Dressed in a navy blue suit, Cathal Kelly sits on the edge of his seat hunched over his MacBook Air. Other writers in Toronto’s Rogers Centre press box sit back in their chairs, some chatting, others racing to finish their first stories of the day. Many are dressed in T-shirts and shorts to stay cool in the heat. It’s 1:07 p.m. and R.A. Dickey has just thrown the first pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays, but Kelly keeps his head down as a grin forms at the corners of his mouth. After years of covering baseball he relies on the crack of the bat to get his attention—even the screaming fans can’t break his focus when he is writing. Now he’s the only one whose eyes aren’t on the diamond. The sports columnist for The Globe and Mail writes quickly without stopping, mumbling quietly to himself. The only reason he stays in the press box is to avoid missing anything, but his column is unlikely to change unless “someone throws a grenade on the field.” He finishes his 800-word column just after the seventh-inning stretch. “I am not a nuts-and-bolts guy,” he says. “I want people to read it and have a laugh, think that five minutes was worth it.”

A couple of weeks later, Bruce Arthur is in Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, eating ham and scalloped potatoes in the media room before he heads up to the narrow press box in the rafters. The Toronto Star sports columnist slides in his earbuds to drown out the noise of the hockey pre-game show and writes his lede before checking Twitter, which he says helps him think. Beside him, Star beat reporter Kevin McGran has already started to write his story. After Toronto Maple Leafs sniper Phil Kessel scores in overtime, all the other reporters run to the locker room, but Arthur heads for the eerily quiet media room.

Later, McGran rushes in. “I wish I had more time,” he says. Arthur’s column is almost finished and he hurries to the locker room so he doesn’t miss the players. He talks to a few, then joins the rest of the reporters listening to then-head coach Randy Carlyle. Arthur stands off to the side intently focusing on his notebook. But instead of writing notes, he’s doodling a cartoon face with beady eyes—the same face he often draws to help him process information.

As two of Canada’s best sports columnists, Kelly and Arthur rarely have to worry about writing game recap stories. Their ability to blend culture and sport in their writing is a far more valuable offering. In 2014, crosstown papers scooped up both Arthur and Kelly. First, the Globe snatched Kelly from the Star, and then the Star raided the National Post for Arthur.

Sports sections are struggling to bring in new readers and keep existing ones in the face of increasing competition. But they still have their ringers: columnists with distinctive voices who cut through the clutter and keep readers coming back.

***

On Saturday mornings, eight-year-old Kelly wouldn’t get out of bed until he’d read a Hardy Boys book. Later, while studying political science at the University of Toronto, he worked in a bookstore, read prolifically and wrote “one really, really terrible” sports article for The Varsity. He then studied journalism at Ryerson University, eventually landing a job at the Star as a copy editor. Later, he became a beat reporter covering the Jays. He wrote with an “I dare you not to print this, I dare you to change it” attitude. “I never could adapt to being a beat writer,” says Kelly. “I was piss-poor at it.” Even as a beat reporter, he was writing columns and his editors would pull out his outrageous flights of fancy and goofy digressions. Looking back, Kelly says they saved him from himself and he now understands how right they were. He expected his editors to say his stories were idiotic, that they needed to find something else for him to do. And they did find something else—four years after he took over the Jays beat, the Star made him a columnist.

In March 2014, Globe sports editor Shawna Richer emailed him, asking if he’d like to meet up. They were friends and the request was a little more formal than usual, but Kelly didn’t think too much of it. When they met, she asked if he wanted to come work for her. Kelly was interested, but the relationships he’d formed over 14 years at the Star were hard to ignore. “My head was spinning,” he says. “I was going to all my rabbis in the business, guys I trust and saying, ‘How do I do this?’” One of them, Norris McDonald, current editor of the Star’s Wheels section, let Kelly babble on and on, then held his hands up. “Dick Beddoes, Allen Abel, Christie Blatchford, Stephen Brunt,” he said in his pebbly voice. “Those are four people who have done this job before you.”

Kelly’s departure wasn’t the only hit to the Star’s Sports section. Columnist Damien Cox announced that he was leaving for Sportsnet, though he would continue to write a weekly column. The paper moved quickly to fill the gap.

Monday, April 14, 2014 was one of the busiest days Arthur can remember. Before scheduled TV and radio appearances, he attended a press conference for newly appointed Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, who was the main subject in his next column. That evening, his kids threw him a surprise birthday party because he was scheduled to be on the road for the big day. Then, around 10 p.m., he met with Star editor Michael Cooke, managing editor Jane Davenport and former sports editor Jon Filson about making the move.

He thought about his decision carefully: he wanted to be good at his job and take care of his family. Although he didn’t like the idea of change, the offer was enticing. He took it. “I left a great job to go to a great job.” Going from the Post to the Star was “abrupt,” says Arthur. “It happened really, really fast.” He left the Montreal Canadiens playoff series and started covering the Toronto Raptors post-season effort, all within two days.

