IN THE SUMMER OF 1988 I shoplifted a pack of baseball cards. I was 11 years old, or possibly 12. My parents and I were staying with cousins in a small borrowed cottage nestled among the dunes and pine just north of Wasaga Beach, Ontario. I was not generally prone to such behaviour, but...
Read more →
How traditional media failed us in the strange case of Manti Te’o HEROES ARE IMPORTANT. We need them for a variety of reasons: encouragement, amazement, entertainment, consolation, understanding. I’m opening “hero” up to its broadest definition here, not just quarterbacks and clutch home run hitters. Your mother can be your hero....
Read more →
Why we want the ones we can’t have I’M WAITING ON A PACKAGE. It’s somewhere between here and Seattle, and it contains a trove of loss and defeat: three ball caps from minor league baseball teams that no longer exist. This is a thing I do. It’s kind of one of my...
Read more →
“Memory and myth are entwined in the Clemente story. He has been dead for more than three decades, yet he remains vivid in the sporting consciousness while other athletes come and go, and this despite the fact that he played his entire career in relative obscurity, away from the mythmakers of New York and...
Read more →
I DON’T KNOW HOW WELL YOU REMEMBER 1989, but it was a pretty remarkable year. The Beastie Boys released a masterpiece (Paul’s Boutique), Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing hit theatres, as did Tim Burton’s Batman (lineups around the block for that one), but Driving Miss Daisy took Best Picture. Down south, Bush the...
Read more →
THEY PLAYED A COLLEGE BASKETBALL game on the deck of an aircraft carrier Sunday, a perfectly ridiculous thing to do, for a number of reasons. Up there on the deck of the USS Midway, anchored in its permanent berth in breezy San Diego harbour, ninth-ranked Syracuse battled that wind and a bright SoCal sun...
Read more →