day, when I drive through the Seafair neighbourhood near where I grew up, I still remember the houses where I dropped The Vancouver Sun, thick and worldly, through rain, sleet and sun. But mostly rain.
The MacIntyres were a Vancouver Sun family. The Lewises, on my wife Tania’s side, were a Vancouver Sun family.
But I am suddenly 51 years old, with teenage boys, Duncan and Tom, who are already smarter than me and will soon be taller, too, and I have been forced by the information revolution to finally look up from my laptop and consider what else might be out there.
I am staying in the media and hope my unemployment will not be long. Whatever happens next, I do not think I am finished with newspapers. I may not even be finished with this one.
But for now — a year after our editorial merger with the Province, whose excellent reporters have refreshed our newsroom and now drive sports coverage — I am the last in a century-long line of Sun sportswriters. And I can’t adequately express how grateful and awed I am by that.
By title or actions, there have been 11 sports editors at The Sun since I began. I’m not responsible for all of them. Honest. But I have always benefited from their support and the latitude they granted me to write as I wished while trying to tell good stories well.
Brad Ziemer hired me, Gary Mason encouraged me, Steve Snelgrove pushed me to be better, Bev Wake made me a columnist and Scott Brown kept our gifted department together until my older Sun colleagues began retiring.
Newspapers still matter. In this era of fake news and shell news sites, newspapers will matter even more.
Employees about to leave the Pacific Newspaper Group often develop a physiological need before termination for dental work and new eyeglasses. I didn’t have time for those, but I did renew my Vancouver Sun subscription for another year. At the staff rate.
It is difficult to leave my fellow journalists, who continue to paddle through this storm in the fervent belief that truth matters, and that there are still readers who value that and their community and will pay for crisp writing and accurate reporting.
Former Province columnist and sports editor Kent Gilchrist famously said of sportswriting: “It’s a great job except for the writing part.”
This last bit is some of the hardest writing I will ever do because I need to tell readers how thankful I am that they have shared their kitchen tables and living rooms, and, yes, bathrooms, with me by carrying The Vancouver Sun into their homes all these years.
I have never taken for granted this privilege, nor the responsibility I felt in trying to inform and entertain as well as I could every time I wrote.
A month ago, after my column about the challenges overcome by Brock Boeser’s family and especially his mom, Laurie, to get their son to adulthood and the Canucks, I received an email from reader Jeff Mammel.
He described growing up on a farm near Chilliwack, playing street hockey every day after school with the gate to the pasture open, so that the ball was easily retrieved, and how he and his father would invariably have to herd the cows back into their field in the evening.
Mammel said sports were his life growing up rurally and the radio and newspaper his “lifeline to what was happening in the sports world.”
He wrote: “This long preview was meant to illustrate that your column ... really made me think of how much I’ve lived my life through sports columns that really hit you. Your column about Brock Boeser and his family sums up why I follow sports and how a sports column, just a bunch of words, can bring tears to a 59-year-old’s eyes. And it does that every time I read it.
“The ‘pinching themselves’ and emotion felt by Brock’s Mom, Dad and family was shared with all of us who read your special column, and I’m going to clip it out and keep it, and read it aloud to people that don’t follow sports. I want to tell them, ‘See! You don’t know what you’re missing!’”
Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, everyone.