Exceptional sports writers have always been one of the strengths of newspapers. At the Globe, that tradition includes not just the writers McDonald mentioned, but also Scott Young, Trent Frayne and Roy MacGregor. The Star had Jim Proudfoot, Randy Starkman and, for decades, Milt Dunnell. Even the Post, the relative rookie among the big papers, fielded Abel, and Blatchford, who covered the Olympics before Arthur.

All of these sports writers earned the loyalty of readers with engaging profiles, colourful investigations and well-crafted stories. Like Young, some wanted to be novelists, some wanted to be political journalists and some knew from the beginning that they were destined to write about sports. All shared the ability to go deeper than what happened in a game.

That’s what may just save the sports section from extinction. The game story, also known as a “gamer,” is more difficult to write as deadlines get tighter while journalists get less access to players and must create more content on a variety of platforms. Besides, when fans can watch any game on television, receive game updates on their phones and find almost limitless analysis on the web, a game story in the next day’s paper is largely irrelevant. One of the worst things in sports journalism is the play-by-play, says Arthur. “It’s like Morse code. It’s completely value-free.”

***

Doug Smith was in a bar one night in September 2004 when his phone rang. The voice on the other end claimed to be Toronto Raptor Vince Carter and said he really needed to talk. The Star sports reporter chuckled and said, “Yeah, right. Call me back in 30 minutes.” But Jim LaBumbard, the Raptors director of media relations, confirmed the call really had come from the star shooting guard. When they spoke again, Carter told Smith it was time for him to be traded. The next morning, the story ran on the front page of the Star with the headline: “‘I Want to Be Traded,’ Vince Carter Says It’s Time to Go.”

If he received a call like that today, Smith would tweet, “Vince wants a trade” as soon as he could get his story online. Then, a piece with a different angle would appear in the paper the next day. Other reporters might chase it as soon as they saw the tweet. Reporters would previously have to steal these stories straight off delivery trucks for a scoop—something the internet has now made extinct.

While the internet makes exclusivity harder, so does decreased access to athletes. That wasn’t as big a problem for Wayne Parrish in the 1980s. During his time at the Star and The Toronto Sun, his working relationship with George Bell, for example, meant that the Jays slugger would have called him to share personal details. He would ask Bell questions in private, trying to get to the essence of him not just as an athlete but as a human being, without other reporters within earshot. “Today, that is much more difficult to do,” says Parrish, who is now the chief operating officer at Postmedia.

Meanwhile, economic turmoil in the newspaper industry is also hurting sports sections and increasing reliance on wire service copy. Reading through the Star one Friday in December 2014, the Sports section featured six articles by the paper’s own staff, one from a freelancer and seven from wire services. There was an Arthur column on the NFL; two Dave Feschuk stories, one a game recap and the other about Leafs goalie Jonathan Bernier; two NBA stories from Smith; a Josh Rubin piece on Toronto FC; and a column about hockey analytics from a freelancer. The “scoreboard” filled one page. The rest of the seven-page section was wire service stories, including a piece on NHL superstar Sidney Crosby from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

***

If the game story is dead, or at least desperately ailing, the good news for publishers and editors is that reporting resources may become available for writing other stories. “If you free up journalists from that and get them to do other things, I think you would be surprised at how productive they would be,” says Sean Holman, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. But it also means losing a valuable farm system for future columnists. Writing columns offers journalists the chance to explore stories those on the sports beat can’t, but it takes years of experience—and sometimes embarrassing lessons—to get there.

Kelly rarely has trouble sleeping, but tonight is an exception. Tomorrow is his first day of spring training camp in 2007. He tries to lie still, feeling sick to his stomach all night long. In the morning, he heads to the ballpark in Dunedin, Florida, with two fellow Star reporters, Richard Griffin and Mark Zwolinski. They seem like nice guys to Kelly, who just landed the sports section job. Though he feels out of place with all the rituals of baseball, he still manages to think up a story idea.

He approaches Griffin for advice, and the veteran reporter suggests he talk to pitching coach Brad Arnsberg, a man standing in centre field talking to some of the players warming up. Kelly starts marching toward the coach without knowing the area is generally off-limits to reporters during practice. Arnsberg watches in growing fear as Kelly closes in on him.

“Hi, I’m Cathal Kelly with the Toronto Star and I was hoping I could ask you some questions.”

“Yeah, but you can’t be here,” replies Arnsberg. Realizing everyone is staring at him, Kelly slinks off the field.

“You can’t run, you can’t show fear!” he says now. After he became a columnist, Kelly passed on notes to Brendan Kennedy explaining everything he wished he knew when he started covering the Jays.

Beyond his experience with the Jays, Kelly has run into other uncomfortable situations while chasing a unique story. Three lines of scars mark the left side of his head are a testament to this. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Kelly walked into razor wire outside the tightly guarded stadium where the North Korean team was training. It didn’t hurt, despite all the blood, but he was worried about the rust. He needed to see a doctor, but the only one around was with the North Korean national team.

