Fellow broadcasters lean toward a couple of Jim Robson calls from 1994 and applaud him for setting a standard in their industry
Jim Hughson was calling the action for Hockey Night In Canada on the evening that a puck ricocheted wildly off a stanchion on the sideboards to Bieksa at the blue line and Bieksa knuckle-balled it past a gaggle of bewildered San Jose Sharks for the winner in a 3-2 double overtime victory that clinched Vancouver the Western Conference title.
Hughson is from Fort St. John. He grew up with Jim Robson as the voice of the Canucks. Robson was one of the people Hughson studied as a young broadcaster.
Ask Hughson to name the most iconic play-by-play call in Canucks history and he points to Robson’s detailing of Adams’ goal in double OT that gave Vancouver a 4-3 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs and clinched them the Western Conference banner.
Hughson liked the call so much, in fact, that he admits “I tried to imitate that,” on the Bieksa goal that came 17 years later. He pegs it simply as a “direct imitation of Robson.”
Hughson used the identicalfinal 10-word phrase to end off his Bieksa call, but it was the mood and emotion that he was trying to mimic most of all. Playing that deep into the spring is rare territory for the Canucks. Those two goals clinched two of the club’s three trips to the Cup Finals in its 55-year history.
“It had a couple of different qualities,” Hughson, 68, said of the Adams’ call. “It was a great, exciting call. It was double overtime. And it meant so much to the franchise.
“But it also had this incredulity about it, this, ‘Can you believe it that the Vancouver Canucks could actually go to the Stanley Cup Final?’ ”
Don Taylor (host of CHEK’s Donnie and Dhali — The Team); John Shorthouse (Canucks Sportsnet TV play by play); Brendan Batchelor (Canucks Sportsnet 650 radio play by play); and Dave Randorf (Tampa Bay Lightning TV play by play) all grew up in the Lower Mainland, all grew up following the Canucks. We asked them for their picks of the most iconic play-by-play call in Canucks history.
Shorthouse and Taylor both went with the Adams’ goal, while Batchelor and Randorf selected the final moments of Game 6 of the Cup Final from that year against the New York Rangers, when a wounded and weary Trevor Linden was coming off the ice at the end of a shift in what would become a 4-1 Vancouver victory to force Game 7 back in New York.
Robson described it as: “We hope they can patch Linden up and get him into that one. He will play. You know he’ll play. He’ll play on crutches. He will play and he’ll play at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night.
“It’s the way he built that moment and did it with just a few sentences and basically gave every Canuck fan exactly what they were feeling at the time: this isn’t over tonight and we’re going to keep on going with the greatest ride we’ve ever seen with this franchise,” explained Randorf, 57, who was born in Toronto but grew up in North Delta.
“It’s a pattern that I use to this day, that building up the end of a game. Whether it’s the regular season or a playoff, you’re trying to emphasis the accomplishment, the win, the night that one player has had. Use a couple of sentences and just time it out as the horn sounds and let the crowd take over from there. It’s something I have completely ripped off from Jim Robson.
“I loved it (the Linden call) when I first heard it. It sends chills down your spine. All the moments aren’t that big, of course. That was a very big one. But it’s still a pattern that I’ve copied for when the moment is right.”
There have other been signature moments. There was the run to the 2011 Cup Final, which brought us Shorthouse’s “they’ve slayed the dragon,” as Vancouver ousted a Chicago Blackhawks’ team in the first round that ended their playoffs the two years previous with a 2-1 OT Game 7 win on an Alex Burrows’ marker.
So much old footage making its way to things like YouTube has a part in that.
“My personal favourite call is, ‘Greg Adams, Greg Adams’, but the most iconic call is the, ‘He’ll play. You know he’ll play.’ It’s remained part of the lexicon for Canuck fans,” said Batchelor, 36, who’s originally from Coquitlam.
“For me, what made Jim so special was his ability to convey the emotion of a moment without necessarily having to provide an overly detailed description. It was all in his tone. It was all in the way he would call a goal or the way in that moment he was like, ‘He’ll play. You know he’ll play.’ He perfectly encapsulated the emotions of the fan base in the way he delivered that line.
“I don’t think there’s ever been anyone in hockey broadcasting who’s been able to take moments like that and amplify them to such a great degree and did it by complimenting the emotion of the moment without taking over the moment.”
Batchelor and the others did have some of these answers on top-of-mind since the Canucks interviewed them for a tribute to Robson on his 90th birthday in January.
