Mayor Rob Ford pauses while participating in a mayoral debate in Toronto on Tuesday, July 15, 2014. Ford has been diagnosed with a tumour after seeking treatment for "unbearable'' abdominal pain. Results of a biopsy conducted Thursday will not be available until next week. Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese TORONTO — My very favourite of the many Rob Ford videos is one that not many people appear to have seen, and is certainly not among his most notorious.
This was just before Christmas of 2013, by which time Ford had admitted to smoking crack during a drunken stupor and his personal failures were already beyond well documented.
At the West Toronto Church of God in the north end of the city, they were having a grand ceremony to kick off an expansion project. They had invited Ford.
And there, at the front of the church, the only white face in the crowd, with the music rocking (if church had been like this when I was a kid, I would be deeply religious) and people raising their arms to Jesus and shouting hallelujah, was the Toronto mayor, having a grand old time.
Bopping along, a beatific smile on his face, and occasionally clapping, he was truly in his element: The happy party guy of whom all that was expected was that he’d show up and be himself, which he did.
I try to remember that video every time his own lunatic antics (Mike Tyson? Yes, who doesn’t want his endorsement?) or the virulent anti-Rob Ford forces threaten to strip away all the kindness in my heart, but I remember it particularly now, as the mayor is in hospital with a tumour, or as his new physician, Dr. Zane Cohen at Mount Sinai Hospital prefers to call it, “a mass,” in his abdomen.
I even watched the video again Thursday, and it was as wonderful as I thought. He reminds me very much of my great friend Moose, who like the mayor is a big man, but graceful and lovely on his feet.
The tumour is at this writing still very much a stranger — it has been biopsied, but the results will take about a week, and if necessary staged, before a treatment plan is worked up — but soon enough, Ford surely will be referring to it as “my tumour” or, if God forbid he’s unlucky, as “my cancer.” Serious illness is the great leveller, and most of us seem to need to friend the thing to make it smaller or lighter, if only in our heads.
Ford has been a magnet for trouble in his first term in office, and as everyone knows, his many wounds have been for the most part self-inflicted. He wasn’t forced into those drunken stupors, for instance, where among other legendary exploits he tried crack; he chose his bad companions; he was deceitful to the electorate for as long as he could get away with it; no one made him respond to an allegation, contained in court documents, that he once said he wanted to perform oral sex upon a former aide with this jaw-dropping line — “I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.”
Still and all, before he got sick this week, he was running a strong second — ahead of Olivia Chow, behind John Tory — in the mayoralty race. How is that even possible, given all that’s happened? I don’t pretend to understand it, but it seems clear that if the press forgot that humanity, and the deeply flawed person, have their charms, a good many of the voters apparently haven’t.
(Similarly, if reporters have abandoned their manners with Ford, Dr. Cohen whipped them into shape Thursday night, shushing them and forcing upon them an old familiar order.)
I was in a cab Tuesday night. The driver was a gorgeous African man of a certain age. We chatted a bit and then he asked, “What do you think of the mayoralty?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m voting for Mr. John Tory,” my former colleague on NewsTalk 1010 Radio. (I voted last time for Ford.) I asked the driver who he liked. He demurred, saying he lived north of the city. I asked who he’d vote for if he was a resident, and without hesitation, he said he’d vote for Ford.
I asked why, of course, and his answer didn’t make a lot of sense. He said he liked Ford’s “focus on the issues” (I thought the mayor rather lost his focus) and then he said something like, “He treats everyone the same, black, white, green, whatever.” I thought that was maybe closer to the truth.
Rob Ford is hardly an ordinary Joe — he’s rich, for one thing — but everyone knows a guy like him, an uncomplicated guy with big appetites who is fun to be around, and lots of us, like me, are in our own private worlds as profane, sometimes coarse, flawed, intemperate and even occasionally ungovernable as he has sometimes been.
There was a nice moment during that Board of Trade debate last week, which by most accounts Tory won.
It came during a discussion about a potential conflict-of-interest for Ford. Chow asked if he’d promise to put his assets, the Ford family firm Deco Labels, in a blind trust if he was re-elected.
Ford snorted that he had “zero” conflicts and that he was “a silent partner of Deco.”
“That would be a first,” said Tory, grinning, and Ford threw back his big head and roared. It was him at his most endearing.
He’ll be scared now; who wouldn’t be? But there is a remarkable amount of goodwill out there yet for him, and I hope he feels it, you know, just in case he doesn’t actually have enough at home.
cblatchford@postmedia.com/
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