All World Hockey by T. Michael Travers

Every football fan knows "Broadway Joe" Namath.  He's a legend. There's a story about him. The night before the Super Bowl, he returned to the hotel following practice with a bottle of Kentucky whiskey and was in the company of a lady-for-hire. She apparently wasn't up on her football heroes and didn't know Joe. In the morning, while the lady was getting dressed, she said ... "What about payment, Joe"? He responded, "It's OK, just buy me a few ties"!  But, enough about Joe ... he'll be back in a few minutes. I’m a Blue Jay fan. But this story really isn't about baseball.  It's about what we should expect from our sports heroes. I met Jay's batting instructor, Cito Gaston, in 1985. A Young Clarence "Cito" Gaston That's when we became friends. When he took over as team manager, his game insights helped to frame my thoughts about the game and about my home team. His coaching style was very unique and his accom...

I just visited Liverpool, England. It was on the itinerary for a recent cruise I was on. I was expecting an industrial town.  A smokey, colourless city of broken buildings with lots of factories and nothing of interest.  It's the opposite.  It's beautiful.  Especially the lovely port/harbour area. Cruisers and locals meet there to walk the Mersey River's shoreline.  In fact, of all of the cruise ports I've docked in Europe and the US and the Mediterranean, Liverpool is now my favourite.  The town of Cobh, (pronounced C O V E) on the Republic of Ireland's south shore is a close second.   We all know that Liverpool's favourite sons are The Beatles.  I may never have heard of Liverpool without them.  I was never a fan of the group when it launched at the beginning of the 1960s.  And, when Ed Sullivan introduced them to North America on his Sunday night TV program in Feb. 1964, they seemed silly, I hardly took notice … Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!...

If you’re young, you wouldn’t know Bernie Schwartz. If you’re older, you still may not know him but once he changed his name, you likely became a fan like me.  The name change came when he enrolled in acting school and became one of Hollywood’s most famous actors. When they say, “In America, you can become everything you ever dreamed of even the president “  — I always think of Tony Curtis. All the stuff you need to know about him, career-wise, you can access online. It’s impressive. His family was so poor, that his parents couldn’t afford to feed him and his brother so they put them into an orphanage. For me, his transition was remarkable and puzzling. How do you go from being that poor to becoming a Hollywood movie star? He was married to an equally famous actor, Janet Leigh. He was the father of actor Jamie Lee Curtis. He appeared in The Defiant Ones and Some Like it Hot  and Houdi...

I've had a long relationship with horse racing. There’s even a Stakes Race with my name on it … The Travers has been run at the Saratoga Race Track every year since 1864. As a kid, my father would take me to the Dufferin Race Track in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was built in 1907 and made into a shopping mall in 1955. In 1958, as a 12-year-old, me and a few buddies got a Saturday afternoon job at the new Woodbine Race Track directing traffic in the parking lot @ 50 cents an hour. Note: Next month, Woodbine will host the 163 running of The Queen's Plate - the oldest continuous race in North America. Superstar jockey Sandy Hawley won it four times. Somehow, he and I became friends more than 40 years ago. Now, jump to me as a newlywed homeowner in Toronto's Mississauga suburb with two kids in the early 1970s. It was a neighbourhood like no other ... actors, musicians, policemen, teachers -- 14 adults plus their children. Everyone loved a good time and enjoyed each othe...