Toronto sportscaster Mark Hebscher interviews pitcher Tom Henke. Hebscher has written a memoir, Madness: The rise and ruin of sports media, that details his career and where the sports media industry stands today.Al MacCormick/Supplied
The Cambridge Dictionary may have named ‘parasocial’ the word of 2025, but the phenomenon it describes – the feeling that a fan has a genuine relationship with a famous person they do not actually know, such as a TikTok influencer or a podcasting bro – certainly predates the internet.
Back in the summer of 1982, more than 1,000 fans of Sports Talk, Mark Hebscher’s suppertime call-in show on Toronto’s CKEY, turned out for a Blue Jays game at Exhibition Stadium and acted their rowdy best under the host’s command, which a Toronto Star report likened to a “credible imitation of a banana republic dictator.”
“I knew how to incite,” Hebscher, 69, quipped during a recent phone interview, speaking from his home in Toronto.
For the next several decades, Hebscher used that talent to goad and entertain his audience on radio and TV.
In 1984, when he and Jim Tatti began co-hosting Sportsline, a late-night highlights show on Global Television, they made the program must-watch TV. The program, with its free-association riffs, pop culture references, joyful banter and weekly segment of goofy highlights and lowlights known as the Hebsy Awards, set the template for the dual-anchor sportscasts that became the dominant form of the genre until budget cuts and the fragmenting media environment all but wiped it from our screens.
Hebscher sketches that arc in Madness: The Rise and Ruin of Sports Media, a memoir of his own colourful career and a historical portrait of the industry that, in his telling, is in the process of having its soul destroyed by bean-counters and the takeover by legalized gambling.
Early in your book, you write about the cozy relationships between the sports reporters in the middle of the last century and the teams and athletes they covered. That would seem to suggest that any notion of a so-called ‘golden era’ of sports coverage was probably a mirage.
Oh, it totally was a mirage. It was all PR for the sport that they were covering. These guys rode in the trains with the athletes, they played cards with them, drank with them and covered up all their stories – so essentially, they were friends. But it was also the first time where a reporter could be the conduit between the player and the fan, or the team and the fan. It was just a lovely little marriage.
Mark Hebscher leads a pack of Toronto Blue Jays fans in a rowdy rally at Exhibition Stadium in the summer of 1982. Hebscher’s suppertime call-in show on Toronto’s CKEY had such a dedicated following that fans turned out and followed their favourite radio voice's lead.Supplied, Mark Hebscher
The promotional copy on the back of the book refers to your “checkered career.” Is that an accurate characterization?
I had a long career, and were there incidents? Sure there were incidents, but I would say no more than the average – although I did highlight some of those incidents in the book, just to show that I wasn’t always a good guy. But I think I chalk it up that I just wanted to get the story, right? It’s competitive. You want to get something different, because everything else was just very blasé and very formulaic.
You believe there’s a lack of interesting sports broadcasters in Canada, which you chalk up to the fear of offending someone. As you write: “You can’t even imply something that could be interpreted as racist, sexist, ageist, ablest, or fat-phobic.”
That’s right. One of my kids saw something of mine on YouTube. I was doing the Hebsy Awards and of course the whole theme of the Hebsys is very lighthearted, and it was a Japanese pitcher, I think it was Hideo Nomo, and I had done an impersonation of an angry Japanese man, with a Japanese accent.
Everybody laughed, and when I watched it back years later with my kids, I cringed! My sons were like, ‘How did you get away with that?’ And I said, ‘Get away with it? There was never any backlash.’ However, there was no social media either, because all it would have taken would be one person to go, ‘Oh my God, what a horrible racist thing to do.’ But in those days it would take someone to actually physically write a letter.
Sure, and social media amplifies complaints. But – wait, sorry, to clarify, are you suggesting we’d be in a better place if broadcasters could be racist, sexist, ageist, ablest, fat-phobic?
No, of course not.
One of your chapters, “My Favourite Influencers,” is a sketch of some legendary sports reporters and broadcasters. Have you ever thought of yourself as an influencer?
It was entertainment: I’m going to get you to call in because you’re so mad at something that happened, or you’re so mad at what someone just said about your team, or whatever. And that was easy. I would do that and just sit back and poke the bear. But those were the real sports fans. They were the ones that sat up in the greys [in Maple Leaf Gardens] or couldn’t get tickets, and their entire lives were built around Hockey Night in Canada and the Wednesday night Leafs games, and all the discussion the next day in school or at work was about the team, the game.
And you convened that circus.
Oh yeah, I was the ringleader, for sure.
Hebscher finds sports media too loyal to the teams they cover these days, with the same material going out to the media en masse.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Why do you believe sports media has been ruined, when there are more outlets than ever before?
There’s more outlets than ever, but they’re all marching to the same tune – and it’s what the teams tell them. I don’t care how many outlets there are, they all stick their microphones in for the same clip and then they have pundits that go over the clip and they try to read into it.
You write that legalized gambling is the worst thing that could have happened to sports. How so?
It’s proven that the integrity of the game and of certain players is going to be called into question more often than not, and it’s going to have an effect. Already, coaches are complaining that fans are screaming at them, ‘Hey, you won by 10 points but the spread was 11’ – stuff like that. Or, ‘Why did you take that guy out?’ I really believe that that the lure of money is going to be such that people are willing to compromise.
Are you at all worried that, by lamenting the state of sports media today, you might be coming across as, you know, old man shaking fist at cloud?
No, because I think a lot of people agree with me, and it doesn’t matter to me if young people don’t even read it. That’s probably not even my target audience. There are people who are aware, they’re keeping their eyes open because of the volatility of this world, and there’s others who are completely closed: ‘I’m just going to keep going along. Things are going to be fine, don’t upset the apple cart. The game will still be on, I can watch my team, it doesn’t matter if the people that are giving me the information are telling the truth, I’ll just take it.’ And people will just go on. They’ll work all week and they’ll look forward to the weekends and watching sports and following sports and gambling on sports.
And yet you’ve written that, because of technological innovations and all of the new services, it’s never been a better time to be a sports fan.
I have Apple TV. There was a game with Lionel Messi where they had a camera on him the whole game. It was fascinating. I could not put it down. Once you’ve experienced that as a fan, you’re like, ‘Okay, I need more.’ Once you start taking a deep dive into what’s available to watch live sports, it’s remarkable. How could you not be a sports fan?
This interview has been condensed and edited.