Anchorboy (11 page)

A
T ONE POINT DURING THE
first couple of years Dan and I hosted the show together, I decided it would be a good idea for me to try to wear a beard on air.

The list of on-air television personalities with beards is surprisingly small: Wolf Blitzer, Charley Steiner, the Most Interesting Man in the World, and so on. I could always grow a nice beard and mustache, and I thought it might be another way to set myself apart, or maybe I was just bored. Either way, I wanted to give the beard a shot. I had taken a week-long vacation and returned to work with a somewhat healthy growth on my face that might best be described as “George Michael in the ‘Faith’ era.”

My idea was simple: I had to host an 8:00 p.m. EST update on TSN, I would have the beard on during the update, and if the producer at the time or anyone else thought it looked horrible I would just shave it off. I brought my razor and shave cream with me to the network that night, so I was ready for the worst. I hosted the update, and while I didn’t look
bad
I also needed a few more days
of growth to really let it fill in and look acceptable. The producer at the time, Mark Blimke, sat down beside me after the update and we both agreed I should shave it off. Just as I was about to leave for the washroom, the newsroom phone rang and someone called out, “Jay, it’s for you.”

I picked up the phone at my desk.

“Jay, it’s Phil King.”

Phil King was the president of TSN at the time.

“Uh, hey, Phil,” I replied. This was
highly
unusual. No network president had ever called in to the newsroom before at any point during my time there as a writer or a broadcaster. Newsroom and on-air issues fell under the domain of the vice-president of production.

“What’s going on with your face there?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, just tried to grow a bit of a beard but I don’t think it looked very good. I was just heading to the bathroom to shave it off.”

“I saw it. I think shaving it off is a really good idea. Have a great night, Jay.”

He has never called the newsroom since.

Embarrassing as that was, it paled in comparison to the time Marek Malik threatened to kill me.

About three or four years into our run on
SportsCentre
I was reading a set of basketball highlights when I saw on the script “MAREK MALIK AND HIS SON COURTSIDE.” Malik was a defenceman for the New York Rangers at the time, and he had taken his son to a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden. In the greatest act of stupidity in my short life (and that’s saying something), upon seeing a shot of Malik and his red-haired son on our studio monitor I blurted out on live television, “There’s Marek Malik and his red-headed stepchild!” Not funny, not smart, and overall just
ill-advised
. I nonetheless waved off suggestions from Tim and Dan that we re-record the segment for our morning
reruns, thinking that Malik himself would never see it and no one would care anyway.

The next day I awoke to an e-mail from our senior producer. Turns out the Rangers watched our show in the dressing room before the morning skate at Madison Square Garden. In fact, it turned out that pretty much every team in the league watched us before their morning skate. The idea that my words were not accountable was suddenly thrown in my face. The producer informed me that Malik had heard what I said and was “extremely upset” and was “threatening to do something about it.” This was of deep concern to me. I didn’t have Dominique Bosshart around to protect me now.

Luckily, the aforementioned Pierre McGuire knew Malik and was able to contact him and convince him not to come after me like Liam Neeson in
Taken
. I basically avoided a well-deserved beat-down for my stupidity because I have good friends in the business who look out for me on occasion. Lesson learned. You never know who is watching.

Sometime around 2004 I was asked if I might be interested in hosting the Red Bull Crashed Ice event in Quebec City. If you’re not familiar with the event, it can basically be boiled down to “roller derby on ice skates down a steep hill.” Only the most insane thrill-seekers choose to participate. Red Bull has achieved tremendous success with these extreme sports events, and Crashed Ice was sort of the pinnacle. It had appeared on another network before, but this year TSN was picking up the broadcast and wanted me to go to Quebec City to serve as host and give the play-by-play alongside
future
Hockey Night in Canada
fixture P.J. Stock. We arrived on a Friday in the middle of January when Quebec was absolutely freezing cold. The event was scheduled to take place on NHL All-Star Weekend.

Red Bull had apparently approved of my involvement, thinking that somehow my slightly bizarre style fit with their slightly bizarre “sports” event. Not surprisingly, the city was frozen that weekend, and soon after I arrived, upon realizing that my laceless John Varvatos Chuck Taylors might not have the warmth and grip necessary to navigate the streets of downtown Quebec, I ducked into a footwear store, picked out a big pair of Sorels, and charged them to the network.

