Broadcast legend Bob Cole gets set to call the action on Hockey Night in Canada between the New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs in an NHL game at Scotiabank Arena on Dec. 22, 2018 in Toronto.Claus Andersen/Getty Images
When you chart the recent history of hockey in this country, the theme is decline.
What was once the centrepiece of Canada’s cultural identity has drifted to the edge. There are a hundred indicators – the Hockey Canada scandal, the mediocrity of our NHL teams, the implosion of Don Cherry and on and on.
The gradual extinction of certain players – when was the last time you saw a great Canadian goalie or a genuine goon in the wild? – speaks to an ongoing diminishment.
Broadcasters regularly add to that sense that hockey has no mojo. Sports speculation has run so wild that everyone with a little cash wants to start a pro pickleball team, but somehow Sportsnet has managed to turn hockey into a loser. At least, that’s the perception.
Canada still loves its hockey, but not every night, and not every matchup, and probably not if it isn’t the Leafs or the Oilers or, better yet, the Leafs vs. the Oilers.
But once in a while, hockey can still get hold of you.
Bob Cole was not a young man and when he died last week everyone had their tributes primed. There were a ton of them.
But everyone also knew that Cole could only be properly celebrated in the milieu he helped mythologize – in a Canadian city, on a Saturday night, at the arena before a game that mattered.
Cole had done so many voiceovers during his half century in business that his gravelly purr was as much the sound of hockey as skates cutting ice. Had you heard that voice in an airport or on a beach or on the moon, you could only have thought one thing – hockey.
Hockey’s greatest strength is nostalgia. That’s what happens when your glory days are behind you. As much as any player – more, maybe – Cole represented that connection to the past. To a time when there wasn’t anything else on, and the guys broadcasting the game wore powder blues and had to practically sit in each other’s laps to fit the shot. Those long, game show host microphones and Harry Neale’s nasal-ese accent and wondering if the signal was going to hold up.
Cole was a steadier presence in Canadian households than any celebrity or prime minister.
In terms of memorials, that’s a high bar to get over. Other sports might not even try. But everyone connected to hockey in this country did, and the results were magnificent.
It wasn’t rocket science. Cole spent his adult life recording a highlight reel of the sport’s greatest moments, which were also his own. Just show those. But there’s nothing easier to screw up than something simple, and no one did.
You know the highlight I’m talking about because if you have a hockey memory, Cole narrated it. His majesty was his pervasiveness.
I watched the Cole tributes from the gondola at Scotiabank Arena – the home place of Cole’s legend.
The crowd wasn’t awed by the celebration. They were electrified by it. The building was buzzing with emotion.
At its best, hockey is not remote. Everyone in the game takes pride in their averageness – or, at least, the impression that they are average. There is no such thing as a hockey player who takes a helicopter to work.
There is no tougher game to do play-by-play for. In his later years, Cole used to miss one now and then. That made Canadians love him more. He wasn’t just the king of the sport, but he also wasn’t all high on himself. That’s the rule Cherry forgot.
When the players who memorialized him spoke – Wayne Gretzky prime among them – the fan in them shone through. The love of a team or a certain player is passed down generationally through Canadian families. Hockey players talked about Cole as though he were their dad’s favourite, and the fact that he knew their name was the truest indicator they’d made it.
In one of the video tributes, there was a wonderful image of Cole in conversation with Leafs president Brendan Shanahan up in the rafters. Cole is in raconteur mode, head wagging as he tells a story. Shanahan is bent toward him, a huge grin plastered across his face, just listening.
It’s only in hockey that a middle-aged power broker who won Cups and gold medals is so delighted to be regaled by a guy who called those games. Because in hockey, the veteran always has precedence. The orderliness of that idea – that we are all part of an unbroken chain – is hockey’s secret formula. Richard and then Howe and then Orr and then Gretzky and then Lemieux and then Crosby. The older ones met the younger ones as kids at some charity dinner in Chicoutimi or Kingston or Burnaby. Once those kids got old, they put the next generation on their backs.
This is how Canadians would like to see themselves and their country – as the sort of people who want to help, who are quietly working on a grand project, but one they don’t talk about too much because who does that?
Though hockey may be in decline, it still has its stories. Cole told most of them. Great players provided the sights, but he was the sound of the game.
His loss doesn’t diminish that. It aggrandizes it. Cole’s contribution is now set in amber, ready to be reappreciated whenever we play ‘remember the good old days’ on a Saturday night anywhere in this country.