Emrick has the final word
When the folks at NBC held a Monday conference call for reporters on the occasion of the retirement of hockey broadcaster Mike (Doc) Emrick, it wasn’t just reporters who dialed in.
Given Emrick’s status as the voice of the sport in the United States, Monday’s announcement that he was setting down his play-by-play headset after 47 years and 3,700 games, came with considerable ado. Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, called in to praise Emrick as a “treasure” whose work will be missed. Eddie Olczyk, the former Maple Leaf who spent 14 seasons as Emrick’s NBC broadcast partner, showed up to offer a teary tribute.
Lou Lamoriello didn’t cry, but the ex-Leafs GM sounded less cutthroat than usual as he happily recalled being interviewed by Emrick back in 1972.
Even Al Michaels, one of the preeminent voices in all of sports — the guy who injected “Do you believe in miracles?” into the Miracle on Ice — popped in to praise Emrick, and to register a professional request.
“I’d like you to leave for me some of your unused verbs so I can use them during Sunday Night Football,” Michaels said.
Indeed, if the 74-year-old Emrick will be remembered for one thing above all — aside, perhaps, from his voice’s occasionally creepy ubiquity in households where the EA Sports NHL video games Emrick long voiced have been frequently played — it’s for his undeniable way with a verb. When you consider the sheer expanse of Emrick’s vocabulary, stacked against that of, say, a typical local-market play-byplay broadcaster, it’s a bit like looking at Wayne Gretzky’s career point total in relation to the rest of the Hall of Fame field. By one famous count during a broadcast of a 2014 Olympic men’s semifinal between Canada and the United States, Emrick used 156 different words to describe the movement of the puck.
When he was calling a game, the puck wasn’t just passed. It was shuffleboarded and shovelled and soccered. It was finessed and regathered and collared. It skittered and curled and angled and trickled.
And given the speed of the game, let’s assume Emrick, who got his nickname by earning a PhD in broadcast communications from Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, never once required a midgame consultation with a thesaurus. Pierre McGuire, who worked with Emrick as an analyst on NBC, called him, first and foremost, “a wordsmith.”
“He uses the language like an expert uses a tool,” Gord Miller, the TSN and NBC playby-play voice, said of Emrick. “I don’t think anybody has a vocabulary like Doc and the ability to use it in a broadcast.”
When Emrick began his career in the game 50 years ago this fall, covering Pittsburgh Penguins games as a writer for an evening newspaper called the Beaver County Times for nothing but access to a press pass, the NHL was a decidedly different league. There were only 14 teams. Gordie Howe was still a Red Wing. Bobby Orr was still a Bruin.
“At the time there were still scoreclocks with sweep hands, and a lot of players with good, bare right hands,” Emrick said in a video essay posted by NBC, the latter a reference to the fisticuffs that helped define hockey’s “Slap Shot” decade.
If Emrick made no secret of his love of a fight, he’s known around the sport as a gentle soul and a consummate gentleman.
“It’s a strange analogy to make, but I’ve always thought of Doc in the same vein as Mr. Rogers. You know, someone who educated people in a nice way,” Miller said. “He never talked down to you. He was never condescending. It was always ‘us’ and ‘we.’ And very gently he taught you things and entertained you.”
As sportscaster Dan Patrick put it on his radio show on Monday: “(Emrick) made non-hockey fans feel welcome when they listened to him. The greatest compliment I could probably give him is he didn’t talk down to you. He wanted to talk with you.”
If the stories are legion of Emrick taking time to counsel aspiring broadcasters, he’s a nurturer by nature. He’s enough of an animal lover that he missed calling the 2002 Olympics because one of his dogs — a terrier named Katie — was terminally ill with kidney cancer and Emrick and his wife, Joyce, were seeking treatment options to prolong the animal’s life. On Monday Emrick said people who aren’t animal lovers “may not understand it … (but) when (animals) are ill or hurting or are terminal, that affects you in a similar way that a human being would.
“I would have not been of use to NBC as a preoccupied announcer, and it wouldn’t have been fair to the sport or people watching the greatest competition in the world at that time, either.”
Emrick was asked on Monday what made a great play-by-play broadcaster. He started his answer by humbly insisting he didn’t really didn’t know. But he suggested that at least some of his success might be attributed to his following the advice of a mentor who gave him one rule — “Be yourself” — not to mention his long-ago abandonment of the notion that he’d ever call a “perfect” game. Hockey’s a fast game. Press boxes are a long way from the ice. And while socialmedia experts make a sport of crucifying broadcasters who make the cardinal mistake of misidentifying a player, mistakes are going to happen. There was a time when Emrick had a hard time accepting as much.
“I would slam my hand down on my book that I kept my rosters in, and it would make a loud noise, but it was just out of frustration with myself that I would see a 28 and call a 29,” he said. “And what was the difference? Well, it was a four-inch number on a sleeve, and it was probably a half inch of material that made the difference between a 9 and an 8.”
Emrick said that, as time went on, he became more comfortable with the idea that he was “flawed.”
Asked to explain his retirement, he said “it seemed like it was just time.” While his love of hockey continues unabated, and while he said he plans to contribute the occasional video essay to NBC, “this is the time for turning to other things,” including his passion for helping animals.
“I just enjoyed the fact that I was given a free seat, a good seat, and I got to work with some of the best athletes in the world, and then twice a month I got something in the mail, and it was really good,” Emrick said.
As Lamoriello said Monday: As good as the game maybe have been to Emrick, Emrick returned the favour a thousand times over.
“It’s always said there are three kinds of people in this world, (including) the ones you like but you might not respect and … the ones you respect that you might not like,” Lamoriello said. “But there is no one in this world that I’ve crossed paths that didn’t not only like (Emrick) but respect (him) to the highest level. I’ve never heard a word other than that.”
Lamoriello may not have heard another word. Emrick, if he would have been pressed, could have surely come up with a few appropriate synonyms on demand.