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.

It is going to be a hard night for Jack Layton. Pre-election polls have forecast defeat of Toronto’s NDP mayoralty candidate at the hands of his Tory opponent, and at 7 p.m. on election day, time is ticking away. And here is Layton, sweating in his overcoat and red scarf, rushing from door to door in the Ryerson student residence, trying to garner some lastminute votes. Though well-spoken and personable, he cannot mask the aura of panic that accompanies him. And as if this weren’t trying enough, this personal campaigning, this compilation of months of work into final-hour sell lines for college voters, a reporter has emerged out of nowhere to chronicle the act. Not just any reporter, either, but gritty Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno-not exactly a die-hard fan of the New Democratic Party. But Layton greets her amicably, and they exchange witticisms as she follows his rushed passage up and down cement stairwells and along hallways.

DiManno, too, has been anxious all evening, dreading the notion of a political story, unsure about the slant she will take. She has even developed a tension headache on the way over in the cab. But leaning back against a wall, observing Layton, she is in her element. She scrawls constantly in her notebook, managing to maintain an air of grace. Layton is making her job easy. As he promises better student housing, Metropasses for university students and better lighting in the residence, DiManno visibly relaxes.
To her amusement, Layton, in his hurry, is knocking on doors and entering rooms before he is invited in. “I’m much better now,” DiManno says, laughing. “I can see the column taking shape. He didn’t even wait for them to answer the door! Does he look manic?!”

“They left you off the voters’ list. That’s how much they think of you,” Layton informs student after student, while DiManno stands to the side, eyes slightly squinted in thought, smiling. If Layton had time to think about DiManno’s presence there that evening, he might have been worried.

Knock-knock, Who’s there? began DiManno’s column the following day.

Jack.

Jack who?

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack who could not win over the electorate.

But oh, how he tried. Until the very last moment he tried. What followed was a sympathetic account of the final hour of Layton’s campaign. Humorous at times, but certainly not cruel.

“It’s so easy to ridicule people,” says DiManno. “But you don’t make fun of losers. It was funny, but it wasn’t ridiculous. Here was a man heading for defeat, and he was going to fight till the last minute. These are admirable qualities.”

Who could have foreseen this forgiving slant on a piece by the writer whose coverage of the funeral of a murdered child aroused public fury for its alleged ruthlessness? And it was only last May that DiManno condemned “a trendy, all-purpose NDP ideology” for being ”as much at fault…as any Tory national agenda or broken Liberal promises.” Not to mention the charges of self-righteousness directed at NDP cabinet minister Marilyn Churley in at least two other columns.

But if DiManno is anything, she is unpredictable, a rare quality for a newspaper reporter in this age of pack journalism and creeping orthodoxy. “Rosie doesn’t toe the political party line,” says friend and fellow Star writer Craig MacInnis. “She doesn’t wear party colors on her sleeve. She’s a situational person. She sizes up a situation on its own merit.” Says city editor Joe Hall, “I find it difficult to pigeonhole her. One of her most appealing qualities is that she’s not predictable.”

Without aligning herself with any faction, DiManno seems to speak for…the people. She writes with a snappy, witty rhetoric which often appears to take on the voice of her subject: the prostitute, the TTC striker, the mother of a murdered child. “Her politics are emotionally situated,” says MacInnis. “She writes from the perspective of someone who feels a certain empathy for the little guy.”
The response she elicits from her readers is emotional too. “She infuriates large numbers of readers,” says Hall. “She outrages them.” He estimates that DiManno gets more phone calls from readers than any other staff member on city side. It’s easy to believe. At her desk this Tuesday afternoon, DiManno’s phone is ringing constantly. Her latest column was about the shooting of Jonathan Howell, a black man, by Detective Carl Sokolowski, and criticism of the police provokes the most virulent of public responses. DiManno listens patiently to the opinions of each caller, responding firmly but respectfully unless the reader gets rude. And some of them do. After one such call impugning the purity of her motives, DiManno sits back in her chair, looking more sad than angry. “This job is disheartening at times,” she says. “You really get to feel the pulse of the city.”