The event itself was an absolute blast. Hundreds of men and women had shown up from all over the world to participate. They would fly down the custom-made track in groups of four, bumping and shoving each other along the way but mostly just trying to stay upright. P.J. decided to try out the track himself and found it a humbling experience, falling flat on his stomach after the first steep decline past the starting gate. Not that I’m calling him out or anything, as I conveniently “forgot my skates” and didn’t make a run down the track at all. I feared I would lose my footing and go crashing into a pop-up poutine shack, scalding my pasty skin with hot gravy and cheese curds.

Red Bull Crashed Ice was another example of my not handling stress well. It was our first year hosting the event, and although everyone working was highly experienced in live mobile production, it wasn’t a wholly TSN-produced event, so many issues were out of the hands of my show producer and director. Instead of having our own camera operators set up along the track, every network broadcasting the event was taking shots from the same group of camera operators, a clever cost-saving device to be sure, but it left us at the mercy of the one crew who was set up on the track.

Communication was also a bit of a nightmare. Trying to talk to my producer over my headset was problematic at best, but the worst part was that the skaters were all wearing identical jerseys, making it virtually impossible to tell them apart. Suddenly, I had great sympathy for Bob Cole’s inability to remember names of players in his advanced age. This was my first shot at TV play-by-play, and I was up against it in a big way. I started to act petulant, demanding more communication from the producer in the truck and asking for changes to the jerseys. My complaints fell on deaf ears for the most part. These guys didn’t have time to address my concerns at this point. The race was about to start, and we were showing it on television no matter how difficult it would be for me to do my job.

I started to get a bit depressed and sullen, returning to my room at the Hotel 71 to take a long hot shower and contemplate whether I’d get fired if I hopped on a plane and hightailed it out of there. It was at that point that I e-mailed Dan.

Just as Mike Keenan had managed to calm my nerves by uttering the words “Park it” a couple of years previously at the NHL Network, Dan seemed to understand just what to say.

“No matter how stressful the situation, losing your temper or freaking out about it isn’t going to make it better. It’s going to make it worse. It’s Red Bull Crashed Ice, not the Stanley Cup Final. Just go out and have fun. If you make mistakes, you make mistakes. Who cares?”

The thing was,
I cared
. I still didn’t know exactly which direction my career was going to go at that point. In my mind there was still a chance TSN would see me host Red Bull Crashed Ice, be completely dazzled at my play-calling ability, and beg to send me to the odd Thursday night NHL game between the Panthers and Blue Jackets. This was never in the cards, but in my mind I still felt like I was actually auditioning. Still, Dan’s words soothed my frayed nerves somewhat, and I was able to get through the broadcast
with a lot of help from P.J., who clearly had a ton of talent. Yet I could never shake the feeling that the producer and director who had been assigned to the event would forever see me as something I never, ever wanted to be seen as: high-maintenance talent.

Thanks to a heavy dose of Catholic guilt running through my veins, any outburst on set during a broadcast is immediately followed by deep regret between my two ears. Dan has formulated a pretty impressive way to calm me down in those moments when he’s the one sitting next to me and he sees me about to go off like vintage Bill O’Reilly: He distracts me like a small child. Like the small child I still am in a lot of ways. He’s got experience at this kind of thing because he’s a father, the father of two infant daughters. So when he sees me start to go off the deep end, instead of muttering “Park it,” he distracts me by bringing up something completely unrelated:

JAY: I can’t believe I fucked up those Marlins highlights. Goddammit!

DAN: Did you see
Walking Dead
the other night? What a show!

And then I start to laugh. It works every time.

The truth is that in this business, for what I do every day, so much rides on your getting along with your co-anchor. We are asking a lot for people to sit and watch us on television when they could get the same highlights on the Internet. If the chemistry between the two anchors is bad, or worse, if the two anchors clearly do not like each other, absolutely no one is going to want to watch. Remember when they paired Dan Rather with Connie Chung on the
CBS Evening News
? Neither do I. There is no “train wreck factor” to watching local or national news or sports anchors who do not like each other. Viewers will just turn away. Trying to get along with someone at work whom you don’t like is difficult enough. Trying to do that while pretending to like the person in front of thousands and thousands of people is truly daunting. I’ve always believed the audience can see right through it.

That’s what makes working with Dan such a treat. It really is just like hanging out with your pal and chatting about sports. Your cheap, lovable pal who is obsessed with sunflower seeds.

