Publish date: 2024-04-30

Tara Slone settled into a chair near the window of her favourite west-end Toronto coffee shop, looking onto Jane Street through a thicket of “Star Wars” dolls. She placed her cup at the foot of a Chewbacca, who was wearing a red knit cap with a reindeer lapel pinned to the side.

“They have fun stuff,” she said with a smile.

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She is enrolled in the customer loyalty points program — collected by name, and not by card — and is fond of the eclectic décor and ample outdoor seating on sunny days. It was going to be one of her final visits of the summer, because she was packing up her home and planning to move away for a month.

Slone and her 12-year-old daughter, Audrey, are bound for California, where Slone’s boyfriend, former NHL defenceman Dan Boyle, has settled in retirement. The planning beyond that trip is, for now, much less certain.

When Sportsnet confirmed it was not renewing “Hometown Hockey” for another season this fall, Slone lost a job she had held for a decade. Ron MacLean, her co-host, is staying with the network as a host on “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Slone is moving on.

“Let’s face it: I think we all saw this coming,” she said. “I had a very strong inkling that this was Hometown Hockey’s last year, so I have been thinking a lot about what’s next for me.”

There had been rumours, she said.

“But no matter how much guessing and wondering we were all doing, when you hear it definitively, it’s painful,” she said. “It’s the end of an era that’s meant so much in all of our lives.”

In a statement provided to The Athletic last month, Sportsnet said “Hometown Hockey” was “retiring from the road” after making 160 stops across Canada. The show launched as programming for Sunday night, but moved to Monday. (Sportsnet will keep its national NHL broadcast slot on Monday, but has not provided details on how the space might look this fall.)

Slone has already had a number of careers. She has worked as an actor, a morning television host and a rock star, both as lead singer of the Canadian band Joydrop and also as a contestant on the CBS reality series “Rock Star: INXS.”

She said hosting “Hometown Hockey” was the longest she had ever held one job.

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“I wasn’t prepared for the kind of grief that I would feel,” she said. “A lot of us had been there since the very beginning. It was a really collaborative effort. It meant a lot to a lot of people.”

Rogers Communications Inc., which owns Sportsnet, is paying $5.232 billion to the NHL to serve as the league’s exclusive national rightsholder in Canada. It was the most expensive rights deal ever signed by a Canadian broadcaster, and it runs through the 2025-26 season.

Slone did not shy away from criticism of the league, or of the culture around the game. Last November, days after TSN broadcast a wrenching interview with reporter Rick Westhead and Kyle Beach, Slone used her platform on “Hometown Hockey” to criticize what she viewed as the game’s “culture of silence,” and arguing “anybody who thinks that this culture is not deeply broken is wrong.”

Two years ago, San Jose Sharks forward Logan Couture wrote on Twitter he was “sucker punched” on a visit to Toronto while discussing Donald Trump and the Republican Party. After Slone interacted with a tweet he viewed as critical, Couture wrote: “Last time I do anything for Sportsnet.”

“I’m not trying to be a shit-disturber just for the sake of being a shit-disturber,” said Slone. “I’m not trying to be incendiary just because. I’m talking about things that I think aren’t talked about enough, and I have the privilege and the platform to do so.”

The Blackhawks betrayed Kyle Beach, a survivor of sexual assault, in 2010.

Logan Mailloux, who distributed a sexual photo without consent, was drafted by the Habs in the first round in 2021.

In case anyone thinks the NHL’s priorities have changed, they have not.

— Tara Slone (@TaraSlone) October 28, 2021

She nodded: “I’ve always known that some of what I say and do can alienate people and could get me in trouble.”

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Slone remains active on Twitter.

“Especially right now, it’s just such a divided world,” she said. “If you try to be inclusive, then you’re called ‘woke’ by half the population, and they think you’re bullshit and they want you to shut up. And they don’t want that in their hockey — they don’t want sports and politics to mix.

“At the same time, sports is more political than ever. The world is more political than ever. The world is more divided than ever.”

She said she reads her mentions, but not all the time. She laughed: “If I did, I’d be in the fetal position.”

“Sometimes, they get me,” she said. “Sometimes they’re so pointed. They’re not all idiots, the people who don’t agree with me. And so, yeah, sometimes they hit me where it hurts. It’s hard, but you just have to take a deep breath and realize, ‘These are not my people,’ and move on.”

As she prepares to move on from Sportsnet, Slone said she is not sure where she will land. She would like to stay in sports, and is open to opportunities in broadcasting. She said she has ideas, and that she has already received a few calls.

“The appealing thing to me about where I am now, it’s that I look forward to being able to diversify,” she said. “And I look forward to being able to take on multiple projects that I enjoy and feel passionate about.”

In the near term, though, she was trying to tame the chaos. Slone was still in the process of clearing out the house she was renting in Toronto. Between work and all of the pandemic-related obstacles, she said she and Boyle had never been able to spend more than two weeks together at a time.

They had been navigating a long-distance relationship for more than two years. And while Slone is not sure where her career might lead her next, she was also not in a rush to liquidate her loyalty points with Golden Gecko Coffee, the eclectic shop on Jane Street.

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She smiled as she was getting up to leave: “It doesn’t mean I’m not coming back.”

(Photo of Slone, in 2015: Denise Truscello / WireImage via Getty Images)

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