Jay Onrait: The best way to do anything is repetition
A conversation with the Canadian television personality
Welcome to Human Pursuits, the column that features need-to-know names and stories in media and other creative spaces. Today, a conversation with sportscaster Jay Onrait.
Jay Onrait casts a long shadow.
Sure, he’s tall. Six-foot-six, according to the internet. A veritable giant compared to most of his Canadian countrymen.
But it’s more than that. He’s got the technical abilities (writing, interviewing, performing). He’s got the intangibles (comedic timing, occasional facial hair).
In other words, he’s got game.
Born in Calgary, Jay spent time in southern and northern Alberta until Toronto’s siren song became too loud to ignore. In the mid-90s, he switched paths, abandoning his plans to become a pharmacist to pursue a career in sports broadcasting.
What followed is the stuff of Canadian legend. Stops in Saskatoon and Winnipeg before returning to The Big Smoke to host his own show on the NHL Network.
His biggest break came in 2003, when he was tapped to host SportsCentre on TSN, first with Jennifer Hedger and then, more famously, Dan O’Toole. Together, they injected some much-needed levity into the sports highlight show, using their Abbott and Costello sensibilities to send the genre careening into hilarious new directions.
What followed was several decades’ worth of bits, silliness, and insights. In 2017, Onrait returned to TSN after a stint working in the U.S., and he still hosts his own show, SC with Jay Onrait.
And so, we had much to discuss.
Our edited and condensed conversation touched on Jay’s commute to work, Toronto pizza, the evolution of sports highlight shows, the manosphere, definitions of success, why he doesn’t have time for professional pickleball, and more.
ES: I notice you often do interviews from your car. Where am I reaching you right now?
JO: I am in my car, heading from my home in downtown Toronto to work, which is in downtown Scarborough. I make this commute every single night. It’s not bad. I get to rip through the city. It’s a better drive now than in the middle of January.
ES: Are we on the 401?
JO: I zip through beautiful Oakwood Village up to the 401, and that takes me right to Scarborough, where the TSN campus has been for about 25 years.
ES: I want to talk about TSN and your storied career, but first: what’s your go-to Toronto pizza slice?
JO: Easy — Pizzeria Badiali. In my humble opinion, it changed pizza in the city forever. When I moved to Toronto in 1994, I thought it was such a great city, but I was shocked — simply shocked! — at how bad the pizza was. For decades, it didn’t improve that much. My friend Ryan Baddeley opened this pizzeria around the time of the pandemic, and it’s been a game changer. You’ll probably have to wait in line for it if you go, but I promise it’s worth it.
ES: What’s your order over there?
JO: I’m a fan of the vodka pie, but you cannot go wrong with any of their slices.
ES: How do you feel about Pizza Pizza encroaching into Western Canada? For so long, I only associated it with Ontario, but now there are several in Vancouver.
JO: It’s the Panago of the east. Laughs.
ES: The Panagopolis, you might say.
JO: I’m sure a wonderful family owns Pizza Pizza, but it’s not amazing. Though I will say my kids love it, so what do I know?
ES: You mentioned the TSN campus has been in Scarborough for decades, and you yourself have been with the company quite a long time. How has the sports highlight show changed since you entered the business? Are the clips shorter? Or is the approach more or less the same as it was in the 80s?
PO: It hasn’t changed in terms of how we put it together. The concept is the same. What has changed, though, is the advent of the internet, and whether a show that existed in the 1980s would be viable now. A show like Sports Page was wall-to-wall highlights. We will never be that show. We mix in a lot more interviews, with the idea being that people can get highlights anywhere, not just from us.
ES: Are the interviews seen as a “value-add” in that case? Knowing that I could watch highlights whenever on TikTok or Bleacher Report?
JO: Yeah, but I don’t think of it that way. I think I’m in the minority, but my philosophy is, if the audience is watching us, they want what we’ve traditionally been delivering, which is highlights.
I also don’t think it’s right to see the interviews as a “value-add”. The interviews allow us to do two things. They make it so the show isn’t just highlights, and we can mix it up a little bit. But, more importantly, we can share those interviews on social and share them on YouTube, which we can’t necessarily do with highlights.
ES: Oh, that makes sense.
PO: Different rights designations apply online as opposed to terrestrial broadcast. We can’t take a collection of Vancouver Canucks highlights, for example, and throw it on social, but we can do that with interviews and original content. The goal is to make sure that we’re available across mediums, since there are so many spaces and ways for people to watch any given game.
