Catching up with Kathryn Humphreys, the Citytv reporter who had fun with Toronto sports

While watching the Maple Leafs practise on a sleepy, slow-news day between games, Citytv reporter Kathryn Humphreys was overcome by two thoughts.

One: “What the f— am I going to talk about today?”

Two: “Like, holy s—.”

It was during the 2008-09 season, while the franchise fumbled toward another spring without a playoff appearance. Humphreys was an anchor and field reporter known for being creative with her stories, but there was not much creative energy flowing through the building that day.

And then she saw Brad May, the veteran forward.

“I’m looking and I’m like, ‘Look at the size of his helmet, that is a massive helmet,’” she said.

Humphreys had just been to IKEA. She rifled through her purse and saw she still had one of the store’s disposable tape measures. A story idea began to crystallize: “I’m going to measure that dude’s head.”

It measured two feet. May was laughing — “that’s a two-foot head!” — and soon, other Leafs players were walking over, asking for their own measurements. Even Ron Wilson, the caustic head coach, got in on the story when Humphreys relayed her statistical findings.

“He made a joke about the fact that, when Brad was on the bench, he had difficulty seeing the play: ‘I can’t follow the play when he’s on the bench,’” she said, smiling. “He totally played along.”

Humphreys laughed. She was sitting by the window in a trendy east-end Toronto coffee shop during a recent workday. She left Citytv — and the industry — after her twin sons were born via a surrogate, in 2014, and she has no desire to return to television.

It would take too much time away from family, she said, and with all the changes to the sports media landscape over the last decade, she wondered if she would have the same freedom in reporting. Over her 18 years at City, she said she was never told what stories she could or could not tell.

Sometimes, when the news of the day demanded, Humphreys would file a straight report. Other times, she might offer Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell a friendship bracelet made of candy wrappers. There was another time she finished a report while riding a borrowed scooter at the Blue Jays spring training complex in Dunedin, Fla.

Humphreys might dance on the field with a local girls soccer team, or compete in roller derby or show the Leafs what the opposing team had written as a scouting report on its dry-erase board at Air Canada Centre, just to see what happened.

She was not the only local television personality who tried to inject levity into Toronto sports — Gerry Dee and Cabral Richards were also on the air — but she was there more consistently.

“I wanted to show people who these athletes were as human beings,” she said. “And if they were dicks, it’s gonna be revealed that they’re dicks. And if they’re really funny and thoughtful people, they’re gonna show that.”

One season, she wanted to know why then-Leafs forward Phil Kessel seemed so uncomfortable speaking with the media in Toronto. (Her story opens with a clip of Kessel speaking, monotone, in an earlier scrum, then cuts back to Humphreys. “A hat trick?” she asks the camera incredulously. “He’s talking like his cat died.”)

“And the hilarious part is that Phil Kessel wouldn’t talk about it,” she said, laughing in the coffee shop. “I loved that stuff. I didn’t find it hard. I really enjoyed it.”

She asked teammates to talk about why Kessel did not enjoy talking. Some of them had fun with it.

“That was my whole philosophy,” said Humphreys. “I don’t want to ask you about the g–d— power-play.”

Humphreys knew all about the power-play, and about life around the rink. Her grandfather had owned the Oshawa Generals, before the franchise moved to her father. Her parents did not hire babysitters on game nights, instead allowing their three daughters to run around the junior hockey rink.

Sometimes, when billets were in short supply, players would move in with the owner’s family. When she was little, she remembers regarding some of the players like babysitters. She laughed and said the situation evolved as she and her sisters got older. (“Three teenaged daughters in the house,” she said. “It wasn’t a tough decision for mom and dad to make, to no longer accept billets.”)

Eric Lindros played with the Generals and, in 2005, he signed as a free agent with the Leafs. At some point that season, Barbara Humphreys was sifting through old photographs and found one taken years earlier, of a much younger Lindros wearing her husband’s ancient leather hockey helmet.

It looked funny on his head. Barbara gave it to her daughter, and Kathryn dutifully showed it around the Leafs dressing room for a story.

“The players on the team, other than Eric, loved it,” said Humphreys. “He was horrified.”

Some athletes were more willing to poke fun at themselves on camera than others.

“There were some guys you were never going to disarm,” she said. “But I found that amusing, as well. Like, Ed Belfour. … When you ask him the ridiculous questions, you got a really angry response.

“I found that amusing, and I would put that on air. So it worked either way for me.”

Humphreys was also always willing to poke fun at herself. Once, for a story about Colby Armstrong and his background in figure skating, she arrived for practice in full uniform.

“I wore a g–d— figure skating outfit into the locker room, which I was so self-conscious about,” she said. “But I’m like, ‘Humphreys, you’re 100 per cent in or you’re out. Just do it.’”

She can still remember the reaction from Armstrong.

“He just shook his head,” she said. “He’s like, ‘Holy s—, here she comes.’”

Humphreys was 26 years old when she started at Citytv. She said she never hired an agent because she never had much interest in moving away from home. But the offers still arrived, from Sportsnet, from “Hockey Night in Canada,” and from several markets in the United States.

She once flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with officials from Fox but had an epiphany standing on the balcony of her hotel room. As she surveyed the city below, she realized she wanted to go home.

“Things were more important to me than chasing the almighty buck,” she said. “And also: Would I be guaranteed those same freedoms that I was guaranteed at City? I don’t think so. You know, ‘Can you wear this? Can you lose a few pounds? Can you say this? You can’t say that.’”

Humphreys said she had the freedom to have fun.

“I heard the other reporters on their phones, talking about what they weren’t allowed to do,” she said. “And there were producers saying, ‘Are you gonna wear that sweater?’ I was like, ‘Not for me.’ I barely got a call in my 18 years. They never interfered. Ever.”

(Photo: Screenshot from Citytv)