HE’S FOUND HIS TRUE NAWTH!
City’s Armstrong is Canadian royalty as Raptors announcer
Jack Armstrong can’t remember exactly which player was responsible for the block, but it must’ve been a spectacular rejection because it brought the Raptors analyst back to his playground roots.
He very nearly blurted out some very Brooklynese profanity. Instead, Armstrong rescued his job, dropped the expletives, and a catchphrase was born in Canada:
“Get that gawbage outta heah,” the voice of the Toronto Raptors yelled.
Armstrong, like any real New Yawkuh, has no great love or need for ‘r’s. That just adds to his charm, and perhaps even to the perception of his basketball expertise — the way a Canadian accent goes with hockey analysis, or a British accent jives with soccer play-by-play. New York City, after all, was the bedrock of basketball, the home of streetball lore, long before the AAU circuit took over the gyms and hotter spots emerged in Chicago, L.A. and D.C.
Armstrong, 58, grew up in that basketball haven, the youngest of four brothers in Flatbush. He played against Chris Mullin. His mother served Stephon Marbury as a cafeteria worker at P.S. 238. He delivered the Daily News on his bike in Brooklyn, running up and down apartments for his paper route when the Knicks had Clyde Frazier and the New York Nets competed for headlines with a celestial soarer named Dr. J.
“Unfortunately, my bike did get stolen,” Armstrong laughed. “I had to chain up the other one.”
Armstrong has been the
NCAA’s youngest D-I basketball coach and an award-winning broadcaster. He credits much of that success to his mother, Mary, an Irish immigrant who raised four boys after their father died in 1970. Armstrong’s bed was a pullout couch he shared with an older brother, underscoring the family’s tight budget. But the boys all were scholars and high achievers.
One became an aeronautical engineer, the other a CFO of a hospital. Jack Armstrong attended Fordham and majored in history, much to the dismay of his ambitious siblings.
“They wondered what I could possibly do with a history major,” Armstrong says. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can tell you what year the War of 1812 happened.’” The real plan was to coach high school basketball and teach history. He coached for a bit at his alma maters, Nazareth High School in Brooklyn and Fordham University, before an opportunity unexpectedly arose at Niagara University as an assistant. Armstrong won the job over Jeff Van Gundy, who also interviewed. About a year later, in 1989, Armstrong was elevated to Niagara’s head coach at just 26 years old.
“Jeff Van Gundy calls me and says, ‘Man oh man, you bastard, that would’ve been me,’’” says Armstrong, who was on the same Fordham staff as Van Gundy’s brother, Stan.
Years later, when Van Gundy replaced Don Nelson as head coach of the Knicks, Armstrong returned the phone call, and the sentiment.
“You just never know how the whole thing shakes out. That’s the coaching carousel,” Armstrong says. “That’s the way it works. I just happened to be in the right place in the right time and Jeff was in the right place at the right time. It all worked out for everybody.”
Armstrong was fired by Niagara after nine seasons and a 100-154 record. He understood the decision. “You could clearly look at my record and see it was time to go,” he says. Van Gundy’s coaching career proved more fruitful, but they both ended up in the broadcasting booth.
Television wasn’t the goal for Armstrong, just the fallback option. But he was good at it.
“I got fired from Niagara. That’s what happened,” he says.
“I always say this is the sports version of white-collar crime.
We put unemployed coaches and players on the air. You suddenly go from idiot to expert overnight. I call it the greatest scam going.”
Armstrong first did some work for MSG Network on the recommendations of fellow Fordham alums
Mike Breen and Michael Kay. The opportunity with TSN in Canada opened in 1998.
“You got to sell yourself in the interview, and I think after a while they just put their hands up and surrendered,” Armstrong says. “Here I am, 23 years later.”
Like any good sports broadcaster, Armstrong doesn’t take himself too seriously. Self-deprecating humor is part of the personality, along with bursts of decibel-rising enthusiasm. His inspiration was another Brooklynite, Phil Rizzuto, whose 40 years as a Yankees analyst was built on idiosyncrasies and entertaining the listeners, rather than hammering them with statistical jargon. Rizzuto also had his famous catchphrases, most notably, “Holy Cow.” In Toronto, Armstrong’s “Get that Gawbage Outta Here” became the slogan for the city’s PSA commercial urging residents to recycle properly.
During a broadcast last season, Armstrong derided Bulls coach Jim Boylan for calling timeout at the end of a blowout, because the announcer wanted to get home for the Super Bowl. In 2018, Armstrong jokingly shed tears for four beers spilled courtside.
“This is a national crisis,” Armstrong says. “How could you drop all that beer?”
A year later, the Toronto Star published a column with the
headline, “Raptors Announcer Jack Armstrong Deserves An Order of Canada.”
“I feel like Canada’s adopted son,” he says.
Becoming a national treasure required good fortune, which isn’t lost on Armstrong. His first game as a Raptors broadcaster coincided with the debut of Vince Carter, who greatly elevated the stature of the sport in Canada. Without Carter, Armstrong fears the Raptors might’ve gone the way of the Vancouver Grizzlies, who were quickly relocated to Memphis.
Today, basketball is Canada’s fastest growing sport. The country developed two, first-overall picks — albeit busts — in Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett. New York’s teams have a Canadian top player (RJ Barrett) and Canadian coach (Steve Nash).
The TV ratings in Canada have exploded, with the 2019 broadcast of the Raptors’ championship-clinching Game 6 hitting an average of 7.7 million viewers on TSN, CTV and RDS. Over 44% of the nation’s population tuned into the game at some point, giving Armstrong a massive platform.
These days, the pandemic has changed his job, just as it’s affected everything else. Due to international travel restrictions, the Raptors temporarily moved to Tampa Bay, benefitting from better weather and taxes but struggling early on the court. Armstrong broadcasts remotely from a studio in Toronto, where he stands up and paces for the entire game to maintain the energy.
There’s also the uncertainty of his contract, which expires after this sixth season. Armstrong is optimistic about an extension.
“The Canadian people have been so warm and fun and have embraced me, and have embraced my style and personality,” he says. “And it’s been a great marriage. And I hope to continue it and I hope to finish my career there.”
Despite his affinity for the people, Armstrong never lived in Canada. He moved to Lewiston, NY, in 1988 to coach Niagara, with a home on the river that separates the countries. He never left. He married the Niagara women’s soccer coach, Dena, and they adopted three boys.
Since 1998, Armstrong has commuted across the border to the Raptors arena, serving as the enthusiastic ambassador to a country that now embraces the sport he learned on the Brooklyn playgrounds.
And, yeah. Technically, he’s still a New Yawkuh.