THERE IS A PLACE FOR THE LITTLE GUYS

By: Fiorenzo Arcadi, Toronto Hockey Repair

It was mid-May of last year, every day was the same as the last. It seemed as if the dog days of August had moved to May. It was hot, muggy, with no coolness in the air to bolster one's energy, especially if they were performing labour intensive tasks such as repairing goal pads.

The used equipment in the basement punctuated the store with the gruesome smell of sweat soaked leather. The heat was suffocating, and my mood deteriorated in direct correlation to every rise of the thermometer. The humidity was additional irritant, that left little patience in me to deal with any peddlers that darkened my door.

One man, not realizing my mood, was brave enough to enter the store. He carried himself with the sombre dignity of a Caesar among the hordes of peddlers, pitching their scheme for a fast buck. He wore a baseball cap, his sleeves were rolled to the elbows, and he had a newspaper tucked under one arm.

His introduction was quick. I soon discovered his name was Sammy Freedman and he was the publisher of a fledgling sports paper. He handed me a mock up of page one and asked for my opinion.

With a condescending attitude, I told him I wasn't interested in a) his paper, b) advertising in his paper, c) anything else he had to offer and d) all of the above.

I pushed the mock up aside, burying it amongst a pile of his competitors. Sammy's face tightened and he launched into a soliloquy of the value of his paper compared to his competitors. He was the archetypal publisher, this wasn't his paper, it was his child and he would fight to protect its honour. My rejection of his paper and his idea was a personal affront. Sammy added, "I haven't asked you for anything, have I?" He bellowed with a hearty insincerity, "You think I came here for the specific reason of you advertising in my paper? Think again. I wanted you to repair my ball glove."

We both laughed and the tension between us melted like a kid's ice cream cone on the upholstery of the family's new car.

Sammy said that the main objective of his paper was to be a voice for the small independent sports store. "The mega stores have a forum with the national media. A vacuum was created by the two diametrically opposed approaches to sporting goods. Idealism comes into play when you have a paper with a circulation of 20,000 but as the editorial might of a paper with a circulation of 1/2 million."

"A newspaper is a dream, but it also carries responsibility. It must carefully chart its course ever mindful that any movement is within full public scrutiny. A newspaper is held together by a common thread. It must create its own conscience and question itself repeatedly. At times, people in the newspaper business must remember they can build their own agenda through public manipulation for their own gratuity. Some newspapers acknowledge themselves as pillars of strength w@thin society. Publishing can be elitist, where a few, through the media, can establish what they think is the public good. People deeply involved in sports know there is a world a lot bigger than professional sports."

"Amateur sports has a common thread that binds the common good of society in its purest form until it reaches a level that corrupts itself. There is an innocence in amateur sports that builds upon dreams, so that even in defeat a measure of dignity is restored in the development of one's self. Professional sports cannot exist without the high ideals set by amateur snorts, nor could professional sports live up to those ideals."

Sammy had struck a chord. Our situations and the products were different, but the dreams and the emotions were the same. We were both struggling, and out of these struggles came an alliance that you are reading today.

Marshall McLuhan once commented that the media is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.

It is up to the little folk, like Sammy, to prove him wrong.