It was in Varney, Ontario, that I realized I was about to die.
It was a peach of a fall day. In fact, you could say it was near perfect. Except for the part where I was being violently tossed around inside of a tiny rusted-out Japanese import. I was out of control and I had no brakes. I felt like an insect trapped inside a Coke can, inside the back of a cement truck.
And the cement truck is careening off the edge off a cliff.
Varney, for those not in the know, is a lovely small town in Grey County, Ontario. The town is not without fame. In the north end, easily visible from the road, is the world’s largest Adirondack chair. It’s a point of great civic pride. The chair’s size in relation to other large chairs around the world has been confirmed numerous times by the international body that concerns itself with such things.
The town is also known for its kind citizens, its charitable nature, and as the location of a small racetrack that draws fans from hundreds of miles around. On the day in question it crossed my mind that the town would soon be known as the place of my demise—but that would never be anything other than a quasi-interesting footnote. It will always be, first and foremost, the home of the big chair.
But it wasn’t the chair that brought me to Varney. It was the track.
The offer came in the form of an email. It was short and to the point. “I have seen you do an awful lot of stupid things on your show,” the guy wrote. “This is about as stupid as it gets.”
The subject line was “The Train of Death.”
Don’t let the name fool you. It’s far worse than it sounds. Turns out the train of death is a popular attraction at speedways all over rural Ontario. It’s a real crowd-pleaser, mainly because the chances of spectacular crashes are extremely high.
Unlike most races, this is not about individual cars going as fast as possible. This is about teams of three cars going as fast as possible. Also, the teams are chained together, which pretty much assures that when one car goes, the others will follow. The goal is to encourage high-speed pileups.
It is a motor sport invented in hell.
The car at the front of each team has a bored-out V-8 motor, a roll bar and no brakes. It’s basically a car that has been customized for a suicide bomber. Behind that car there is a twelve-foot (3.7 m) length of chain, to which car number two is attached. Known as the “middle car,” car number two has no brakes and no engine. Behind the wheel is a young local legend with a history of concussions and a death wish. He’s the one who sent me the email inviting me to participate in the race. At the rear of his car is another chain, to which is attached a third car. This car also has no engine, but it does have brakes. And really, they might as well have taken the steering wheel out when they removed the engine. It is a placebo. It is as effective as the toy steering wheel used to amuse toddlers on a stroller. This car in the rear? This was my ride.
I found myself in the situation because it turns out there is a huge appetite for seeing me in peril. Yes, people loved the small towns and the way we celebrated the country, but what the audience really enjoyed, perhaps most of all, was watching me suffer. Dangle me high, throw me in water, or better yet, do both at once and make it in February. The colder, wetter and more terrified I was, the better. It became a running joke in the office. If we found ourselves running low on ideas for the next adventure, someone would always pipe up and say, “Can we taser him?” In the back of my mind I would think, How far are we from that becoming real? I could picture the taser, not on a cop’s holster, but in a see-through case with words emblazoned across the front: “In event of show-business emergency, break glass.”
But work is work and I am certainly not complaining. And I’m not the first guy whose job involved stuff I’m not keen on. Some people are in the porta-potty business, some people went to nursing school and now face the reality of enforced double shifts on a weekly basis. I know a guy who worked in his aunt’s hair salon through all of high school and university. His job? Washing the hair of elderly ladies.
Compared to those gigs, the Train of Death was a gift.
And on paper it was pretty darn good.
For the perfect Rick Mercer Report segment, we needed three elements. Ideally, I would travel to a beautiful and/or interesting part of the country; I would talk with clever, fun people; and there would be some element of action. Occasionally we would throw in a famous Canadian for good measure.
The Train of Death didn’t have a celebrity attached, but it had a racetrack culture worth exploring, Varney was a beautiful town (let’s not forget the big chair), and this shoot didn’t just offer the suggestion of action, it guaranteed it. Also, it had the word death in the title. Wild horses couldn’t have kept me away.
