The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 146

TSN: a new Canadian institution U-lf ftfUlf JHKVllim WMiima in. iiiMiiiira, Lj II III I I Ml W. a I If 4 1 M- "i i-; -is yv Gordon Craig, the president of TSN. The offer to be president came when he called to enquire about tickets to a basballgame. Gordon Craig knows precisely the dilemma The Sports Network has created in households across the country, the 24-hour allure of sports yanking powerfully at people's competitive natures.

Craig has two TV sets in his family room "and the only question is who uses the headphones." He has more than your average zealot's interest, mind you. He's president of the outfit, having launched TSN after a four-month, fast-track gestation period in 1984 and nurtured it to the point, entering its fifth season next week, that it reaches 1.3 million households and is turning tidy profits. A 28-year CBC veteran who was head of TV Sports for eight years, culminating in the network's coverage of the 1976 Olympics, the offer to run TSN came in the heels of an inquiry for tickets to a Toronto Blue Jays-New York Yankees game. It is a vignette that underscores the trinity of interest involving baseball, Labatt's and TSN. The brewing company created the network and owns a large piece of the Toronto Blue Jays.

"Tickets were scarce with the Yankees in town and I was with a public relations firm helping Labatt's form a broadcasting strategy for TSN. I called to ask about some tickets and then was transferred to another fellow who thanked me for the work I'd done. "I told him it was a labor of love and he said that was great because they wanted me to run it." The Blue Jays became TSN's first big-ticket item when it signed on Sept. 1, 1984 and Craig allows that the club's successes and rocketing popularity through the next four years, along with the network's Montreal Expos package, was the bedrock from which his baby prospered. He remembers the sign-on as a moment of "elation, emotion and pride" because the launch time was so short and what he had started was, in effect, a perpetual motion machine.

"Now we get a giggle out of the fact we only got to play the anthem and wave the flag once." But he's as proud of the exposure the widely followed sports like baseball, hockey and football have permitted complementary broadcasting of tennis, golf and the Calgary Games (a cable first) and events on the periphery, activities like darts, cricket and some autosports. Ditto for TSN's role in highlighting smaller communities across the country. "We see it almost as a mandate. We take seriously the origination of sports from communities across the country and mirroring those communities to a national audience. We've done the Brier from Chicoutimi and our curling skins game from Thunder Bay and we also have exclusive reporters and cameramen under contract to us across the country." That mandate only gets stronger in the network's fifth year as it goes to basic cable.

It's expected to take a year before all cable operators offer TSN on basic but that will increase viewers, advertising revenue and the responsi-bilty Craig feels to provide broadcasting of the highest standard. And with its state-of-the-art facility at Toronto's new SkyDome, TSN's Dome productions stands poised to provide pay-per-view on sporting specials and entertainment extravaganzas, the next wave in broadcasting. That's further reason for network troops to trumpet the other words for that acronym, Turned Successful Now..