Stacey May Fowles - Best Canadian Sports Writing

Fun and Games: My 40 Years Writing Sports Find out what its like to have the best job in town

Dave Perkins was once told by a bluntly helpful university admissions officer: You dont have the looks for TV or the voice for radio. You should go into print. Which he did, first at the Globe and Mail, and then for 36 well-travelled years at the Toronto Star.

In Fun and Games, Perkins recounts hysterical, revealing, and sometimes embarrassing personal stories from almost every sport and many major championships. After 40 years of encountering a myriad of athletes, fans, team managers, and owners, Perkins offers unique observations on the Blue Jays and Raptors, 58 major championships worth of golf, 10 Olympic Games, football, hockey, boxing, horse racing, and more.

Learn why Tiger Woods asked Perkins if he was nuts, why he detected Forrest Gump in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and why Super Bowl week is the worst week of the year. Perkins exposes the mistakes he made in both thought and word once, when intending to type the shot ran down the goalies leg, he used an i instead of an o and to this day, he has never found a sacred cow that didnt deserve a barbecue.

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EDITED BY

STACEY MAY FOWLES
& PASHA MALLA

The scene is familiar: a TV studio decked out to look like a man cave, a couple of aggressive guys in business casual hollering stats at each other from their La-Z-Boy recliners, commercial breaks segued with the grind of corporate rock. The faux intimacy of the homey decor and all that macho soliloquizing can seem a bit like being stuck at a family dinner with a know-it-all in-law who rains his opinions down from the head of the table and its just as exhausting. That this has become the go-to aesthetic for sports commentary feels like a relic of a bygone age, and its hard to believe that the subterranean alpha male is still the dominant archetype of fandom. Arent there more of us than this?

Of course, theres no wrong way to talk about and experience sports some armchair quarterbacks can be insightful and hilarious at times but what tends to be represented as the status quo doesnt necessarily reflect the multiplicity of perspectives, experiences, and opinions of players and fans. So the initial impulse to create a collection of the best Canadian sports writing came, in some ways, from a place of dissatisfaction: we know that this country is home to a vast range of responses to the games we love, yet there seems to be a cultural failure to celebrate and spotlight these efforts in an accordingly diverse yet coherent way.

It also seemed strange even self-defeating that our neighbours to the south have been putting out a popular compendium of their best sports writing for over twenty-five years, while Canada has long failed to do the same. Yet we didnt want to fall victim to that prototypically Canadian, little sibling instinct to merely chase after American achievements. So in assembling a comparable collection, we felt that it would be important to not simply transcend nationalism, but also defy certain traditions and conventions as theyve been established both here and abroad: The