Within minutes of us beginning a practice lap, I was having serious buyer’s remorse. The cars I was chained to kept increasing in speed. I might not have had an engine, but every part of the vehicle was shaking. Panicked, I hit the brakes. Apparently, that’s the worst thing you can do. Unfortunately, nobody explained this counterintuitive fact earlier.
The car I was in was too small and too light for the brakes to have any impact on the heavier cars ahead of me. When I hit the brakes, my wheels locked up, causing my car to suddenly whip to the side. I was the wagging tail on the Train of Death. I whipped so far and so fast to the right, and then the left, that my side door slammed into the side door of car number two. I was now facing backwards.
To be clear, this was not the first time I had faced what I believed was certain death. A brief series of odd symptoms a few years prior led doctors to believe there might be something lurking in my brain that shouldn’t be there. Tests were ordered and my doctor did her level best to appear optimistic. Which is why I found myself, at three in the morning, being fed headfirst into an MRI machine at one of Toronto’s fine hospitals. All I could think the entire time was I know how this movie ends.
After the MRI I went home and sat on the back deck of my house and watched as the sun rose. It may be cliché, but the sounds of songbirds waking up coincided with me overcoming my fear of death. I thought to myself, If this is it, if this goes sideways, I have had a good run. And I truly believed that. There were no regrets.
Within days I was given the results. Thankfully, there was nothing sinister hiding in my head. Of course, I was overwhelmingly relieved. And while I didn’t dwell on the experience, I was glad to have had it. Nothing puts life in perspective quite like the view from inside an MRI machine.
But this was different. There was no way I was prepared to die in this car on this track.
You do not, under any circumstances, want a comedy death. A comedy death being the kind of death that, when people hear about it, they laugh.
And I could only imagine the reaction surrounding my imminent passing. Someone would say, “Did you hear Rick Mercer died?” And the person receiving the news would react the way we are all taught to react when hearing such things. “Oh my goodness, that’s terrible. How did he die?”
Then the bearer of the bad news would say, “He was taking part in something called the Train of Death.”
And really, how is anyone supposed to keep a straight face when dropping that little tidbit? That’s a comedy death.
A few years ago, a lawyer at a fancy downtown Toronto law firm developed a party trick to impress visiting law students. Part of his job was to give the interns at his firm a tour of the offices. When they reached the impressive boardroom he would allegedly always say, “The view is spectacular and the windows are impenetrable.” And then, to prove his point, he would sprint across the boardroom and throw his body at the window with all his might.
Of course, the glass would do as it was supposed to do and remain impenetrable. Some students would scream, all would be shocked, none would be impressed.
Until, of course, the day the glass popped out of its frame like an ice cube coming out of a perfectly twisted tray.
The students who were there to witness the lawyer’s last party trick claimed that he travelled an incredible distance out of the building before gravity kicked in and did the inevitable. The few young lawyers who had been raised on vintage Looney Tunes cartoons commented that they’d been reminded very much of Wile E. Coyote.
Luckily, neither he nor the impenetrable glass landed on a pedestrian twenty-four storeys below. And nobody threw an anvil.
The passing of this man was reported all over the world. Not because he was a good man, not because he was a good lawyer—which he most certainly might have been—but because he died a comedy death.
People shouldn’t find that kind of thing funny, but they do. For example, who among us doesn’t enjoy it when an exotic pet owner is mauled by his own pet?
It happens. In 2010, the chairman of the Canadian Exotic Animal Owners’ Association was mauled to death by his pet tiger. The tiger he kept as a pet in much the same way some of us have chihuahuas or goldfish.
There’s the test of a news anchor’s professionalism: report that with a straight face.
And you know what they say: once a tiger gets used to the taste of a member of an exotic pet-owners’ association, they never go back.
