The Ben Mulroney Show - The rise and ruin of sports media

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

GUEST: Mark "Hebsy" Hebscher /  Madness: The Rise and Ruin of Sports Media If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠��⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Tools that make it possible to go from tax question to client comms in minutes. Get better answers to tough questions. BlueJ. AI for tax experts. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday to you. It's the 18th of December 25. It's Thursday. And thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Ben Mulroney show. And a few weeks ago, we decided we wanted to engage with our listeners and our viewers on YouTube and our followers on social media even more than we do already. And that was by pouring over the comments and pouring over the emails and the texts as well as the messages that we receive as a show and engage. with you by answering some of the questions that you leave for us there. So on that note, let's jump into the Ben Mulroney Show mailbag. Do-wop, do-wop.

Welcome friends to play and sing. This is Reply, I love that. You love that. Do-wop. Yes. All right. So now is the time where I guess I'm going to hand the mic over to Mike Jolet, our intrepid producer, and he's going to read some of this stuff, and I'm going to answer them. All right, first comment is interesting. If Ben is a conservative, I can't understand why he and the other two gentlemen are on the panel, are going on and on about how great a job Carney is done.

What am I missing, Ben? We will never get Pierre into the PM seat if we rely on the guest today, who I always thought were conservative. Pierre has moved ahead in the polls this week, so what on earth are you doing all voting for Carney? Solomon and McKinnon. Okay. What? Solomon, thank you.

Solomon and McKinnon to both of you? Evan Salomon. No, no, no. Evan Solomon and... Oh, talking about the Carney, Solomon and McKinn and stuff. Look, I am not... I am a conservative. I'm not a member of the Conservative Party,

but I believe that I espouse conservative values. And I am not a member of the opposition, which means my job is not to oppose. That's Pierre's job. My job is not to oppose everything. If something good comes to this government, I want to celebrate it because the success of this government,

in turning around some of the boneheaded and destructive policies of Justin Trudeau will be a net benefit for all of us. And while my side didn't win in the last election, I'm not here to relitigate the election each and every day. That's unproductive, unhelpful, doesn't move the ball forward. And if Mark Carney does something that I think is of value and is a net improvement over what preceded it, I'm going to celebrate it. Sorry if you don't like that, but my job is not to scream at clouds all day long.

I will not be that guy and if you want that you can find it somewhere else. Now, just because he's going to he's going to do some stuff right doesn't mean he's going to do everything right. Fundamentally, I was having a conversation with someone a few days ago

about whether or not Mark Carney is a progressive conservative. And I said, with all due respect, he's not. He's a centrist. He's a centrist, but centrist is not a political persuasion. Centrist just means he's not going to fly too far in one direction or another.

And I said, fundamentally, he is still a liberal, and I know that because the values that I have noticed in this budget and the values that I've noticed in this major projects office, it's called the major projects office, right? Demonstrate to me that he believes and his government believes that every problem has a government solution. There is nothing that the government can't help solve. And I believe that a lot of problems are created because the government is involved in the first place. I think some of the best solutions are where private citizens and industry are left to fix the problem themselves. And when I see this government creating one new bureaucracy or another new bureaucracy, that tells me that their vision is a world where every problem has a government solution. I'm not on board.

Now, some do. I'm not on board with that writ large. And it feels like this government is. That's why I will be opposing them on certain things. But I'm also going to celebrate them when they get things right. And yeah, if they get things right, then things will get better. That being said, we do celebrate them when they get things right, and they still will come on our show.

Today is day two, by the way, day two of an ongoing attempt to get somebody from the government to join us on this show. We reach out every single day and thus far, goose eggs. And thank you, everyone, for the suggestions on who you like us to reach out to. This is the next comment is from a listener who doesn't feel heard in society, I suppose. She writes, I wanted to cry by how touched I felt by Ben's moral clarity and outrage at the hypocrisy of leaders such as Mayor Chow. Our kids' schools have veiled fencing and cinder blocks to block car attacks. Our synagogues has twice been attacked by it with bullets and firebombed and the media barely covered it, which only compounds ignorance.

