Now that you’ve met Rob, you should experience those he surrounds himself with; beer cannot be served by one man alone. Hillary can have her village; it takes a crew to serve a stadium.

Meet Dave, a.k.a Dorian Gray

Born the son of a cobbler and an illiterate washerwoman, David Bartholomew Rowan entered this world in 1764, the result of his soldier-father returning to Annapolis Royal from the Seven Years War. Declining to be a fur trapper like his grandfather Lucius, David set out at the age of 10 to find Laura Secord and kill her for her delicious chocolates.

It was at the port of Halifax in 1774 where he was kidnapped by stevedores and put to work on a Belgian whaler. In his escape on April 19, 1775, David inadvertently started the American Revolution, because what Paul Revere thought was a British invasion was actually Dave signaling for help. Nonetheless, he stayed in his new country, eventually getting Mel Gibson’s farm in South Carolina.

He comes by his love of baseball naturally. Stranded by Lewis and Clark in St. Louis in 1804, Dave patiently waited until baseball was invented, and then chose the Cardinals as his team. However, upon deportation from St. Louis in 1904, for driving the car Fred Lorz used to win the marathon, he settled in Mexico, introducing the game to a group of peasant children in Laredo. His friendship with sportswriter Ernesto Carmona led the latter to create the Mexican League of Professional Baseball in 1925.

Returning to Canada in 1936 to be the first director of the newly founded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), he thought the life of a radio director would satisfy him. But he promptly returned to the US in 1939 as a CBC “correspondent” to cover the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.

In reality, David had been sent by PM Mackenzie King to lobby FDR on behalf of British PM Chamberlain to gauge US willingness to enter the oncoming World War. Dave skipped the meeting due to “heartburn”, a term later discovered in the autobiography of Vivien Leigh as code for “meeting her lover”; Britain never got their answer, and the rest is history.

A treasonous offence in the US, a lax Canadian justice system rewarded Dave with the ambassadorship to Australia. Upon arrival, he declared there to be “nothing in Australia worth having relations for”, summarily fleeing to India to fight alongside his croquet partner from his days as Dean of King’s College, Oxford, Bernard Montgomery.

His postwar biography is sketchy. Constant movements, the result of the media age, have forced him to maintain residences in many countries, should the FBI, Interpol or the Weekly World News find the true location of the portrait that bears his sins. [One of which sins was discovered in 1987 by the News, entitled “Girl Gives Birth to Vampire Baby!” Quis pater patris, David?] He works at Nat Bailey on weekends and all day games, giving him ample time to return to Peshawar to look for Osama.

That’s Dave Rowan: all man, immortal, and not taking your pennies.