As other journalists watched the team practice, Kelly found himself alone with one of the players—Ri Jun-Il. He pointed to his head and Jun-Il winced appreciatively. Kelly prodded some more: “You. Brazil,” he said, miming a running motion and giving a thumbs up for the team’s losing effort against the South American powerhouse in its last game, in which they “ran like demons.” Jun-Il responded by shaking his head, and saying, “No, no. No good.” It occurred to Kelly that he was having the first-ever sit-down interview with a North Korean soccer player inside a dressing room.

The doctor arrived and wrapped Kelly like a mummy, pointing to his own head and telling him, “I have great pity.” In his column, Kelly reflected, “He was saying sorry that this had happened to me at all. I liked him more than any doctor I’ve ever met.”

Kelly wrote his column in 50 minutes. He told not just the story of his trip through the forbidden stadium, but also how the experience changed his view of the country and its oppressive dictatorship. “I met them for only a moment yesterday. But those two men changed my mind. The regime is evil. They weren’t.” Kelly shook both their hands before he left and thanked them. They smiled and nodded in return. “They seemed embarrassed by my thank-yous,” he wrote. “So I left.”

Kelly regularly makes readers feel connected to the athletes he writes about. One-by-one, the Raptors walk into the large room on the second floor of Toronto’s Real Sports Bar & Grill, squeeze past the reporters and stand in front of the traditional black backdrop for some pre-season face time. Kelly, dressed in a grey suit and black tie, doesn’t join the sweaty circle of journalists digging elbows into backs and yelling over each other. Instead, he stands about three metres back and watches until a player who’s just signed with the team drifts off near him. Kelly introduces himself with an outstretched hand.

As they talk, Greg Stiemsma laughs and opens up to Kelly about a little cabin he’s stayed in with no electricity on Lake St. Joseph in northwestern Ontario. As other reporters notice, their heads pivot toward the pair and soon they surround the once-private conversation. But Kelly has his column. “First guy out of the gate? Greg Stiemsma, a gentleman so fetchingly midwestern you want to take him home so that he can make everyone pancakes and advise you on livestock purchases,” he wrote, using the new player to show how the Raptors are finally getting attention in a hockey town and telling the story the way he’d share it with a friend in a bar.

Kelly knows he must grab readers and hook them within 100 words. The first thing you want to tell a friend, he says, is what the story should be about. He understands his audience wants the bigger picture and not just a breakdown of statistics. The only two things that matter are what happened and what it means.

To Arthur, sports writing is about stepping back and tackling the story from a different angle. As he watches the Leafs skating circles during their morning practice, he says, “You need to be able to write bigger picture and be able to write small details. Perspective is the word—sports is really easy to not put in perspective.” If he could cover one event for the rest of his life, he says it would be the Olympics. “It means something to people—everyone watches, everyone cares.” Sports is one of the things that ties municipalities together (other than traffic) and is something that can make people feel in ways that few other activities can.

That was the case with a 2008 story about a Vancouver basketball star who’d disappeared more than 20 years earlier after playing his last game at the age of 17. Arthur offered a vivid account of the people who knew him: “And so they live their lives. They experience joys and sorrows, indignities and triumphs. And through all the years, a lost boy named Acron Eger follows them, sits on their shoulders, inhabits their dreams. Acron Eger may never be found. But he will never be completely lost, either.”

Similarly, a Post column about Brian Burke marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade gave a rare glimpse into the pain of a father who’d lost his son, and the pressure that gay athletes face. “One year ago Brian Burke promised his son Brendan he would march in the Pride Parade with him. And in a way, he did…But the reason marching was easier is that every time he tries to talk about Brendan, 156 days later, he gets strangled by his heart. Brian Burke can talk about anything but this,” Arthur wrote in a July 2010 column that earned him his first National Newspaper Award nomination. In 2012, he was named Sportswriter of the Year by Sports Media Canada.

***

Arthur and Kelly are different personalities, have different voices and they take different approaches. Eccentric and witty, Kelly is often the first to say hello to fellow reporters. He makes his readers laugh. Arthur is friendly, but is quieter while working. He entertains by making his readers think.

Their readers form relationships with them, whether they agree with them or not. That’s why sports columnists are so valuable to newspapers when they can find—or steal away—good ones. They represent a level of excellence that editors and publishers wish they could put on every page. “I think many of the newspapers that we’ve got around at the moment will struggle to survive the next ten years because they have cut back so much on the quality,” says Globe publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley.

Those cuts mean losing distinctive content that make sports sections a must-read. “Everyone is vulnerable right now, regardless of their property and regardless of their reputation,” says Holman. To stay competitive, newspapers need to invest in unique voices and insight, which often comes in the form of columnists. “You’ve got to give them something that is special,” Holman adds. And that is why columnists are so invaluable.

Readers don’t buy the Globe for sports, admits Crawley, but they expect high-level journalism in every section—and since Kelly joined the paper, people who wouldn’t normally look at the sports section find themselves laughing out loud at what he writes. Crawley wants to see his star columnist write general columns in the near future, but for Kelly, there isn’t a better part of the newspaper to work for than sports. Arthur agrees: “It can make you feel ways that very few other things can.”

Sports columnists such as these two writers may not be able to save newspapers on their own, but they sure can keep the fans wanting more.

