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Emrick’s roundtable with five megastars will air Wednesday
Famed broadcaster Mike Emrick acknowledged he was sleepless the night before he sat for an NBC Sports Network roundtable interview with Sidney Crosby, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Bobby Orr and Jonathan Toews.
“With people of that stature, you don’t want to come out and lay an egg and not be ready and not have things that interest them,” Emrick said.
As it turned out, the day was one of the easiest and most mem- orable assignments Emrick has had. The 30-minute program, titled Game Changers, will be shown after Wednesday’s Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals between the Pittsburgh Penguins and Ottawa Senators.
“There really wasn’t a lot I had to do other than throw the ball out there and let them kick it around,” Emrick told USA TODAY Sports.
The five all-time greats had never sat down together before. Toews had never met Orr. They touched on a variety of topics, including the state of the game, what it was like to be named to the NHL’s Top 100 and Orr’s Superman flying pose after he scored the Stanley Cup-clinching goal in 1970. A photo by Ray Lussier has immortalized that play.
Gretzky remembers watching the goal on television as a 9-yearold. He called it the “most famous goal that was ever scored in the National Hockey League.”
Orr says every time he sees St. Louis Blues goalie Glenn Hall, who gave up the goal, Hall says: “Is that the only goal you ever scored?”
“It was a lot of fun for me to just sit and listen. That was the best part. I was hoping they would enjoy each other’s company, which they did,” said Emrick, who was to miss his second consecutive game Monday because his voice has been impacted by a head cold.
Emrick said the only disappointment was running out of time before he ran out of questions. He had worked on memorable last questions, but he never got to ask them.
“For example, my last question for Wayne was, ‘I hear you won 23 cars,’ ” Emrick said. “‘Is that correct, and did you keep any of them?’ ”
He wanted to ask Orr about being a bellman at a hotel when he was 12. He wasn’t able to ask Orr on camera, but he asked him afterward. “He said: ‘People took pity on me because I was a little kid, and they wouldn’t let me carry their bags,’ ” Emrick said.
Emrick is a life-long Pittsburgh Pirates fan, and he wanted to ask Lemieux if planned to make another run at buying the Pirates, as he did in 2010.
But the questions Emrick asked created entertaining television. This will rate as one Emrick’s favorite assignments, he said.
Emrick walked onto the set next to Orr. “I said to him: ‘If I had never done a Stanley Cup game in my life, this would be it for me.’ He laughed. … To have all five of these guys in one room was pretty special for me.”