Cut to Black: A Legendary Life in Sports (and Maybe a Few Beers) - Hardcover

Black, Rod

 
9781668034552: Cut to Black: A Legendary Life in Sports (and Maybe a Few Beers)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668034557 ISBN 13: 9781668034552
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Rod Black shares all the stories, all the fun, and all the inside scoops in this revelatory book about his forty years in Canadian sports broadcasting.

Foreword by Joe Carter

For more than four decades, Rod Black has been one of Canada’s most versatile sportscasters. He has either hosted or called play-by-play for practically every sport there is. Rod broadcasted some pivotal Blue Jays games in 1992 and 1993, when the team won the World Series. He was on the ice with Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. He lived with a Toronto Maple Leaf and partied with the teammates until legendary Leafs coach Pat Burns told him to cut it out. He was around for Ben Johnson’s fabled win and disastrous fall from grace. He was live on air during 9/11. He captures all of these stories and a lot more in the pages of this book, showing how the business of broadcasting could truly be a blast and also cutthroat.

After years at CTV, Rod Black moved to TSN, where he evolved into broadcasting game-a-day Black. It wasn’t unusual for Black to call five different sporting events in a single week, sometimes more than one a day. Rod Black has two families: his own, and his work family. Black’s work family is a result of his years on the road calling every sport imaginable. He was even a DJ at a roller-skating rink in Winnipeg, a rather inauspicious start to a stellar broadcasting career.

Cut to Black is funny, engaging, warm, and revelatory—the perfect gift for anyone who wonders how sports broadcasts are made (sometimes by the seat of the broadcaster’s pants).

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rod Black reported sports stories for CTV and TSN for four decades. A devoted family man, Rod has spent countless hours giving back to numerous charities around the world, including the Special Olympics, the Giants of Africa, Canadian Men’s Health Foundation, Children’s Aid Foundation, SickKids, and Plan International Canada. Rod Black is a sportscaster, host, emcee, and a philanthropist. Black was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for his volunteer work. He lives outside Toronto with his wife, Nancy. Follow him on Instagram @RodBlackTV.

Jim Lang is a sportscaster, journalist, and the coauthor of hockey memoirs by Tie Domi, Max Domi, Wendel Clark, and Bryan Berard, as well as Everyday Hockey Heroes Volumes I and II with Bob McKenzie, Everyday Hockey Heroes III and My Day with the Cup. He lives outside Toronto with his wife and kids. Follow him on Instagram @LangersWorld.

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Chapter 1: The Transcona Kid 1 THE TRANSCONA KID
I AM SERIOUS WHEN I say that sports is an obsession. To some, being obsessed with something can be viewed as being unhealthy. However, to me, sports has been my life for as long as I can remember. I have been hooked on sports since I was a young kid growing up on the cold Canadian prairie in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

How did this love affair with sports begin? Was it was somehow embedded in my DNA, or passed along at a young age? I would probably say that neither was the case. The more likely reality is that I didn’t find sports—sports found me in the 1960s in a sleepy, yet quirky little suburb in the east end of Winnipeg called Transcona. Known as the Park City because of the abundance of green space, it had a bigger reputation because of its history with the national railways, including the National Transcontinental Railway, which gave the town its name. Everyone, it seemed, worked for the railway or at least knew someone who did. Transconians worked hard and they played even harder.

For whatever reason, Transcona was also endlessly suburb-shamed by people who lived in other regions of the city. Some mockingly referred to it as “Trash-cona,” as it wasn’t exactly high on the economic scale, or they called it “Flamingo City,” since a lot of houses in the area displayed plastic pink flamingos on their front lawns. That flamingo lingo has been part of Transcona lore for decades. Despite all the trash talk, Transcona was and always will be one thing to me: home.

It was my neighbourhood. It’s where I grew up, made friends, went to school, played games, got my first job—and, more than anything, learned to dream.

Like many kids, I dreamed of being a pro athlete. The goal was to become a hockey player like my father, who was born with the given names Henry John, but to everyone he met was forever known as Jack. Yep, that’s right, Jack Black, who, decades before a Hollywood actor made that name famous, was a junior hockey star in Flin Flon, Manitoba, and earned a tryout with the New York Rangers.

