2009 Dave Shoalts & Paul Waldie

Dave Shoalts & Paul Waldie
By Tim Wharnsby

When David Shoalts first began to write on the dire financial situation the Phoenix Coyotes were engrossed in last fall, the NHL club and commissioner Gary Bettman downplayed the stories emanating from north of the border. But the veteran Globe and Mail hockey columnist, along with the Globe’s championed Report of Business reporter Paul Waldie, kept unearthing the facts that demonstrated the Coyotes financial woes should be taken seriously.

Waldie & Shoalts

Waldie & Shoalts

The Coyotes soap opera went on and on. But Waldie and Shoalts kept sifting through the mounds of fact and fiction to present the pertinent truth through their own enterprise. “This story was, in turn, the most exhilarating, exasperating and, when the lawyers were particularly turgid in their brief writing, boring I have ever covered,” said the colourful Shoalts. “But I also knew it was one of the biggest, so somehow you kept going through the guilt of missing another family dinner because some lawyer thought it was a great idea to file a court document at 7 o’clock at night.”

Shoalts and Waldie proved to be quite a Woodward and Bernstein team. Even when other media outlets finally decided to chase the story, the Globe tandem remained out front.”Working with Paul Waldie was a real pleasure,” Shoalts said. “He was unfailingly helpful, especially in volunteering to keep an eye on the court filings on a Friday night, and his sharp eye and experience at reading those filings kept me from making too many mistakes.”

To readers of the ROB section, Waldie has been part of their daily diet for years. The award-winning Waldie rejoined The Globe and Mail earlier this decade after a stint as the national editor of the National Post.

He has won two national newspaper awards for business coverage and authored a best-selling biography of the McCain family, entitled A House Divided, a profile of Canada’s McCain family.

With Globe colleagues Janet McFarland and John Stackhouse, Waldie won a national newspaper award in 1998 for ground-breaking investigative work on the Bre-X scandal.

Shoalts has been entertaining readers at the Globe since 1984 after stints at the Calgary Herald and Toronto Sun. In 1986, he was transferred to the business side of reporting before returning to the sports section as the CFL reporter and then four years later switching to hockey.

He has covered the Toronto Maple Leafs and the NHL ever since and became a hockey columnist in 2003. Among his highlights was covering the men’s and women’s gold-medal hockey games at the 2002 Winter Olympics. He also is the author of a book of humour, Tales From The Toronto Maple Leafs, and co-author with retired Globe columnist William Houston of Greed and Glory, The Fall of Hockey Czar Alan Eagleson.