Transcript: Scott Oake
An interview with the Canadian sportscaster and author
Negotiations over border security and the Trump administration’s tariffs have once again highlighted the opioid crisis that’s taking so many lives on both sides of the border. This week on the program, we’re going to leave behind the political and instead focus on the personal. My guest is a beloved Canadian sportscaster who lost his son to an overdose — and who has managed to transform his family’s pain into hope.
Scott Oake is an award-winning sportscaster for CBC Sports, Sportsnet, and Hockey Night in Canada. He’s the author of For the Love of a Son: A Memoir of Addiction, Loss, and Hope, and a founder of the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.
TH: It's good to have you on. It's such an important issue, and a really important book, and I'm glad we're getting to talk about it today. The book opens in August of 1985, with your son Bruce's birth. You were in New Brunswick covering the Canada Summer Games for the CBC when your wife Anne's water broke. You made it back to Winnipeg to welcome your son. Tell us about that day.
SO: I got a call in my hotel room in the wee hours of the morning. Anne was actually in the front closet of her mother's home in St. Vital, here in Winnipeg. She was in the front closet, because she didn't want to disturb anybody. That was the kind of person she was. I said, “Okay, I'll get home ASAP.” We arranged a ticket. Back in those days, of course, not much was electronic; you actually had to have a paper ticket. So, I went through all of that, and got home. I think Anne would have been, when I rushed into the birthing room, probably about 14 or 15 hours in labour. Her first words, as I tried to wrap my arms around her, were, “Get your effing hands off, me!” [Laughs] Feel the love.
It was a long and protracted labour, as first children can be, and they finally took Bruce out with forceps around midnight. Then I was back on a plane to the summer games, on a red eye flight to get me back to Saint John, New Brunswick for the next day. When I think back on that now, according to today's standards it is shameful what I did. But that's what happened in the mid-80s. You just did your job and went to work, whatever the obstacles might be.
It's hard to imagine now, according to today's standards. “The Canada Summer Games couldn’t have done without me” — that was one thought. But the prevailing thought for most people in broadcasting, and you would know this, is: “If I don't get back there, someone else is going to do my job, and they'll do it better than me, and I'll never get back on the air again.” So, there was a bit of that too.
TH: I mean, the standards of fatherhood have changed over the years, but the standards in the media probably haven't so much, have they? We work all the time, all of us in this industry.
SO: It's part of protecting your position, almost at all costs. I'm way past that now, as I'm a lot closer to the end than the start — put it that way. But anyway, that's the way it was in the mid-80s for me.
TH: Bruce, as you describe him in the book, was a very special person in so many ways: bright, very determined, often funny, very charismatic. He could be quite good with people. But it did become clear at some point that Bruce was struggling in his childhood, and he did receive a diagnosis early on. Tell us a little bit about what those struggles looked like, and what that diagnosis was.
SO: There was a lot of oppositional behaviour in our house. Darcy, on the other hand, was a very easy child to get along with. I digress here to address one thing that I'm sure listeners will wonder about, and that is: Is it nature versus nurture? We would be here to say that it was not nurture. Because our kids were raised in the same house, a loving home, according to the same standards. One became a world world-class entertainer. Bruce could have been too. But he was diagnosed with ADHD around the age of eight or nine.
We were desperate to get an answer to the oppositional behavior. So, we dragged Bruce to a lot of psychologists and doctors, and all seemed to agree that he had a case of ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There was also a referral to a Tourette's clinic, which was, I think, a factor in his life. Although it was primarily ADHD that made him ripe for taking chances — and there weren't many he didn't take, the consequences be damned. That had a lot to do, I would say, with his descent into substance abuse, or addiction.
TH: Fast forward to his teenage years, and things got worse. When did you and Anne first realize that Bruce was dealing with addiction?
