BOWLING GREEN — The voice of hockey rises with excitement.
Mike “Doc” Emrick has just brushed up on a big upcoming matchup and is armed with all manner of new facts on the home team.
“Did you know they’re the only team in the country that’s won a best-of-three playoff series in each of the last five years?” he informs.
It still is two weeks before his anticipated broadcast, and already the Hall of Fame play-by-play man’s notoriously thorough preparations are under way.
Beyond his reading homework, Emrick has called the coaches, made plans to attend their practices, and gone over pronunciations with his broadcast partner.
“He wants to do this 100 percent the entire way,” said his partner, Evan Pivnick.
It will be just like any other day in the booth.
Well, except for ...
“I believe we’ll be above the student section, and they stand the whole game,” Emrick said , laughing. “That will be unique.”
For one weekend in February, Emrick, the venerated lead NBC hockey announcer, will return to where it all began, swapping the high life of the NHL for the cozier confines of Bowling Green State University’s Ice Arena.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
More than four decades after BG gave him his broadcasting start and — as a doctoral student — his well-known nickname, Emrick cleared his schedule for the bandbox rink’s 50th anniversary celebration weekend.
Originally, Emrick was scheduled to call NBC’s national game of the week between the Red Wings and Minnesota Wild.
Instead on Feb. 11, he will broadcast Mercyhurst vs. Bowling Green on 88.1 and 100.7 FM.
Emrick will ride shotgun alongside Pivnick, a senior from Long Island and the third-year voice of the Falcons, picking up where he left off 44 years ago.
As a student here, he broadcast the second period of home games, eagerly subbing in for Terry Shaw, a future announcer of the Toledo Goal Diggers. For his homecoming, Emrick will do play-by-play for the second period and provide the color analysis in the first and third.
“It was wonderful that they invited me,” he said by phone last week. “Bowling Green gave me a lot. It gave me 18 periods of the home games my first year, and the second year the same. And then, finally, I had authentic tape that I could send out.”
Turns out, there was a little interest.
For all of the great names in Bowling Green’s proud hockey history — from Ron Mason to Jerry York to Ken Morrow to George McPhee to Brian Holzinger to Rob Blake — none is more widely known today than Emrick.
If you have watched a hockey game, you probably have heard Emrick, 70, who will call his 14th NHL All-Star Game today and is scheduled for his 19th Stanley Cup Final.
Always, you’re in for a treat.
His breathless calls — “Ohhhhhh!” — are enlivened by a bard’s command of the language. With Emrick, the son of high school teachers and a former speech major, there is never one way to describe a moving puck. By the count of one fan during a recent broadcast, there are 153 of them. Pucks are paddled and rattled, whistled and whacked, poked and pitchforked. They flip and flop and skitter and squib.
Name a sport. For our money, Emrick is unsurpassed.
“Maybe,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman once told a reporter, “Vin Scully is the Doc Emrick of baseball.”
Funny to think now we almost never got to hear him.
Emrick came of age with baseball and hockey, and idolized the men who carried the games into his family’s home in LaFontaine, Ind. He most wanted to be Bob Chase, the legendary announcer of the nearby Fort Wayne Komets.
He intended to earn a living the same way. He just needed an in.
Before arriving at Bowling Green, Emrick had burned through two degrees — from Manchester College in Indiana and Miami (Ohio) — and untold hours of tape on his voice recorder from Komets hockey games. These would have made good audition tapes but for one problem. They were for an audience of one.
“I would sit in the corner in Fort Wayne and record it and play it back to myself,” Emrick said. “I sent those out as auditions, and remarkably, nobody hired me with no experience.”
By 1971, he was a 25-year-old speech professor at Geneva College in suburban Pittsburgh, covering the Penguins on the side as an “unpaid correspondent” for the Beaver County Times.
Emrick decided to pursue a doctorate in communications, mostly because, with the advanced degree, his pay at Geneva would jump from $7,000 to $7,600 per year. But there was one condition.
With his broadcasting dream still flickering, the school had to have a hockey team.
He settled on Michigan and Bowling Green.
On his visit to BG, Emrick bumped into Shaw.
“He said, ‘Do you like hockey?’ I said, ‘Oh yes.’ Well, he said, ‘The student that does the second periods of the games — I do the first and third — just graduated, so if you come here, you’ve got the second period of our home games.’ Well, that made it pretty easy.
“And so I finally got my first chance to to talk to somebody other than myself. I don’t know how big the audience was, but I got to do the second period of the first game between Bowling Green and Ryerson College that year.”
Emrick proved a natural. What’s more, he was hooked, those roaring nights at the BG Ice Arena staying with him like it was two line changes ago.
“They would make a PA announcement 10 minutes before the game encouraging all of the students to scrunch together a little more so that more could more people in sitting in the aisles,” he said. ”It was a hard ticket.”
His favorite memory was the 1973 CCHA title game against rival Ohio State, which admittedly was a little personal. During a game in Columbus weeks earlier, the BG radio team was denied a spot to broadcast in the Buckeyes’ cramped arena.
This time, back atop his familiar perch in Bowling Green, Emrick had a perfect view of the Falcons’ 8-1 dusting.
“Ohio State basically imploded in the second period of the game and BG won in a walk off,” he said. “It was a championship for the school and it was right in BG, but it meant a lot to me, too, because the Buckeyes were going down and that will show them to make room next time!”
From there, he caught on with the Port Huron (Mich.) Flags of the IHL in 1973, balancing a full-time play-by-play and public relations job with school. He polished off his doctorate in 1976 upon the completion of a dissertation on the history of broadcasting in baseball.
Emrick spent eight years in the minors — he called the raucous Toledo Sports Arena “a different atmosphere than there was in any other arena in our league” — became the radio voice of the New Jersey Devils in 1982, and began landing national TV work in the late 1980s.
In other words, he has not looked back. Except that’s not true.
In February, Emrick can’t wait to look back, his career coming full circle with a return to his old perch.
Emrick will arrive in Bowling Green the Thursday before the game. He plans to meet with students, catch up with old friends and, of course, finish his prep work for the big broadcast.
“I want to be able to do this weekend right,” he said. “It should be fun.”
Even if the broadcast table is standing room only.
Contact David Briggs at: dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084 or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.
First Published January 29, 2017, 6:07 a.m.
