Road to Glory: An Insider's Look at 16 Years of Blue Jay Baseball

Since earning his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1992, Andrew Thomson has taught Canadian history at several universities, most often at Wilfrid Laurier University. For the past 16 years, he has created and taught a wide range of Canadian history courses from the history of French Canada to Canadian business history. Dr. Thomson has written for The Dictionary of Canadian Biography and been a guest lecturer at Kitchener Public Library’s Ideas and Issues series. He has recently been an active instructor in the Lifelong Learning program at Wilfrid Laurier. Dr. Thomson is also the Academic Reviewer for the Business History section of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and also works with the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier.

Tom Cheek, the radio voice of the Toronto Blue Jays, has seen every game
the team has played. Road to Glory is his chronicle of the 16 years it
took the Jays to become world champions.

The book begins with Cheek’s memories of the early morning hours of
October 25, 1992, as he watched the Blue Jays hold on to a slender lead
and claim their first championship. Cheek sets the tone for the book
with an honest and critical appraisal of his own call of the game, and a
frank discussion of his emotions at the time. From the drama of that
game, he turns to his own origins in the radio business, the early days
of the Blue Jays, and the championship season.

Cheek is at his best when discussing the early Jays. He is frank (often
brutally so) about the abilities of the team, but he is also effective
in portraying the troubles the team faced, the conflicts (and strengths)
that developed in the years of losing, and the people who built the
team.

Road to Glory was written with the help of Howard Berger. At times, it
reads like the transcript of a tape-recorded monologue, perhaps because
Cheek’s voice is so familiar. This is a minor weakness, though, in a
book that is clearly the best examination to date of Blue Jays history.