The idea of having a city columnist had been in the air for years at the Star before DiManno was selected for the job in September 1989. “I’d always said the Star should have one,” says DiManno. “I was always interested in the prospect of me doing it, but I just thought that somebody should do it. It was an element that we were missing in the newspaper.”

Hall was looking for a column that would provide a younger person’s perspective as well as a sense of the city. Born and raised in Toronto, at 33 DiManno seemed like a prime candidate. It was an impressive position to hold at such an age, and DiManno knows how fortunate she was. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I think I got the best job in this city.” It didn’t exactly fall into her lap.
Born to Italian immigrant parents, DiManno was raised around Christie Pits in Toronto’s west end. The only girl among five boys, she experienced the restricted childhood typical of kids of traditional Italian parents. At 12 she was forced to attend Central Commerce, a secretarial school in which she had no interest. To her horror, she excelled there. But she left halfway through the year when her family moved to North York. “I don’t know what would have happened if my family hadn’t moved,” says DiManno, who doubts she would have become a secretary. “I might have led a life of crime.”

So it was on to William Lyon Mackenzie Secondary School, and the trial of adolescence under the thumb of “phenomenally strict” parents. “Curfews? What curfews?” asks DiManno. “I couldn’t go out at all. No curfew. Home after school. You weren’t allowed to go to a dance or anything like thatever .” Her marks began to slip when she started cutting classes. She would go down to Yorkville and panhandle, pretending she was a hippie, or go to a movie, or go to a mall. It was the only freedom she had in those days.

North York was also the place where DiManno discovered sports. She’d played a lot of softball as a kid, but she’d never been a good athlete, never had much interest. Then one morning she woke up a sports nut. Her primary fixation was hockey, and she read everything she could about it. “If I read a newspaper at all, it was just the sports pages,” says DiManno. Except for a “book” she put together while in Grade 9, DiManno did not do much writing in those days. “God knows what it was about,” she says. “It was a stupid book, about sex and drugs and being 14. I used to hand it out in class. There were always people reading chapters of it.”
Still, she had the notion back then that she was going to be a writer, and the Ryerson School of Journalism seemed like a good place to start. The restrictions set by her family had always been a problem, and with the prospect of a career in sight, they loomed larger than ever. “I didn’t know how I could be a journalist and get along with my family at the same time. Even in my ignorance I realized that journalism involved travelling; it involved long hours.”

Bu t DiManno thrived at Ryerson, becoming editor of The Ryersonian, the journalism school paper, in her final year. She describes her paper as the worst one in history. “I just picked my friends, people who were good partiers, and I don’t know how we put that paper out. 1’d bring from .home these great big bottles of homemade wine. We’d sit in the back…and we’d just drink all this wine, and then we’d go outside and smoke some dope. Then we’d come in and try to put the paper together .”

She began working part-time for the Star when she was 17 years old, and the summer after third year she was hired full-time as a sportswriter. She doesn’t remember when the epiphany occurred at Ryerson, when she decided that she wanted to write sports. But Christie Blatchford was already doing it at The Globe and Mail, and DiManno thought that even being a female sportswriter might be a more realistic goal than setting out to write fiction.

She had “the time of her life” covering the ’76 Olympics in Montreal for the Star. Her stories were getting good play, and she describes that period as a delayed adolescence. Because she worked in sports, she worked a split shift. She’d work in the morning, have the afternoon off, then return to work at night. Most people went home during the d~y but DiManno, who was still living with her parents, would go drinking. Sometimes her assignments were late. “This was the first time that I was going home at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. That never happened before. So perhaps I was behaving like a
lot of other people when they’re 15I thought that those good times were never going to end.”

