My favourite Dave Perkins story was in a place both of us would rather forget, to be honest: the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, as we were going in via the press entrance one Saturday afternoon to cover the 100-metres final. On the other side of the fence waiting for the general gates to open, and not liking it one bit, was famed trial lawyer Johnny Cochran.

“This has to be the only place in America you can’t talk yourself into,” Perkins cracked, earning a smile from Cochran that, if it was paying at his hourly rate, would’ve made us both rich.

Fun and Games: My 40 Years Writing Sports (ECW Press). More

Perkins is good at that kind of thing, and remains part of the Canadian sports conversation as a guest voice on Sportsnet’s Prime Time Sports. But as his Fun and Games: My 40 Years Writing Sports demonstrates, there’s no substitute for reading the man.

In his spot in the Toronto Star, Perkins had as fine and comfortable a voice as you’d find in all of journalism, and after six years out of the full-time ink-stained wretch business, Fun and Games is every bit the delightful read you’d expect. The ECW Press book out this month is something of a love letter to a pre-digital media era gone forever, a collection of yarns expertly told by a guy who, as he often said of others, “made the alphabet behave.” After a bit of heart trouble that’s since been taken care of, I caught up with him just ahead of a trip to Italy he was taking with his wife Debbie to spend all the royalty money.

Q: So why do a book?

Perkins: It was because my rehab was going badly. Seriously, last summer I had no outlet - my cardiologist didn’t want me to play golf, and I was just kind of sitting around looking at the four walls going what am I gonna do? People had asked me for a long time to do something, but I was never interested, and I never thought people would be interested. Two days later I got a call from a guy offering it again. So one thing led to another. I always had the stories floating around in my head. I was telling them at golf tournaments, standing around bars yakking and I’d tell them to people in the business. A lot of people told me to put ‘em in a book. I never paid them any mind until I had nothing else to do.

Q: Remember Plimpton’s small-ball theory of sports writing? Does it apply to your own writing, and likes? You did a lot of golf and baseball.

Perkins: And racing, too. But it’s got such a limited shelf life, racing. It’s sometimes hard to explain racing stories because people just don’t understand it like they used to. But everybody understands baseball and golf. I spent a lot of time covering golf -- 58 majors, that’s a hell of a lot, and Presidents Cups and Ryder Cups. The best thing I liked about golf was there were no night games. You could live like a human being, have a decent dinner. You weren’t eating stale popcorn at 11 o’clock at night waiting for some extra-innings game to end. Golf and baseball, you had time. So much of baseball was sitting around and telling stories at 4 in the afternoon, when you do that clubhouse pass, what I used to call ‘the arrest check.’ That’s when you hear good stories and you trade a few.

Q: Do you have a favourite among them?

Perkins: It depends on the crowd. If push comes to shove my favourite would be some of the boxing stuff from Las Vegas - the night that Jim Morris told Arnold Schwarzenegger to f*** off was just priceless.

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