ES: What interests you as an interviewer? Do you have a strategy or something you’re trying to accomplish?
PO: It depends on the person I’m chatting with. For instance, today I’m interviewing the Canadian men's national soccer team coach Jesse Marsch. That will be more straightforward, looking at the team’s program and the 2026 World Cup. With our regular TSN analysts, though, my main goal is to help them shine, you know? I want to set them up to do the best possible job, while also making it as casual as possible. I want the interviews to feel like a conversation.
The best way to do that — the best way to do anything in our business — is repetition. Interviewing as much and as often as I possibly can. Fortunately, I get to interview a lot of the same people over and over. I get to learn the cadence of their personality, the rhythm of their speech, and other information that helps me help them succeed.
ES: So you see it as an ensemble, almost.
PO: For sure. One of the main goals is to showcase all the different talent at TSN, to demonstrate how good everyone is, and how well everyone gets along. People ask me: Is there anyone you don't like at work? I sincerely like everybody. I want everybody to succeed. I want the audience to see our talent more because I don’t feel like viewers necessarily get to see everybody enough.
ES: Something I’ve always respected about your show is that, while it certainly appeals to men, it doesn’t seem to carry the baggage or values of things that we now refer to as the manosphere. What do you think of the current state of men in media? Does it make you sad or frustrate you at all to see how men are using these platforms?
JO: It doesn’t make me mad, but only because I don’t pay attention to it. Again, I’m probably in the minority here, but it doesn’t affect me because it seems so obvious what people are going for. It’s not just talking about Barstool Sports, I’m talking about Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless and the trolls of the world, whose only goal is to get clicks and incite engagement. We are not above that, either; we share stuff that is specifically intended to spark engagement.
From our perspective, politics will never enter SC with Jay Onrait’s lexicon. To me, it’s a massive turn-off when sportspeople get political. Not that they don’t have a right to do it, everyone has the right to feel how they feel, but it’s not my thing. I don’t love bringing it into a workspace that’s supposed to be about entertainment and sports. I’ll never do that.
As far as the misogynist vibe of places like Barstool and stuff goes, the thing that bothers me the most, and the thing that bothers me about the trolls I mentioned, is that the only thing that feeds them is the engagement. If people would just stop paying attention, it would be their kryptonite. People allow themselves to be sucked in. And it’s not just with sports. It’s with everything. It’s unfortunate because the solution to the problem is super easy. Just stop following and stop paying attention.
If people would just stop paying attention [to the trolls], it would be their kryptonite.
ES: When I’m not writing this newsletter, I work in TV news, so I know a bit about on-air performance. Your approach seems to require an open heart, and I wonder if it’s ever difficult for you to maintain that goofiness or silliness, or if it’s just second nature now because you’ve had years of positive feedback.
JO: People often think I came out of the womb like this, ready to express myself on TV. That’s absolutely not true. Like everyone else in the business, I was nervous and unsure. I was completely lacking self-confidence. The first year of my career, I was as boring a sports anchor as you could find. Laughs. I was capable. But my personality was hardly coming out. It was okay, though, because deep down I knew that it was more important for me to get the reps in and to be a good broadcaster first. I knew that would eventually allow my personality to come out.
When Dan and I’s show started taking off, we had already worked together for a few years. We’d made the boring show. We were comfortable enough to show more of our personalities on air.
ES: You’ve told other interviewers that you had a bit of a killer instinct when you were younger and were quite competitive. Do you still put a lot of pressure on yourself?
JO: I’ve relaxed a lot. I used to be way too hard on myself. Sometimes I still am. That’s just my personality. It’s got nothing to do with the business. I’d be the same if I were a doctor or a lawyer, or whatever.
There’s this line of thinking where, if you are a person who has a bit of an edge, you worry you will lose something if you relax, or that your presentation will suffer. It’s not true. Laughs. That’s a fallacy that allows shitty people to continue behaving shitty. It took me a long time to come to grips with that.
I have high standards for myself and super high standards for the show. That’s not always great, it can manifest in how you treat people and yourself. It’s important that I get along with my crew, and I absolutely do. They're one of the best crews I’ve ever worked with. I’m also at a stage of my life where people are coming to work for me and already feel like they know me from TV, and I try to be conscious of that in my day-to-day.
ES: What does success look like for you at this point, then?
JO: This week has already been good. We had a great show yesterday.
I always tell people that, growing up, my goal was to be on TSN’s SportsDesk. That was my ultimate dream. I achieved it at 27, in 2002. In a weird way, everything after has been gravy. I’ve been fortunate to try a bunch of different things and have them go well. There’s no pressure after that. I didn’t have aspirations to do anything else.