When DiManno finally moved out she was 23 years old, and the action did cause a rift. She now lives by herself in a downtown apartment. Relations with her parents were eventually restored, though the relationship has always been limited by the language barrier; DiManno speaks Italian but not very well. “I don’t think that they know to this day what it is that I do for a living,” she says. “It must be a terrible puzzle to them.” And any freedom she has taken for herself was reluctantly yielded. “If I phone them and say ‘I’m going out of town tomorrow,’ then there’s always that sigh, ‘Oh there you go again. Why do you always have to do this?'”
When her quarterly probationary period at the Star came up for the third or fourth time, then-sports editor Jim Proudfoot fired her. “It would probably be correct to say that I was having too good a time,” says DiManno. “I didn’t take it all that seriously, they tell me.” Thus began a low period in her life which didn’t lift until six months later when she started freelancing for magazines. She got a story in the first issue of City Magazine, a now defunct Toronto Star publication then under the editorship of Hartley Steward. Freelancing kept her alive for three years until she decided to go back to newspapers.

This time she tried The Globe and Mail. “I walked over to the Globe, got an interview and was hired. I remember later coming out and sitting on a curb outside the Globe and thinking ‘My God, what have I done?'” She worked as a general assignment reporter at the Globe for four months before she decided to quit. “If there was ever a person who was un Globe, it was me,” says DiManno. “It took itself much too seriously.” She walked into managing editor Ted Moser’s office ready to quit, but before she could get the words out of her mouth he said, “You’re gone.” She had gotten in trouble for hitchhiking home from an out-of-town assignment the previous week, and he didn’t like the way she dressed. “You didn’t wear little halter tops to the Globe,” says DiManno.

After a year of freelancing, Star city editor Mary Deanne Shears offered her a job as a summer replacement. “I jumped at the opportunity,” DiManno recalls. “I always felt that I had the Star tattooed on my ass. I always felt that I wasn’t where I should have been. I mean, I felt like a Star person all those years when I wasn’t a Star person.” Shears gave her a stern welcoming lecture about responsibility, but by the end of the summer DiManno was hired on as a general assignment reporter. She worked as a GA reporter for five years, in entertainment for less than two, and then for one and a half years as part of the features team. Last September was the second anniversary of her column.

The role of a city columnist is a precarious one, says Blatchford, city columnist for The Toronto Sun. You’ve got to be newsy, but not too newsy, to avoid taking stories away from reporters. You’ve got to be topical, and at the same time give readers something they won’t get from a news story or from television. What you have to do is provide the kind of detail that newspaper and television reporters can’t supply.

“I like columns that rely heavily on detail,” says DiManno. “I think I have an eye for detail. Sometimes you write columns that are really just mood pieces. They’re not really saying anything. They’re just word pictures.”

This knack for verbal impressionism, nearly poetic at times, is typical DiManno. Hall compares her work to Jimmy Breslin’s, and DiManno too is a fan of Breslin’s writing. “I’m not a great hockey fan,” says Hall, “But I remember quite well a piece she wrote a year ago about the Leafs. It was just a look at the Leafs all geared up for a new season…but with the words she used you could just about see the blades cutting through the ice.”

Blatchford describes the relationship between herself and DiManno as “curious.” DiManno keeps her on her toes, she says, especially when they’re covering the same story. In one case last summer, both columnists were writing about Kay~a Klaudusz, a missing child who was later found murdered. “I can’t tell you the times I’d see her in front of [the family’s] apartment building and start to worry,” says Blatchford. “Then she’d disappear and I’d think ‘Fuck, she got inside,’ and it would turn out she went for a coffee.”

But DiManno is a harsh judge of her own work, and says there are many columns she regrets having written. She warns of the traps columnists can fall prey to: like falling in love with the sound of your own voice. “Sometimes I just want to say: ‘Shut up, Rosie! Shut up!’… There are days I don’t go into work because I’m so ashamed of what I’ve written.”

Ironically, the columns she regrets are rarely the ones that caused public furor. Perhaps the best-known of these controversial pieces was on Andrea Atkinson’s funeral. Six-yearold Andrea had disappeared days earlier from her mother’s east end apartment, and her body was later found in the storage room of her building. DiManno went beyond the death of the child, exploring the intentions and suspicions of the funeral goers, many of whom had appeared with small children and shopping bags.

There are times when you can almost touch the face of madness. And it was there in the tawdry spectacle of a service for the dead, turned into a circus for the living. In the almost giddy grief of a childless mother. In the murmur and hissing of strangers. In the hostility of a crowd engorged with rage.

