On Sports | Interview with David Macfarlane

David Macfarlane is a man for all seasons – but you’ll forgive him if he asks that baseball stick to the spring and summer, football to the fall, and hockey to the winter.  

In On Sports (Biblioasis, March 2026), the famed Canadian author and journalist blends memoir, criticism, and observation to examine the distance between how sports are remembered and how they are experienced today. Far from becoming his feared “grumpy exercise”, Macfarlane explores what remains of those connections that made us fall in love with teams, players, and moments in an era now defined by money, corporate excess, and a constant stream of gambling ads.

The result is a book that resists easy nostalgia (although he has some great stories from the sidelines, courts, and fields of the world). On Sports is, instead, a measured and often pointed reflection on what we continue to love about sports, and why that love has become more a lot more complicated.

This interview is edited for length and clarity.

Jason Winders: I love these little books Biblioasis puts out, Field Notes, all short conversations on various topics. I’m wondering why sports for you, and why this conversation right now?

David Macfarlane: I’ve always liked writing about sports, even though I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, a real sports aficionado.

When I used to write for Saturday Night Magazine and various other magazines, they could send someone who was not an expert out to cover a particular subject in those days. The idea was just to go and keep your eyes open and see what happens.

I’d always liked writing about sports for that reason.

This particular book grew out of a conversation I had with the editor of the Literary Review of Canada, Kyle Wyatt. We were talking about writing a piece on baseball.

Kyle is from Nebraska originally, where every year there is the College World Series in Omaha. So, partly because it would be fun to write about, partly because we thought it would be an interesting insight into America in some way, that was going to happen. But for various reasons, it didn’t work out.

By that time, though, I was thinking about sports and writing about sports.

Like you, I’ve admired this Field Notes series that Biblioasis does. I was drawn to the idea of writing a short book because I knew I couldn’t write a long one. There’s that famous quote that goes: “I’m sorry I wrote you a long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

I liked the idea that the length would mean the book didn’t have to be comprehensive. It had to be an opinion. That’s how the ball got rolling.

JW: Some of my favourite sports books are by decidedly non-sports writers. George Plimpton. Norman Mailer. Joyce Carol Oates. There’s something about the literary eye on sport that’s fantastic to me.

DM: I loved reading about sports as a kid. But sports are just really fun from a writer’s point of view to write about. Particularly because I was freelancing a lot in those days for magazines, and sometimes the assignments wouldn’t be the most exciting in the world, like a profile of a businessman, for instance. Sports was engaging to write about. 

Even though I’m not particularly knowledgeable, I’ve always loved sports and loved writing about them.

JW: Me, too. But I don’t think I’ve ever felt as guilty about loving sports as much as I do. The world isn’t making it easy right now. You say in the book that you’re a sports fan, but you see how the non-sports people have a point.

DM: When I had to confront myself about what I was going to say in this book, I had to admit that I’m just not on a regular sports feed. I don’t follow sports particularly closely. Some, yes. Some, no. But not in the way that a real sports fan does.

I had to admit to myself that I have this love-hate relationship with sports – quite a profound love-hate relationship to the point where I tell this story on myself that’s not in the book.

When I was doing a story on a tennis player, Carling Bassett, I was at Wimbledon to flesh out the story. I arranged with the groundskeeper to talk to him about what goes into maintaining Centre Court. I wanted to know what you have to do to look after that plot of ground. So, he met with me, and to my surprise, he said, “Well, let’s go out and have a look.”

Nothing was going on. It was just an empty court. So, we walked out to Centre Court. 

We were talking, and at one point I stepped onto Centre Court and to my surprise – and sort of my embarrassment – I started crying. Not just getting a little moist in the eyes, but I was actually crying. 

I am a big tennis fan, and I realized I am standing at the centre of tennis. This is where the greatest matches in the history of tennis have taken place. 

So, I can get very emotional and very sentimental about sports.

But there’s another side to me that just loathes it. Loathes the gambling ads. Loathes the smarmy commentators. There’s just so much about it that I dislike.

I thought, well, that’s an interesting perspective. Rather than pretending I’m knowledgeable and a sports enthusiast, why not go with this idea of loving and hating sports?

JW: The book also seems a bit dreamy, timeless, in that you pull names from many eras, many sports, and rarely reference current events directly.

There is a very practical reason for that. I quickly realized that almost any sports story becomes immediately old. Even something like the Blue Jays almost winning the World Series last year, that’s already an old story.

I needed to write a book that wasn’t invested in a present tense, that wasn’t going to evaporate before the book came out.

JW: That’s interesting. Sports for me was consumed in the daily paper when I was a kid. One comes out today. Another one comes the next day. It’s tough to press pause on sports and put it into a slice of timelessness like you have.