Photo by Laura Arsie

Here is a sneak peek at one story from our Spring 2015 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine.

Five years ago, Cody Royle and Justin Robertson stood facing each other on opposite sides of an Australian football field. The teams they coached were playing each other. “That was one of the first times we met,” Royle says, smiling.

Today, the Australian transplants are planning the launch of their Canadian online sports publication, Bradman Magazine, in January. “We don’t want to compete with TSN, Sportsnet or the Score,” Royle says. Bradman’s mission is to tell long-form sports stories that focus on the stories of the players, not all of whom are professional. Instead of game recaps and scores, Royle says they want to engage the sports fan who’s interested in both the culture of the sports they love and well-executed journalism.

Robertson currently works as a freelance writer—mostly covering cricket—and Royle holds a job in business and marketing. With their combined skill sets, they hope to appeal to a feature sports market they feel has been left untapped in Toronto.

The name Bradman is inspired by an Australian cricket player, Don Bradman (who bears the surname), though Royle and Robertson have no affiliation with him. Instead, Royle says they were inspired of his practice technique—hitting a ball against a cast iron statue—which Bradman, the player, claimed increased his focus and aim. Royle and Robertson, along with their writers (they’re open for pitches), seek to practice a similar method with their journalism: tight, yet provoking writing that can grab and hold a reader’s attention.

As it stands, both Royle and Robertson will continue to work paying jobs as they develop their magazine, and their writers will remain temporarily unpaid. As they gain attention, sponsorship and funding, Royle says, they hope to expand to a national market and, eventually, an international one.

The duo hope to develop a magazine that tells human-interest sports stories, bringing fans into the intimate worlds of their favourite athletes and the local teams around the Greater Toronto Area—to find out what these athletes do beyond the field or stadium. They do, however, maintain that quality journalism is high on their list of things that cannot be sacrificed, alongside a close-knit atmosphere among colleagues. Their first assignment is a low-key beer meeting to build a sense of companionship among their group of sports writers. They hope that these will be the people who will help two young, Australian New York Giants fans develop an online magazine that connects sports fans with athletes, weaving a compelling enough tale to create a lasting relationship.

Bradman plans to have a soft launch, with some preliminary online content posted on the website, later this month.

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By Alanna Kelly

There are many viral videos that The Globe and Mail columnist Elizabeth Renzetti refuses to watch, but she had to see the video that showed Ray Rice punching his then-fiancée Janay Palmer. As disgusting as it was, it showed an issue that people needed to talk about. The couple had just left a dinner party, where they had been arguing. Once inside their hotel elevator, Rice punched Palmer in the head and sent her into the elevator wall before she fell to the floor unconscious. The first video showed him carrying her out of an elevator like a doll. The second video showed Rice, then a Baltimore Ravens running back, hitting her.

Although sports journalists were the first ones to jump on the initial video, once the second video came out in February, the coverage spread rapidly. Most of that reporting and commentary missed an opportunity to step back, look at the bigger picture and consider a difficult subject in a responsible way. Instead, many of the headlines and front-page stories about the Rices served as clickbait instead of addressing domestic abuse.

Some sports journalists wrote about the assault like they were reporting a sporting event. They explained the speed and strength of Rice’s punch while giving details such as how he used his dominant football arm. Some described it as “professional quality,” analyzing the incident like they would a boxer in the ring. “That is, his left hand is the dominant one. The one he used to knock out his now-wife,” wrote the National Post’s Scott Stinson, who then went on to question why Janay would even stay with Rice. Similarly, John Kryk of the Toronto Sun wrote: “Rice pre-empting her move with a sudden roundhouse left to her face—a massive blow.”

Meanwhile, some headlines featured sensational words such as “slugging,” and the Sun ran “Ravens cut Ray Rice after knockout video surfaces.” The Calgary Herald and The Vancouver Sun posted a video with the headline “Longer version of Ray Rice video shows couple screaming, spitting and ‘She’s drunk, right?’” even though no one in the video mentions Palmer being drunk. The Globe published a similar headline, but left out the ‘She’s drunk, right?’ part.

Under the headlines, there was a sense of breathless reporting about the video. Some sports journalists scratched only the surface of issues surrounding domestic abuse in sports and instead focused on analyzing why Palmer would stay with Rice. “As much as sports media is more diverse than it ever was,” says Morgan Campbell of the Toronto Star, “it is very phallocentric, very male-dominant and I feel that has a lot to do with it.”

Domestic violence is a nine-headed monster for a sports journalist to cover, says The Vancouver Sun’s Cam Cole, who has been writing sports columns for several papers since 1986. He says covering the deeper issue is something that many sports reporters don’t have enough time to do properly, and they are afraid to tackle it because it is so big. “It is probably the one big omission or oversight, that in the hunger to hang the people responsible,” says Cole, “we kind of forgot about who got beat up here.”

Renzetti says sportswriters may not even know what language they should be using. But if they don’t feel comfortable talking about domestic abuse, they perpetuate the problem. “They have to be the one to carry the ball on this issue, they have to man up,” she says with a chuckle. She rejects the idea that only specific journalists can write about certain topics. If someone has something to say, he or she should cover it.