Dan is also a dealmaker. We had filled in for our good friend James Cybulski on his afternoon show on TSN Radio in Toronto a few times and enjoyed it. We filled in for an entire week once, acting like our usual immature selves until the day Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke died unexpectedly in a training session. The news got out seconds after our radio show started, so we were forced to spend the first two hours of the show discussing it and interviewing people connected with her, including CTV’s own Brian Williams. Rob Gray, who was program director of TSN Radio, was impressed that we could actually handle ourselves in a serious news situation, and I think we managed to gain a modicum of respect from him.

Dan bugged Rob as well as our bosses to allow us to do a weekly podcast in the wake of the success of shows like
The B.S. Report with Bill Simmons
and
The Rich Eisen Podcast
and
Marek vs. Wyshynski
.

We started the podcast in September of 2012 and it was an instant hit. We went to number one on iTunes right away. It was really gratifying to have instant success because the podcast is even more “out there” than the TV show is. Just an hour of unscripted talk about “butt chugging” (the art of ingesting alcohol into one’s anus); stories from Producer Tim, whose voice was modulated to sound like a guy from the witness protection program; and lots and lots of talk about poop. As in feces. It’s not as if we planned to become a podcast that was best known for discussions about excrement. It just sort of happened. We’re not even “potty humour” types. Our friend and Our Lady Peace drummer Jeremy Taggart became a well-loved regular on the show. I genuinely enjoy doing the podcast every single week with Dan. That chemistry that we had on the desk
and just our general friendship translated into something totally unique and surprisingly listenable.

You know those times when you stop and examine your life situation and say, “I’m going to miss this someday”? That’s how I feel about working with Dan.

T
HESE WERE THE BEST OF TIMES
at
SportsCentre
. Our bosses were starting to become comfortable with the idea of Dan and me adding comic elements to what was supposed to be a straightforward sports news show. If we ever took things too far we’d be politely asked to “dial it back 10 percent.” Such a request would usually come after we hurled confetti in the air or had one of our writers appear with a chicken mask on his head. Overall, however, we were given amazing freedom to do what we wanted, and Producer Tim begrudgingly allowed himself to become a part of the show via nightly ridicule. Life was good.

Still, I wanted to get out in the field a bit and actually cover sports once in a while, so beginning in 2005 I asked and was granted the privilege of covering the NBA Finals for
SportsCentre
. I did it for the next three years, the most memorable moment coming when I suddenly found myself to be the first reporter in the Miami Heat dressing room immediately after they clinched their first NBA championship in 2006. Jason “White Chocolate” Williams soaked
me with champagne as I made a futile attempt to ask him intelligent questions while taking elbows to the ribs from cranky print broadcasters. I was also sent on the road a few times to host Toronto Raptors broadcasts on TSN with Leo Rautins, back when the broadcasters covering the team actually travelled on the team plane. I was sitting happily enjoying my ice cream sundae on the way back to Toronto from Philadelphia in 2008 when suddenly I heard then Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell say loudly, “Who the hell is this peckerwood?” to everyone on the plane as he walked the aisle.

“Boy, I feel sorry for whomever
he’s
talking about,” I said to myself as I scooped up another bite of caramel. Leo was sitting behind me, and I turned around to ask him whom Mitchell was referring to. The look on his face said it all.
He’s talking about you, idiot
. Sam then went on a diatribe about this new “peckerwood” who had suddenly appeared on his plane out of nowhere to everyone who was interested in listening. No one was listening. They had all heard this song and dance before. Realizing his “bit” was played out, Sam offered a fist for me to bump, which I promptly did, and then returned to his coaching staff to probably discuss ways to keep Primož Brezec off the court as much as possible.

After that I mostly stayed behind the desk where I belonged. However, I did cover a press junket for the network once. I’ve been to only one junket, and that was enough for me.

For the uninformed (consider yourselves blissfully uninformed), a “junket” is when all the major movie stars of an upcoming motion picture are gathered into a suite, or several suites, at a beautiful hotel in New York or Los Angeles. This way, different entertainment reporters from across the country and around the world can travel to that location and interview each of the stars one or two at a time. It’s a subject that Billy Crystal tackled in his horrifically bad film
America’s Sweethearts
. Didn’t see it? Again, consider yourself blissfully lucky.

TSN had sent reporters to press junkets before, mostly for sports movies like
Cinderella Man
or
Ali
. This time they decided it might be a fun idea to send someone to the junket for a sports comedy like my favourite movie of all time:
Caddyshack
. Could you imagine working the
Caddyshack
junket? You would have had the chance to interview Michael O’Keefe, who played Danny Noonan, before he dropped off the face of the earth.

