Featured Interview With Howie Mooney
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Ottawa in the 1960s. At that time, the only professional team in the city was the CFL’s Ottawa Rough Riders. My grandfather had season tickets on the north side. When they built the south side stands, my uncle got season seats there. When my brother and I were 11 or 12, a local bank had a deal for kids that if they set up an account there, they could get season tickets in the end zone seats for $5.00!! We jumped on that deal.
We were both sports nuts. Eventually, I worked covering the Riders for local television and my brother worked as one of the team’s statisticians. Today, he does the play-by-play for the OHL’s Ottawa 67s.
We both did a lot of TV and radio in Ottawa. He still lives there. I moved from Ottawa to Seattle to Vancouver to Toronto, all with work. I now live in Barrie, Ontario and work in Toronto. I now host The Sports Lunatics Show, a sports history podcast on the FiredUp Network. I am also a feature writer for the network, focusing on sports history.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I think I began to realize I loved the written word when my grandfather would bring my brother and me the programs from the Rough Rider games. I still have many programs from the games from the 1970s. For my brother, he fell in love with drawing the players. I navigated toward the writing aspect. One of my uncles was a sports columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and I thought, maybe, I could do that too. In the mid 1980s, I began researching the possibility of creating a Canadian Sports History Calendar. I spent a year and a half going through old newspapers until I had enough material for a few calendars.
I then spent almost a year trying to peddle the material to a company that might publish it. Eventually I was successful and my calendar was sold across Canada in the fall of 1989 for 1990. Another calendar for 1991 went across the country the following year as well.
In 1995, I was commissioned to write a book on the history of the Ottawa Rough Riders. That was the last book I wrote before my new book, Crazy Days & Wild Nights.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love non-fiction and I especially love sports history. There are a lot of great writers and great books on both of these genres. A friend of mine, Danny Gallagher, has written a bunch of books and I’m thinking he’s written about ten alone on the Montreal Expos. Over the last few years, after reading his books on the now defunct ball team, he inspired me to set back out on my own path as a writer. He’s been like a mentor to me in putting my own book together. I have enough material set aside now for a couple more books that I will be able to put out over the next few years.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My current book, Crazy Days & Wild Nights, is a collection of nineteen of my stories. These are not just stories of everyday, run-of-the-mill games. The events contained in these stories are absolutely out-of-the-ordinary. Some are violent, some are instructive, some are almost silly, but all of them will make the reader sit back and say ‘wow’!
I’ve been asked in interviews if I have a favorite story or stories, and, honestly, for me that’s like ranking your children. But one of my very favorite things in the book is the foreword of the book. It’s written by an old friend, Mike Ross. Rossy and I worked together at the sports radio station in Ottawa. I was one of the morning show hosts and he was the producer. He has worked so hard and so smart at his craft. He’s still working in broadcasting, now in Toronto. But he’s also the public address announcer for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
In the foreword, he told a story about a night in 1998 or 1999 in which I get him into an exclusive little room for beers after an Ottawa 67s game. He sent me the story in an email and as I was reading it, I had a smile on my face and a tear in my eye. He brought me back 25 years in the blink of an eye.
Many of the stories in the book are about hockey, but there are also stories about baseball, football, basketball and there is a tennis story in there as well. They span the period from the mid-1960s to today. All the stories are true, and many are spectacular.
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