A friend of mine who grew up in the same neighbourhood as me works in sports media in Toronto. You'd know his name if I mentioned it.
But, anyway, this friend has known Norm for almost 20 years and once a year or so he sits down with Norm at Tim Horton's or some other place for a coffee for an hour or so and he says that Norm always had a million complaints about what a horrible dump the fan was to work at.
He's applied all over the city at other radio stations or TV stations for work and they won't hire him because he's been stereotyped as the late night vampire at Fan590.
Norm is also unbelievably thin skinned and is deeply offended when athletes don't show him the courtesy and respect he feels he deserves. He was in his glory days in 90's when Fletcher ran the Leafs and Cliff used to have lunch with Stormin Norm every once in a while.
But, Norm's glory days with the Leafs are long gone and at 54 there is a huge generation gap between Norm and younger athletes and they don't want to spend 2 seconds more with him than they need to. Norm finds all this really offensive.
A funny thing about Norm is that he is completely non technological. He never uses computers or email or the internet. Never. If you put him in front of a computer he is literally like a caveman. He has no idea what to to.
Rumack gets newspaper subscriptions from all over North America and shows up at work with two shopping bags filled with newspaper sports sections from all over N.A. He spends a lot of his free time reading sports stories and is endlessly fascinated by all kinds of sports stories.
Anyway, overall I enjoyed Norm's work at the Fan. He was really well informed and did really good interviews.
He's a much more interesting person to listen to than shallow nobodies like Dan Dunleavy or Mike Hogan.
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