Some of that rage was directed at Ruth Windebank, Andrea’s mother, and DiM anno’s piece made that clear. It was her description of Windebank’s behavior which provoked an outcry from readers who felt the grieving mother had been unjustly served by DiManno’s prose.

In the chapel, Andreas casket was laid out in front of pale pink curtains, laden and surrounded with flowers. On the lid, a burst of pink carnations with a card that read: To our little girl. From Ruth and Doug. Not mother, not mom, but Ruth. That’s Ruth Windebank, mother, and Doug Heinbuch, the boyfriend she met on Labor Day.

Hall doesn’t regret having run the piece, though he wishes he could have prevented the error which caused DiManno’s photo byline to be dropped from the column, making it look like a news story. But even without this confusion, people would have complained, says Hall. DiManno was trying to convey that the funeral had become a spectacle of sorts, with a turnout that seemed more like audience than mourners. But her efforts were largely misinterpreted, because in our society funerals are like death itself. They are surrounded by taboo.

DiManno admits that she did not like Ruth Windebank. She was angered by the fact that Windebank had let Andrea out of her sight for at least three hours the morning she disappeared. And on the day she was told that Andrea’s body had been found, DiManno overheard Windebank complaining about her stereo.

DiManno concedes that nobody can judge somebody else’s grief, and Windebank’s reaction could easily have been an expression of shock. But that doesn’t excuse the behavior of Windebank before her daughter was found, she says. The reason she was there that first day was because Windebank, dissatisfied with the way the investigation was going, had phoned the Star and the Sun, asking to give her side of the story. “Christie Blatchford…was there from the Sun and we went inside [Windebank’s apartment],” recalls DiManno. “And for over an hour Ruth Windebank talked about herself. Ruth Windebank told jokes. She was more concerned about the image that was being presented in the press about her than she was about her daughter’s disappearance, and that was my honest-to-gut feeling about what was happening that day.”

DiManno never heard from Windebank after the column came out.

In contrast, her column on the World Cup soccer sparring in July 1990 elicited an active response from its subject, the Italian community. After Argentina knocked Italy out of the World Cup in Naples, thousands of Argentinian and Italian soccer fans battled it out with eggs and bottles on St. Clair Avenue West.

Arriverderci Italia.

And shame, shame, shame, wrote DiManno in her column the following day. She continued to reprimand the Italian community for being sore losers, “despite all the practice we’ve had at it.” The Italians were so outraged by the column that a reaction was broadcast on Italian TV. Letters of complaint poured into Corriere Canadese, Toronto’s Italian newspaper, which went as far as to publish an article in response to DiManno’s. “It raised a lot of fur,” says Silia Coiro, then English news editor at the paper, of DiManno’s piece.

Surprised by the reaction, DiManno does not regret the column. “I didn’t anticipate that they would react so virulently,” she says. “What were they so angry about? Were they angry because I said they behaved like a bunch of assholes on St. Clair Avenue West? They did.” She says while some members of the Italian community are proud of her for having made it in “the big Anglo-Saxon culture,” others think they own a piece of her and consider her a traitor when she is critical of them.

The Italians aren’t the only ones to lay claim to DiManno’s loyalties. She has also been attacked by feminists who say that she writes articles demeaning to women. They write in to say that she’s sexist, and if not sexist, simply stupid. “Had DiManno been racebashing instead of feminist-bashing, would her column have been printed?” asked one Star reader after the appearance of a column criticizing a LEAF (women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) breakfast.

She has always considered herself a feminist, and is shocked by the suggestion that she is not. “The word ‘feminist’ has been co-opted by certain factions,” she says, “and their definition seems to be the only working definition that’s allowed any more. My feminism is as good as anyone else’s, goddammit!”

In one instance, DiManno co-wrote an article on pornography with MacInnis in which she defended it from a civil rights perspective and because she finds it funny and entertaining. She attributes the critical response to the piece to an increasing trend among journalists to adhere to the laws of political correctness. As an example of this DiManno cites the issue of a national day care program which, despite the fact that it has opponents, is covered largely from the perspective that it should exist. ‘We don’t approach it as a news story any more,” she says. The feminists have become the status quo these days, says DiManno, and the role of the media has never been to uphold the status quo. “You’re supposed to have questions. You’re not just supposed to say ‘four legs good, two legs bad.'”

