John Shannon interviews Wayne Gretzky and Bob Cole at the Rexall Centre in April, 2016.
John Shannon swore he’d never write a book. Sure, as one of the senior figures in Canadian hockey TV production, including decades behind the scenes of Hockey Night in Canada and years as an on-air pundit, he’d amassed his share of stories: tangling with the Edmonton Oilers GM Glen Sather; plucking Ron MacLean out of obscurity as a Red Deer, Alta., weatherman; forcing Pierre Trudeau to crawl across the Montreal Canadiens’ dressing room so the PM wouldn’t get free airtime during an election campaign; whispering in the ear of the aspiring but evidently useless colour commentator Bobby Hull through an entire broadcast, because the Hall of Famer was so ill-prepared he didn’t even know the names of the players he was watching. But a book? “That sounds like work,” he said in a recent interview. And his career – which nowadays includes co-hosting The Bob McCown Podcast, as well as segments for Global, Corus and Sportsnet’s Oilers TV – has never felt like a job.
Then along came the pandemic, and a whole lot of free time, and this fall Simon & Schuster published Evolve Or Die: Hard-Won Lessons From a Hockey Life. Shannon spoke about it with The Globe and Mail last week.
Help me understand something: You were born with club feet, so you’ve never skated, and you are, as you say, blind as a bat. How did a guy like you become a powerful hockey TV producer?
I grew up in a family that loved sports. My mom and dad would think nothing of getting in the car and driving the 250 miles to Vancouver to watch the Canucks play, or the Lions play, or on holidays to go watch the San Francisco Giants play. So, sports was always on in the house. And growing up with one TV channel, you learned to love it on the radio, too. So my love of broadcasting came from purely the imagination that it created: Here I was, in a small town [Oliver] in the interior of British Columbia and I could listen to something from New York or Los Angeles or Toronto or Montreal, and I was there magically. I knew I couldn’t play. So I thought the next best thing was to be in broadcasting.
There’s an elegiac tone in that, and in the book as well: a remembrance of things lost. One of those things is the baby blue blazer of Hockey Night in Canada, where you began your career as a production assistant in the late seventies. What did that blazer mean?
No matter what arena you went into, people knew who you were. Some of the greatest thrills I had was having legends of hockey – whether they be managers or coaches – if I walked into the room wearing my Hockey Night in Canada blazer, they knew who we were. I was 22 years old and they were on the verge of treating me as an equal. That was the licence that the blazer gave you, that was the credibility the blazer gave you.
That program brought the country together – well, two programs: one in English, one in French – on a weekly basis. We don’t have many events that do that anymore. Audiences are so fragmented, partly because there are endless sports now available at our fingertips.
There is something to be said for ‘less is more.’
Basic law of economics: scarcity creates value.
One of the reasons Hockey Night can’t exist the way it did before is because there is so much hockey on television.
You’ve worked with legends, including Bob Cole and Dan Kelly, but I thought it was funny that you wrote of Dave Hodge that he was “too smart to just be in sports broadcasting.”
Well, you know, you don’t have to be able to split the atom to be in sports. Hodge is the most complex thinking broadcaster I’ve ever worked with.
There’s one guy you worked with – once – who didn’t seem to think much at all. Have you seen the film Broadcast News?
I loved the movie. I think it was the first movie I took my wife to, on a date.
Oh, well, then I’m sorry to bring it up in this context. Because there’s a famous scene in the movie where Holly Hunter’s character, a TV news producer, puppeteers the dimwitted anchor, played by William Hurt, through a special news report, feeding lines to him through his earpiece just before he says them on air. I was reminded of that when I read about you working with Bobby Hull during a Whalers-Canucks game in 1981.
This was one of the stories that is almost folklore now. I haven’t talked to Bobby since that, because I was so mad at him, and so disappointed.
When you chastised Hull after that broadcast, Ralph Mellanby – the creator of Hockey Night in Canada, and your boss at the time – disciplined you. You write, “I suspect people around [Hull] had enabled him to act less than responsible away from the game because of his greatness on the ice.” That culture of enabling infects all pro sports, but it’s certainly seen as a key ingredient in hockey’s toxic culture.
Explain that to me, just so that we’re on the same page.
If everybody is saying “Yes” to these players because of how good they are – or in the case of Hull, how good they had been – then they don’t know what it is to hear “no.” And inevitably some push the “Yes” too far. We’ve seen the results of that play out this year with the Hockey Canada scandal.
Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t carried it that far.
Now, I’m not suggesting Hull felt that the world was a buffet from which he could take whatever he wanted. But I’m curious to know what you think about the role that the industry you’re in – and by that I mean broadcasting games, which is in essence promotional – plays in helping to create that toxic culture?
I have never proclaimed in my job as a production person that I’m a journalist. When a TV network has to pay for access, you are creating a partnership with the sport. We did see this in Qatar, right? We see it in the NFL every week. We see it in the NHL, we see it everywhere. There’s a fine line of what you do about the journalistic side – the truth of what’s going on. Are we just supposed to be able to say: “We’re playing in the sandbox of life; sports on television is supposed to be escapism?” Every individual situation has to be measured on its own merits.
Just as an aside, when the Sheldon Kennedy story broke, we spent tons of time talking about it. And we actually had to teach ourselves how to do it, because we’re not journalists. And that’s the hard part. And I remember we did a two-part documentary on Bill Goldsworthy, who had contracted AIDS.
Do you miss the rush of producing?
Some days. But remember, I stopped actually producing games in 2000. I did the Olympics [for NBC] in 2002. I did some games as a freelancer over the next two or three years for some networks. One of the reasons I went from being a producer to getting into what I would describe as senior management was, my emotional state between 2 o’clock in the afternoon and game time. It was driving me crazy. I was so ready to go: Drop the puck now! I mean, there are nights [now], I think I watch nine games and produce them all still. Talk to people and send texts, saying: ‘Don’t forget this.’ So, I still involve myself discreetly in the business. I love the business, and quite honestly I think I can contribute.
You write that your wife, Mickee, does not like the media business.
Hates it.
Is she smarter than the rest of us?
Some days, she watches a lot of British murder mysteries, and I think she might be doing a lot of research. So, if one day I disappear, there’s something up.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.