Sports writing will never forget the great Cam Cole
As former colleague Brad Ziemer reminded me daily for roughly 10 years, I was The Vancouver Sun’s lead sports columnist for about 15 minutes. The newspaper promoted me on April 30, 2005, and I was so impressive that three weeks later it hired Cam Cole.
Cole is one of the three heads — and easily the broadest — on my Mount Rushmore of Canadian sportswriting, carved high above the rest of us next to Roy MacGregor and Michael Farber. You know you are special when there are statues of you. Cole keeps one on his own desk, although some people claim it’s a bobblehead Nacho Libre, the Mexican wrestler played in the movie by Jack Black. The tights are a dead giveaway, though. It’s Cole.
Cole is the best daily newspaper sports columnist in our country, so I’ve been avoiding weighing in on his retirement because I figured he would write about it and I’d be no more than the second-best read in the paper yet again.
But time is running out and maybe I can file first before people will know what they’re missing. After only 41 years in the business, the last 11½ at The Sun, Cole is bailing on newspapers at the end of this week. And just as the medium is poised to take off and become a thing.
Part of Cole’s brilliance is that he can write crisply on anything and pretty much everything falls between his topical wheelhouses of golf and figure skating. I defy you to name another scribe who has simultaneously been the defining journalistic voice on these diverse sports that have only white shoes and flashy wardrobes in common.
Most people can’t spell Salchow, but Cole can identity the jump by sound, then navigate the sensitive kiss-and-cry area at skating competitions while looking like Nacho Libre.
Long before we worked together, Cole and I played golf together. In Victoria at the 1994 Commonwealth Games, in Denver during an Oilers-Avalanche playoff series in 1998, in Buffalo and Toronto during the NHL’s Eastern Conference final the following year. Then the Internet came along and eliminated daylight leisure time on the road.
But we clung defiantly to postgame leisure time. Everyone has a Cam Cole story from the road.
All of my best are ones he told me, usually involving Terry Jones, another Canadian sportswriting icon who was Cole’s friend and sparring partner for 23 years in Edmonton, when Cole worked at The Journal and Jonesie at The Edmonton Sun. They covered the Eskimos and Oilers and followed Kurt Browning all over the world.
My favourite is the one about Jonesie getting hit by a truck in London, England, as he stepped out of a taxi during leisure time. As Cam and the cab driver rushed in horror to see if he was alive, Jonesie got up from the pavement, looked at them unsteadily and then restated the address of the next pub on their crawl.
There was also the time that Cole and TSN’s Pierre LeBrun were so desperate to get back to their hotel from a hockey game in Chicago so they could start writing that they jumped into a rickshaw in front of the United Center. The pedicab immediately pulled a wheelie.
As its driver strained to keep the front wheel in contact with the earth and propel his beefy cargo forward, CBC’s limousine whizzed past and the producer, emerging from an open sunroof, yelled at Cole and LeBrun: “Nice ride!”
Two reporters from the same newspaper are rarely on the road together, but I do recall an early lunch with Cole before he came to Vancouver from the National Post. I was still young and eager to learn about writing and storytelling. As I blathered on at my idol, Cole wordlessly arose from his chair, sashayed debonairly across the restaurant floor, then reached out with his foot to scrape toward him a tiny piece of paper that he snatched up with a movement as fast and fluid as a cheetah. “Receipt,” he explained. The man is brilliant. His retirement at age 63 is a loss not only to colleagues and readers, but also to journalism in Canada, although Cole has earned his retirement. He’ll be joining the rest of Alberta in the Okanagan.
Cole has covered 66 golf majors and all but a couple of Stanley Cup finals over the last 25 years. He hasn’t missed an Olympics since before Calgary in 1988.
The last bunch of years, Cole’s mandate was to write out of Vancouver for a national audience, which meant working on eastern deadlines and losing three hours. This meant Cole rarely had the benefit of writing after an event, waiting for news to fully develop or even, in many cases, interviewing anyone. And yet he never failed to make something from nothing, starting only with a blank screen and an opinion and then crafting 1,000 words that were as informed as they were authoritative. And always the right words in the right place.
His breadth of experiences and sporting interests allowed him to be the alpha male of that endangered animal, the general sports columnist. He thrived because there was a general sports audience — readers who trusted the motives and quality of the writer and did not need, as a prerequisite, to agree with everything he said.
As the U.S. presidential elec- tion illustrated, we are lurching dangerously toward a time when people will read only what they wish to hear, usually from websites that pander to their biases, instead of reading what they should. There is a lot of Breitbart News out there under other names. Journalism still matters.
Near as I can tell, Cole worked his entire career without an agenda. He wrote honestly on what he saw, told stories well and entertained and informed us on everything. Well done, pards. Last of a breed.