Our synagogue now has bulletproof glass and a panic button. Wow. And attack drills for services. We've never been this afraid. When our mayor, the mayor of Toronto, gets up in front of a crowd and declares with no facts and with no evidence that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, and look, people can disagree on that. But when the mayor says it, when the mayor of the city says it as if it is fact, she puts a target on the backs of Jews across this city. And just this week at first day of Hanukkah, she jumped on stage and off stage, she took a selfie, boom. You cannot have it both ways.

You can't get up there and curry favor with one group and say, oh, yes, there was a genocide perpetrator and then go to the other group. And by the way, I'm not the one setting this dichotomy. I'm not the one setting the us versus them. I believe that there is empathy and love out there for everyone. And the Jews that I know

are not actively out there in the streets calling for the death and destruction of people in Gaza. I've never seen that. So that is not a worldview that I subscribe to. And my defense of the Jewish people of this city is I refuse to let anybody ascribe any other motivation to me. I am here to defend my friends the Jews. I'm here to make new friends as well as we've been discussing over the course of this show. And I am not going to live in a world where you get to tell me that because I support one group of people that automatically means that I'm

against another group. I refuse to live in that world. I will not live in that world. You can live in that world if you want. That is the world that gets us in trouble. That is why we are in this dumpster fire currently. And I'm not, and I'm trying to get us out of it. This next story is in response to British Columbia, renaming the Petulow Bridge. They built a second, a new bridge. And the replacement's been given an indigenous name, which means a space where you can view the river. But it's written in an indigenous language. So the comments we, we got. A bunch of them, most of them were talking about how BC is woke as hell and where our land rights are going to, going to hell and insanity is BC. But then this one one is interesting

from the Drewby. You didn't even get the first name right. We honor the original landowners in BC. Give it a try sometime. You're so privileged that you can't find anything to complain about other than a name, check yourself. Gosh, you're from 2015, man. Check yourself. You're so privileged. Welcome. I don't live in 2015.

I know you want to live there where talking about somebody's privilege is some sort of attack. My privilege is that I wake up every GD morning and do a hard job, a hard day's work. I pay my taxes. I pay more than my fair share of taxes.

And I watch as people with no jobs run around this city, clamoring for the death and destruction of people and the destruction of this country that has given them everything. That is the definite definition of privilege in 2025. You can check your privilege with all due respect.

And I didn't get the name right because I don't speak the language. I speak both national languages. That should be enough. Thank you very much. And it's written in a different... Yes, it's written in a different language with characters that I don't recognize. And I did my best to say it with respect. And if that's not enough for you, jump off the bridge.

Please don't jump off the bridge. Don't jump off the bridge. Don't jump off the bridge. This next one is about Canadian identity. This one is a couple of, from V-Toc 514. The day Carney spoke those words that Muslim values are Canadian values, is the day I changed my opinion on him, and I voted for him. No more.

He has to go and the rest of his woke leftist liberal party. Well, look, I want to be clear, and I think I was clear, but let me say it again. there are countless wonderful Muslim Canadians who have found a way to create a life here and live as Muslims within Canada. But if you're telling me that the values of the national values that make up a number of the countries in the Middle East

are Canadian values, that is not true. Just try living the life that you lead here, there, and see what it gets you. That's all I meant by that. And like I said, I think it would be far more honest if we were more, if we were more honest in what we're trying to achieve. We want to build economic ties. We want to build deeper connections with those countries to the benefit of those people and our people. But why it has to be on this false notion of shared values, it's disingenuous and it doesn't get us anywhere.

So why say it? Like, why say it? There's nothing wrong with having a nation-to-nation relationship that has nothing to do with our values. That's it. All right, thank you very much. And on that note, the rise and ruin of sports media from someone who is on the 50-yard line. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show,

and I'm continuing my conversation with Mark Hebsie Hebscher, the author of Madness, the rise and ruin of sports media. And if you go to my social media, Hebsy just posted a picture of himself with my dad and I replied, how tall are you, man? Because you tower over my dad and he was six feet tall. Yeah, no, we had, I think the foot, we set it up that way. We're about the same height.

