A comment by one reader and the response by two others to my blog on Mike "Doc" Emrick leaving the New Jersey Devils' TV booth after two decades to concentrate on NBC and VS (Mike "Doc" Emrick ... My best friend in hockey goes "National" full time) had prompted me to post this comment on the value and importance of the "non hockey" or "non game" information that Doc and other broadcasters weave into their calls.

A reader from Buffalo commented: "Wish he'd give up the NBC and Versus gig too...most overrated play by play man in the league."

To this a fan from Vancouver replied: "Doc is great, how could anyone not like him? So entertaining."

A second reader from Buffalo responded to that with: "Yeah, if you care to know where a player's wife's sister went to school to become a gynecologist and ended up marrying a lawyer who's brother plays for the Leafs."

Of course that would not be "essential" information ... but it is not out of place either. Far from it!

As I stated up front in my blog on Doc, I am clearly in the camp of the reader from Vancouver. Doc and I have been close personal friends since 1977 and have also worked together professionally many, many times in the third of a century since. However my brief comment here has to do with the "non game" portion of the play by play calls of Doc and everybody else who does that job at any level of hockey, or for that matter, any other sport.

Competitive sports played at both the professional and "amateur" levels (NCAA, junior, etc) for which people pay to see in person and is broadcast on radio, TV, or the internet, are first and foremost "entertainment" as well an an athletic endeavor. Each is also more than "a game" limited strictly to its rules and objectives such, as in hockey, scoring goals, preventing goals, winning games, and earning standings points. Hockey and other sports are also played, managed, scouted, broadcast, written about, and enjoyed by spectators who are more than just athletes, managers, media, fans, etc. Each also has a personality, nonhockey interests, roots, connections to others, et al, that contribute to the fabric and "color" of the game.

In order to do his or her job completely, each broadcaster must recognize and acknowledge this as an essential element of sports entertainment. Doc Emrick is, in the opinion of myself (and, I dare say, millions of others), one of the greatest living and practicing masters of delving into those corners of the game and its participants to give each features and depth and then communicating that to his listeners. 

Each individual listener is free, of course, to care or not about such information, but simply because some are not interested does not mean that a great many (if not the vast majority) like to know about hockey people as "people" beyond just their association with the game. That is both what helps make our game great as well as an acknowledgement of human nature and curiosity. And as entertainment -- which, as I say, is why people pay to see and/or follow professional hockey and other sports -- our game would be a pretty sterile activity if treated merely as pablum existing in a vacuum.

I, for instance, may not particularly care for the approach or style of one broadcaster as much as I do for another, but I would not for a moment denigrate any one of them telling me, for instance, that such and such a player was "both the smallest forward and leading scorer on his pee wee team in Floral, SK, as a 14 year old" as say Pierre Maguire or Harry Neale (both of whom I know well and like) might well do. (This is a completely hypothetical example.) Even if I didn't know or particularly care (although I do and I do) where Floral is (for the record it is a small, unincorporated village located in the southeast city limits of Saskatoon, of which it is now considered by many to be constructively a part, just east of Highway 16 that is part of Saskatchewan rural municipality Corman Park No. 344), what distinguishes it (it has a huge grain elevator and was once served by a one room schoolhouse), or who may have come from there which brothers Gordie and Vic Howe did. (Born in March, 1928, the Howe family moved to nearby Saskatoon when Gordie was nine days old so he didn't actually grow up or play in Floral.)


Gordie Howe as a 14 year old bantam
King George Athletic Club
Saskatoon, SK -- March, 1942

You see, you just learned something "non essential" (but I hope interesting) -- Gordie Howe was born in a town with a one room schoolhouse! He certainly was not the smallest player on the KGAC bantam team as 14 year old as he was already six feet tall when he left home two years later in 1944 at age 16 to pursue his professional hockey career.

None of these extra bits of information is "necessary" to the outcome of the game, of course, but they are an essential element of the game (and all sports) as vehicles of entertainment. I may not really need or "...care to know where a player's wife's sister went to school to become a gynecologist and ended up marrying a lawyer who's brother plays for the Leafs." But from an entertainment perspective -- hockey's real raison d'etre -- I would rather know it than not, and nobody is better at serving up these glorious tidbits then is "Doc" Emrick. (As long, of course, that he doesn't mention the War.)