Fun and Games
My 40 Years Writing Sports
-
- $16.99
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
“Covering many of the biggest names and greatest events in sports, it’s a wonderful collection of yarns and reminiscences, told in Perk’s inimitable style” (Postmedia News).
Dave Perkins was once told by a bluntly helpful university admissions officer: “You don’t have the looks for TV or the voice for radio. You should go into print.” Which he did, first at the Globe and Mail, and then for thirty-six well-traveled years at the Toronto Star.
In Fun and Games, Perkins recounts hysterical, revealing, and sometimes embarrassing personal stories from almost every sport and many major championships. After forty years of encountering a myriad of athletes, fans, team managers, and owners, Perkins offers unique observations on the Blue Jays and Raptors, fifty-eight major championships’ worth of golf, ten Olympic Games, football, hockey, boxing, horse racing, and more.
Learn why Tiger Woods asked Perkins if he was nuts, why he detected Forrest Gump in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and why Super Bowl week is the worst week of the year. Perkins exposes the mistakes he made in both thought and word—once, when intending to type “the shot ran down the goalie’s leg,” he used an “i” instead of an “o”—and to this day, he has never found a sacred cow that didn’t deserve a barbecue.
“Few can spin a yarn with the wit and clever turns of phrase that Perky can.” —Shi Davidi, Sportsnet
“Anyone who has ever spoken to Dave Perkins, or read Dave Perkins, remembers his voice. This book is a delightful way to experience it all again, through the wise, funny man’s eyes.” —Bruce Arthur, Toronto Star sports columnist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For much of his career at the Toronto Star, Perkins was a columnist, aiming to write the stories behind and beyond the game scores. He saw a lot in his 40 years with "the best job in town," and in this memoir he takes readers behind the scenes of sports writing, both in the newsroom and in the pressrooms at every event from the Grey Cup to the Olympics. While jumping from sport to sport Perkins especially loved to cover golf, horse racing, and baseball he reminds readers of ways that the times have changed. Athletes, once fairly accessible, began hiding behind public relations staff. Performance-enhancing drugs entered the scene. His best rants are on how the Internet and social media changed the news business: "Now, every single word that is published is fair game for comment or challenge, and two truisms seem to be firmly in place: when you are right, no one ever remembers and when you are wrong, no one ever forgets." Perkins is able to laugh at his own mistakes including many yarns of side bets made to keep life interesting at games and readers can bet on being well entertained too.