DM: Sports stories get old quickly. It just wouldn’t work. That’s why I didn’t overly invest in the present tense.

JW: Speaking of some of that loathing … As I read the book, I thought: The book I really want to read from David is him dismantling legalized sports betting. You’ve got these amazing lines scattered throughout. It’s almost like you don’t want the reader to forget your opinion. 

Can you put all your thoughts together as to why sports gambling is, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, well, evil?

DM: Some people who are sports writers, some people I respect, like someone like Dave Feschuk (Toronto Star), they see the danger in this.

The very foundation of what we love about sports is really being tested here. Or maybe more than tested. Gambling adds something to sports that has always been there in the background, of course. People have always bet. But to institutionalize it and advertise it as much as they do is just unspeakable to me. Unspeakably evil. I’ll use the word you used.

It undermines the whole foundational purpose of sports. It takes away the magic completely and reduces it to something that isn’t magic.

It also is bound to impact games, and we see this already. Who are these athletes and coaches? Do we think they’re saints? They’re not going to be tempted to make a little on the side by easing off on a slapshot? Who knows?

It’s ridiculous to imagine that there isn’t going to be cheating involved.

So, there’s this whole subversion of what sports is all about that I find really, really disturbing.

Sports leaders and owners have invested so much time and money, particularly hockey, in being this kind of uncle who talks to kids about how to play hockey. “Here’s how you do this.” “You kids out there …” All that sort of thing. The NHL’s whole shtick was that its audience was a bunch of 11-year-olds learning how to play hockey by watching their heroes.

And then overnight – literally overnight – they sell out to gambling. 

Suddenly gambling is fine. Don’t worry about the millions of gambling addicts. Don’t worry about how much it’s changing the game itself. Just suddenly all these people who were like our Sunday school teachers are now telling us it’s okay to take your money and throw it away.

I’m not suggesting that professional sports should be our moral guides in any way.

But the sudden turnaround, the abrupt shift from “this is good for you” to “we don’t care anymore”, that’s what I find so disturbing.

JW:  I know sports and vice advertising have gone hand in hand for a long time. I’m sure there were people when I was a kid who were upset I was watching 300 Miller Lite ads during a game. 

But there’s something different about this. I can’t quite put my finger on it. It scares me. I’m the dad of twin 13-year-old boys, and it’s a conversation I never thought I’d have to have – telling them sports gambling is dangerous.

DM: And there’s nothing good to say about it. 

It’s completely bad. It’s bad for sports. It’s bad for the people who are involved. And, if you take sport seriously, as I do, it’s almost sacrilegious.

The fact professional sports just kind of shrugs and says, “Yeah, it’s cool. Go bet!” is distressing. I know a number of people involved in working against it, but everyone is making so much money on it that there’s no way they’re going to turn this around.

The genie is out of the bottle. We’re stuck with it, which is a huge shame.

I absolutely blame the owners and the Gary Bettmans and all those people who are in charge. They should be ashamed of themselves.

JW: Beyond the existential crisis of it, it’s also just constant. Every commercial break, it’s four of those ads, often the same ads. Just let up.

DM: It’s fantastically tedious. It really subverts the whole idea of athleticism.

If athleticism isn’t the greatest thing about sports, but making money is, then I’m not really interested in it, to be frank. It’s too bad. It’s really – pardon the bad pun – a game changer.

JW:  I’ll go to a happier subject. You have a real fondness for sports writers and the craft of sports writing, as I do. What makes them special in your eyes?

Let me point to a section that jumped out to me as a former newspaper guy. You had a couple of paragraphs on the appreciation of a sports writer’s lede. You said you won’t find a more information-packed sentence anywhere else. You get everything in that opening stanza.

DM: It’s almost perfect. If you want to learn about writing, read on-the-beat sports writers.

I was lucky enough to work with Robert Fulford, who was for many years the editor of Saturday Night. Bob had, as far as I could tell, zero interest in sports. Like none. But interestingly, his first job at The Globe and Mail, was as a sportswriter.

They used to write what was called “running copy.” Running copy was where you were sitting at your typewriter in the press box, watching the game and writing the story as the game was happening.

The idea was that your story would be finished moments after the game was finished. You could rip it out of your typewriter and run down and put it in a taxi that would take it to the composition room.

The goal was to cut off all possible seconds from the process.

Bob saw that as an amazing discipline to learn as a writer – to sense out quickly what the lede was going to be while being prepared to change it if in the fourth quarter something amazing happened, then that becomes the new lede.

He said he learned how to write writing sports stories. And he was the most “unsports” writer I knew.

So, there is something attractive about writing about something that has built-in drama and built-in excitement. From a structural point of view, you can tell a story that allows you to convey the information you need to convey because there’s suspense: Are they going to win? Are they going to lose? Is the pitcher going to do whatever it might be?

