Dave Hodge, former TSN sportscaster photographed in his home in Ancaster, Ont. on Feb. 17.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Decades before quiet quitting became a thing, Dave Hodge raised a ruckus that was heard from coast to coast. In March, 1987, he was host of Hockey Night in Canada when a CBC functionary decided they were going to cut away to the news at 11 p.m. ET instead of continuing with a Flyers-Canadiens game that was headed into overtime. Hodge snarked something about “the way we do things here” and flipped a pen in disgust. Asked to apologize later, he refused: His time at the network was over.
Hodge has always been a man of principle: In 2017, he quit TSN after the network cut the budget of his show, The Reporters, to a point that he felt compromised its quality. “I don’t believe I would have survived without credibility and integrity,” he told The Globe and Mail, when asked to identify his favourite virtue. The moment occurred during a wide-ranging, almost confessional interview in which Hodge acknowledged his faults and revealed what happened to that infamous pen.
What are your favourite qualities in a man?
Can I presuppose your next question and answer the same for men and women? My favourite qualities are: a) a sense of humour, and b) the ability and the willingness to engage in interesting conversations, sometimes spirited. But I’ll separate men and women this way: I like a man who isn’t afraid to show his emotions.
And a woman?
I like a woman who is willing and able to do a lot of things that a man normally does, because she knows she can do them better. A long time ago, a babysitter told me that my young daughter was asked where her father’s toolbox was and she said, “I don’t know, but Mummy’s is in that cupboard over there.”
On what occasions do you lie?
When I’m late and it’s my fault. I hate being late, so I’ll blame it on traffic or whatever works as a believable excuse.
What is your main fault?
Messy desk, messy room, messy car. I am not easy to live with in that respect, and I know I should correct that fault, but it just never gets corrected.
What would be your favourite journey?
I travelled so often during my career that I’m not interested in journeys, per se, but if I could somehow be placed in a seat behind home plate in all 30 major-league baseball stadiums without actually making that a journey, I’d love that.
What is your favourite possession?
I could speak about my music collection – and maybe we will as we go. But those who know me say that I’m always in possession of something that I call a flipper: a coin, a medal, a coat-check tag, a matchbook cover – a worry bead by any other name. Anybody old enough to remember the film The Caine Mutiny, starring Humphrey Bogart, whose strange habit was twirling steel balls in his hand – I do the same thing basically with my so-called flipper. If I leave home and I press my pants pocket and it’s not there and I’m not too far along, I will turn the car around and go back and get it. I’m really uncomfortable without it.
Huh. So, what brand of pen is the best one to flip?
Whichever is in my right hand. The brand doesn’t matter. The value [of that infamous pen] obviously increased once it landed. But it wound up in a hotel in Vancouver, eventually donated to charity, where it gathered money for a good cause.
Of Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’ which is the best, and why?
I’m going to pick “the Justice [aka ‘middle age’],” because I like deciding what’s right and wrong, and I like being right.
What is your idea of misery?
A sleepless night makes me miserable, and I’m miserable on most nights. I struggle mightily with that. And many doctors and many prescriptions haven’t solved it, although I’m still around, but sometimes the little bit of sleep that I get makes me wonder how I survive the rest of the next day.
If not yourself, who would you like to be?
The manager of the World Series champions. That makes me Dusty Baker now. I think that I enjoy baseball as much or almost as much as he does, and I would like to experience the joy of winning as much as he did last year after a full life of trying.
What is your favourite sport to watch?
To the surprise of many when I’m asked, I say baseball, and they can’t believe it’s not hockey. But though I do love hockey, hockey was my job, and I don’t think you should love your job more than anything else in the world. I think there needs to be something beyond that, whether it’s a hobby or another interest – or in this case another sport – so you can get away from what is seen as work and just be a fan.
Do you have a favourite character in fiction?
My wife is never without a book at her side, or in her hands, but I don’t read a lot. One book that has stayed with me, with the help of a movie, is To Kill a Mockingbird. So, my favourite character is Atticus Finch.
Which historical character would you have liked to have met?
Could I say Elvis?
Sure!
I have to believe that my love of music has something to do with the fact that I share a birthday – Jan. 8 – with Elvis, and David Bowie, and Ron Sexsmith, and Jim Cuddy’s son, Devin, and a favourite female singer of mine, Jenny Lewis. So I like to admit that I’m no better than the sixth-best singer born on Jan. 8. And while I didn’t meet Elvis, I did spend a birthday at the next table to David Bowie at a New York restaurant. It was 1994, and I was stuck in New York because of a snowstorm, and I was determined to celebrate and TSN was going to pay for it. The restaurant was Estiatorio Milos. And my cameraman and producer wanted to express happy birthday wishes to David Bowie, and I was dead-set against that. It would have embarrassed the hell out of me. So I tried to quiet them, but they were a little too loud, and David Bowie was moved to a different table.
Who is your favourite music act?
One reason I wouldn’t pick one, even if I could, is that many of my favourites, I have also either met or befriended, and the last thing I would want to do is put one of them ahead of others. One thing that I demand of myself is that I’m up to date with current artists. I’ll go to the live events and be wrongly mistaken for the singer’s father or grandfather. I’m very good friends with the members of Arkells. And I go to their shows and I’m very often seated with their parents, who happen to be younger than me.
What is the first record you bought?
I was 10 years old. It was a 78 RPM, the song was called Band of Gold, by a singer by the name of Don Cherry. No, not the same Don Cherry. I haven’t stopped collecting since then, and I have an embarrassingly high number of compact discs – like, many, many thousands. I was kind of stubbornly late to the idea of streaming services. So I have what used to be a valuable music collection. Mostly worthless now, I guess. But it’s a treasured, treasured possession.