Dave Perkins - Fun and Games: My 40 Years Writing Sports

The gentleman said right up front that he didnt wish me to die, at least not at any time soon. What he hoped for, he said, was that my children got rectal cancer and died, painfully, in front of me. That would serve me right, he was implying, for saying something he did not appreciate about his favourite hockey team.

Well, I thought, as long as the punishment fits the crime.

Other emails, always anonymous of course, have more directly wished every possible painful death upon me, or commented freely and usually disparagingly about my appearance, background, family, thought processes, teeth, genitals (a true favourite), hair, hairline, waistline, apparel, choice of friends, immigration status, emigration status and, once, the vehicle I drove. The guy had no idea what I drove, but he just knew it was a horseshit car. Occasionally, someone would simply disagree with what I wrote without feeling the need to bear arms. Even more occasionally, they would agree with something I said. My favourite email once told me that while I was right about everything I had written that day, I still was a piece of shit. That kind of suggestion makes a guy feel... better?

I think back 30 years, to the time Blue Jays fans were first getting up on their hind legs and making their feelings known en masse to chroniclers. When someone or something in print displeased them, or they merely had what they thought was a better idea, they put thoughts down on paper, addressed and stamped an envelope and went to the post office to mail it. I always figured, since they went to that trouble, that I owed them a read of their thoughts. Hell, sometimes I even agreed with them. The best reader response you can get is the civil one that says, I believe youre mistaken and heres why... Those often seem to be the ones that feature such antiquities as correct spelling and punctuation, too.

So there you have the opposite ends of one little corner of the newspaper business, a noble but (alas) slowly dying enterprise from which I now am happily retired after 40-plus years of labour. Perhaps people, meaning readers, are dumber and more vicious now than they used to be, or perhaps its simply the speed and anonymity of the internet that emboldens them to make personal attacks with impunity. I have given up trying to figure it out.

I said I was happily retired and I think I truly am, although every now and then the Blue Jays do something that causes the Toronto Star to try to lure me out of my chosen idleness, at least for a day. Plus, I got into the sports-talk radio business as a kind of a poorly paid hobby, doing the minor sidekick act now and then with Bob McCown on his national radio show. I suspect McCown, who is huge within the industry, wanted me around for two reasons: one is that he seems to have fought with every other co-host and parted company with them, as they say at the racetrack; and two, he remembers when he and I played on the same high school football team nearly 50 years ago and, possibly, he suspects I know where some of the bodies are buried.

Nah, not me. I was always better at burying the lead paragraph than bodies.

I began working at the Globe and Mail in 1973 while still studying journalism at Ryerson, moved over to the Toronto Star in 1977, worked full-time there until 2010, hung around as a freelance weekly sports columnist the dreaded columnist emeritus, we called them when it was someone else until 2013 and then went off to do a tiny bit of teaching and have my heart attack. In my time with both papers, I did everything imaginable, starting as agate clerk, copy editor, layout man, slotman, police reporter (very briefly), assistant sports editor, racing handicapper, racing writer, baseball writer, baseball columnist, sports editor and general columnist. That is almost chronologically correct, with my two and a half years as sports editor crammed in between the end of the Blue Jays first period of glory, in late 1993, to the beginning of, for want of a better description, the Tiger Woods Era in mid-1996. That time as sports editor is better left undiscussed, because neither me nor the job was suited to each other. I used to say I went into the job having zero children and soon had 31 of them. To be fair, you should hear what the staffers say about my time at the tiller.