Robson lives in Vancouver, and you’ll see him at the odd Canucks game or from time-to-time at Nat Bailey Stadium watching the Vancouver Canadians.
He picks apart both the Adams and Linden calls. That is very much on-brand. He’s notoriously humble.
Robson maintains that “every time I hear the Linden call I wish I had finished it off with, ‘He will play for the Stanley Cup.’ ” And the Adams call had “too many Adams in it.”
Press him for memorable calls, and he’ll give you some. There’s the Rosaire Paiement game-winner in a 5-4 triumph over the powerhouse Boston Bruins in the Canucks’ 1970-71 inaugural season. There’s Jim Nill’s OT winner in a 2-1 win over the Blackhawks in the opening game of the 1982 Clarence Campbell Conference final.
There’s the Bob Nystrom OT winner in a 5-4 victory for the New York Islanders over the Philadelphia Flyers in Game 6 of the 1980 Cup Final that cinched the first of four straight championships for the Islanders. Robson was tapped by Hockey Night to do that series.
He also cites Wayne Gretzky scoring his 802nd career goal for the Los Angeles Kings versus the Canucks in March 1994. That broke Gordie Howe’s all-time record. Robson called that action on BCTV and offered up a “there it is … No. 802,” before letting the fan reaction and the video take over the story.
Ask Robson about hockey play-by-play in general, and he readily brings up that he thinks Hughson was the best ever “but was not appreciated in the east.”
“I’ve always said that Foster Hewitt was the first, Danny Gallivan the most-loved, Bob Cole the best voice, but it’s Jim Hughson who’s my choice as the very best,” he continued.
Robson called Canucks games on TV until 1999 but retired from the radio in 1994 and was succeeded by Hughson. Hughson told The Vancouver Sun then that “Jim Robson has made this job a very prestigious one.” He was Robson’s backup for a time before that, and admits that Robson was always “open to having you just look over his shoulder and watch and listen.”
Hughson would, of course, eventually move onto national broadcasts.He retired in September 2021 and lives in White Rock.
It’s all part of this market’s remarkable run of play-by-play voices. That includes Kelowna’s Rick Ball, who is handling Blackhawks games on TV.
Robson set the table. Along the way, he received the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award from the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1992 and was inducted into the B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame in 1998 and the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2000.
“With all due to respect to everybody else, because they’re all friends, but I grew up with Jim Robson and I don’t think he just set the standard in Vancouver but also across the country and across all of hockey,” said Taylor, 65, who’s a Burnaby native. “It was just something about his voice. It was just amazing. He made you feel like everything was so important and fun and exciting. I just loved his voice.”
Hughson added: “I think the bar was set pretty high by Jim and all of us had to work hard to try to reach that level.”
Shorthouse, 55, is from Vancouver. The Canucks have had their eras where they’ve struggled mightily. That included during Shorthouse’s adolescence. There was a time, as a kid, that Shorthouse felt Robson was the “best part of the team,” and he remembers being excited when Robson would get a national assignment for the playoffs because “he was getting recognized for how good he was outside of our market, where we already knew how good he was.”
“When you turned on a Canuck game and Jim was calling it, you knew it would be concise, it would be accurate and it would be fair, and you could tell how the Canucks were doing just by the sound of his voice,” said Shorthouse, who, like Taylor and Randorf, is an alum of the Sports Page TV show as well. “It wasn’t just the words. It was also the tone.
“That was one of the things that made him so special — just the number of gears he could go to with his voice. Some guys have one gear or two. You’re either really low or screaming, or you’re always screaming. Jim could go from here to here to here to here to here, depending on the gravity of the moment or the excitement of the game, or the importance of the game. He had so many different gears he could go to.”
Greg Douglas was the Canucks’ media relations director for their first seven seasons, so he has a long history with Robson. He recalls the Canucks playing the California Golden Seals on the road in that inaugural season. Charlie Finley owned the Golden Seals and was in the building. Finley was high-profile, through his ownership of baseball’s Oakland Athletics.
Douglas offered to try to get Finley to be an intermission guest. Robson told Douglas that would never happen. Douglas managed to bring him on with Robson for the first-period break. According to Douglas, things went so well that Finley offered to come back for the second-period intermission, too, and “hundreds of Jim’s guests over the years shared the same sentiments.”
He has that kind of affect on people. Always.
“Jim Robson never changed during a Hall of Fame career that saw him broadcast over 2,000 NHL games on television and radio between 1970 and his retirement in 1999,” Douglas explained.