But many newsrooms and journalists seemed to skip the discussion about the best course of action and posted the videos without any apparent thought to spousal abuse. What was missing and should have been done was a quick story breaking down what happened in the video and then a wide array of columns packaged with insight exploring the complexity of what happened.

One writer was able to convey all of these things to his readers and he rarely watches NFL football. Just down the street from Ian Brown’s home, in an upscale downtown Toronto neighbourhood, is a women’s shelter. On his way to the office, the Globe writer stopped on the doorstep of the shelter. He didn’t think anyone would answer, but knocked anyway. He spoke to three women who had similar stories of abuse, though he wrote about only one of them. “It makes you feel sad about it over and over,” says Brown. “And yet we don’t really solve the problem.”

He had time to think about the story and was able to respond after it had unfolded. An abuse counsellor named Noa Ashkenazi questioned Brown on why no one was asking, “Why do men hit?” Yet she had been asked over 100 times why women stay with their abusers.

Brown was not an expert on domestic assault, or sports for that matter, and had just 1,200 words—not nearly enough, in his mind—to make his point, but after speaking to Ashkenazi, he knew what his piece would be about. He reached out to Janay Rice (but heard nothing back), called six or seven agencies that help abused women and attempted to speak with men who had also been abused. In the story, Brown reported the facts and touched on the shame men feel about domestic abuse. And, he questioned why a man would hit the woman he loves.

He points out that now more than ever, readers think reporters need to take a moral stance on issues. For him, it is telling the story in the most appropriate way. “Most of the time that means not taking a stance,” says Brown. “It means observing what you see before you and conveying it with relish.”

People will move on from Ray, from the eight seconds it took him to knock his wife unconscious; the world will find something else to focus on. But the story was an opportunity for journalists—including sportswriters—to learn that the stories they tell can shape the way people think.

As executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC), Ralph Mellanby committed what he considered his first act of journalism just by rewinding some tape. The sponsors, Molson and Imperial Oil, insisted the program not replay fights. Show them live, show the cheap shots that instigated them, but don’t show the fights again.

The rule lasted until April 4, 1968. That day, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King; that evening, Liberals elected Pierre Trudeau party leader and prime minister. And that night, eight minutes into a playoff matchup between the Canadiens and the Bruins, Montreal’s John Ferguson and Boston’s Ted Green dropped the gloves. (Ferguson won.) But CBC didn’t show it, opting for news instead. Sensing the fight would set the tone for the rest of the series, though, Mellanby replayed it when HNIC finally went to air.

Fans were livid—because they’d missed the first period, that is. The outrage was so great that even CFTO, aCTV affiliate, fielded 150 calls from viewers who couldn’t reach the CBC switchboard. On a day that dramatically changed the political and social landscape of North America, Canadians just wanted to watch hockey.

While Mellanby’s defiance might have been brave, it’s a low benchmark for journalistic excellence. And despite the show’s periodic proclamations of a renewed focus on journalism, the old standard remains. On January 16, HNIC host Ron MacLean interviewed the NHL’s director of hockey operations, Colin Campbell, about the league’s latest scandal: Alexandre Burrows had accused referee Stephane Auger of having a vendetta against him after the Vancouver Canucks winger allegedly exaggerated the effects of a hit from Nashville Predator Jerred Smithson in a December 2009  game. When Auger officiated the Vancouver-Nashville rematch a month later, he gave Burrows a pre-game warning about embarrassing him, then handed the player three dubious penalties. The Canucks cried conspiracy.

Calling Campbell “Collie,” MacLean mocked Burrows while showing a clip of the hit: “We all thought he was dead.” The host broke down the footage of the player surreptitiously scoping out the refs and dragging out his recovery time—a tactic MacLean, a retired amateur referee, claimed was indicative of someone trying to draw a larger penalty. He then ran a series of clips of Burrows skirting the rules and getting away with dirty plays in the past. “Your sins will sort you out,” he pronounced. “Burrows has clearly made his bed.”

His unconcealed contempt aside, MacLean made a compelling case. But what could have been a measured takedown of both a dodgy player and a biased ref—a far worse problem for a sports league—degenerated into an ad hominem attack. MacLean didn’t give Burrows a chance to defend himself and later scoffed at the notion of a ref with an agenda, limiting his criticisms of the league to its ineffectual handling of habitual trouble-makers. Among his colleagues, MacLean (who did not return requests seeking comment) has a reputation as a guy who doesn’t pull punches. But that night, up against an NHL official, he seemed content to carry water.

Canada’s hockey broadcasts—HNIC, Rogers Sportsnet’s Hockeycentral and NHL on TSN—rely on business partnerships with the league. As reported by William Houston, then a sports media reporter for The Globe and Mail and now editor of truthandrumours.net, CTVglobemedia pays $35 to $40 million annually to air about 70 games and several playoff rounds on TSN, while CBC forks over $100 million per season for its marquee games on Saturday night and exclusive rights to the Stanley Cup final. Critics say these deals present a conflict of interest and undermine the networks’ motivations to do investigative journalism that could sully the reputation of the league—and their shows. “Anyone looking to a hockey broadcast for journalism,” says Toronto Star sports media columnist Chris Zelkovich, “is looking in the wrong place.”

