No, I don’t remember anything about the 1950s. I showed up at that party – a little late.
Fifty years ago this very day, a young English professor at the University of Toronto and his brilliant, eccentric, utterly unstoppable wife celebrated the birth of their first son. Me.
My father told me years later he had always wanted a son named Bernard. That’s BERnard, the English pronunciation, with the acCENT on the first sylLAble. So Bernard was my name – for about four seconds, and then he wheeled around and named me Ben.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
It’s the only nickname that has ever, in half a century, really stuck to me, even though I’ve never been able to stick it to my passport.
“No, you can’t be Ben from Bernard,” a passport clerk once told me. “You can be Bernie! You wanna be Bernie?”
No. I don’t. No offence to all the wonderful Bernies in the world. But I’m Ben.
I remember the black-and-white TV in the living room. I vividly remember Expo 67 and Canada turning 100. By the time that happened, I’d been to England, up and down Italy by train, and on the fringes of a shooting war in Africa.
I was certainly around when the Toronto Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup, but I didn’t know or care about hockey until two years later. Then I got obsessed. My lifelong involvement with sports began with the Leafs beating the Los Angeles Kings 4-2 in their first home game of 1969. The Kings wore yellow uniforms. Even then – with no context at all – I knew that was weird.
Hockey ate my life, then baseball and gridiron football. Basketball, not so much. Then, on one of the family trips to England, I started learning about soccer.
It wasn’t the sport that hooked me. It was the idea that there could be four leagues instead of one. That teams were promoted and relegated, and that every tiny town had its own version of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
I’m never quite clear on the first soccer match I attended live. It was either:
- Dallas Tornado 3, Toronto Metros 0, at Varsity Stadium (three blocks from the family home),
or
- Wimbledon 2, Barnet 2, at Plough Lane.
I can never remember which came first. I could look it up in under a minute, but I’m honestly happier not quite knowing.
I’ve probably mentioned this along the way, but I honestly never had any intention of being a sportswriter. I’d done journalism school at Ryerson in the eighties, and hooked up with CBC National Radio News, which took me all the way to Iqaluit on Baffin Island. Back in Toronto a few months later, the work environment turned toxic, and one morning I just up and quit.
I’ve never had a full-time job since.
I became a copy-writer, bass guitarist, cab driver, researcher, data entry grunt, got married, divorced and really didn’t have a whole lot of direction throughout my 30s. And then, funny things started to happen.
I started writing about amateur box lacrosse on the Internet. It needed doing, and wasn’t being done. Before long, I was covering an eleven-city Jr. A lacrosse league – from all eleven cities – for no pay whatsoever.
That, believe it or not, eventually landed me eight years of columnist work with Sportsnet.ca. Lacrosse eventually gave way to soccer. Hundreds of columns later, on the very same day Sportsnet said they were done with me, the Globe and Mail grabbed me in mid-freefall and put me to work. The economic downturn did that in last November, but I don’t know thing one about quitting. Onward! was born a few days after that.
Fifty finds me single (delightedly), somewhat poor (financially) and happy (every single blessed day, thanks).
I get to write about sports, play music for children (didn’t intend that, either, and now it’s 250 pre-school music shows a year) and do home care for special-needs adults in Etobicoke. Money comes and goes, but every time I show up for work, I love what I’m doing.
I realize now that happiness was always the goal. In any lifetime ever, I’d rather be happy and stretching a few bucks than wealthy and miserable. There’s still plenty of time to be happy AND wealthy – but you have to be happy first to pull that off.
I am.
Thanks to everyone who’s ever read, enjoyed or been annoyed by my work.
Onward!