Canada's three medals at the world figure-skating championships surprised everybody, including the CBC, which was not prepared to give the competition world-class coverage.
The network aired only one show in prime time. Jeffrey Buttle's gold medal triumph on Saturday afternoon was tape-delayed for an hour. And the play-by-play commentators were kept home, where they called the performances off a monitor in Toronto.
Scott Moore, the head of CBC Sports, said sponsorships were difficult to sell and, therefore, sending a broadcast team to Sweden would have put the telecasts in the red.
"If I'd known we would win three medals, I might have sent the commentators and taken the loss," he said. "But, figuring we had a good chance at one medal, I made the decision to keep them here."
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The International Skating Union was late approaching the CBC about a rights deal. By the time a contract was signed in December, programming for March had been set and advertisers had spent money elsewhere.
Also inhibiting advertisers was the decline of Canada as a figure-skating country. Audiences had dropped. The CBC drew 432,000 on Friday night for the dance final, tape-delayed, in which Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir won the silver medal. Buttle's triumph on Saturday was watched by 255,000. Ten years ago, Elvis Stojko would have pulled in three times that audience.
Moore says viewer feedback included praise as well as complaints.
After all, a skating fan subscribing to CBC Country Canada on a digital TV tier or with a high-speed Internet connection to CBCSports.ca would have been able to watch virtually every performance live. The CBC main network aired replay packages late at night. Reporter Brenda Irving was at the competition for interviews.
With more time to prepare, coverage of the 2009 world championships will be beefed up, Moore said.
He notes that the CBC is the only over-the-air network now televising Canadian amateur sports.
"That puts a lot of extra pressure on us, because we have other commitments, as well," he said.
Perfect headline
George Gross, 85, who died on Friday of heart failure, joined the Toronto Telegram in the 1950s after fleeing his native Czechoslovakia.
Despite English being his second language, he became a top reporter, particularly on the Toronto Maple Leafs beat.
He was among the handful who started the Toronto Sun in 1971 in the wake of the Telegram's demise. An insider who developed relationships with powerful people, he became influential beyond journalism. He was also a demanding boss with a tight fist.
When two of his writers, Rick Fraser and Donald Ramsay, both hard drinkers, were assigned to a story in Montreal, they were required to share a hotel room. Early in the morning, the telephone rang. It was Gross, checking up on them. "Is this idiot No. 1?" he asked. "Or idiot No. 2?"
His Czech accent occasionally caused confusion. After the Toronto Argonauts, rarely a good team, won their opener, Gross called the sports department to tell the editor in charge that he had the perfect headline.
Actually, it would have been "zeh perfect headline," and, because the editor in charge was from the southern United States, two accents clashed.
"What's the headline, George?" the editor asked.
"Vuppy," Gross said.
"Sorry, can you repeat that?"
They went back and forth, trying to understand each other, until the editor, flummoxed, asked, "Can you spell it?"
"I don't spell them," Gross said. "I make them up."
The headline finally made it into the paper: Whoopee!
At the Telegram, Gross rose to the position of associate sports editor, but, despite his skills and hard work, hit a wall. Richard MacFarlane, in his excellent biography of his father, the legendary J. Douglas MacFarlane, recounts a meeting between Gross and MacFarlane, who, after running the Telegram newsroom in the 1950s and 1960s and a stint as head of the journalism department at Ryerson, was the editor emeritus of the Sun.
Richard wrote: "JDM asked Gross if he wondered why he'd never been made sports editor of the Telegram. Staring at him with those blue eyes, MacFarlane confessed, 'Somebody blocked it. I was that somebody. I didn't think a recent arrival from Europe was able to be sports editor of a major metropolitan newspaper in Canada. I was wrong and I apologize.' "
Gross told Richard he never would have known but for his father's confession. "It took a man to do it," Gross said.