As luck would have it I was wearing a microphone in the Train of Death—something I had momentarily forgotten. It came in handy because it was recording every word coming out of my mouth. And those words were being transmitted to the headphones worn by camera operator Don Spence.
Don knows me very well. And he knows there is no scenario where I would start swearing while he was recording. This isn’t because I’m morally above such behaviour; it’s just that when you have a TV show that airs in prime time at eight o’ clock, swearing is not allowed.
So, when Don heard what was coming out of my mouth, he knew I was in trouble. A man of few words, he turned to John Marshall and said, “I think he’s about to die.” And then, being a professional, he continued to shoot video of my car careening out of control.
Johnny was holding a walkie-talkie into which he yelled, “Abort!” Immediately, some flag person on the track waved a flag that told the lead car to lay off the gas, which he did. And just like that we came to a peaceful gradual stop. It was a miracle I was dry.
And as my heart slowly returned to normal, I swore to myself, No more “host in peril.”
The next day, I would be seeing producer Tom Stanley early in the morning.
To quote his LinkedIn profile, Tom’s job was to “conceive, plan and produce weekly cross-Canada trip segments for RMR.” He also coordinated all research, fact checking and rights clearances.
In a nutshell, it was his job to make sure I had two places to go every week. He made it happen.
And I was going to deliver some news that would make his job a lot harder. I was going tell him that the host in peril angle had become exhausted.
Unfortunately, the next day when I went into the office, I never even had a chance to say hello before Tom said, “You’re going to Ottawa.”
“When?” I asked.
“In a few hours. You have a shoot early tomorrow morning.”
I love shooting in Ottawa. Ottawa is my town. It’s where I plied my trade for almost a decade, interviewing all manner of living prime ministers and somewhat-alive cabinet ministers.
“Ottawa is great,” I said. “Who am I talking to?”
“A police sergeant,” he said. “He trains a SWAT team.”
“That sounds pretty good,” I said.
Tom carried on. “It’s cool. They teach rappelling, they have a mock-up of a hostage house where they run exercises, they have a bomb disposal unit and very cool toys.”
And then he added, “The cop in charge is really looking forward to meeting you.”
“That’s great.”
“And,” Tom said, “he’s offered to taser you, for real.”
Silence.
Tom added, “His idea, not mine.”
Silence.
Then I said, “Tom…I’m not being tasered on TV.”
Tom said, “I don’t blame you; nobody has done it before.”
Nobody had done it before. Well, that’s like saying, “Do you want to be the first man on the moon or the second?”
At that point John stuck his head in the door and said, “The Train of Death footage is hysterical.” He gave us a solid thumbs-up.
And sadly, that’s all I needed to hear. I suddenly forgot how afraid I was in that hellscape of a racetrack and I completely forgot what I was going to say to Tom.
Train of Death was a winner and Ottawa SWAT would be too.
Two hours later I was on the plane with a printout of a Wikipedia entry on my lap.
It began: “A taser is an electroshock weapon that fires two small barbed darts intended to puncture the skin and remain attached to the target…”
Advice to the reader. If you are ever told, “Stop or I will taser you,” it’s best to stop.
Our shoot with the Ottawa police was busy and jam-packed. There was no shortage of action. Just as Tom promised, there were lots of cool toys.
The shooting day had gone so well, and we had so much material that John was completely sincere when he said, “We have more than enough stuff for a piece. I’d bail on the taser if I was you.” It was tempting. And I knew nobody would mind. In fact, I was the only one who was advocating for the bit. Gerald told me to pass, as did Tom. But at this point I was all in. I had interviewed lots of young police officers that day, and they all were psyched that I was going to do it. They had all done it as part of their training.
I wasn’t giving in to peer pressure. I just wanted to make some great TV.
“Nope, let’s do it,” I said, and we went to the gym where the officer who had kindly volunteered to shoot me was setting up.