I think I learned it from SCTV, right, when they would do the zoom in. So I made sure I got closer to the camera. Oh, there you go. Here it is if I'm a head taller. Yeah, what's that? Yeah, you got to stand next to my producer, Mike Droulet, because he's, what are you, seven foot three?

Six, five. I've stood next to Mike before. Oh, yeah? Yeah, he's a tall man. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about, so the role that sports reporters and, you know, the host on all these sports shows that meant so much to us growing up and still do in a lot of cases,

the role that they've played over the years has changed. And I wonder what you think caused that change. Like I remember, I was at school in the United States. I went to Duke for years. And so every night I was, you know, ESPN was my jam. And I was there during the rise of like the superstar sports reporter on, on, on, on, on, you know, giving me my, my, my color commentary and giving me my, my, my updates and my, you know, my news every single night. 11, 11.30, midnight.

It was, it was the same, same thing. And then that sort of, you know, the comedy started infusing those, that coverage. And then that sort of came to Canada as well. And now it feels like we're in a different place because of, say, the barstool sports of it all. I'm wondering what you think of the evolution, or maybe you don't even view it as an evolution, but the morphing of, you know, these anchors

who've meant so much to us over the years. Well, first of all, I want to correct something. The stuff that you watched when you were at Duke, we were already doing on sports line on global, in the early mid-80s. The two-man format and two-guards. and two guys being able to laugh and joke about it as opposed to being straight, straight up sports.

You know, C-Spot Run, he shoots, he scores. That I think was, you know, that was sort of the evolution of the type that you're doing now. I believe we actually would have been Nick Charles and Fred Hickman at CNN just before us. That's right. That's right. And then it was us.

We were a decade before Oberman and Patrick, we did in their stick. Anyway, that was the best version of Oberman, by the way. Like if I had to just say, if I got to pick one version of him, I have him doing sports with that mustache, because everything he's done since has been garbage. Well, you know, I don't think we knew it at the time, but, you know, Taddy and I and everybody on Sportsline, you know, had created a, we were part of the sports news as opposed to just delivering it. Yeah, yeah.

Because people were saying, like, you know, do you see Sportsline last night? They had highlights of a fight or they showed this some wild kind of a thing or they had like, Gretzky had just scored in L.A. and they had it like 20 seconds later. Yeah. So that was exciting for us. We enjoyed doing that, and I think that sort of spurred to people. Hey, let's make it entertaining. It's just sports. Yeah, but because your personalities started imbueing everything you did,

because people were attracted to that and they were coming to you for that, I have to believe that the athletes themselves were watching and recognized in you that personality that they gravitated towards. And I got to wonder if that altered the dynamic between sports journalist and the people you're covering, the athletes themselves. Was there ever, you know, was, I have to believe that in, you know, friendships deepened and all of a sudden there might have been a blurring of the line between the people you were covering and the friends that they were.

Absolutely, there was. And on a couple of occasions, I really had to take a step back because it had gotten too far. In that, I had gone to this particular player, my wife and he and his wife knew each other, blah, blah, blah. We had gone for dinner there. And then we had gone again to this player's place. and there were other players around that it was a backyard barbecue. And some of the players were reluctant to talk because, you know, off the record, whatever, it's a barbecue.

Yeah. Because I was there and they thought I would be writing everything down or recording everything. And so I had to back off from that. But you're right. I think it's very difficult to try to develop a relationship with a player and then be, you know, impartial. However, today that's not a problem because very few reporters or journalists, whatever, can get that close. to a player. Right. Who gives you hope these days when you're looking at the young crop of sports journalists or anchors or podcasters? Who are you looking at saying, you know what?