Hence her problem with Marilyn Churley, an NDP cabinet minister and the focus of several of her less flattering pieces. In a column last March, DiManno called Churley “the mother of all big sisters.” The column was inspired by Bob Rae’s decision to put Churley in the position of Peter Kormos, former minister of consumer and commercial relations. “The fey Ms. Churley: charming, earnest, and always righter than the rest,” wrote DiManno. “The standard-bearer, during her truncated tenure at Toronto City Council, for a certain dogmatic strain of feminism that long ago parted company with the most basic tenets of diplomatic principle.”

The reference here is to Churley’s efforts to ban sexist ads from City of Toronto property, and beauty pageants from Nathan Phillips Square. DiManno sees her as a member of a group of people cavorting under the title of politically correct, dictating to everybody else the right way to live. “These are all people of the same age-group. They’re a little older than I am,” she says, “but they went through the sixties. And they had free sex. And they went out and did all the drugs they wanted to do. And they went out and had the adventure of their lives. They broke all the taboos. They went against their parents. And now they’re 20 years older and they’ve had their little piece of fun and they want to go back and have the same Victorian prudish society they rebelled against in the first place. Now they want it for different reasons, though.”

DiManno has little tolerance for people or institutions she perceives to be taking themselves too seriously. Certainly she can ‘t be accused of taking herself too seriously. She has no noble objectives as a columnist, and does not see herself as being under any particular obligation. “I don’t have a role,” says DiManno. “I just want to tell good stories.” Maybe, she suggests, she is having a late adolescence. “I want to be perverse and outrageous.”

She sees herself as a city-side reporter given the freedom to write in her own style. Her desk sits amidst the hustle and bustle of the newsroom, not in the tower with other columnists and editorial writers.

She would rather write about breaking news than pontificate about a subject. “I don’t like using I,” says DiManno. “It’s embarrassing. Where do I get off using 20 inches of the Star to tell you what I think?”

Despite herself, her column seems to have taken on a life of its own, says DiManno. It’s become more personal than she ever intended, and now she considers that perhaps there is really no way to keep her personality out of it. And she doesn’t know how long she should continue to write the column either, before the time will come to pass the space on to someone else. “I’m always waiting for the tap on the shoulder saying ‘Hey kid, it’s been fun, but you gotta run!'”

Blatchford agrees that DiManno’s opinions usually manage to sneak through somehow. “Even though she doesn’t say ‘I think,’ it’s pretty plain 90 per cent of the time what she thinks.” DiManno insists there are few issues she gets really passionate about, that steam her up enough to bring out the opinionated Rosie. One of them is the conflict between the police and the black community.
“You talk about being affected by a story,” says DiManno. “That one I wanted to go home and rip out my hairI think there are a lot of really good police officers in the city who care. But the fact that we should even be discussing that it’s right to shoot people over a theft kills me. How can it be? How can it be?”

And taking a stand on the police issue is not an expression of her feeling of responsibility as a columnist, she says. Rather, it’s the least she can do in the face of the racist sub text of the incidents. She’s had readers and even some police officers suggest that given her stance on the issue, she must be ‘sleeping black.’ “If you’re not outraged by that, then you can check out,” says DiManno. “Then you’re not alive.”

While some may see inconsistencies between her stands on racism and feminism, DiManno can’t equate the two. “If you’re talking about the opportunities that women are given or not given in their lives, that’s a far cry from young black males being shot in Toronto,” she says.

But then there is nothing neat or packageable about Rosle DiManno’s assorted stands. There is no way to infer one from the next. Every issue is considered individually on its own merit, and there are no hard-and-fast rules that apply’ to any of them. If this capriciousness makes her somehow more credible than other, party-oriented columnists, the effect has occurred incidentally. She never set out to create a persona for herself in print. It just happened naturally.

“Be a maverick,” says DiManno, who ought to know. “Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no cant. There are too many people walking around thinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.”