Last of the NHL broadcast play-by-play legends: Bob Cole’s microphone goes silent

If you were to ask how one might become a legend in Canada, you could do worse than answer by having a storied, long-running career as a National Hockey League play-by-play man, first on radio, later in television.  Think Foster Hewitt, Danny Gallivan, Dick Irwin, and Bob Cole, who signs off the air tonight, and who will be quite likely the last in a line of legendary Canadian play-by-play men hockey broadcasters. Actually, there was Foster Hewitt and then everyone else who came after him in the puck-chasing pantheon. Unlike their often colourful colour commentator cousins, the play-by-play men are the workhorses of the immediate as the longer game unfolds.

Bob Cole called his first NHL game on CBC Radio on April 24, 1969, a game that saw the Montreal Canadiens’ double-overtime Game 6 Stanley Cup playoff semi-final elimination of the Boston Bruins, on Capt. Jean Beliveau’s only career overtime goal. Cole switched from the radio to television side in 1973. “Painting the picture is more important on radio, I think,” Cole told NHL.com columnist Dave Stubbs for a story that appeared online April 4. “On TV, you don’t want to get in the way. There’s the danger of getting in the way by talking too much. There’s no point in my lecturing a viewer when he’s watching the game I’m calling, when my eyes are focused on someone coming down the left side. You have to capture and feel that. A person watching on TV can flow with you. If we’re all talking too much, we’re ignoring what we’re looking at.”

Cole calls his final play-by-play of his half-century career when the Toronto Maple Leafs visit the Montreal Canadiens at Bell Centre tonight at 7 p.m. EDT in a nationally televised NHL hockey broadcast. He is now 85 and lives in St. John’s.

If you want a bit of context to think about just how long Bob Cole has been on air since that first CBC Radio broadcast on April 24, 1969, think of it this way.

The world of April 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission, and less than eight months after Cole’s broadcast.

The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.

And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7 – a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California Oct. 29, 1969.

The Thursday night of Bob Cole’s first NHL radio hockey broadcast, if you were doing a bit of double duty with an ear on the radio and eyes on the television set, you were perhaps watching Ironside on NBC, The Jim Nabors Hour on CBS or Bewitched on ABC.

That’s how long Bob Cole has been an NHL broadcast play-by-play man.

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Referendums and historic newspapers … ‘we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’

One of the benefits of being something of a collector of old newspapers is that it gives one the opportunity to do some shuffling and sorting in seldom opened bankers boxes when spurred on by some historic event such as today’s referendum on the 307-year-old union between Scotland and England. The fact none of my stored newspapers likely have anything to do with earlier Scottish news is largely beside the point. After all, surely there might be something on the first Quebec Referendum  of May 20, 1980 or the photo-finish second Quebec Referendum on Oct. 30, 1995 to take another look at today?

Or not.

But the search was by no means time wasted. It lead to me uncovering a cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for 45 years now.

The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day– in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed'”

For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.

The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”

In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”

Ah, 1969.

To put in perspective just how remarkable the achievement was, the world of 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission.

The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.

And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7– a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California Oct. 29, 1969.

It was quite a year, 1969. Or as the Eagles noted in their 1976 seemingly ubiquitous title track from the album, Hotel California …we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”