But TSN, which launched in 1984, tries to tailor its coverage to the hardcore fan with strong and unsentimental reporting and analysis. In August 2009, Darren Dreger was following the upheaval in the NHLPlayers’ Association (NHLPA). On Friday, August 28, he predicted on-air that executive director Paul Kelly’s future was in peril. Leadership has long been controversial in the NHLPA. Founding executive director Alan Eagleson served time for fraud, and players accused Kelly’s predecessor, Ted Saskin, of spying on their e-mails. Given this history, senior producer Ken Volden granted Dreger’s request to cover the union’s meetings in Chicago. Two days later, he was the lone journalist at the Drake Hotel when the executive board fired Kelly at 3:30 a.m. Dreger won’t make assumptions about why no other network covered the meetings, but says, “I can assure you, if most had a do-over, they would do it differently.”

Faced with the challenge of covering a game so deeply rooted in the Canadian identity—combined with overbearing sponsors and a league that can be thin-skinned and arrogant—it’s easy to opt for deference and to let uncomfortable stories slide. But NHL on TSN suggests televised hockey-talk can still be principled, trustworthy and undeterred by the inertia of tradition.

* * *

For CBC, the game’s steadfast protector, hockey is ritual. Nostalgia-heavy broadcasts are an effective draw, though: HNIC regularly places in the top 20 in Canada’s BBM Nielsen ratings. Not that the show has no journalistic spine: Scott Morrison, a one-time Toronto Sun sports editor and Sportsnet’s former managing editor of hockey, co-hosts the “iDesk” segment with Jeff Marek, while Pierre LeBrun, a respected writer for espn.com, often appears on “The Hotstove” panel discussion. And Elliotte Friedman roams the sidelines conducting interviews and contributing features to the pre-game show Inside Hockey. Still, Friedman acknowledges the duality of his role. “It can’t be hard-core journalism all the time,” he says. “I still take it pretty seriously, but I realize part of making a broadcast successful is making it entertaining.”

That’s why “The Hotstove” also features loudmouth Mike Milbury, a former player, coach and general manager whose role is to react to LeBrun and the other panelists with contrarian bombast. That’s also why “Coach’s Corner”—a platform for Don Cherry to praise the troops, junior hockey and tough guys, and to heap scorn on those who dodge fights, wear visors or are European—remains the show’s spiritual centrepiece.

Although the talking heads may occasionally hold the league accountable, there’s a difference between debate about the news and the reporting that breaks it. Coordinating producer Brian Spear calls HNIC a “family show,” noting many Canadians watch one game a week—his. As TSN’s vice-president of production, Mark Milliere says, “Your grandmother’s watching it while she’s making soup on Saturday nights.” Even Mellanby’s wife “won’t watch the game, but she’ll watch Don Cherry.” Hockey fans may tune in to HNIC for the hockey, but the average Canadian watches out of habit.

* * *

Sportsnet’s role in the mosaic is less defined. Since its launch in 1998, the network’s personality has vacillated as its personnel has turned over. When Morrison arrived in 2001, he wanted to build a journalistically sound hockey department, with a staff that included Darren Dreger as Hockeycentral host. But that philosophy changed in 2006 when Sportsnet decided to go after what Morrison calls “the elusive 18-to-whatever audience,” discarding the standards he felt his team had successfully established.

Morrison and Dreger left, but Nick Kypreos stayed. Last fall, the former NHL tough guy scored an exclusive sit-down with Mike Danton, who’d just served five years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder. Most people believed his agent, David Frost, was the target when he’d tried to hire a hitman. (Frost’s long relationship with the player struck most people as harmful and exploitive.) But now, out of prison, Danton claimed he actually wanted to kill his allegedly abusive father, Steve Jefferson. The November interview was a huge get—a high-profile, national event for a network that specializes in regional broadcasts.

When Danton claimed he’d wanted his father dead, Kypreos ignored the substantial evidence to the contrary. “Rogue Agent,” one of Bob McKeown’s three documentaries on the story for CBC’s the fifth estate, featured multiple phone calls in which Danton tried to hire two different men—including a dispatcher for the local St. Louis police—to “take care of” Frost. Officers later arrested the player at San Jose International Airport. While awaiting indictment in a California jail, he crawled back to Frost. Later in the documentary, McKeown played a call in which the nervous agent advised the player on the coming legal proceedings, instructing him to blame his parents. Frost then asked if he still had to worry about his own safety.

Now walking free, Danton told a wildly different story. But Kypreos didn’t challenge this alternate history—he legitimized it. Over the hour, Danton spoke at length, explaining his bad behaviour, downplaying his relationship with Frost and offering appropriate contrition. By the time Kypreos asked what “prison was like for a guy that knows nothing but hockey,” it was obvious this wasn’t a fifth estate-style exposé. This was the first stop of the Mike Danton Soft-Focus Redemption Tour, sponsored by Sportsnet, with your host, Nick Kypreos.