In my briefing, I learned a few salient facts: The farther apart the two small darts hit your body, the more painful the taser will be. And everybody falls over. That’s why there were crash mats.
Legend had it that some young cop had stayed on his feet for five seconds. Hearing that, I made a simple decision: I was going to beat the record. Success at this, I was convinced, would simply come down to mind over matter. I didn’t care how much it hurt, I was going to stay on my feet. It would be epic. I could do it. I was never more convinced of anything.
I stood where I was told to stand. Don started rolling. I psyched myself up. I had interviewed boxing legend George Chuvalo and he’d told me that when he was in the ring with Muhammad Ali, he told himself over and over again that he would not go down. He said to me, “No matter what happened, no matter how hard he hit me, I knew it didn’t matter, because I’m not goin’ down.”
And he didn’t go down. He lasted twelve rounds with Ali and didn’t hit the mat. After the fight, Ali went to hospital and Chuvalo took his wife dancing.
I channelled the champ. I was not goin’ down. I also channelled Luke Skywalker—I was summoning the force. I’m not goin’ down.
And then I heard the click. The taser became engaged.
I remember distinctly the barbs piercing my skin. One tiny barb attached itself at the very base of my spine; the other one got me in the back of the neck, above my collar. Good lord, I thought, could two barbs get farther apart on the human body?
I’m not goin’ down.
And then everything was just a blur.
And I broke the record. That is, if there is a record for hitting the floor the fastest and the hardest. Whatever a nanosecond is, I wasn’t on my feet for one.
It was completely insane. The pain racked every part of my body. Of course it did. What was I thinking? And the pain went on forever. I tried to remain calm, told myself it would be over soon, but it wasn’t. It went on and on. Clearly, there had been a mistake. I was way past seven seconds. I passed fifteen seconds, and then thirty.
The taser gun is supposed to stop automatically, but obviously it was malfunctioning. They couldn’t get it to stop. Why weren’t John or Don stepping forward to pull the wires out of me? How could this still be going on? Nobody has ever been tasered for this long.
And then it ended. And there was nothing. That was the weirdest thing. I stood up as easily as if I were getting off the couch. There was no pain, no residual nerves. I wasn’t shaking. There was no adrenalin rush.
“How long did that fire for?” I asked.
“Seven seconds,” said Don.
“Seemed longer,” I said. “How’s the footage?”
“Boy, you went down fast,” said Don.
Now that it was over, I was oddly elated. Elated that it was over, but also that I had gone through with it. I had committed to the bit. I knew I had done something very few people would be prepared to do.
And I knew we had a really good piece of TV.
What I didn’t know was that at just about the same time as I was tasered in that gym, another man was being tasered. This fellow wasn’t shooting a TV show. He got off a flight at Vancouver International Airport and allegedly caused a disturbance in the baggage area. He didn’t speak English, he was disoriented, nobody knew what he was saying. And he didn’t know what was being said when he was told to stop.
Why nobody knows, but he was tasered. He died instantly.
This, as they say, changed everything.
Were tasers safe? Everything up to that point had indicated they were. Now, not so much.
To air the segment would have been in bad taste. This wasn’t “host in peril”; this was “host with a death wish,” which I was not. We did not want to be part of the national conversation that was suddenly happening about tasers. So we decided to wait a week and see how things played out. Give the story enough time to evolve, we thought. Within a week there would be autopsy results and we figured we would find out the man had overdosed on drugs or had a bad heart, or perhaps was in anaphylactic shock from some seafood. There would be some rational reason as to why he died.
And, as predicted, after a week all was revealed. There were no drugs, no heart condition, no allergic reaction to food. He was a confused man who died from a taser.
We decided to pull the bit. The segment never aired.
I was tasered for nothing.
People sometimes ask me if my show was simply me working through my personal bucket list week after week. “Not at all,” I say. “I was tasered on the show, and believe me, that was not on my bucket list.
“But the guy who tasered me? It was on his.”