Dear folks, dear friends, it is time for me to go.
After twelve and a half years of all-in internet soccer writing, this is the final edition of Onward!
There are many reasons for this decision, but they pretty much all boil down to one:
I’m done.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
CSA reform is taking shape. A good soccer man is president. Alberta soccer is delivered from its various scandals. The Old Boys, the Ancient Fiefdoms, are now just individual voices. The real power, the make-or-break decision-making and back-room power-broking continues to be routed away from the self-serving glad-handers of the past.
Oh, and Tom Anselmi's not Toronto FC president anymore.
I didn’t actually do any of that, but I know I helped. I’ve learned, over and over, over all these years, to never, ever, ever take “trust me, I know what I’m doing” for an answer.
The basic Onward! formula – lift the rock, shine the light, hold – has undoubtedly helped wrench the decision-making out of the backrooms, and onto the computer screens of Canadian soccer fans everywhere. It has been my great honour and joy to have been any little part of that.
And now, with a bold new generation of soccer writers on the web, it is time for me to pass the torch.
I’m smiling now, because so much has been accomplished – despite the fact that I never really intended to be a soccer writer at all. I took the job – at Sportsnet.ca in 2000 – as a lacrosse writer for whom lacrosse writing wasn’t even paying the gas money to get to lacrosse games.
To give you a sense of how isolated things were then: One morning in the early 2000s, I was helping a dear friend sell her stained-glass jewelry at Toronto's St. Lawrence Market. Dick Howard (journalist, CSA official) wanders over and looks at the glass. I turn to my friend and whisper "There are two and only two Canadian soccer columnists, and they are both standing at your glass table."
For the first few years I wrote that column, I remained a lacrosse writer who also had a job writing about soccer.
That changed – hugely and happily – in the spring of 2007 with the arrival of Toronto FC.
Chronicling that huge happy explosion of soccer fandom – from the inside, for the mass media – was one of the most electrifying, utterly enjoyable writing gigs there ever could have been. I made so many dear friends. And though I don’t see them all as often as I like, I am – and will remain – U-Sector till I die!!
I’d like to get a couple of things on the record, before I take my leave.
- It helps to be an outsider:
Sportsnet.ca is a mainstream sports site now, but for its first few years the goal was very different. The original plan was that all the columnists would be fans, instead of journalists. I had a friend designing the site, and they couldn’t find any lacrosse and curling fans who could write. That got me eight years of work – and also shifted me to soccer.
Even in my thirteen months at the Globe and Mail, I was encouraged to take an outside perspective. Of course, it’s a little bit hard for outsiders to stay employed when the economy crashes and print media gets caught in the avalanche. Soccer ceased to be a job at the end of 2008 – but many great days were yet to come.
Canadian Soccer News, the ultimate outsider, suddenly sprang up as the embodiment of everything I’d ever tried to do. Fans become journalists. The game goes under the permanent microscope of the very folks who love it most.
I could never have written the Alberta and CSA election stories in such minute detail in the major media. They have buildings, staff, ink and newsprint to pay for. Lengthy, multi-part governance yarns won’t do that.
- Don’t do – or accept – favours:
Way, way back, when the plans for what ultimately became BMO Field were first unveiled, I asked ranking CSA honcho Kevan Pipe a question at a press conference. I didn’t like his answer, so I asked the question again. I didn’t like that answer either, so I asked the question a third time. I still wasn’t satisfied, so I had the freaking nerve to ask one of Canada’s highest-ranking soccer officials the same question – four times in a row – with all the major media watching. (Got a good quote, too.)
You can’t do that if you’re giving and receiving favours.
For all the years that I threw bombs at the CSA, what were they going to do? Ban me from the stadium? I was favour-proof because I never, ever needed to be in the stadium to do what I do. It helps, and it’s great fun, but it’s more a luxury than a necessity.
Understand: I was nice to lots of people in my soccer years. But I never had to be. Yes, I took sides, and threw blocks for people or ideas I believed in. But I never asked for anything in return.
Canadian soccer had far too many secret networks and back-door dealings when I arrived. I resolved on day one to never, ever be part of that.
- Trust your gut:
I had a few key “informants,” whose perspective I greatly appreciated. But I wasn’t about to take anyone’s word for anything. What emerged was a kind of emotional detective work. Yes, the nuts-and-bolts facts mattered, but you can’t always get those right away.
It became clear that if this guy says this, this other guy agrees, and that chappie over there says it’s rubbish, the story is true. Then it’s just a matter of making lots and lots of public noise until the facts fall out of the tree.
When you’re wrong, you have to admit it quickly, openly and whole-heartedly. I ended up making excellent contacts that way, with people who five minutes earlier thought I was an arrogant ignoramus.
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The very week I wrote my first soccer column – nominating Prince Charles for the then-vacant role of England manager – the Canadian United Soccer League story broke.
This glad-handing, “trust me, I know what I’m doing” delusion of a plan to pull an eight-team professional league out of a leaky hat represented everything I had ever hated about the misplaced priorities of Canadian soccer. It turned out its own front man – Gerry Gentile – completely agreed. He told me years later, and was nice enough to repeat it that night on the FAN 590’s Soccer Show.
That was a major high point.
Shining the light on the CUSL taught me everything I needed to know to go after the CSA board structure and president, bad owners, idiotic regulations – most of what was keeping Canadian soccer from even being pointed in roughly the right direction.
But now? Imagine if Don Quixote sat astride his horse, and there were no more windmills left to charge after.
In the last three and a half years, my life has hugely changed.
I’m hardly ever in Toronto on match days now, having found love in the calmer, quieter lakes, rivers and lovely soft, sweet energy of Peterborough, Ontario. Whether I move there, or remain in my Toronto home of almost 54 years, all that remains to be seen.
As many of you know, my beloved and inspiring mother passed away recently. I find myself at a unique turning point. I truly don’t know where my life is going now, so I am simply going to go about my business for a year or so, and see what schemes and opportunities emerge.
To do this, I have to stop wrestling with the ongoing exorcism that is professional writing.
I’m going to throw myself into my other passions (playing children’s music in the mornings, doing social work in the afternoons). I’m sure I will write again. But I don’t know when, and I can’t even imagine about what.
Right now, my family needs me. My sweetie needs me. I need me.
Twice now, in two different sports, I have started writing all alone on the Internet, and ended up inspiring the next generation of Canadian lacrosse and soccer writers. I am immensely pleased with all that has happened – just as I know I am no longer able – or willing – to keep making all the required anonymous sacrifices to keep Onward! afloat.
At this point, I need to single out Ben Rycroft. His inexhaustible courage and belief mark him as the next great Canadian soccer scribe. It is to him, specifically, that I pass the torch.
There are too many others to name, and I would hate to accidentally miss anyone. Duane and Squizz are the ones I have walked the most happy miles with. Dave Bailey, too, who first put me in a soccer broadcast booth way back in the late-eighties Toronto Italia days. And Nigel Reed, for all those appearances on The Soccer Show.
To one and all, my grateful thanks.
I will be around – and I’m sure I’ll still have a quarter-way entertaining perspective on things. There are also four full years of Onward! archived on this site. Please feel free to browse. A lot of fun went into them.
There are no words to adequately thank you all for the kind support you have given my words over these grand and unforgettable years. I have been prouder than proud to speak for Toronto and Canadian soccer fans, in whatever little way I ever could.
I have no idea where this goes from here, but one more great and wondrous journey starts … now.
Signing off, and standing down.
Onward!
