There was a day — and no one can say surely which one — when two men met on an historic and groundbreaking day some five years ago. The City of Brandon — and indeed all of humanity — would never be the same.

When David Larkins moved his one-man show to the Wheat City in the spring of 2003, no one could have anticipated the sheer mountain-moving impact it would have on thousands of individuals. When that gigantic force of life teamed with a shaggy, young upstart named Jeremy Sawatzky, a legend was spawned.

A year of being unemployed from an industry that rewards sedentariness and social dysfunction nearly took Larkins out of the sports-writing game, but a fortuitous turn of events landed him at the Brandon Sun in March, 2003, where he has been a university and high school beat writer ever since.

Larkins — equal parts self-loathing and egomaniac — is a graduate of Brock University (1998) with a BA in Media Communications. During his time in St. Catharines, Ont., he worked as a sports reporter, sports editor and editor in chief of the Brock Press, the school’s student publication. He hosted a popular radio talk show called Kings of the Hill for five years and was the public address announcer for Brock Badgers basketball for six years. He has worked as a play-by-play man and colour commentator in the Niagara region and currently finds himself in a side gig with southwestern Manitoba’s WCG-TV. There he teams with Sawatzky to bring weekly broadcasts of Brandon Bobcats basketball and also serves as the play-by-play voice on BU volleyball broadcasts.

Currently a sports and news reporter with Brandon’s 880 CKLQ, Sawatzky’s penchant for the dramatic transcends his broadcasting style into his diva-like everyday life, a man who demands much from himself, but infinitely more from those around him.

A native of smalltown Altona, Man., Sawatzky took the tiny Pembina Valley ‘burg by storm, turning the populace on its ear before shipping off to Westman where he immediately began piercing ear drums with his trademark calls on WCG, the undisputed voice of BU hoops. For seven-plus years he has brought the Bobcats into the living rooms of Westman homes, (much to the chagrin of the unsuspecting public who weren’t expecting the players to actually set up shop in their living rooms) and continues his unrelenting self-promotion to this day as the brawn behind The Scrum.

He makes weekly requests that his green room at The Scrum be filled with red smarties, bottles of kosher Christmas Ham Jones Cola and bobblehead dolls of the 1987 New York Jets offensive line, and demands white rose petals bedeck his surroundings. His love affair with the Jets is matched only by his loathing for bad drivers and people who don’t appreciate Seinfeld on the same level as him.

Individually they are difficult to be around, at best. Together, they are… barely tolerable.

They are, collectively, The Scrum of the earth.