Beyond the inside of hockey

Opinion

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This article was published 16/10/2014 (3471 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The limo driver doesn’t know who the indistinct guy in the backseat is, but if this were a cab in Toronto or Montreal, Winnipeg or Moose Jaw, there would be an autograph request and an unassuming, “Sure thing, bud.”

Bob McKenzie may not have taken Manhattan just yet, but he owns Canada. And hockey.

The undisputed champion of hockey media with an industry leading 800,000 followers on Twitter and podiums on TSN and NBC, McKenzie has come a long way from the big-haired cable TV pioneer known as Hoser Bob (a tip of the Canadiana hat to the Second City TV Bob and Doug McKenzie skit) to insiders.

Oh, and that word, “insider.” He is an original. Nowadays the label gets thrown around pretty loosely. Break a few stories, build up a solid set of contacts and a producer will anoint a budding media star with the “insider” tag. Fair enough.

But there were no hockey insiders before McKenzie.

 

With the loss of its national broadcast package, all of TSN’s hockey people will be in the crosshairs while Rogers attempts to mount a challenge as not only the place to watch games but as a leading source for news and information. Certainly, there are talented people at both places, but until further notice McKenzie remains the boss.

It’s a Wednesday morning and that means McKenzie has flown from Toronto to New York and will be ferried out to NBC’s hockey set in Stamford, Conn. On this day, however, there will first be a stop in Manhattan for a book signing.

McKenzie recently released his latest book, Hockey Confidential, Inside Stories from People Inside the Game.

“It’s different and probably meant to be different because, you know yourself, when you’re in the business every day, if you’re going to write a book, it’s got to be different than what you do every day,” says McKenzie, still TSN’s top hockey journalist.

“Writing books is too hard. It’s a laborious process, and if all you’re doing is duplicating what you do all day long, then it’s no fun because you’ve had enough of that. I wanted to get back to doing some storytelling, because the nature of my business is 140 characters at a time, 40 seconds here, 40 seconds there on TV. And over the course of my career I got away from what I initially got into it for, which is probably to tell some pretty good stories.

“So, this is more long-form storytelling. I think the shortest chapter was probably 3,000 to 4,000 words, and some of them upwards of 15,000, like mini-books in and of themselves.

“That was kind of the motivation. I thought I had a few stories to start with that nobody else has, that might be interesting for other people.”

Hockey people want to talk to McKenzie for business reasons and because as much as the GMs and coaches, players and agents are sources of information, so is he. Want to know about a junior player? McKenzie likely has seen him and has an informed opinion. What are people saying about a certain trade or signing? McKenzie has heard something.

Trust is a hard thing to build in this business. And as hard as it can be to earn it, just as easily it can be burnt. McKenzie’s relationships and the respect people in the game have for him comes through in the openness of the book’s subjects.

“I think if you’re around the business long enough and develop relationships with people, they’ll share with you. What I’ve found over the years always to be true, and this may be a universal truth, that deep down, if there are good stories to tell, the people want to tell them,” said McKenzie.

“And I found that to be the case here. It didn’t matter who it was, once I asked them and told them what I was doing, ‘Hey, I’m doing a book and would like to do something on you and this particular angle or this particular story,’ I was actually pleasantly surprised at how quickly everybody opened up. And once they got into it, they really opened up.”

 

The book opens with McKenzie getting a well-known hockey man to tell the most personal of stories.

“It’s the story of an NHL executive who had a near-death experience. And I mean really near death. Not a close call, he was virtually dead and miraculously saved himself,” said McKenzie.

“It’s not even a hockey story, other than it involves a hockey person. It’s more a story about life and death and how (things can) change you. That was one of the stories that launched the book. He wasn’t prepared for a number of years to tell that story to anybody, and then I said, ‘I want to do a book and I want to do yours as one of the chapters,’ and he said, ‘OK, I’m prepared to do it.’ I don’t think he wanted a quick hit on a website or a newspaper. I think he wanted something different.”

The book ends with a story of tragedy and finally hope.

“There’s a guy by the name of Jari Byrski, and he’s a skating and skills coach. He has clients all over the league. Steven Stamkos, Mike Cammalleri, Jeff Skinner, Alex Pietrangelo, Brent Burns, you name it, the best of the best goes to this Polish-Ukrainian who is somewhat crazy and has this incredible life story to tell,” said McKenzie.

“He told this incredible story about after his wife died, he was thinking about committing suicide because of depression, and it was a Steven Stamkos goal that snapped him out of the deep depression he was in. He’d never told that story to anybody. I didn’t even know that story when I started talking to him, but once he started talking, he opened up about it and suddenly we’ve got this epic life journey that’s known to a lot of National Hockey League players, but not very well known to a lot of other people, and that was true to the name of the book, Hockey Confidential.”

