Cut to Black

Rod Black shares all the stories, all the fun, and all the inside scoops in this revelatory book about his forty years in Canadian sports broadcasting.

Foreword by Joe Carter

For more than four decades, Rod Black has been one of Canada’s most versatile sportscasters. He has either hosted or called play-by-play for practically every sport there is. Rod broadcasted some pivotal Blue Jays games in 1992 and 1993, when the team won the World Series. He was on the ice with Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. He lived with a Toronto Maple Leaf and partied with the teammates until legendary Leafs coach Pat Burns told him to cut it out. He was around for Ben Johnson’s fabled win and disastrous fall from grace. He was live on air during 9/11. He captures all of these stories and a lot more in the pages of this book, showing how the business of broadcasting could truly be a blast and also cutthroat.

After years at CTV, Rod Black moved to TSN, where he evolved into broadcasting game-a-day Black. It wasn’t unusual for Black to call five different sporting events in a single week, sometimes more than one a day. Rod Black has two families: his own, and his work family. Black’s work family is a result of his years on the road calling every sport imaginable. He was even a DJ at a roller-skating rink in Winnipeg, a rather inauspicious start to a stellar broadcasting career.

Cut to Black is funny, engaging, warm, and revelatory—the perfect gift for anyone who wonders how sports broadcasts are made (sometimes by the seat of the broadcaster’s pants).