The movie in consideration for TSN coverage was
Blades of Glory
starring Will Ferrell, Jon Heder, Amy Poehler, and Will Arnett. Technically, it
was
a sports movie, though it was about as much a sports movie as
D2: The Mighty Ducks
. I loved Ferrell on
Saturday Night Live
as much as everyone else on the planet. In my mind, Ferrell’s cast, including Darrell Hammond and the criminally underrated Chris Parnell, had erased the memories of a few down seasons on the show (sadly those “down seasons” pretty much involved every season with former
Kids in the Hall
star and beloved Canadian Mark McKinney).

Ferrell was also coming off
Old School
and
Anchorman
and was pretty much the hottest comedy star on the planet at the time. My bosses asked if I was interested in travelling to L.A., interviewing the entire cast of the movie, staying overnight, and then flying back the next day. Yes, I was interested. But truthfully, I was kind of terrified. I didn’t really want to interview any of these people. I genuinely felt bad about their situation: Who the hell would want to sit there all day while reporters from places such as Toronto fed them dumb questions like “So how long have you been wanting to work with Jon?” The whole thing was just nauseating to me. I really had an uncomfortable feeling about it. But a trip to L.A. did sound pretty good.

I arrived in L.A. the day before the junket. All the entertainment reporters who had been invited to the junket were scheduled to get picked up at the hotel and taken to the Grove to see the film
that evening. If you haven’t been to L.A., the Grove is a beautiful outdoor shopping mall and another reason to hate people who get to live in that city. We would see the film with our fellow reporters, thereby giving us all the material we would need to ask the actors highly provocative and fascinating questions the following day.

It didn’t take me long to realize I was the only person in the group of reporters attending the film who didn’t know anyone else. These people had probably worked alongside each other on a million of these junkets. Everybody was so chummy, talking about interviews they had just done or were about to do, trading stories about recent interviews that had gone horribly wrong, and sharing general entertainment-biz gossip. I immediately felt the same way I used to feel when my parents made me attend hockey school in the Okanagan during my summer vacation as a kid. I’d arrive knowing absolutely no one because I was from Alberta, and all the other local kids would be chatting and goofing around because they had known each other for years from playing minor hockey.

So as I sat amid those reporters like an outcast that day, I did what everyone does in that situation and pretended I was reading and typing very important things into my BlackBerry, all the while my fellow film attendees relaxed and chatted like it was some sort of entertainment reporter family reunion.

I wasn’t entirely concerned about looking like an outsider in this situation, however. I was already preoccupied with what I was going to ask Will Ferrell the next day. More specifically I was preoccupied with how I was going to come up with something “funny” for him to do that would justify TSN’s giving me the assignment in the first place.

The film itself was just okay. I remember thinking I probably laughed more than I would have had I seen it in a theatre in Toronto in another attempt to show what a great time I was having. The premise was sort of brilliant: Two male singles figure skaters
are banned from competing individually, but a brilliant figure skating coach (played by “Coach” himself, Craig T. Nelson) figures out a loophole that allows them to compete as a pair. Hilarity ensues. Probably the best gimmick was having then real-life husband and wife Will Arnett and Amy Poehler play a brother and sister figure skating duo with designs on bringing down our heroes, Ferrell and Heder. In the end I thought the film was missing a little something. Ferrell would tackle the world of ABA basketball (
Semi-Pro
) and NASCAR racing (
Talladega Nights
) to greater success in the future.

After the movie was over, I imagine the rest of the entertainment reporter mafia went to some sort of fashionable lounge in West Hollywood to swap stories about how difficult it was to interview Tommy Lee Jones or something. I quickly hopped in a cab and went straight back to the hotel to plan my interview strategy. I had one specific plan: I knew my interview time itself would be no longer than five minutes (as it turned out it was four minutes). Therefore, I needed to allot my time accordingly. My first idea was to have Ferrell himself participate in “Headlines,” which was the voiced-over montage that kicked off every edition of
SportsCentre
. Usually this involved Dan O’Toole or me reading a script that said something like this:

“Coming up on
SportsCentre
… The Leafs try to knock the crown off the Kings in Los Angeles … PLUS … The Oilers head to Minnesota to try to TAME the Wild! … AND … The RED HOT Flames travel to the music city … to TANGLE with the Predators!”

