Raise YOUR Voice!

Brad A . from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

May 24, 2004 -- it’s a day that will live in NHL infamy.

That’s the night the Tampa Bay Lightning faced off against the Calgary Flames in game one of the Stanley Cup Finals, live on ESPN.

That’s also the night that ESPN’s ratings finished near the bottom of the cable TV charts. Below The Chappelle Show, below Monk, even below re-runs of The Cosby Show.
You can blame it on a bad match-up, you can blame on the pre-strike league’s stale play, you can even blame it on a particularly good episode of Cosby (was it the one where Theo finds a joint in his history textbook?). But the fact is, when your billion-dollar sports league is losing the ratings war to Reagan-era sitcoms, you have a problem.

And that problem is simple – hockey just isn’t that good on TV. Unlike football, baseball, and even basketball, ice hockey is a sport that you really have to see in person to appreciate. That’s partially because it’s the most thrilling sport to see live but also because it just doesn’t lend itself to television (though hi-def and the increased accessibility of large-screen TVs helps). But NHL fans, being among the most devout followers of any sports league, continue to tune in. You’d think a station like FSN, which might otherwise be airing bass fishing re-runs, would be grateful.

Thus, it’s especially confounding that FSN has seen fit to make an already middling television experience even worse by replacing legendary announcer Mike Lange with the legendarily bland Paul Steigerwald. It’s not necessarily that Steigerwald is especially bad – he’s no more inept that the countless other cookie-cutter play-by-play men who fester in the broadcasting booths of North America’s sports leagues. He sees what happens, and he relays it to the viewers – simple enough. He even makes the occasional keen observation. What he’s completely devoid of, though, is even the slightest hint of style, and in sports broadcasting, especially in the lightning-fast game of hockey, style and passion carry a lot of weight.

Look at it this way: Would you rather listen to a talented karaoke singer perform “Night and Day” or would you rather hear Frank Sinatra do it? They’re both singing the same words and hitting the right notes, but one of them makes hear the song, the other makes you feel it.
That’s what Lange brings to hockey broadcasts. In a game that often unfolds faster than the listeners can absorb the words, Lange takes his own enthusiasm for the sport, and conveys it in a manner that makes is completely contagious, and makes a difficult sport compulsively listenable. It’s something that few can do, but at which Lange excels. If he hadn’t gravitated to hockey, he could have been just as good calling some other sport – in fact, in the mid-1980s, Lange spent a few years doing Pirates games for KBL, and he was fantastic. Steve Blass still credits him as a mentor. (And Lange credits as his mentor another Pittsburgh broadcasting legend – Bob Prince, whom he befriended back in the 1970s).

While it’s inarguable that Lange brings life to the Penguins radio broadcasts, let’s face it: radio is still the ghetto of the broadcasting world. TV is where the money is, and that’s where you put your best people. Relegating Lange to the radio dial is like NBC deciding that John Madden and Al Michaels would be better not on TV.

FSN’s decision is a bizarre one. Pros like Lange come at a higher cost than rent-a-voice stand-ins like Steigerwald, and perhaps FSN wasn’t willing to pay the price for a top-of-the-line announcer. If that’s the case, and they’re trying to give their loyal fans the cheapest product possible, maybe it’s fitting that the NHL will be remembered as the league that was beaten by the Huxtables.