This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
Ahead of the 1972 Summit Series, Globe and Mail sports columnist Dick Beddoes promised to eat his column if the Soviets beat Canada: “If the Russians win one game, I will eat this column shredded at high noon in a bowl of borscht on the front steps of the Russian embassy.”
Montreal Star columnist John Robertson made the same promise, but came at it from the opposite direction. He pledged to eat his column if the Soviets lost.
So Beddoes splashed the columnistic pot. If the Soviet Union won the series, he’d also eat his signature accessory – his hat. Beddoes was famous for the hats. These weren’t pork-pie jobs. They were garishly coloured, deeply unfashionable, cartoonishly wide-brimmed fedoras. We’re talking multiple square feet of felt. No man, however robust, could eat one of those hats and live.
It was an eight-game series. Not a best of eight, but eight games total. Beddoes wasn’t making a bet. He was leveraging a guaranteed loss.
Canada was wiped out 7-3 in the first game. Beddoes’s game-over mea culpa was so ornately over the top (for example, “The Northern Lights are dimmer than a mole’s boudoir in a Siberian salt mine at midnight”) that he must have been working on it for days before puck drop.
The next day, Beddoes went to the Hyatt Regency in Toronto, where the Russians were staying. While a writer from Pravda tore the column up and placed the pieces in the bowl, Beddoes squatted on the ground and slurped his borscht. A couple of grinning Soviet players loomed in the background. Guess what? There were cameras there. And giddy coverage by other outlets. And a chance to write another column about the previous column, and then a couple of columns after that. This was excellent content back when people still called such shenanigans regular life. No hat was ever mentioned again.
Beddoes had a wonderfully broad and comedic way of writing. But if you had to reduce all those columns to their essence, it’s a guy sitting on his haunches eating paper in order to amuse his readers.
Dick Beddoes eats a bowl of borscht, seasoned with one of his Globe columns, on Sept. 3, 1972 in Toronto, as Pravda correspondent Konstantin Gueivandov kneels beside him and Russian hockey players stand around.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
When one of Beddoes’s Globe predecessors, Jim Coleman, retired from the paper in 1950, he blamed the daily pressure. Coleman was emblematic of a certain sort of mid-century sportswriter. A hearty, jocular man’s man. A leftover from the Hemingway ideal of a commentator who not only taught, but did. Coleman’s trick was burying his machismo in self-deprecation.
In reflecting on his choice to leave, Coleman talked about the “sword hanging from the ceiling” inside The Globe’s newsroom. “Any daily columnist can tell you about the sword,” Coleman wrote later.
“As soon as one is completed, the scribe heaves a couple of deep breaths and begins to worry about the next day’s chore. Like the simple, but perilous business of staying alive, writing a daily column is a job that ends only once.”
Jim Coleman left The Globe to become a syndicated sports columnist, and later a radio and TV sports commentator. He died in 2001.The Globe and Mail
This is good stuff. It’s a guy who writes about other guys running around in their pyjamas for a living telling you that what he does isn’t just important, it’s existential. This is the kind of thing sportswriters do – “Ha ha, what we do is ridiculous. But it’s also, ha ha, more important than space exploration. Ha ha.”
This tradition of bluster is unique to just one corner of the newsroom. It begins with a couple of basic principles.
First, sportswriting is not important and everyone knows it. I don’t know how it goes at your job, but at ours, someone else is always doing something way more important than whatever you’re doing. Down the hallway, someone is blowing the lid off government corruption. Two aisles over, someone else is writing a touching human story that will change the way the country thinks about a given issue. What are you doing? Trying to figure out who’s starting in net on Saturday night. This inherent triviality encourages wild excess.
That’s the second principle of sportswriting – don’t be afraid to be big; don’t be afraid to be wrong. The Sports section is the only one in the newspaper where it is not only possible to be incorrect, but encouraged. You could guess right, but it’s more amusing if you’re usually wrong. It’s certainly more fun to write. That’s what Beddoes was doing. Being big by being wrong. And it worked. Of course, anyone can be wrong on the regular. The trick is doing it with panache.
The Globe’s first, and possibly most often wrong, sports columnist was Francis Nelson. He gave himself the job after being named The Globe’s sports editor in 1888. A man of tremendous energy, Nelson didn’t just write and edit sports, he also played them. All of them. He grew continentally famous later in life as a horse-racing impresario. When he died on a steamer in the Panama Canal, one paper said of him that “no man was better known in Canada.”