All those questions are there to be answered.

That makes it fun to write about. I don’t want to pick on business profiles, but it was harder to find the storyline in those. The storyline is more apparent in sports.

Also, I’ve always admired great sports writers.

Roger Angell, for instance. I read him before I was even a serious baseball fan. Those long articles in The New Yorker at the end of every year would be a kind of roundup based on the World Series, but really he was telling the whole story of the season. They were endlessly long articles, and I found them completely fascinating.

You mentioned Norman Mailer. Mailer on boxing is amazing.

As I was trying to figure out how to be a writer, one of the ways you become a writer is to read good writers. What I found early on was that there were usually a lot of good writers over in the sports department. Whether they were writing book-length things like Mailer or writing daily coverage, it’s kind of remarkable.

I cite a gold lede in the book. It’s incredible. Creative writing classes should teach this. This is how you get a ton of information into the opening.

I mention the Scott Young books, Scrubs on Skates (1952) and Boy on Defence (1953), in my book. As a kid, I loved them. Looking back, they were the kind of books where I can see when my reading advanced. They were the right books at the right time. Much like the James Bond books I got at the drugstore, they were the books where I first realized I can read them, understand them.

I’ve always admired sports writing. Not so much commentary, be it television commentators or radio shows, but writing. That really drew me to sports.

JW: There were two categories I always thought should be added to the Pulitzer Prizes. 

One is for a photographer who can go out on a boring Monday and make something out of it for the front page. And one for sports beat writing. It’s impossible and gets no love; it’s the hardest job in the newsroom. 

DM: They become knowledgeable just because they’re plowing the same row all the time. You know that world in a way that people outside it don’t. The sports pages are among the first things I read thoroughly in the newspaper.

First, I flip through the paper to make sure the world is still here, and then I sit down and read the sports. We subscribe to the Toronto Star, and they’re blessed with several good sports writers.

JW: Canada is very lucky. Print hasn’t been completely depleted. We still have some great sports writing up here.

DM: You’re right. I don’t read widely enough to know for sure, but I do remember – and this is kind of sad now to think about – being on assignment once in Washington, D.C. Whatever hotel I was in, there was a Washington Post delivered to the door. I almost missed my appointment that morning because I started reading the newspaper. Everything about it I just thought, ‘Wow, this is a really fantastic newspaper.’ Especially its sports section. It was great.

Not so much anymore, sadly.

I agree that in Canada we’re blessed with some great sports writers. I wonder if that’s because we put more value on a kind of literary tradition of sports journalism. Sports writers often assume a kind of intelligence. There’s a kind of connection with the readers that I really like.

JW: Speaking of sports writing, you introduced me to someone I didn’t know, Alison Gordon. I went straight to eBay, picked up her memoir, picked up a couple of her mystery books, too. (Author’s note: Can a publisher get these back in print? They are incredible.) 

Tell me about Alison. Why does she show up so strongly in the book?

DM: That’s sort of funny. It certainly wasn’t something I planned from the beginning that Alison would be there as much as she is. Once I started down this path, however, I kept kind of hearing Alison’s voice in my head.

She died a few years ago. She was fantastic fun, for all kinds of reasons, but she was especially fantastic fun to go to a baseball game with. She was very knowledgeable. She was a little bit cynical, but she really truly loved the game, and her enthusiasm for the sport was something that I realized I wanted to emulate or draw on.

I didn’t want my book to be just a kind of grumpy exercise – grumping about this for a while, then grumping about that for a while, then grumping about something else.

I wanted the love of sports to be there at its heart.

And then Alison emerged as I was writing it. I realized that her affection for baseball was something I really wanted to draw on. It was slightly accidental.

JW: Her spirit is infectious. I was excited to see her name pop up every time she did.

DM: There was a point when I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the book. It was one of those things where you wake up in the middle of the night and think, “God, what am I going to say about sports?”

It so happened that I went to a professional women’s hockey game. It was Toronto against Montreal, a few years ago. I went in the company of my friend Dave Wilson, who used to be the editor of the United Church Observer (now Broadview).

And I went with Dave and his daughter, Charlotte Day Wilson, a well-known contemporary singer now. A bit of a superstar, actually. I was sitting beside Charlotte at this hockey game – which was a great hockey game, I loved it, it was terrific – and I began thinking about Charlotte being a huge admirer of Alison, and Charlotte’s song Work.

Then I remembered something that I had written once in a notebook.

I was watching a tennis player practice, and I just wrote on one whole page of the notebook the word “WORK” in capital letters just to remind myself that the level of work involved was beyond anything I had ever even imagined.

For all kinds of reasons, Alison kept kind of popping into my head.

