(Quebec) This Saturday night at the Videotron Centre in Quebec City, Réjean Tremblay will arrive at ringside a little after his young colleagues, but he will not be late. He is never late.
He’ll walk to his assigned spot for the boxing gala. He’ll pull his laptop out of his bag, struggle with the wires, possibly swear as he tries to connect to the WiFi.
Then, once everything is set up, he will get up, go and sit with the elite to try to find some news, a story, an anecdote, something… and we won’t see him again for the rest of the evening at the journalists’ table.
“I’ve always done that. Where is the story? It’s not in the ring, everyone sees it, the ring! You have to go see the world,” says the sports journalist, who The Press met this week at the chic Entourage sur-le-Lac complex, where he has his headquarters.
Réjean Tremblay will celebrate his 80th birthdaye anniversary on August 24. August 19 will mark the 50the anniversary of his entry into The Pressa newspaper where he worked for 37 years before leaving for Quebecor.
Last year, Tremblay left The Montreal Journal. He had a column this year for the BPM Sports station (formerly 91.9 Sports). His last one will be published in a few days.
And for the first time in his career, Réjean Tremblay will find himself without a column. The author of these lines asked for a coffee with him in order to get the answer to a simple question: is it retirement for this columnist who has left such a mark on Quebec sports journalism?
“On September 2, I don’t know what I’m doing! That’s a poetic way of saying it, because I have productions, documentaries, two books to write,” Tremblay begins.
PHOTO MICHEL GRAVEL, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Guy Lafleur and Réjean Tremblay near the Montreal Forum, in the days following the announcement of Lafleur’s first retirement, in November 1984
Then he adds: “In the United States, we have 11 feature film projects submitted. There is one called The Magistratethen a TV series about a big liner with 5,000 people where there must be murders, thefts, there must be a prison… Nobody has ever talked about that!”
Retirement? A few days before his 80th birthdaye birthday, Réjean Tremblay doesn’t even think about it. He even tells us that he is in talks with a media outlet to resume a column. He prefers that we don’t write which one, but it might surprise some people.
“It could be two or three columns a week. But my preference is to have the pressure of one column a day,” Tremblay explains. “We’re not dead at 80! Joe Biden has done us a lot of harm. I want that to be written. People think that at 80, you’re senile!”
One more round…
Just before the interview, Réjean Tremblay runs into skier Mikaël Kingsbury. The hotel on the shores of Lac Beauport sees its fair share of celebrities. “This is the best place to learn that a Canadiens executive is going to lose his job two weeks before everyone else,” notes the columnist.
Tremblay greets the skier and asks him about his father. “He’s a chiropractor, right?” The scribe has always had the memory of an elephant.
“I have two knees that have been rebuilt, a hip that has been rebuilt, and I have to re-do my left shoulder. But I am privileged. I have all my wits about me. I don’t want to brag, but sometimes I feel like my memory is improving as I get older,” says Tremblay, who says he has never used a recorder in an interview in his career, except with Jacques Parizeau and Muhammad Ali.
PHOTO ROBERT NADON, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Carl Marotte, who played Pierre Lambert, director Jean-Claude Lord, author Réjean Tremblay and actor Robert Marien, on the set of the series Throw and countin October 1985
In recent years, in some columns, Tremblay has sometimes seemed out of step with his times. “Maybe. But is it the times that are right?” he asks. “Pierre Lambert, I didn’t need the wokes for him to fall in love with a Haitian doctor, she wasn’t a barmaid!” Tremblay defends himself, referring to Throw and count.
At 80, what drives the journalist? He answers without hesitation: curiosity. “I’m really interested in the world.”
The day we met, he had just come across the story of this Cuban boxer, Osleys Iglesias, who defected to Germany. Iglesias, who is fighting this Saturday night at the Videotron Centre, told him about the day he called his mother from Europe to tell her he was not returning to Havana, that they would never see each other again. “That’s a story,” Tremblay says.
His love for these unusual stories explains his attraction to boxing. Nor does he hide his disenchantment with the Canadiens, a team he covered for decades.
“The ultimate danger for sports journalism is the tyranny of clicks. The Press managed to avoid that quite a bit. I’ve seen a major change in other media, where clicks are everything. Five-line headlines, I-me-me to get clicks…
“Who’s going to be interested in a guy like Mikaël Kingsbury if there are no clicks? At some point, is there only Cole Caufield in life, with information programmed by the Canadiens?”
PHOTO BERNARD BRAULT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
At the June 2009 draft held at the Bell Centre, Montreal Canadiens president Pierre Boivin and owner George Gillett
Still, the Canadian made him live some great stories. He remembers this scoop released in 2009: the team’s owner at the time, George Gillett, wanted to sell it.
Tremblay was in Florida that day. It was a Sunday. He was at the beach when a source called him to warn him. The journalist made a few calls to finally get the story confirmed. The exclusive news was published on Monday on the front page of The Press.
“I released it in the morning. Pierre Boivin, the president of the team, was a speaker at the Chamber of Commerce that day. And he told the journalists: read The PressI have nothing more to say,” Tremblay recalls. “That was the ultimate happiness. And I was in Boynton Beach on the beach!”
Speaking to Tremblay, one gets the impression that he would like to publish others, scoops like that, that he hasn’t given up, that he still dreams about it, at almost 80 years old. The fire still burns, like a boxer who dreams of another, a last, an ultimate fight…