Investor's Business Daily, September 28th, 2007
For Foster Hewitt, the Voice of Hockey, the sport was anything but cool in 1923.
The man who would first proclaim "He shoots, he scores!" and whose famous 1972 call -- "They score! Henderson has scored for Canada!" -- would be repeated constantly across Canada hadn't even expected to spend his evening at the arena.
The then-20-year-old sports reporter was finishing his day's work for the Toronto Star, which also ran a radio station. No one else in the newsroom was able to broadcast that night's hockey game, so Hewitt glided to the rescue.
But it's amazing he kept his cool.
Radio was in its infancy, and the space allotted for Hewitt and his equipment at the arena was near ice level on the rails. Still, the freezing temperature just feet away could do nothing to help Hewitt.
For the whole game -- and 30-minute overtime -- Hewitt sat in a glass-walled enclosure no more than four feet high. If that wasn't enough, whoever built the space forgot to drill air holes in the glass.
"The first broadcast nearly ended in disaster," Hewitt wrote in a 1928 Toronto Star article titled "Who Wouldn't Be A Sport Announcer!" "When I finally did get in and closed the door, all the air was cut off. In a few minutes my head started to go round."
Despite Hewitt's difficulty catching air that night, listeners immediately loved the picture of the game he painted orally.
The next day, thousands clamored radio station CFCA for more. A decade later, in the 1934 playoffs, 6 million people would be tuning in to hear his voice.
"The impact he's had on Canada has almost been a religious one," Chuck Kaiton, president of the NHL Broadcasters' Association and the announcer for the Carolina Hurricanes, told IBD.
All Over The Map
Hewitt became the first announcer to cover hockey coast to coast. Other radio stations had begun broadcasting junior league or senior league hockey, but Hewitt saw the interest in the budding National Hockey League and skated with it.
"He was the voice that the whole country had," said Dirk Irvin, a 41-year veteran of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s "Hockey Night in Canada." "He was the guy. He was the only voice that people heard."
Irvin added: "He started every broadcast by stating, 'Hello, Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland.' He knew he was the voice of hockey. ... He kind of fell into it, but that's part of why hockey became so popular."
His sway even helped Canada's cause in World War II. With its military in need of binoculars, Hewitt mentioned it on the air, and fans sent in thousands of pairs.
It's no surprise that Foster Hewitt (1902-85) fell into a career in sports. Born in Toronto, Foster was the son of the Star's sports editor, William Hewitt, and grew up always watching competitive sports.
In 1921, when Foster was a freshman at the University of Toronto, he accompanied his father on a trip to Detroit to learn more about radio. That year, boxer Jack Dempsey's successful title defense -- the first major sporting event to be carried on radio -- convinced young Hewitt that the airwaves were his calling.
He left school to work for the Star. But it wasn't because of his father's position; the paper had recently bought a radio station. He would broadcast a weekly hockey game on Saturday nights for decades.
In 1923, the year Hewitt just about suffocated, the NHL was just six years old and all over the ice, battling teams from other leagues for the Stanley Cup. Three years later, the NHL featured 10 teams and generated the most interest, thanks in part to its star announcer.
"Foster Hewitt ... brought hockey to life for millions of people," Kaiton said. "It was a thing played in a distant place, all the way in Maple Leaf Gardens. So if you were in western Canada, or if you didn't live near Boston or Montreal, he brought the game home. He gave (fans) a fantasy of what the game was all about."
Hewitt connected with fans at once because of his simple style and knowledge of the game. "There was no cookie-cutter way of doing a broadcast before Hewitt because there was no other," Kaiton said.
"I say he was unique," Irvin told IBD, "but we didn't have anyone else to compare him to. He was the only one!"
Said Kaiton: "His approach to hockey was much simpler than broadcasters today. Today they want to excite you. Foster had a natural way of crescendoing his voice -- you cannot always have a high-intensity voice all the time."
Hewitt's play-by-play defined so many games across so many provinces and states, his exuberant, nasal voice became as much a part of the sport as the puck.
In his roughly 5,000 broadcasts spanning 50 years, he never took sides or gave unneeded analysis -- he just called the action.
On Nov. 12, 1931, Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens opened. Hewitt had exclusive rights to broadcast all events at the arena. Yet his position was not so enviable.
The next two decades, he called hockey from "the gondola," a dangling structure in the rafters of the Gardens, so named because it resembled a cabin beneath an airship.
In a video available from CBC's archives on archives.cbc.ca, Hewitt described his stage:
"The first time I ever went out, I went out on my hands and knees. They just had a plank at that time, a metal plank that went from ... what they called the fan room. You went out from the fan room, which was at the top of the graze. And then you went up a catwalk, or a stairway that was more like going up on the bridge of a ship. And you'd reach the top catwalk, which was about 90, 90-odd-feet high, and then you'd walk straight along parallel to the ice surface and go to the middle and then there was a ladder there that had a 90-degree drop, and it went right in to one end of the gondola."
He never broadcast games with a partner. Still, the member of the Sports Hall of Fame maintained the professionalism of a whole radio team; he once took a two-year engineering course in six months so he would know how to handle all the equipment and technicalities.
The Toronto Star's radio station folded in 1933. Hewitt's broadcasts were carried by CFRB until CBC started operations in 1936. His popularity led to a Friday night show highlighting all of the week's sporting exploits. "Foster Hewitt Reporting" debuted on Sept. 3, 1948.
By 1951 Hewitt had bought his own radio station, CKFH (the FH for his initials), but remained with CBC for many years. He called the first televised hockey game, a closed-circuit broadcast in the spring of 1952. Then, on Nov. 1 that year, a televised version of CBC's "Hockey Night in Canada" started in Toronto, with a game between the archrival Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens.
He did it all in simple fashion.
"Today you have broadcasters ... spending seven-eight hours preparing for a three-hour broadcast," Kaiton said. "I don't think Foster did much more than pick up a lineup card and figure out who was playing."
Said Irvin: "People who are listening to you, they're not listening if they don't care. And if they care, Foster Hewitt was very aware of that fact, that the people really cared."
Hull Of A Listenership
Across the years, countless players formed their dreams of NHL stardom by listening to Hewitt.
"Nobody could do it quite like Foster," Hall of Famer Bobby Hull recalled in the NHL's 75th anniversary commemorative book, "and naturally we'd get so pumped up on Saturday nights that we couldn't wait to get up on Sunday mornings, get on the ice and pretend we were all the heroes we'd heard about the night before on the radio."
Just five years after Hewitt launched CBC's "Hockey Night," he turned the microphone over to his son, Bill.
The father remained with the program for some years, doing postgame analysis and the recap of the three stars of the game -- and later broadcast sporadic games.
Son succeeded at the craft his father pioneered, and this year Bill Hewitt was posthumously awarded the NHL Broadcasters' Association's Foster Hewitt Memorial Award.