The way that I write, I sort of pay attention to stuff like that. Writing is, in some ways, opening yourself to the universe – to put it grandly – and then seeing what comes along. Alison just kind of kept coming along in the process of writing this book.

JW: I’m excited to find out more about Alison. I’m excited to read her memoir.

DM: She was really an extraordinary, extraordinary person. She was Zelig-like, in this weird way. I mention in the book that she was in the hotel room with John and Yoko during their 1969 “Bed-In for Peace” in Toronto.

JW: Just incredible.

DM: I once mentioned John Hammond, a big producer at Columbia who signed Bob Dylan. I mentioned him to Alison and said, “The thing about John Hammond that interests me is how do you see someone like an early Bob Dylan and get it?”

I was fascinated how you see what’s there. With Dylan, it wasn’t an immediately attractive package. He wasn’t a particularly good singer. He was a terrible harmonica player. There were all kinds of reasons not to sign him. And many of Hammond’s colleagues at Columbia thought he was crazy. They called Dylan “Hammond’s folly.”

Anyway, I was talking about this with Alison and she said, “Oh yeah, when I lived in Greenwich Village as a kid, I used to ride tricycles with John Hammond’s son.”

She was full of all these kinds of surprises.

Her love of baseball was very, very deeply rooted. I think it came from her father. She traveled a lot as a kid; she grew up in Cairo and several other places because her dad was a diplomat. Baseball was always a kind of home base for her.

She had a deeply held affection for baseball, which I loved. She also knew Roger Angell, which to me, was like knowing Jesus Christ.

There was a bar on King Street called the Kit Kat Club – I’m not sure if it’s still there – where we used to meet there for martinis before going to a ball game. You’d sit with her and talk about baseball, have a couple of martinis, and then go to the game.

She had great seats just behind the visiting team’s dugout.

She was really something.

JW: That’s some of my favourite part of reading – finding someone I’ve never heard of and then going deep on them. Those little side streets are always the best.

DM: She’s a side street worth walking down.

JW: Alison’s belief in seasonality of sport kind of helps shape the book too, right?

DM: Oh yes! I feel that way, too. You know, I always find it weird to be watching hockey in June. I really get what Alison was saying about baseball. A ball just moves differently. It reacts differently. A pitcher can only do so much with a cold baseball on a cold night.

It’s different.

And that’s what the sport is.

That’s what it’s all about when the pitcher isn’t fighting against the elements to control the pitches.

JW: That ties back to childhood, too. We played football in the fall, baseball in the summer. Seasons are ingrained.

DM: Deeply ingrained. We live not far from a baseball diamond where the county league plays. It’s pretty good baseball. I like going up and sitting on the side of a hill and watching a game there.

Around this time of year, I’ll go for a walk up there, and the snow will be gone. Work will have been done on the field. The baselines are down. And I think … “spring.” It says spring to me way more than if I see a crocus or anything else.

Just like growing up in Hamilton, the fall was always football. The season nominally would begin before Labour Day, but as far as we were concerned, it began on Labour Day, because it was always the Toronto-Hamilton game on Labour Day. After that, the football season had really ensued, and then it ended just when the weather started to get too ridiculous to play football.

JW: Not only do we end Major League Baseball in November now, but we’re starting the season in March.

DM: There was something I loved about getting to go to spring training. That was exciting because it was Florida. It was different. It was like John the Baptist to Jesus. Jesus was the proper season; Florida was John the Baptist. I really liked that. Right now, it goes on too long.

JW: When we talk about your follow-up to this book in 20 years, where will our conversation go. 

DM: The saddest possibility for me is what we’ve already discussed. The idea that something that’s truly, truly wonderful is being undermined for what are clearly only commercial reasons.

For instance, there’s no other reason to extend the seasons longer than they are. Only commercial reasons. No baseball player, no baseball fan, was wandering around saying, “Gee, I think we need an extra two and a half weeks of regular season play.”

There’s something about baseball – Ken Burns points this out in his documentary – that there’s something weirdly perfect about the game. The distance from the mound to home plate could not be shorter, could not be longer. The distance between the bases is exactly what it needs to be. It’s like this odd thing that’s been sent down from on high.

Part of that package was that it ended when, as Alison put it, you “couldn’t feel any summer in fall anymore.” That’s when baseball ends. There’s something magical about that equation.

Alison also said, “Don’t fuck with perfect.” 

And they are. They are screwing around with something that’s really, really, really important to a lot of people. I don’t think it’s going to end well.

Jason Winders

Jason Winders is a writer, editor, journalist, ad man, and dad living in Tecumseh, Ontario, Canada. His first book, George Dixon: The Short Life of Boxing’s First Black World Champion, won the 2022 North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Book Award.