The Last Idol

James Duthie

TSN Host

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On Sunday, Tim Raines will finally be enshrined in Cooperstown as he is officially inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In a TSN.ca story originally featured this past January, TSN's James Duthie looks back at his boyhood sports hero who played the first 12 seasons of his 23-year career with the Montreal Expos.

Never been much of a birthday guy. The only birthday I really remember is my 16th. My family threw a surprise party for me. Don’t recall any of the presents. Just the cake. My sisters spent forever on it. Chocolate, with lots of blue, red and white icing at the top, shaped and baked perfectly into an Expos cap, on the head of a smiling Tim Raines.

***
My list of sports idols is short.

Chicago Blackhawks forward Cliff Koroll is the first.  We live next door to his brother in Edmonton when I’m a baby, in the prime of my id phase. My parents constantly remind me of our Koroll connection when my baby brain grows big enough to understand that hockey is everything. So I religiously check the paper every morning to see if he scored (sorry kids, we weren’t quite at the instant-alert-on-your-phone stage back then.)  

I start idol-cheating on Cliff with his goalie, Tony Esposito, soon after. (Same team, so it’s legal.) Make my parents drive all over Ottawa to find me a mask that resembles his. I share this story with the audience at a ceremony I host in 2015. Canada Post is releasing a set of stamps featuring Esposito and a handful of other legendary goalies. Espo comes up to me after, and says, “I had no idea I was your idol!  Why don’t you come stay with Marilyn [his wife] and me down in Florida for a couple of weeks this winter?” God love hockey players. Didn’t have the heart to tell him the idol thing ended when I was about 12, and I couldn’t really abandon my family and job to hang out by the pool with the Espositos in St. Pete’s.

Ronnie Lott becomes my football idol soon after. I worship USC as a kid (before I discover Clemson cheerleaders with orange paws on their faces as a teenager, and my world and NCAA allegiances change forever). Lott is a safety who just destroys receivers. And this is a time when bone-crushing hits still make us jump up and whoop. Unlike now, when we mostly cringe because of our knowledge of…the after. I dump the Houston Oilers and choose the San Francisco 49ers as my team the moment they draft Lott in 1981. (They had drafted Joe Montana two years earlier. This works out well for me).

I would get to sit down with Lott during my first year at TSN. It is, and always will be, the most nervous I have ever been for an interview. A jack-hammer doing work in the next studio stops the interview three times. Ronnie looks pissed. Checks his watch. I die a little.

But he doesn’t bail, and the interview turns out fine. Lott doesn’t even seem to mind that I keep staring at the remains of his pinkie finger, which he had cut off so he wouldn’t have to miss a game. Now THAT is idol-worthy.

In my life, I would only own two jerseys worthy of names on the back that aren’t my own.  A white away Niners with 42 and LOTT.  And a white home Expos with 30 and RAINES.

With apologies to Cliff and Espo and Ronnie, I never worshipped an athlete the way I did Tim Raines.

The timing is perfect. Raines arrives in the majors just as the Expos have stolen my sports heart. He debuts as a pinch-runner at the end of the 1979 season, “The Year the Expos Almost Won the Pennant” (At the time, this was the best book I’d ever read. Full disclosure: I didn’t read much back then).

By 1981, Raines is THE reason I start spending all my allowance, and later summer lifeguard money, to go see Expos games on weekends on Big Man-Chappy Tours buses from Ottawa. The three to four seconds it takes him to steal a base are the most exhilarating moments of my young fan-life.

I become obsessed with his stolen base totals, to the point where I prefer Raines going 2-for-4 with three SBs in a loss, over 0-for-4 in a win. (I’m clearly a terrible Expos fan, but an amazing Tim Raines fan.)

I listen to every one of his games in French on my tiny a.m. radio, becoming increasingly confused over a mysterious player named “Orling” that I can never find in the box scores, even though every second ball seems to be hit his way. “Balle frappe Orling!” It takes me about a half-season to figure out Orling was “Hors Ligne,” the French phrase for foul ball.
 
When Duke (Snyder) and Dave (Van Horne) finally showed up on English radio in Ottawa, my life gets much more clarity. I would take my Sony Walkman (yeah, I’m old…get off my lawn) to the movie theatre on dates and listen to Expos games so I wouldn’t miss a single Raines moment. I don’t get a lot of second dates.

The one and only angry hand-written letter I ever write Sports Illustrated comes after they put Ricky Henderson on the cover for his base-stealing exploits, and don’t mention Raines at all. They write me back to thank me for the letter. But they never give Rock his due. No one really did, outside of Canada.  

Those were Raines’s two tragic flaws: playing at the same time as Ricky Henderson, and playing in Montreal. They are the reasons this ludicrous Hall of Fame wait has taken this long.

In 1983, I bus down to some sort of Fan Appreciation Day at Olympic Stadium where they allow us on the field before the game. It’s a zoo, so I carefully calculate the spot where I figure I have a chance at getting the best photo of Raines. And with my Kodak disposable, I take the image below. I dug it out of an old photo album this morning. Hey, it's hardly Walter Iooss Jr., but until my kids came along, it was the favourite photo I’d ever taken.

A year later, Raines comes to the Rideau Centre in Ottawa (for some paid promotional appearance I’m guessing). I skip school with my pal Darryl to go see him. I fangirl too much to say anything, but he signs the baseball I brought. It is the only sports souvenir I keep into my 20s. Until I have a party, and my well-oiled friends find it in my room, and decide it would be funny if everyone at the party also signed the ball. (I still hate them a little for that.)

I lose the ball sometime after. And lose Raines soon after he leaves Montreal. I have girls, and work, and life to worry about. I still follow his career, am happy when he wins his two World Series as a New York Yankee.  But I’d moved on.

There are plenty of athletes I’ve admired since, but Raines was the last idol.    

I didn’t think about him much until the Hall of Fame snub got to, oh, year seven or eight, and it looked like he’ d never get in. Then I started to get mad. 

Raines is one of the most exciting baseball players I’ve ever seen. Yeah, I’m biased. But apparently so were the writers who didn’t voted for him all these years. I’m thankful for guys like Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) who helped changed minds.

Raines won a batting title, was a seven-time all-star and stole 808 bases, the most of anyone not in the Hall of Fame. Oh, and one kid loved him so much that his sisters made a cake of Raines’ head for his 16th birthday.

As I write this, it’s five hours until the Hall of Fame announcement. He’s getting in. He has to. It’s time for his own party. His own cake.