The Squire
Squire Barnes - Sports CKO-FM-4 Vancouver
1984-89; sports show producer CKWX and CHRX Vancouver; weekend sports CBC-TV
Vancouver; sports anchor/Satellite Debris host Global TV Vancouver current
His name should have
been his handicap. In the days of chivalry, esquires were the attendants of
knights. Basically, you carried the big man's shield around for him and washed
his shorts in the hope that one day you too would become a Sir. Alas, it was
often futile. The fraternity of knights was so tightly bound up in a
hyper-developed sense of self-importance and ego that most squires never made
it above their station.
When you think about
it, it's not all that different from the world of TV -- except, it turns out,
at BCTV, where suddenly it's hip to be Squire. How else could a nerdy,
125-pound midget get to anchor the evening sports on
If it's hip to be
Squire," says CKNW sportscaster Neil Macrae,
"then I guess the anorexic look is in for people other than supermodels.
He makes [The Province's] Tony Gallagher look like Gallagher's on
steroids."
Barnes certainly
doesn't look the part of the knightly TV jock (indeed, he may even be a few
notches below the minimum requirements of the proverbial 'face made for
radio'), but by infusing his delivery with welcome signs of wit and
intelligence, Squire Barnes is making a mockery of the traditional code of
television sports: GQ looks? Don't need 'em. Suits by Stacatto? Sears will do. Ex-jock pedigree? Nope, not even ex-jockey. It's a classic
brains-beats-brawn tale, but the story of how this squire rose above his
assigned rank is just as intriguing.
Barnes was promoted
to the coveted evening sports post last fall, leapfrogging over established
BCTV personalities Bernie Pascal, John McKeachie and
Barry Houlihan. For four years prior, Barnes, now 33,
had been working in relative obscurity on the weekend shift -- carrying the
shield, as it were -- with news anchor Jennifer Mather.
Then, all of a sudden, the youngest, most unorthodox sportscaster in the
company -- and arguably the country -- was pulled out of line and plunked down
ahead of everybody else to sit, as an equal, mind you, beside the big man
himself, the famed Tony Parsons. Understandably, egos were bruised.
Yeah, I wouldn't
want to try and minimize it," says BCTV senior producer Steve Wyatt.
"Change is never easy. Bernie and John and Barry have done a hell of a job
here for a lot of years. It was difficult for some of the guys."
In an era when the
judgment of editors is increasingly being subverted by more 'scientific'
decision-making, it is both surprising and refreshing to discover that Barnes's
promotion was a gut decision. No focus groups. No polling. They just went with
him. "If Squire was ever away, we would get phone calls and letters
demanding to know where he was," Wyatt continues. "It was clear that
people responded well to him. I think it's the fact that he's not the
stereotypical jock up there reading the scores. He presents it like an average
guy who's interested in sports, while at the same time realizing that it's not
brain surgery. It's entertainment, and he knows that."
It's just after
When finally I meet
Barnes, he's still wearing his makeup from this evening's show. He's even
shorter than I imagined, only five-foot-six. His jacket has been taken in to
the limits of its structure -- and still looks too big -- and his buttoned-down
Oxford-cloth shirt bulges around his neck. The only thing this veritable mad
genius is missing: a pocket protector, and it would
have come in handy, too, because it seems his pen exploded in his shirt just a
few minutes ago.
Despite his
appearance, he's no rocket scientist. In fact he says he was such an appalling
student in high school that he couldn't even get into community college. His
father suggested Squire get some computer training, but he failed the aptitude
test. "The test was algebra," Barnes says, curling up on his chair,
"which just happened to be the one course I cheated my way through high
school in."
Not content to work
in a warehouse for the rest of his life, the
He got his first gig
in radio, but when the all-news station CKO died in 1989, he realized he was
going to have to have more than one job to survive. He began collecting them
like baseball cards, writing sports articles for Hollinger, talking sports for
CKWX radio and helping out behind the scenes as a sports writer at CBC-TV.
Then one day,"
Barnes begins, "the director of the weekend show [at CBC] asked me if I
wanted to audition to host while the other guys were away. I said 'Yeah, who
else is auditioning?' He said, 'Nobody. You'll just keep auditioning until you
get it right.'"
He had parlayed what
he calls his "cleverer than average" writing into a job in front of
the camera. But he sensed that CBC didn't hold much of a future for him, so he
began hanging out at BCTV. He says there's a lesson there for anybody looking for
a career in broadcasting. "I see these young kids all the time who think
they're just going to walk in with their diploma and get a job. It doesn't work
that way. You've got to hang around like a bad smell if you want to get
anywhere."
Barnes takes me to
an editing suite, where he puts in a videotape and analyzes every aspect of
this evening's sportscast. Precisely what he's looking for isn't clear, but
he's dissatisfied with his performance. "I didn't really get it
tonight," he says, eyes fixated on the monitor. "I'm always looking
for a good line, some good clips, some good energy around the thing. Some
nights it just falls flat."
He isn't trying to
provide good journalism so much as he's hoping to entertain you. It's a
philosophy that the more 'serious' sports writers enjoy trashing, but Barnes
has thought this one through and remains decidedly unphilosophical.
"It's entertainment. Plain and simple. Anybody
who tells you any different is kidding themselves. I'm not saying there
shouldn't be good sports journalism. But look, this is sports. It's games. People love to play them. They love to watch
them. But at the end of the game the story is really on the scoreboard."
It's hard to argue
with that, but the Arthur Griffiths sellout to John McCaw
provides an opportunity to challenge him. For the most part, sportscasters were
content to parrot the
I think that really
big sports stories become lead news stories anyway," Barnes counters.
"I mean, is the
Barnes pops in
another video, his
I'm happy doing what
I'm doing," Barnes shrugs. Then he adds, "I've done the entertainment
thing, too, interviewing celebrities and stuff like that. It was kinda fun. I liked it."
Neil Macrae, for one, hopes Barnes doesn't decide to go too Hollywood. "At BCTV he could be holding down the kind
of job that most people in this business dream of in a couple of years. He's in
a very enviable position. He's got the biggest market in