Unfortunately, debilitating knee injuries and bad timing ended his pro career before it started, but he never looked back with regret. He did keep some scrapbooks of his hockey memories, but he hid them in the bottom drawer of a dusty dresser and rarely, if ever, brought them out. He wasn’t someone who bragged about his playing days, but it was clear from the pictures, old newspaper articles, and write-ups that “BlackJack,” as he was nicknamed, was a big deal and had a legitimate shot to make the NHL. And while he didn’t get an opportunity to live out that dream, my dad never lost his love of the game and passed that passion down to me and my younger brothers, Derrick, Sean, and Ryan. He never made it to the big leagues, but make no mistake: Jack Black was my first true sports hero.

My dad was my coach growing up. He did the typical parent thing and drove us all around to rinks. My dad coached me for a couple of years, then he moved on and coached my younger brothers. He was big on volunteering, and he did a lot of stuff in the community. My dad wasn’t one of these parents who pushed sports on you. When we were growing up in Winnipeg in the 1960s and 1970s, playing sports was just part of the culture. Everybody was outside all the time, playing some sort of sport, and we mainly learned how to play on our own. Growing up, we were outside playing, morning, noon, and night. I was lucky enough to be in a neighbourhood that had so many kids. We would arrange games every day and we even kept stats! Invariably, there would be some fight that would happen, mainly brothers against brothers. But the next day, we would all be there, and we would all get back to playing.

Dad was an everyday hero, too. A friend to anyone he met. The only issue he had: The dude just loved to talk—to everyone, everywhere, anytime. He talked and talked and talked (I guess the apple doesn’t fall far). He even talked in his sleep, but he never, ever talked about himself, and what I admired most was how much he listened and how much he cared.

He cared mostly about his family and then his community. He became a local coach, a volunteer for charities, and a champion of first aid, where he saved lives and received a Governor General’s Medal.

Before my dad became the safety coordinator for the Manitoba Highways, he worked down the street from our house at a construction company called BACM, which in the early 1970s had an ownership stake in the Winnipeg Jets of the new World Hockey Association.

That wasn’t my dad’s favourite job, but it soon became mine—as in gold mine. As a valued employee, he got tickets to almost every single Jets game, and we in turn got great seats to see so many of hockey’s biggest names who had made the jump over to the WHA.

I was too young to know the impact that this new rebel league would have, and at the time, I honestly didn’t care. All I wanted to do was see all those familiar stars that I had watched on Hockey Night in Canada. That’s where my dream began. Every Saturday night, I was transfixed by the black-and-white TV set in our living room, cheering and hoping that someday I might be the next Jean Béliveau, Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, or Bobby Hull, who just happened to be my favourite.

Yep, to me, Bobby Hull was a hockey god. So, you can imagine my nine-year-old excitement when my dad, at the dinner table on June 26, 1972, told me that he had heard a rumour in his workplace that the man nicknamed “The Golden Jet” was about to leave the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks to sign with the Winnipeg Jets. My dad looked at me and said, “Apparently, Bobby Hull is flying in tomorrow and then coming to BACM before he heads over to Portage and Main [the most famous intersection in Winnipeg] to sign the richest deal in hockey history.”

I remember that moment just like yesterday. My dad looked at me sternly with his dark eyes squinting, and then, breaking into a little grin, added, “Whatever you do, keep it a secret.”

I didn’t know what to think. At first, I thought he was joking, but why would he joke about that? I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I wanted to jump out of my chair and scream to the moon, but I held it together because I suddenly had a plan.

I quietly nodded to my dad, scoffed down my Kraft Dinner, left the table, and then sprinted to my younger brother Derrick’s room, shut the door, and put a finger to my mouth.

“Shh… listen, I got some big news,” I breathlessly whispered to Derrick, who was only seven years old at the time and, like me, was absolutely infatuated with hockey. “You are not going to believe this. Dad just told me that Bobby Hull is coming… to Winnipeg… tomorrow… to sign with the Jets… and he’s going… to Dad’s work.”

Derrick looked at me like I was an alien… but then, in unison, we started jumping up and down like we had just won the Stanley Cup—or at least the Bobby Hull Cup. When we stopped celebrating, I grabbed him with both hands and said, “Listen, we can’t tell anyone. Put your pyjamas on. Go to bed and I will wake you up bright and early.”

He looked at me quizzically. “Why?”

I looked back towards the door, and, in an even lower whisper, told him, “Why? Because we are going to see Bobby Hull.”

I slowly crept back to my room, where I set my alarm clock for 6 a.m.—but that really didn’t matter because I don’t think I even went to sleep. I was so jacked.
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Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668034557
ISBN 13 
9781668034552
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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