As the model of what we do starts to go away, I want to enjoy the end of this run. I have many colleagues from 10, 20, and 30 years ago who would like to be in the business, and aren’t because it’s shrinking. So I constantly remind myself how lucky I am to be here, to have my own show, to do what I want to do, and to be able to make a living at it. I don’t take it for granted.
ES: Would you ever consider experimenting with new media or starting an independent production company?
JO: I mean, we had a super successful podcast. And that was before podcasts took off. I’ve done a lot of the things people are doing now. I don’t think it would be very hard to jump back in.
ES: So, never say never?
JO: I’ve never understood broadcasters who were married to one specific company or one specific network. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s narrow-minded, and it’s also a massive disadvantage from a career perspective because it closes so many potential doors. I’ve always been open about the fact that I’m willing to work for anyone, and I’m willing to go outside of sports. I like TV, it’s my first love. As long as I can keep doing that, I’ll be happy.
ES: Maybe this is a stupid question, but what excites you about sports at this point? You’ve spent so much time talking and thinking about it.
PO: I’m excited by all the young talent coming into the leagues. Look at the WNBA with Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers coming in. For years, that league struggled to gain traction, and suddenly two players, who happen to be white — take from that what you will and make whatever argument you want — have gotten a ton of attention. It can change so fast. We went from never showing the WNBA to showing it anytime Paige is playing or any of the Canadian women are playing. It’s great.
I don’t have bandwidth for anything to do with pickleball in a professional way whatsoever. Zero.
Same thing with tennis and soccer. We’ve got Alphonso Davies starting for Bayern Munich… All these Canadians are doing great on the world stage in sports that we were traditionally not good at. It’s the young talent like that which keeps leagues fresh. And it’s weirdly reassuring, too. Canada is doing well at the sports we’ve historically been associated with, but we’re also developing new talent in new games that we can excel at.
ES: We saw that at the 2024 Summer Olympics, too. That hammer thrower from B.C., Ethan Katzberg, was fun to watch.
PO: He was great, right? His look and everything. That’s why the Olympics will always be my favorite sporting event. No matter how cynical you are about performance-enhancing drugs and how athletes get into the games, at the end of the day, it still feels like the biggest, most level playing field and the most global of the events. You know Phil Wizard, the break dancer? He’s a gold medalist! I would’ve never imagined that growing up.
ES: Are you into newer sports like F1, pickleball, or Banana Ball?
PO: No. Laughs. This is harsh, but I feel like pickleball is the sport of baby boomers and now older Gen Xers. It’s a great sport for them, but I’m not watching Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras play pickleball or paddle tennis. I’m just not doing it. I’m also not watching any 3-on-3 basketball leagues or arena football. I’ve got enough bandwidth for one league in every sport. I’ll watch the NFL but not the UFL, for example. I don’t have bandwidth for anything to do with pickleball in a professional way whatsoever. Zero. It’s great that people can play it to a ripe old age; we need sports like that. But to try and make it a pro thing?
You mentioned F1. TSN has had the rights to broadcast F1 pretty much since its inception, and in the 80s, we used to joke that you could show the races at 2 A.M. and it would always get the same viewership every time. The same 450,000 F1 fans across Canada would watch it. It would never be higher than that or lower. It was the same year after year. From a business perspective, it’s great because it’s always going to deliver. You can assure advertisers that half a million people will see their stuff.
When Formula 1: Drive to Survive took off, I didn’t see it coming. But I feel like it’s coming back down to earth. The bump was significant, but at the end of the day, you have to love the sport, and there aren’t that many people who can dedicate 4 hours of their Sunday to it.
ES: We’re slightly over time, but I need to ask: you and your family famously love B.C.’s Okanagan, and I wonder which you prefer more, Okanagan peaches, or Okanagan cherries?
PO: Man, this is my favourite question. I’ve been going to the Okanagan for 45 years — almost every summer.
ES: As any good Albertan does.
PO: Exactly. It’s every Albertan’s dream location. It’s got the hot weather and the lake, but you can also ski in the winter. Anyways! I think I have to go with cherries. Cherries in the Okanagan will always remind me of my childhood. Going to Penticton and Okanagan Hockey School and doing wall sits in 30-degree heat. I was just waiting till it was over so I could get a handful of cherries.
Jay Onrait is a Canadian TV personality and host of SC with Jay Onrait. He lives in Toronto.