The script never really deviated much. The key was to tell the viewer what was coming up on the show using clever wordplay that related to the teams playing that night. Simple. So my thought was: What if I could get Ferrell to read the opening headlines to the show in which my story would appear? Surely that alone would justify my entire trip to Los Angeles! I could just imagine the reaction back in Toronto!

“Brilliant work, Onrait!” they’d say. “We’re doubling your salary immediately!”

The question was: Would Ferrell play along? Or would he actually be so tired of answering question after mundane question from a continuous series of entertainment talking heads that he would be cranky and shut down my idea on the spot? I decided I simply had to go for it and hope for the best. What I didn’t count on was the fact that I wouldn’t be interviewing him alone.

Often in the case of ensemble pictures with several so-called stars, they will pair a couple of stars together to save time. The idea is that you’re probably going to ask the same questions to Will Arnett that you’re going to ask Amy Poehler,
so why not have them in the same room answering those questions together
? I’m sure for people like Poehler and Arnett it’s also a welcome proposition since it means they won’t be completely bored the entire day since they’ll have someone to talk to. For the reporters asking the questions it’s also appreciated because perhaps the stars will loosen up and banter about the film and play off each other a bit. For me, it was a bit of a nightmare. I had envisioned being alone with Ferrell in a room, connecting with the guy over sports (he had said often in interviews that he was a huge sports fan and actually considered becoming a sportscaster while attending USC), having him laugh uproariously over my ideas, maybe even asking me to join him on the set of his next film. Oh, the fun we would have!

The next morning I woke early, ordered room service oatmeal (easy on my notoriously bad stomach), and went over my questions for all the actors I’d be interviewing. Most importantly, I had collected all the information I needed for Ferrell to participate in the headlines portion of the show. And by “information I collected” I mean I wrote his “script” on a Post-it-note-sized piece of hotel stationery. There were no lines in the script for Ferrell to read, all I had written down was this:

KINGS–LEAFS

OILERS–BLUE JACKETS

FLAMES–WILD

BLADES OF GLORY!

That’s it. That’s what I was going to present to this beloved, highly successful comedy actor: a piece of paper with ten words on it that really made no sense whatsoever.

Coincidentally, there happened to be another press junket going on in the hotel at the same time for a serious film called
Reign Over Me
, starring Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Liv Tyler, and Jada Pinkett Smith. The entire hotel was bursting at the seams with reporters, publicists, and hangers-on. It was exciting but at the same time it did little to calm my nerves. I threw on a suit and headed up to the
Blades of Glory
junket, only to find myself sharing an elevator with Tyler and Pinkett Smith, who were heading up to be interviewed in their own junket. Tyler looked tired, but Pinkett Smith was positively radiant, much more beautiful than I had ever seen her on the silver screen. Both ladies were surrounded by their teams of managers and handlers, and an awkward silence was thankfully broken when I jumped off on my floor to start my day. They were probably thinking this was going to be the worst day of their lives.

When I arrived on my floor for the
Blades
junket I was briefed on the situation: I would be interviewing Craig T. Nelson first, alone, followed by Arnett and Poehler together, and then Ferrell and Heder
together
.

My heart sank.

How would I explain to Heder that I needed him to sit and be quiet while Ferrell worked his comedy magic for me? I decided it was too late to change the plan. Just like everyone, I liked Heder in
Napoleon Dynamite
, but I knew that Ferrell alone would knock the opening headlines out of the park. Hopefully, Heder wouldn’t be
too offended. Maybe he would appreciate the break after the assembly line of banal questions.

I waited my turn in one suite that had been designated the “wait-your-turn suite.” I sat silently and went over my questions for Coach. Anyone who glanced over at me would have seen I was noticeably terrified. I had never in my life seen a single episode of
Coach
. That’s right, not one single episode. As I panicked about my first interview of the day, I overhead two of the entertainment scribblers mention that Nelson was a “tough interview.” Great. Just the way I wanted to start my day. My name was called and I was led into another suite where Nelson sat, alone, chatting amiably with the camera operator and lighting guy.

As I mentioned previously, each interviewer was given an allotted time of four minutes. This may seem like a short amount of time, and if the interview is going well, that’s absolutely true. But if the interview is going poorly, it seems like an eternity. I was immediately transported back to my days on
The Big Breakfast
where every single segment on the show was four minutes without exception. Interview with an author? Four minutes. Cooking a crepe with a local chef? You’d better cook that crepe in four minutes. Band playing a song? That song needs to be around three minutes and thirty seconds if you want me to take thirty seconds to tell the viewing audience what bar you’ll be playing at that night.