Hair gel and humble beginnings: Behind the anchor's desk for Day 1 at Sportsnet

The final episode of Seinfeld aired just five months before the first episode of Sportscentral.

And while the first of those two events cleared the path for a changing of the guard at the top of comedy television, No. 1 in sports television wasn’t even on the minds of Sportsnet executives in 1998.

TSN was the lone wolf on the landscape and already well into its second decade of owning the Canadian audience. “Survival” would have been the word more people threw out when Sportsnet hit the airwaves that fall. (For the record, Survivor, the landmark reality show, was still almost two years away from its debut.) If internet polls had been popular back then, an overwhelming majority would have voted “NO” on the prospect of a second national sports network making it beyond five years, let alone to 25. And yet, here we are.

Along with a limited number of production and management staff, only three on-air people have remained with the network for the entire 25 years: Rob Faulds, who Sportsnet inherited from CTV, Jamie Campbell and yours truly.

Faulds worked in live events from Day 1 at Sportsnet. His days “on the desk” were already behind him and he showed little to no mercy when promoting our show — the nightly recap program, Sportscentral.

“Stay tuned for Sportscentral with Fay and Millard,” began one memorable throw, on a night I was working with fellow Day 1er Daren Millard, “to see who has more gel in his hair tonight.”

Campbell, co-anchored the inaugural Sportscentral, throwing to me for a report from Vancouver, where I had been hired to serve as a regional reporter. Four months later, I was brought to Toronto to work alongside him on the weekend edition. Fittingly, the first time we physically met was at one of this nation’s great sporting cathedrals, Maple Leaf Gardens, just two days before it hosted its final game… and one day before our debut as a tandem.

Like many anchors in that first year, I had come from the West to the centre of the universe — the same week then-mayor of Toronto Mel Lastman called in the armed forces to combat a snowstorm — and it’s impossible to overstate the impact of walking into that state-of-the-art studio for the first time. The mass of television sets that served as our studio backdrop, like the Brady Bunch opening on steroids, set us apart from TSN, as did the hope that we would provide a little more irreverence for the viewers.

Early reviews, as you can imagine, were mixed. For every young sports fan laughing along with our antics, there were as many “serious” fans who, if Twitter had existed back then, would have told us to shut up and “stick to scores.”

Sportsnet’s start-up strategy was to identify on-air personalities who had garnered just enough experience to make the move to the national level, but who remained unfamiliar to most of the viewing audience, so we could be branded unquestionably as the network’s own. We then donned baggy suits with shoulder pads, pastel shirts and — yes, Fauldsy — tidy sums of hair product.

There was healthy internal competition from the start.

Millard set the early pace. He was much better than the rest of us. And the calm presence you still see from Darren Dreger today was already evident when he was an original at Sportsnet, both anchoring Sportscentral and hosting our NHL coverage.

Right from the outset, Jamie, my co-anchor for the first six months, was the one who took the craft most seriously.

Our two national reporters were longtime SN personality Christine Simpson and Trevor Thompson.

Kevin Quinn was the other original primetime anchor, soon to leave for a lengthy stint as the Edmonton Oilers play-by-play man, making way for the man who changed the trajectory of the network.

Mike Toth was a force of nature, and if irreverence was still headlining the mission statement, Sportsnet had found its guy.

And that was it.

At that point we were still a few years away from being joined by the likes of Jody Vance, RJ Broadhead, Peter Loubardias, and three others who came on board in the early-to-mid 2000s and remain to this day: Hazel Mae, Martine Gaillard and Evanka Osmak. So getting reps on the desk in the early days — a lot of them — was never an issue.

Three-and-a-half hours of regional television per night, and a schedule that was the polar opposite of almost everyone else in society served to establish two patterns: We all got better, at least much more confident and comfortable, in a hurry. And post-work, all-night gatherings at assorted Sportsnet staffers' homes became a ritual.

There were so many young people starting out in the business then and, as a result of the wonky hours we kept, the Sportscentral crew rapidly closed ranks as our work family basically doubled as our social circle. It could feel like a treadmill at times, sure, but the fact remained we were making a living in sports — or as the great John Shannon still says, “working in the toy store.”

Perhaps those early days were stressful for those on the executive floors, but those of us on the airwaves weren't thinking we were fighting some battle to keep the network afloat.

I guess CBC’s satire show This Hour Has 22 Minutes got it right when they had some fun at our expense in a skit midway through our first year on the air: “I’m one young Sportsnet guy… and I’m the other young Sportsnet guy… and we’re just (*smiling into camera*) happy to be on TV!”

A quarter-century later, I still won’t argue with that.