McKenzie often comes across as all business. But there’s definitely a soft side to the man. When he talks about his family, wife Cindy and sons Mike and Shawn, his voice rises a register or two.

Hockey is big in McKenzie’s life; family is bigger.

The one story McKenzie doesn’t tell is his own. But his views and values seep into the pages.

“I don’t tell my story in the book, at all, other than maybe I tell a little bit of my story by some of the stories that I chose to tell. In other words, they’re reflective of some of the values I have,” said McKenzie.

 

“There’s a lot of universal themes here, outside of hockey: family, giving back to your community or sharing, coming to terms with life and death and our own mortality. There’s certainly some elements of my core values or beliefs, but there’s nothing in the book about me, per se.”

The guy in the perfectly tailored suit and modern haircut is the McKenzie presented to us on TV. But it hasn’t always been Manhattan book signings and TV studios.

Like all great hockey stories, McKenzie’s began on the bus.

“I went to Ryerson for journalism, and after my second year of the three-year course I got a summer job at the Sault Star. I worked in news, actually, and I only got to do sports for two weeks. It was the two weeks when Craig Hartsburg left the Soo Greyhounds to be one of the Baby Bulls and go to Birmingham and the WHA,” recalls McKenzie.

“So I got to talk to Bill Watters, Alan Eagleson and Johnny Bassett, and that was my first real hockey stuff. So I do the Sault Star thing for the summer, I go back for my final year of Ryerson, the paper tells me they want to hire me full time, but they can only do that if somebody leaves over the course of the next year.

“Well, funny enough, the guy that left was in the sports department, and his name is Rob Stone, the father of Mark Stone and the other Stones in Winnipeg. Stoney left the newspaper business to go work in the airline business in Winnipeg. I got his job in the sports department and covered the Soo Greyhounds for two years.”

 

From there it was off to the Globe and Mail for a stretch before a 25-year-old McKenzie was named editor in chief at The Hockey News. Nine years at THN were followed by six as hockey columnist at The Toronto Star. But along the way, TV started to nip at his heels.

“The Hockey News did a deal with TSN where they bought time for what was called The Hockey News Television Edition, and one of the conditions was I got to do a minute or two with Jim Van Horne, and that was kind of what started the TV career in 1987. And each year it escalated and expanded,” said McKenzie.

Between building a trusted brand in newspapers and TV, came sons Shawn and Mike and they followed Pop into hockey. Shawn is now one of the rising stars in Canadian broadcasting and a complete natural in front of the camera and handling an interview. Just watch him.

Mike played NCAA hockey at St. Lawrence University before a short stint as a pro, and now he’s an assistant coach with the OHL’s Kitchener Rangers.

“It’s awesome. First off, aside from the fact that they’re in related businesses, as any parent knows, you want your kids to be happy doing what they’re doing, you want them to be employed and not on your own payroll,” he laughs. “It’s hard. We’ve got lots of friends and their kids can’t find work, and if they do find work, it’s not what they want to do. Mike loves coaching, and Shawn has made his way very quickly in the business and loves what he’s doing, too. My wife and I touch wood all the time at how lucky both the boys have been.”

Cindy McKenzie might not move about the NHL draft floor accepting and passing whispers like a mob boss at a Family funeral, but she’s very much a part of the business of collecting and sharing hockey secrets.

“There is no Bob McKenzie Media Enterprises — I can’t do any of the stuff I’m doing without my wife,” says McKenzie. “I don’t have the time to do the work if things aren’t organized. She runs the whole business, she runs every aspect of the household. I do nothing around the house — I’m useless. She oversees home renovations, she buys and sells homes when we move. She’s the boss.”

From Sault St. Marie to a limo zipping from LaGuardia to Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Just like he planned it all along?

“No chance. All I ever really wanted was to be a hockey writer. That was the full scope of all I ever really wanted to do when I went to Ryerson. When I went to the Sault Star, what I did know was I didn’t want to cover the stock car races. I didn’t want to cover high school football. I wanted to cover hockey. And I was doing everything I could to turn that into a full-time hockey beat job, which is hard to do in a small town because you have to cover all that other stuff,” said McKenzie.

“I saw guys like John Herbert with the London Free Press and Marty Knack with the Windsor Star, and people like that, and I thought ‘OK, that’s what I want to do.’ The goal for me was always to specialize and only be a guy that was involved in covering hockey.”

Huh. In this case he shot for the 401 and its paved path through the Ontario Hockey League and hit the stars.

McKenzie’s story is its very own version of Hockey Confidential.

 

gary.lawless@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @garylawless

 

Editor’s note: McKenzie is employed by TSN. Gary Lawless has a show on TSN1290 and is a frequent contributor on TSN television.