Here’s the thing about a city jonesing for a championship: the air gets weird. It gets heavy. In Edmonton right now, it’s a high-voltage hum you can feel in your teeth, a city-wide feedback loop of desperation and manic hope bouncing off the concrete. They’re praying for a 35-pound silver trophy called Stanley. For 45 years, I’ve been around the Edmonton Oilers as a reporter. While I live with a disability – cerebral palsy – and use a wheelchair, at times, I can be hard to understand.
It’s the Edmonton Oilers versus the Florida Panthers, a heavyweight title fight on ice at Rogers Place in downtown Edmonton and I’ve got a ringside seat for the carnage. But let’s get one thing straight: for me, this whole dance…this gonzo ballet of sports journalism, is powered by a relentless, grinding, and sometimes beautifully shameless symphony of empowerment to do but one thing.
The first chord strikes at 9 a.m. Game day. A 14-hour marathon, if some overtime doesn’t mess up the schedule. I’m shotgun in my chariot, a WAV van, and my driver is navigating the backstage labyrinth. “That last door on the east side, brother,” I say. Not the main gate with the plastic smiles and corporate gloss. My gate. The real gate.
And there’s Anne, a guardian angel in a security red, white and black bomber jacket. “Morning, Cam!” she belts out, a smile that could melt the ice. The second chord. “Anne, you’re a lifesaver. Please grab my bag and scan it for me?” Without a blink, she’s on it. The weight of the computer bag vanishes from the back of my wheelchair into the security X-ray gizmo. A small act of grace in a world of sharp elbows. She scans it, places it back with a gentle thud.
Then, the loading dock. The orchestra swells into an ironic, beautiful, chaotic noise. A sea of media hyenas, a travelling circus of familiar faces from all over the continent, all sniffing out the same story. I lock eyes with some road-worn scribe from Toronto. “Hey man, got a sec? Give me a push, please?” And just like that, I’m in the caravan, my wheels a quiet hum against the thunder of Gatorade carts. We snake past the makeshift dining rooms for the broadcasting teams, walled off by black curtains like some sad attempt at VIP status in a concrete bunker. The ramp to the media pit is a long, steep climb to some hockey Olympus. My buddy, my human engine for the moment, grunts me up the incline, his breath fogging in the arena’s chilled guts. We hit the media nerve center, a sprawling den of 200 reporters buzzing like flies, the air thick with the stench of deadlines and burnt coffee.
My laptop, my weapon, is still bagged. “You got a minute to set me up, please?” I ask my friend. He does. They always do. He jacks it in, fires it up. My day officially kicks off. A day that will be a staccato rhythm of a hundred more questions and a hundred more surrenders to the kindness of the tribe.
A catering angel, who knows my diet soda addiction by heart, materializes with my fix. In the coach’s press conference, a chaotic scrum of microphones and desperation, I text the guy next to me, “Ask him about the power play for me, will ya?” His voice becomes my voice. Lunch and dinner are a blur of surprisingly decent food for a pack of ink-stained wretches. Someone always makes sure a plate lands in my lap, loaded with a slice of that legendary second-period pizza in the press box eight floors above the controlled mayhem on the ice. We’re a pack of well-fed, feral beasts on a deadline, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
My entire life, my whole career, is built on the bones of that one simple phrase: “Can you please help me with this?” It’s a lesson in raw, unfiltered interdependence. Independence isn’t about being a lone wolf; that’s a crock. It’s about having the stones to admit you need a pack.
Forget what they told you about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Most of us are just trying not to drown, and sometimes you need to grab the hand that’s offered. This fear of asking, this terror of looking weak or needy? It’s a con. A lie sold to us by a world that worships a phony brand of cowboy individualism. Social psychologists, man, they’ve proven it: people want to help. They’re wired for it. We’re just too proud, too scared, to let them. Mastering the ask is an art form. Be specific. Say thanks. It isn’t weakness; it’s the ultimate sign of self-awareness. It’s how you build a team.
And this daily grind, this constant symphony of asks that keeps me rolling through Rogers Place, finds its echo in something bigger, something with real stakes. It echoes in the life-and-death mission of the David Foster Foundation. For more than 30 years, they’ve been making the biggest ask of all. They’ve been asking Canadians to sign their organ donor cards. A two-minute flicker of a pen that can save up to eight lives.
It’s the same principle, just cranked up to 11. I need a push to get to the press box. Thousands of Canadians, many of them kids, are waiting for a stranger to give them a shot at staying alive. The families in the orbit of the David Foster Foundation, staring down the barrel of a kid’s mortality, know the crushing weight of the ask. They’re asking for a miracle.
The bridge between my story and theirs is built from the same raw material: vulnerability. My ask for a push down a ramp is a whisper – not even that – compared to their primal scream for a new heart, a new lung, a new liver. But both come from a place of radical honesty. A place that admits, “I can’t do this alone.”
The roar that will shake this building when the puck drops is the sound of a team, a city, a collective will. The David Foster Foundation is asking us to be a team in a way that truly matters. To look out for the stranger, for the family on the ropes, and to give their kid a reason to score a winning overtime goal as well. It’s an ask that doesn’t require a press pass or a 14-hour shift in the trenches. It just requires a little bit of guts and a whole lot of heart. And that, right there, is a power play certainly worth joining.
