Kotkaniemi is a tongue twister for TV
Habs centre racks up points while seasoned professionals struggle to get his name right
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To my 13-year-old son, the sports I watch are such foreign territory that he asked recently whether a batter was supposed to round the bases clockwise or counter-clockwise — or did he maybe have a choice? Obviously, I have failed as a parent. But now and then, when he isn’t wrapped up in such absorbing pastimes as duct-taping a pillow to his head, he will glance up at the screen and ask a random question that makes me think. During the Montreal Canadiens’ game against the Colorado Avalanche, it was a seemingly obvious inquiry: “How do the announcers know how to tell you all that stuff, like who has the puck?” My son stumbled on an issue that I have been pondering of late: Hockey names, especially Finnish names (specifically Jesperi Kotkaniemi) and the problems they pose. Superficially, the answer to my son’s question is obvious: Announcers look at the numbers and the names on the back. But in a high-speed game like hockey, those numbers have to be absorbed into something like muscle memory, because there isn’t time to consult a roster sheet between passes during a three-on-two break. That most play-by-play people do it, and do it well, is a tribute to their professionalism. If you think it’s easy, try muting the sound and doing the broadcast yourself. It’s considerably harder than it seems when you listen to a skilled pro do it. My first experience of broadcast sports wasn’t with television: It was radio, the Friday Night Fights brought to you by Gillette. Calling boxing on radio required a level of vocal agility comparable to an auctioneer trying to slip a spavined horse past a buyer with his rapid-fire patter. “Carmen Basilio with a rightleft combination to the head and a right to the body, Gene Fullmer counters with a straight left and a right hook and Basilio throws three left jabs before …” And those were the slow fighters. Sugar Ray Robinson, with a single combination, could leave you with your tongue tied around your tonsils. It all became much easier with the advent of television. The picture told the story and all you had to do was to give enough to clarify what was happening. In television, less is more — a fact that has sadly been lost on generations of broadcasters. Still, you have to get it right, especially when it comes to names. For years, we listened to anglo broadcasters rhyme Guy Lafleur’s name with “sewer.” “Steve Shutt gets it back to Laflewer.” Someone pointed out last week that the great hockey gentleman Bob Cole deals with the names issue by memorizing four names on each team and referring to the rest as “the right wing” or “the defenceman.” Throw a Scrabble board like “Jesperi Kotkaniemi” at Cole and it’s like watching John Kruk try to hit Randy Johnson at the AllStar game: the best he can do is bail. It’s all right: Cole has earned the right to mangle the occasional moniker and we’re willing to grant that Finnish can be a tongue-thickening thicket. During the first round of the 1998 NHL playoffs, a bunch of us accompanied some of the Pittsburgh broadcast people to an excellent mom-and-pop Italian restaurant, where a Pittsburgh play-by-play man kept us in stitches by mocking his own stumbling attempts to call Finland’s games at the Nagano Olympics: “Numminen … over to Niinimaa, down to Rintanen who gets it back to Peltonen and here’s Lehtinen finding Niinimaa it’s back to Numminen for the shot from the point …” Say that three times quickly with a mouthful of marbles and you’re ready for the big time. That said, I’m a little mystified as to why Kotkaniemi’s five-syllable mouthful has become such a stumbling block. As with spelling it, Kotkaniemi is a name you can master after a few tries. It’s surely easier than Branko Radivojevic, Jason Bacashihua or Numminen to Niinimaa. But with Kotkaniemi, even the play-by-play guys struggle a bit when the play speeds up. Getting ready to take a faceoff, he’s still Kotkaniemi. Bring on a scramble in front, when the puck is bouncing around like stock prices reacting to President Idiot’s Twitter remarks and even veteran play-by-play guys tend to drop a syllable or two and turn it into “Kokkanamie” or “Kotnamey” in their rush to describe what’s going on. It’s awkward, but it isn’t offensive. It’s a very different matter when our national buffoon, Don Cherie, exchanges smirks with sidekick Prince Smarming before offering up his latest butchery of Kotkaniemi’s name: “Cockamamie,” “Kootenamie,” “Cocklenomie” or “Katzenjammer.” Cherry is doing it deliberately, another ugly little wart on his long history of xenophobia. Here we are nearly two decades into the 21st century and the man whose bestby date expired in the last millennium is still croaking his increasingly unfocused inanities. Cherry, mercifully, is a relic of a time when the game was entirely Canadian and prejudice as common as stitches. Kotkaniemi, who picked up his fifth goal Saturday, is a child of the 21st century, born July 6, 2000. He’ll be playing the game for a couple of decades at least, long after Cherry has mercifully packed it in. Maybe it’s time we all learned to say the name. Jesperi, by the way, begins with “Yes!”