Bookworm, no. 133
Alex Wauthy reviews Mark Hebscher’s “Madness.” Jess Nicol on “Best Canadian Stories 2026.” The Tory Syndrome. Inside the March issue.
Lost Signal
Madness: The Rise and Ruin of Sports Media
Mark Hebscher
ECW Press
344 pages, softcover, ebook, and audiobook
Sports fans of a certain vintage may know Mark Hebscher best as “Hebsy.” He co-hosted Sportsline on Global TV for eleven years, starting in 1984, and anchored four CTV programs in the late ’90s. With Madness, he intertwines his experiences with the rise and fall of sports journalism in North America.
Hebscher has a highlight reel of memorable adventures. In March 1990, for example, he interviewed Wayne Gretzky on live TV, when sweat fell from the Great One’s nose, “right on the crotch of my dress pants.” Once, during the holidays, he asked the enforcer Bob Probert to smile and sing “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” Hebscher praises notable broadcasters, including Howard Cosell, who helped increase the NFL’s popularity. He calls Bob Cole, who did play-by-play for Hockey Night in Canada for forty years, “a legend” and argues that Rogers Communications disrespected him by cutting back his assignments as he neared retirement. Hebscher also compliments the on-air personalities who followed his footsteps—including Elliotte Friedman, Sid Seixeiro, and James Cybulski, who once worked with him at the Headline Sports station.
At the end of the first chapter, Hebscher admits, “In my heart, I couldn’t recommend entering the business.” Between anecdotes and history lessons, he doubles down on this bleak tone: “It won’t be long before sports journalism has both feet in the grave.” He blames legalized gambling, the loss of local coverage, and the decline in advertising dollars, starting when “the World Wide Web was taking off and sports fans were able to get their information from online sources with the click of a mouse.”
—Alex Wauthy
Curious Synchronicities
Best Canadian Stories 2026
Selected by Zsuzsi Gartner
Biblioasis
224 pages, softcover and ebook
In her introduction, Zsuzsi Gartner explains that the pieces in Best Canadian Stories 2026 have “reserves of energy to spare, never flagging, never spinning their wheels.” This liveliness is evident in Aaron Kreuter’s “Tasmanian Shores,” which envisions an African haven for European Jews in the early 1940s, while investigating the ills of colonialism. It’s evident, too, in Julie Bouchard’s “What Burns,” an intricate elegy of an ecosystem—forests, buildings, bones, people—on fire. Elsewhere, the narrator in Randy Boyagoda’s “Wo” moves from Ceylon to Canada, and the protagonist in Grant Buday’s “The Light Never Shuts Up” carries an unlikely message to an even unlikelier recipient.
Quality, inventiveness, and curious synchronicities bring this collection together. Three authors depict characters navigating digital obsessions with stories about sleep-deprived hackers, a non-binary hunter seeking Instagram fame, and passive-aggressive communication via emoji. The boy in Rishi Midha’s “We Are Busy Being Alive” sings, “Adoom-DA!” as he stands atop the dining table, flopping his privates around. Three stories later, in Erin MacNair’s “Sand Penis,” a girl on a beach shouts, “Boomwalla!” while defending the “giant phallus” she and her friends have built. Some contributors play with form. “One Way Out,” D.F. McCourt’s second-person narrative, follows a video game set in Montreal. Petra Chambers’s “Containment” includes an intergalactic course syllabus.
Gartner believes that the short-story form is “alive and well” as far as talent is concerned. But in a world “bedazzled by reels” and “Hallmark-style pensées masquerading as poetry,” she also warns of a “near-extinction-level crisis” in terms of audience. “What will help swell the ranks of the short-fiction reader?” she asks. Well, for one, they could pick up this book and celebrate some of the country’s finest recent examples.
—Jess Nicol
From the Archives: Thank You, Next
On Friday evening, Conservative Party of Canada delegates voted overwhelmingly to keep Pierre Poilievre as their leader—in a move that goes against the so-called Tory Syndrome. “It’s almost as old as the Tories themselves,” Joe Martin wrote of the phenomenon in the October 2020 issue. “Conservatives tend to eat those leaders who don’t give instant gratification.” It seems the times are a-changin’...
Inside the March Issue
“Fake magazine covers can be delightfully harmless, especially when done right. Donald Trump knows all of this, and he relishes how commentary about his vanity shields him from more substantive scrutiny of his reckless remaking of the world order.” First things first: a note from Kyle Wyatt.
Christopher Waddell reviews David Cayley’s The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back).
“Shifting perspectives allow readers to trace the thrumming economy of money, art, booze, and love.” Irina Dumitrescu on Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse by Daniel Cowper.
And much more!