Like any good sports columnist, Nelson had a lot of strong opinions on things about which he knew relatively little. He delivered them in a rat-a-tat-tat style in a garrulous, impossibly long regular entry titled “Jack at Play.” At the time, the fashion was to treat the sports pages as agate – a long list of results. Nelson instead used them as a pulpit to hector his readers, with a few results thrown in.
Torontonians enjoy winter sports circa 1912, during the tenure of the first Globe sports columnist.From Toronto: Canada's Queen City (1912)
Among the things Nelson held in esteem: the spirit of amateurism, anything that happened in the only place that really mattered (that is, England), lacrosse. Things Nelson did not esteem: the Olympics, anything that happened in Quebec, professional hockey.
He spent years trying to take down the NHL (then called the NHA), calling the people who ran it “parasites” and those who wrote about it their “promoters.” In 1915 he wrote: “Other newspapers may if they choose donate the greater part of their sporting pages to free advertising for a commercial enterprise with a sporting side, but The Globe does not see the light that way.”
In 1913, Nelson wrote off the sport in Toronto, since the audience “knew little of real hockey.” He also rubbished the new five-a-side “mongrel” version of the sport. His complaint? “Rapid scoring.” The Toronto Maple Leafs would be founded four years later, so the scoring part would eventually take care of itself. Did Toronto ever figure out real hockey? Based on recent history, no. It’s one of the few predictions Nelson got right.
What else didn’t Nelson like?
Curveballs (1914): “The comment of English papers on baseball as demonstrated by the Chicago-New York exhibition displays many varied views of the game, but on one point there is absolute unanimity. The critics were not so simple as to be taken in by any stories about the curve, drop and ‘fade-away’ deliveries of the pitchers. They knew that it was contrary to the laws of nature for a man to influence the course of the ball after it had left his hand.”
The laws of nature, eh?
The women's hockey team in Rossland, B.C., suits up in 1905.Women On Ice, Ronsdale Press
Women in sport (1908): “Modern women are exceedingly keen on sport. The more violent the sport, the better they enjoy it. This is excellent from the hygienic point of view, but it has also its drawbacks. The sportswoman loses much of the grace and charm inherent in womanhood, and mentally she often lacks refinement.”
Eeeesh.
The natural world (1912): “It is probable that the King’s bag in the Nepal hunting ground constitutes a record in big game shooting, says an English correspondent. Thirty tigers, and thirteen rhinos, in a little more than a week is certainly a wonderful achievement. But it is to be remembered that his majesty is one of the finest shots, with a rifle or a gun, now living.”
By 2009, there would be 121 tigers in all of Nepal.
Fair to say that if a couple of “Jack at Play” columns were reprinted in The Globe today, there would be a torch-wielding mob outside the building by midmorning.
Sportswriters don’t mind upsetting people, but never too much. It’s one thing for them to love to hate you. It’s another if they plain hate you. Robertson of The Montreal Star used to say he wanted his correspondence to be at least 80 per cent negative. (There’s only one way to keep the ratio that high, and it isn’t pristine intellectual integrity. For those who seek blanket approval, it works the other way round as well.)
The 1948 Calgary Stampeders celebrate after a 12-7 win against Ottawa. In The Globe, Jim Coleman had predicted a 12-point lead for Calgary, ‘just for the heck of it,’ despite odds favouring the Roughriders.John Boyd/The Globe and Mail
Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, fights Canadian champion George Chuvalo at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1966. Beddoes, whose columns disparaged the U.S. boxer’s politics, praised him for besting Chuvalo and chided the sports press for mostly predicting the opposite outcome.Boris Spremo/The Globe and Mail
Mid-20th century, sportswriting was moving away from the “hygienic” Nelson model to a new, prognosticating model. Suddenly, everyone was an odds picker. It’s safer that way. Better to guess the score wrong than to misjudge shifts in social mores.
Some newspapers do hard sports. Through its hiring choices, The Globe held sports at some remove, viewing them with a sense of ironic detachment. The mid-to-late-20th-century lineup was all-star, all the time. Beddoes, Scott Young, Trent Frayne, Allen Abel, Christie Blatchford, Stephen Brunt. If you have cared about sports in Canada during that time, you know these names.
What linked them all was a literary approach and a sense of humour. There is nothing in the world more deadly serious than a hockey writer faced with a goalie crisis. They care more about it than the team or the goalies. The Globe’s sports ethos avoided this sort of parody.
This is what happens when you work with people whose journalism really matters. It gives you a freeing sense of perspective. Important human stories that just happened to involve sports would also be told. But in The Globe’s Sports section, the writing always led the way.
