Glenn Kubish

Bruny Surin knew before the rest of us did. As soon as the Canadian sprinter transferred the baton and the heart of a nation safely into the left hand of teammate Donovan Bailey, Surin raised his arms in victory. Roughly nine seconds later, his celebration was confirmed. The Canadian men's 4x100 relay team had won the gold medal at the Olympic Games in Atlanta. "Oh, if you're Canadian, you have to love Saturday nights in Georgia!" said CBC commentator Don Wittman as Bailey crossed the finish line. Today is the 24th anniversary of that consummate team accomplishment. It was later punctuated by a bit of Canadiana trope, as Bailey said sorry to his teammates—Surin, Glenroy Gilbert and Robert Esmie—for easing up at the finish line. Not easing up would have meant a world record and not just the gold medal. It was the second most amazing track victory I had ever seen. The most thrilling, of course, was Mario Nemec's win in the 1100 metre race at the zone...

Mr. Nowak offered me a deal. Mr. Nowak was my Physics 10 teacher, and he had done the math. I was going to fail Physics 10 unless some force stronger than the gravitational pull on my 45 per cent mark intervened. Up by the lockers in the hallway on the second floor of O'Leary High School, he laid it all out in a few easy-to-follow propositions. You're going to fail Physics 10. The final exam isn't worth enough to get you and your knowledge of physics to pass the course. That's unfortunate because I know you want to go to university and a fail won't help. I'll give you a 55 in the course if you promise not to try to get into my Physics 20 course. I took the deal. I woke up this morning and, as I do, checked Twitter. My high school buddy Slavo Cech had sent word that Mr. Nowak was dead. The obit is  nicely written. "Larry loved being both a teacher and a coach throughout his career. He also had a passion for basketball. He began playin...

A group of us, I think Blatt was there and McIntosh, too, were on the 11th floor of the Tory Building where Professor Carmichael was talking excitedly about the Challenger crash, his eyes magnified by his glasses as he made an ancient point. Carmichael translated the explosion's skywriting from the Greek. Daedalus and Icarus, he said. It's Greek mythology on CNN, he said. Flying too close to the sun. The sky was always a thing for me. As a boy growing up in the north end, I was routinely sent outside by my mother to lie on the lawn and look up at the sky to look for the shapes of animals in the clouds when I was bored, which was pretty much all the time. There wasn't much else to do in those summer days. It was still a few years before you could buy the Coleco Electronic Quarterback at Eaton's or Woolco. So, the big book of analogy illustrated in endless blue and puffy white it was. I found elephants and dogs and lions. In those days, the Canadian Forces base at...

I remember sitting on the examining table in the doctor's office and feeling the concept of immunity sinking in a bit. The doc had taken a pen and drawn a single line on the table's thin tissue topping.  I had asked about shingles. Could I ever get it again? What could I do to prevent ever getting it again? The pain from my shingles episode a couple of years before had been at times unbearable. Those were the hours it felt like some tiny invaders under the torso splotches were slowly pulling a tiny pipe cleaner tipped with tin foil through my blood vessels. Yes, I got the vaccine, but could it ever happen again? The doctor said, yes, it could happen again, and then drew two more figures. The horizontal line was the virus. It stayed in my body. It would always be there. The downward-pointing crooked lines represented my immunity. When my immunity was lower than the strength of the virus, he explained, when it dipped below the base line, boom, welcome back shingle...

Aaron Brown wasn't sure who was in his ear. "We have, um, one of our producers on the phone, and I didn't get the name, so, why don't we just go ahead," said Brown as he anchored live coverage of the World Trade Center attacks. "Are you there?" Brown's ear had in it what in the television news game is called an IFB. IFB stands for interruptible foldback. It's a kind of earpiece that delivers a one-way audio feed into the head of the TV reporter. It is a medium used to deliver cues and information to the reporter from the TV control room. If you've ever seen a live reporter touch or motion to her or his ear to get a better handle on the incoming information, you have seen an IFB at work. That second, Brown, as one of the Twin Towers still stood behind him like giant chimney emitting smoke from hell, was in silent contact via IFB with the CNN control room. Someone, the director, a producer, maybe, was telling him that another produ...

I am thinking more about pylons these days. I knew the word first as slang, a demeaning term applied to someone without natural athletic ability on skates. Used this way on the typical hockey bench: "Did you see him blow past the defenceman? What a $%&# pylon that guy is! Hahhahaha, moron. Throw me the water." Like that. If someone calls you a pylon, they are not complimenting you on your strength or solidity or reliability of character. They are not likening you to a bridge pylon or to an electricity line pylon or to any other huge piece of technology that can be counted on to just stand there and mutely do its work of support. No, if you're called a pylon, it's because someone has decided that you exhibit the dumb part of the pylon's being. Like the way Lemieux reduced Chambers to a piece of material in 1991. Nobody wants to be the pylon. Except, as John Milton said in a different context, those who only stand and wait also serve. Mil...

On December 30, 1981, Wayne Gretzky scored five goals against the Philadelphia Flyers, setting a record for the fewest games (39) needed to reach the 50-goal mark in the NHL. It is a record that will stand longer than the Northlands Coliseum that played host to the historic night in Edmonton. It's easy to re-live the game highlights. Search Google. In 0.37 seconds 1,140,000 results are returned, including video of the four goals Gretzky scored against Flyers goalie Pete Peeters, making him look more like a masked mannequin between the pipes than an elite netminder of the time. And then the fifth goal as Gretzky carries the puck up the ice, cuts to his left just before the opposing blue line and toys with defender Bill Barber for an extra second, making the Flyers star dive in futility to stop the empty net goal. Peeters on the bench, Barber on his face, fans on their feet, Gretzky in the record book. It's all easy to find and re-live. After the game, Gretzky sat...