Ex-Hawk small in stature, big personality

Former goalie Pang returns to Chicago for TNT broadcast

Darren Pang is the height of contradiction.

He stands 5-foot-4½ but managed to stick as an NHL goalie.

He was a Blackhawk in the late 1980s, but as a television commentator he calls games for the hated St. Louis Blues on Bally Sports Midwest with play-by-play man John Kelly.

He’s small in stature but well-known for his big personality.

“He’s always a character,” said Hawks coach Luke Richardson, who like Pang grew up in Ottawa. “Fun to talk old stories with him.”

Pang was at the United Center on Wednesday as part of TNT’s national broadcast of the HawksBlues game with play-byplay man Brendan Burke and fellow analyst Jennifer Botterill.

Plenty of Chicago connections will be on hand to welcome him back.

“I do love coming back to Chicago and I’m going to meet up with some friends for dinner and then we’ll do the game tomorrow night,” Pang told the Tribune on Tuesday.

Pang reminisced about his Chicago days, talked about his high regard for Hawks counterpart Troy Murray and broke down what it was like to play goalie at his height — including the chirps he heard, even from teammates such as Hall of Famer Doug Wilson.

Here are three things we learned from Pang.

1. Pang goes way back with Hawks on the bench and in the booth. The start of Richardson’s 21-year career as an NHL defenseman overlapped with Pang’s tenure as a goalie, and they played against each other. But they knew each other long before that.

“I actually played summer hockey with him in Ottawa before and I used to watch him play junior,” Richardson said Tuesday. “Great character, always small and he always kind of poked fun at himself — (he) couldn’t believe that he was playing in the NHL. He just has that character.”

The feeling was mutual with Pang. Richardson would sign autographs for kids at Pang’s hockey school.

“I’ve been a big fan of Luke for a long time,” he said.

Told about Richardson’s comment, Pang played it for laughs: “By ‘character,’ he probably means a little guy with a lot of energy and tells a lot of stories and goes out and has a nice meal and has a few glasses of wine.”

Pang was a Hawks teammate of goalie coach Jimmy Waite.

“I remember seeing Jimmy Waite for the first time (at a camp) thinking, ‘This guy’s going to be a star,’ ” Pang said.

His visit to the Hawks booth before the game will be bittersweet. Contemporaries Pat Foley and Eddie Olczyk won’t be there. Foley retired and Olczyk took a job with the Seattle Kraken.

2. There’s no shortage of jokes, but the self-deprecating Pang is the bigger man. Pang recalled the first game he dressed as a Blackhawk, though he didn’t play.

It was Feb. 20, 1985, against the Montreal Canadiens, and one look at Pang got a reaction from the opposition.

“I got called up from Milwaukee, I’m backing up Warren Skorodenski at Chicago Stadium, the Montreal Canadiens are in town,” Pang said. “And (Canadiens defenseman) Larry Robinson stopped Doug Wilson at center ice and asked him point blank, ‘Where is the other half of your goalie?’ And, you know, that was one of the best lines I’ve ever heard.”

He wasn’t even safe from his teammates.

One particular goal sailed over Pang ’s head — he can’t remember which game — and Wilson quipped, “Over my head and under the crossbar and in.”

Wilson added, “Well, that’s the first six-hole goal I’ve ever seen.”

“The puck kind of dipped on me and I kind of ducked down,” Pang said, “and it went just buzzing over my head and then hit the crossbar and went right in the net.”

Then there was his first start, on Feb. 22, 1985, when the Hawks faced the Minnesota North Stars at the Met Center.

“It got quiet just before puck drop or the first whistle,” he said, “and I could hear clear as day somebody in the stands, yell out, ‘Hey, Pang, the Pee Wees are on next.’

“And I laughed because I thought it was a funny line. You know, I get it: You’re trying to tell me I’m too short to be in the NHL and I should be with the Pee Wees that are on in between periods.”

Pang even gets it now as a commentator.

“I’ve done (bench interviews) where I had a coach (who) brought a milk crate so I could stand on it so the camera could see me over top of the players,” he said. “I think that’s great humor. I love that stuff.

“Being small and being short, being bald, I think that’s been beneficial to my broadcasting career, to be quite honest with you. If I was average height and looked like everybody else, then maybe this wouldn’t have worked all these years.

“I think being self-deprecating is a lot better than being full of yourself, to be quite honest.”

3. Pang fudged his height and weight at combines. Pang figured he faced long odds of getting a shot at the NHL, so he left nothing to chance.

“I was just a shade under 5-5, and I was 135 pounds,” said Pang, who’s commonly listed at 5-5 and 155. “I lied and cheated and put weights under my underwear to get me to 150 pounds or 155 pounds. I never weighed — I still don’t weigh — 155 pounds.

Pang recalled “one game that Mike Gapski was our trainer and he weighed me in. He said, ‘I’m a little worried about you, you look really frail.’ And he weighed me in and I was 128 pounds after a game.”

Pang said he’s really 5-4½ and tried to fool scouts by using skate liners.

“I put them (in) my socks,” he said. “So I when I got measured at the NHL combine, or when I was in junior when they measure you, that added about a half an inch. So that’s what got me to 5-5.”

Pang said he didn’t know why he thought 5-5 would make a difference in general managers’ minds, but “I just thought that it looked like a better number” and would make people think he was stockier and able to hold up to the rigors of the NHL.

Now he’s proud of his real measurements.

“I think it’s safe to say that I’ll be, in modern hockey, the smallest goalie that’s ever played,” he said. “And I think that’s quite cool.”