Jim Kelley

Jim Kelley writes regularly on the NHL for Sportsnet.ca and can be heard on Primetime Sports on the FAN590.

For the most part, those of us who have engaged in the writing profession seldom hold players-turned-broadcasters in high regard.

If they work at the club level, well, they work for the club and many are, by extension, a mouthpiece for the people who employ them. There’s no crime in that, but writers chafe at the public perception that fans get the truth or as close as anyone can get to the truth from players turned club employees simply because the player "played the game" and the writers, at least at the higher levels of the game, did not.

It is true that the players played the game, but that doesn’t mean they are held to the standards that professional media people hold dear. If you came from print, you had to back up what you wrote with facts or if you were doing opinion, it had to be based on truth and observation and not character assassination.

It’s usually a different set of rules at the network level, but there are still the chronic problems or perceived problems. Players are generally loathe to criticize players. Fired coaches and general managers are generally just dodging questions until they get their next league gig and in the worst case scenarios they shade or avoid the truth in hopes of sending a message to the person or persons they are hoping will employ them.

But the purpose of this column is to tell you that there are exceptions and two of them were on display in recent days.

Colleague Nick Kypreos last week gave one of the most moving and honest declarations about the physical pain and mental anguish a "tough guy" goes through both during his career and afterward, in an interview with Bob McKeown of CBC’s the Fifth Estate.

I’ve heard this before from players. Former Buffalo Sabres and Los Angeles Kings defenceman Larry Playfair, who also dabbled in broadcasting before going into private business, recently spoke out about the role of the fighter in the game and how he wouldn’t be surprised to see it come to a much-needed end. He said it not just for the sake of the game, but seemingly for every player who ever had to go onto the ice and live up to a code that few could ever imagine, let alone deal with on a nightly basis.

Now for the record I should say that Kypreos and I are acquaintances and have worked together from time-to-time, but we aren’t close friends and we certainly don’t agree on all issues, especially the role of fighting and fighters in the NHL.

Still, it needs to be said that he went deep on national television and he was riveting in his honesty. Coming almost to tears, he spoke of the cold sweats he would get just thinking about having to deal with another team’s tough guy, a guy big enough and strong enough and sometimes uncaring enough to literally try and tear his head off and with no regrets.

Where it truly got fascinating, and emotional, was when he was asked about whether or not he would want his son to follow in his footsteps. This is the torment question for any hockey tough guy and Kypreos, in a fashion that should forever shatter the illusion that these kinds of hockey players don’t have feelings and fears, dealt with it like any father who wants his son to do better and go farther. It was as raw and as honest as you will ever see from someone in the public eye and I take this space to applaud him for it.

Now another thing we don’t normally do in this space is praise or even recognize the competition, but if you saw TSN’s Matthew Barnaby reporting and commenting on the deal that sent Olli Jokinen from the Phoenix Coyotes to the Calgary Flames on trade deadline day, he too is to be commended.

Barnaby didn’t say it was his opinion that people in Phoenix were happy to see Jokinen leave and that he was a "cancer" in the room. He said that’s what he was told by people who were there. He didn’t make it up either, he had it in writing from certain people and he showed it to his bosses before he took it to air.

That’s fair and TSN is to be commended for letting him do it. The network is a NHL rights holder and it’s been my experience that rights holders hold a lot of sway over the institutions that purchase their rights. I have, upon occasion in the United States, worked for people who let that power seep far too deep into the news reporting operations.

But on a different level what Barnaby did took tremendous courage. He didn’t mince words; he reported what people in a position to know were saying. That breaks a totally different kind of code in the media business, one that says that players don’t call out other players in the media, not while they are playing and not after they’ve transitioned to a role in media.

Barnaby incurred the wrath of Calgary coach Mike Keenan on that one. Keenan accused him of trying to make a name for himself at Jokinen’s expense and said so in no uncertain terms.

"For Matthew Barnaby to make comments about something he doesn't know about ... he really is just trying to create good television for himself," Keenan said at a press conference in Calgary.

Reached by phone, Barnaby declined to get into a debate with Keenan but he did defend his reporting and he did mention that Keenan texted his discontent in even stronger terms than he used at the press conference.

In Barnaby’s defence I would say that if you saw the report Keenan couldn’t have been more wrong. Barnaby did not say he thought Jokinen was a cancer, he said some people close to the player conveyed that to him. Jokinen and Keenan may not be happy with that, but it’s true and that’s what Barnaby was hired to do: give the truth as best his ability to find it and report it.

While it perhaps doesn’t equal, at least in the minds of many, standing up to a tough guy or taking a hit for the team, what Kypreos and Barnaby did took emotional courage.

They told the truth as best they could get to it and opted not to take the easy way out.

For that they deserve some applause and some of it should come from their peers.