In 1987, former Globe sports columnist Trent Frayne embraces his wife, the activist and former Globe reporter June Callwood.Hans Deryk/The Globe and Mail
Of course, there were still plenty of bad predictions, too numerous to recount here. If it could be guessed wrong, it was. The philosophy was best summed up by Frayne in the late 1980s, when the pick ‘em wave was ebbing. In one of those columns plucked from nothing on a day when the sword was hanging closer than usual, Frayne went off on the practice of guessing results: “The only guy I know who handled this assignment was author Scott Young who, back in the days when writing a Globe and Mail column, made 4,739 selections during a brilliant career. As he himself noted, Right, 4,739; Wrong, 0; Pct. 1.000.”
You still have to guess. No one wants to read, “Blues play Reds tomorrow, hard to say what will happen.” But don’t hector. Don’t guarantee unless you already know what you’re doing once your guarantee disintegrates. People had learned that much since Nelson’s time.
Though she did it for only a short while, Blatchford remains the iconic modern Globe sportswriter. That is in part because she got out of the Sports section as soon as she could. She had more important things to write about. An unabashed fan of the men and women who do it, but not of sports in general, Blatch wrote everything with a small curl of the lip.
Here she is on covering the only event she kept coming back to throughout her career as a big shot: “An Olympics is that occasion, every two years, wherein the profoundly unknowledgeable and often profoundly unfit affect expertise in such things as biathlon, skeleton and moguls and then presume to judge the performance of those who do the actual competing.”
A good sportswriter is always advancing. Never retreat. If you’re dead wrong, advance at a trot. Blatch lived that credo.
Beddoes offers advice to his sports-column successor, Christie Blatchford, in 1975.Erik Christensen / The Globe and Mail
Thirty years after it happened, another Globe great, William Houston, went back and relived the Summit Series from the perspective of the sportswriters who were there. His view – never specifically laid out but hinted at everywhere – was that they’d shamed themselves. They couldn’t help but get tangled in the flag and act the fools.
Coleman, who one supposes missed the sword and had gone back to sportswriting, recalled standing in the press box and pumping his fist at Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev after Paul Henderson’s goal to win the series for Canada. In his memoir, he described the feeling as “delirium.”
The Globe celebrates a successful Game 8 of the Summit Series on Sept. 29, 1972.
That’s what sportswriters must avoid at all costs. You are not a fan. You aren’t part of the team. You’re not getting a playoff bonus. Though it is beyond your capacity to do so, you’re there to explain what it’s like and to critique. Since you can’t do that authoritatively, try to have some fun with it.
Sports hates fun. Sports is always trying to drag things back to a fascistic impression that it really is us versus them, and that all of this actually matters. When things were going really wrong in that series, Frayne got caught in an elevator with Alan Eagleson. Eagleson, the Richelieu of Canadian sport, asked what he’d thought of the game they’d both just watched. Recounting the exchange to Houston, Frayne recalled he’d said something complimentary about Soviet puck-handling.
“You must be a fucking Communist,” Eagleson replied.
“All I said was their passing knocked me out,” Frayne said.
“We lost, you know.”
“Yeah, I know we lost.”
“We lost and you’re telling me you liked their passing?”
“Yeah, well, I certainly liked their passing.”
“Anyone who thinks like you has to be a fucking Communist.”
Frayne said the exchange left him “astonished.” But what’s astonishing is how Frayne remembered the back-and-forth. Listen to those beats. That is real conversation. No embellishments. Whether it is a verbatim recounting doesn’t matter. It’s the way people actually talk, so it sounds true.
If the Sports section is great – and who’s anyone from the paper to say that? – that’s why. Because it was a home to writers like Frayne. People who understood you could get it wrong, but you couldn’t be boring or pedestrian or false while you did so.
In this one section alone, being right is overrated. And so’s being wrong. Being willing to eat your hat is what sets you apart.
Cathal Kelly is sports columnist at The Globe and Mail.
The Globe at 180: More reading
CEO Andrew Saunders: After 180 years, our promise – journalism that matters – is unchanged
To capture history in photos, Globe editors must make hard choices on what to show
John Willison and Wilfrid Laurier, the dynamic duo of ‘sunny ways’
The Globe amplified, and then outgrew, early Canada’s feuds between Protestants and Catholics
In the Second World War, The Globe’s skirmishes with the censors nearly sent its publisher to jail
When The Globe changed its outlook on Africville, the razing and the racism
In shift on LGBTQ rights, The Globe helped the state leave the bedrooms of the nation
Globe film critic Jay Scott changed how Canadians consumed and talked about culture