These guys are doing it right. And if these are the ones who are going to be carrying forth the craft, we're in good hands. Yeah, I got to tell you that it's the guys from spitting chicklets that they just announced they're going to be going to Netflix from YouTube. They're great because they have no ties really to any. I mean, even though, you know, Biz Nasty is on TNT and they Turner and they have you know rights NHR rights they've been

these are the kind of guys similar to Don Cherry where it's like listen man people love you because you're honest because you're brutally honest sometimes you're passionate and so are most sports fans that's the thing is you a sports fan sees themselves

in Biz Nasty the same way they saw themselves in Don Cherry it's authenticity right yeah like you may not you may not agree with with Don Cherry and a lot of people took issue with some of the things he said, although a lot of people are looking back at some of the stuff he said and said, you know what? He might have been ahead of his time.

But people related and connected with his authenticity. There was nothing fabricated about it. That's right. And I think you're right. I think now when you look at someone, the first thing you might say is who are they being paid by? Are they associated with the gambling company? Are they doing

this because it's a sponsor segment by Proline or name a gambling company? And so it's hard to get someone to be able to just be themselves and their bosses to be able to say, don't you worry about the consequences? You just be yourself. Be honest because people will tune in and we'll make millions of dollars because they want to watch you. Mark, is there any way forward in a positive way with gambling becoming this ever-growing aspect to sports coverage? I don't see it, Ben.

No. I'm trying to find a good way. Is some of the money that's being, you know, used in gambling? Is it going to the right places? Is it helping non-gamblers? That sounds to me kind of, it's a nice thing to suggest, but I really don't think gambling companies are interested in that. I think they're interested in you gambling as much as you can on a game.

So not so much the TV network saying we've got to have great ratings. But if their partners are happy that people are gambling right up to the final whistle or the last out or whatever it is, that seems to be the end game. And so I'm trying to find a silver cloud in this. The silver cloud is that the athletes are going to be paid more money than ever. There's just going to be more money available, even for college kids because of nil. Name, image, likeness. There's just so much money to go around that average Joe's are being paid by gambling companies to pump the product.

Hey, I only have about a minute left, but I'd love to get your take on sort of what everybody felt was the Toronto Blue Jays punching above their weight seemingly giving us a postseason to remember. And while it didn't, it didn't land the way we all wanted it to, I don't know by you, but I feel like they're making some of the smart moves to build on this year's success for next season. Well, they have to, Ben. You see, they're stuck now. They went so far and came so close that there's no way they can go back. They can't take a little, even a mini step backwards and only.

win one round of the playoffs yeah and so now you have to go for it all and you have to take on the dodgers again i'm sorry to say you have to be better than them right by by by by by a half an inch or however you want to praise it it was shocking at first but it's a painful wound that isn't healing right yeah and it's not going to heal for a while because we're going to go we're going to have a great regular season they might win a hundred games this year and then you're going to remember what happened against the Dodgers last year and that's a Toronto thing too that's a 4-1 against the Bruins that's a blowing that's all that it's the Toronto thing there so they came so close that they have to be better they have to sign

bow for sure yeah or if not him Kyle Tucker and I think other than that they look man they look they look really good we got a listener text and they want to know if you're going to ever please bring back the Hebsie Awards is that something that could ever come back sure it is as a matter of fact I'm trying to do with you know in a with the book, you know, some, some live performances. I guess you'd call it, Ben, and I want to include a live version of the Hebsi Awards as part of my, my schick, I guess, or my routine. So, yeah, yeah, I think it would work.

Mark, thank you so much for spending time and conversation with us. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on the book. It's called Madness, the Rise and Ruin of Sports Media. Please come back any time to talk about anything, my friend. All the best to you and your family. Merry Christmas, happy holidays. Same to you, Ben.

Appreciate you very much. My name is Jordan, and I'd like to invite you to join me on the Canadian Gothic, a podcast covering stories of Canadian crime, mystery, and the offbeat. The Canadian Gothic blends the spirit of late-night talk radio with the dead. depth of a documentary film and applies that approach to both developing stories and historical cases. So if you're drawn to the dark, mysterious, and offbeat, search for and subscribe to the Canadian Gothic wherever you find podcasts. You were listening to Canadian Gothic.