Although the show drew an impressive 189,000 viewers, the reviews were predominantly negative. Globesports media columnist Bruce Dowbiggin said Kypreos seemed “unwilling to judge his subject” and that this approach “postpones the inevitable date with reality.” Friedman, who’s careful not to denounce his friend, admits there were elements of the interview he didn’t believe and wondered how thoroughly his colleague had prepared. Houston was blunt: The reluctance to push Danton to answer any tough questions “made the exercise a failure.”

In a statement on sportsnet.ca, Kypreos admitted he could have been more thorough and tenacious, but didn’t want to risk “Danton getting up and leaving with so many storylines still untold.” Considering the Rogers stable also boasts veteran reporter Mike Brophy and radio host Bob McCown, revered by one peer as the “greatest shit-disturber in Canadian sports media,” Kypreos’s botched effort was just another squandered opportunity for the network.

* * *

Steve Dryden, TSN’s managing editor of hockey, gets a little sheepish when he talks about his binders.

His office in the CTV complex in suburban Toronto is unremarkable, except for a signed photo of Bobby Orr and Eric Lindros on the ice together. The bookshelf to his left is stocked with hockey reference materials, scouting reports and record books dating from the 1970s; below those are colour-coded binders. Smirking, Dryden explains the red binders contain handwritten box scores for every NHL game since the early 2000s, while the others are packed with pertinent stats—blocked shots, breakaways, fights and turnovers, all of which he diligently compiles. The former editor-in-chief of The Hockey News has been doing this since he covered the OHL’s Cornwall Royals for the Cornwall Standard Freeholder in the 1980s. The records help him keep track of trends and storylines, and serve as a physical memory bank when he sends producers into the archives to put together clip packages. He considers it an “old school” approach rather than an obsessive one—a throwback to a newspaper sensibility.

On Dryden’s desk is a replica of a crude early-model goalie mask. It’s there for a segment on Jacques Plante, the first goalie to regularly wear one 50 years ago. TSN commemorated the milestone with a piece that explored the birth of the mask from the perspective of Andy Bathgate, whose shot was the last to hit Plante before the goalie insisted on wearing his mask in games. NHL on TSN host James Duthie introduced the segment with an under-reported side of the story: the shot, Bathgate admitted on air, was intentional. A few games earlier, the Canadiens’ goalie delivered a dangerous poke-check that sent the New York Ranger headfirst into the boards. When Bathgate got the chance to retaliate with a wrist shot into the netminder’s cheek, he took it. Rather than rehash the oft-told Plante story with the pablum of the goalie mask’s evolution, Duthie found a lesser-known, more substantial angle.

The studio component of NHL on TSN supports the program’s role as what Milliere calls “the show of record” for hockey in Canada. The team includes Bob McKenzie, another editor emeritus of The Hockey News, and Dreger, the show’s “insiders.” Even Duthie is a journalism school graduate who started in news. Though they too admit entertainment is a large part of the job—“You’d be naive to say it’s not the number one goal,” Duthie says—they keep the analytical elements accessible and dignified, complemented by daily reporting. The result is an editorial mix that blends the breaking news of trades, transactions and injuries with reflections on issues facing the league and the occasional investigative report.

On October 29, 2009, the broadcast day begins when the Ottawa Senators and Tampa Bay Lightning arrive at the St. Pete Times Forum for their morning skate. The play-by-play announcers, colour commentators and producers speak with players and coaches. They’ll develop five to 10 stories (including who’s injured, who’s playing well and who’s changing lines) that will be further refined as the broadcast approaches. “It’s preparation meets opportunity,” says Milliere. “Every match-up is a play in three acts, and every night there’s a story to be told.”

But these stories can often seem like fictions. He offers the hypothetical example of an early season game when Maple Leaf goalies Vesa Toskala and Jonas Gustavsson were in competition for the starting job. The show’s opening teases the rivalry with footage of each man at practice. When Gustavsson makes a spectacular save during the game, a camera cuts to Toskala on the bench, lingering long enough on his blank expression to cast doubt on whether he’s happy for his teammate or upset his job is on the line. With a cut to Toronto coach Ron Wilson looking pleased, the dramatic elements of the story, real or not, begin to emerge.

This is storytelling, absolutely—an important component of journalism, and more entertaining than, say, a dry recitation of statistics—but given the banality of the typical athlete interview, there’s little reason to believe the truth is nearly as exciting as this series of jump-cuts makes it seem.

* * *

Both TSN and CBC deny their sponsors or the league carry any editorial weight. “Push-back is not common,” Dryden says. “They understand that that’s the job. We’re constantly raising issues, big or small.” He notes that TSN found instances of goals scored after the puck bounced off the protective netting above the boards. Officials had been missing it, counting goals when the play should have been called dead, and NHL on TSNaired the evidence. “The NHL didn’t want us shining a light on that,” he says.

But the league has bigger problems. Head injuries have been impossible to ignore since Don Sanderson, a 21-year-old minor league hockey player, fell into a coma and died after hitting his head on the ice during a December 12, 2008 fight. Through the end of last October, the NHL claimed only 10 players had suffered concussions in exhibition games and the first month of the season. But TSN conducted its own survey of all 30 teams and found that 26 players had missed games with concussions or related symptoms. “I don’t know what their threshold is,” Dryden says of the league’s head injury policy. “Apparently, it’s bigger than ours.”

Still, autonomy from the powers that be isn’t always a given. McKeown says that during production of one of his Danton docs, he asked CBC Sports for footage, but his timing was lousy; CBC was negotiating rights with the NHL and there was rampant speculation that the network might lose its broadcasting rights altogether.CBC Sports denied him access to any Danton footage and he ended up using clips from a Fox Sports affiliate in Missouri. Joel Darling, then the executive producer of HNIC, says he doesn’t remember the incident, but points out, “There are rights issues everybody has to deal with.”

McKeown’s not bitter—he happily acknowledges the value of HNIC—and maybe he should have expectedCBC to be risk-averse. Dave Hodge, now an NHL on TSN commentator, was similarly stymied. He preceded MacLean as HNIC host and, after Philadelphia Flyers goalie Pelle Lindbergh died in a 1985 alcohol-related accident, wanted to do a feature on drunk driving. He worried it was too common around the league, and hoped to include HNIC’s sponsor, Molson, in the segment. CBC killed the feature without explanation. Hodge won’t speculate about what happened—he just chuckles and says he no longer pays any attention to sponsors.

* * *

Because they must live in what McKenzie calls a “state of perpetual awareness,” he and other hockey reporters don’t have a formal preparation period. “You don’t cram before going on television,” he says, en route to shoot a segment for TSN’s Off the Record as a last-minute fill-in.

The game day routine is similar for everyone at NHL on TSN: Read sports on the internet for a few hours, have a conference call with Dryden at 10 a.m., maybe do a radio appearance, then call up sources or catch up on game footage before a 5 or 5:30 p.m. meeting in Dryden’s office, where all the stories and segments go up on the white board. At the October 29 meeting, Duthie’s BlackBerry buzzes. He reads the message aloud. “Did you see this? Cogliano dressed up as Dany Heatley for the Oilers’ Halloween party.”

Everyone in the room laughs. Over the summer, rumours suggested Heatley, then with the Ottawa Senators, would be traded to Edmonton, against his wishes, for Andrew Cogliano and two other players. Dryden adds “Cogliano” to the board and moves on, but Duthie occasionally pipes up with more information until there’s a complete picture: “All Ottawa gear—bag, hat, gloves, visor, no teeth.”

The updates came from Cogliano. “I have relationships with a couple hundred players,” Duthie says, “but I tell them it doesn’t mean I’m going to coddle them. If there’s something to criticize about them, I will.” Still, he admits there are secrets he keeps—secrets that would surely be stories. “But that’s how you foster a relationship with someone to gain trust. Sometimes you don’t repeat what you know. That’s just all part of the process.”

For McKeown, this can both help and hinder coverage of sports—or Parliament Hill. “You get to know the individuals on a personal basis,” he says, “and it takes you away from the arm’s-length objectivity journalism is supposed to have.” Paul Romanuk, a former tsn play-by-play announcer, is more direct: “Journalism is what a newspaper writer does, perhaps a reporter at a TV station, but not a live sports broadcast. Anyone who tells you otherwise is kidding himself.” He qualifies that statement a moment later: “I’m not saying broadcasters aren’t critical of the product, but never confuse it with hardcore journalism, because it simply is not.”

An example of a story he doesn’t believe a rights-holder would break is the 1986 Sports Illustrated feature that exposed the wild partying of the Edmonton Oilers—to Romanuk, a piece of “real” journalism.

When McKenzie was editor at The Hockey News, though, that paper picked up on the story. Even today, he insists he and his colleagues wouldn’t hesitate to break it. He knows NHL on TSN isn’t all hard news, “but is a newspaper all hard news?” he asks. “No, it’s not. And yet, people might not ask whether a newspaper is journalism—they’d just say, ‘Of course it is.’ The vehicle doesn’t really matter.”

But this is Canada—hockey does matter, and the networks that broadcast the NHL have a choice: commit to journalism or bask in the game’s glory. For Friedman, Morrison and others who work on HNIC, being part of the program is an honour. The show, however, is an institution often interchangeable with hockey itself in the annals of Canadiana. The journalistic pedigrees of its staff are legitimate, but the broadcast is the sport’s standard-bearer.

NHL on TSN isn’t hamstrung by history, and without a rigid format, it can make room for stories others might miss. Critics may dismiss the job as easy—this is just sports, after all. The reporters work hard, sure, and there are stories worth chasing, but the stakes are undeniably lower than covering politics or finance. That’s not lost on the TSN crew. “The guys always show up at the same time at the arena,” jokes Duthie. “They skate around for an hour and you ask them dumb questions afterwards.” Some reporters more effectively than others.