No Heavy Lifting

by Rob Simpson

  “What the hell, let’s do it,” he said.

  He gave us two corporate tickets to the game and also paid for our flights and accommodations. “Our” included local celebrity golf pro, Thor Swensson, and myself. “The Mighty” Thor had Boise’s only golf simulator at the time, was a regular on a local sports talk show, and had a larger-than-life persona. He was allegedly qualified to be my “radio producer” because of his creative organizational skills. Thor had previously invited Jack Daniels to my already-out-of-hand thirty-second birthday party. What better guy to bring to the Super Bowl?

  Reporting from New Orleans during Super Bowl week was the only time I ever drank before going on the air, and I did it on purpose, because the show was entirely on tape. We weren’t there on press credentials and we weren’t interviewing football players; we were there to report on the scene and the atmosphere. Our show ran Monday through Friday for an hour at six p.m. mountain time. During Super Bowl Week, we’d head onto the very crowded streets each night at about eleven p.m., with a tape recorder, a couple of hurricanes in us and another in hand. We’d walk into bars and interview Packers fans and Patriots fans and anyone resembling a celebrity. Naturally, we included the hottest women we could possibly find to talk football. Thor, an extraordinary production assistant, held my drink while I held the microphone and actually gathered material. As for celebs, they were all sports types if I remember: Dan Patrick from ESPN, former NFL coach Jerry Glanville, and Pat O’Brien from CBS among them.

  At about midnight, we’d wrap up with about forty minutes of material, drop the recorder off in the room, and proceed back outside for a night of revelry. The next evening before heading out to duplicate the assignment, we’d host the live portion of the radio program. We’d set up the remote equipment in the hotel room, basically a mixer box with two headsets connected via phone line to the studio back home — we’d welcome everyone to the show, shoot the shit for a bit, and then hit Play on the tape recorder. Forty minutes later, having stopped it a couple of times for commercial breaks, we’d hit stop for good, chat live about any football news, and then say goodbye.

  Repeat effort five times, then have Saturday off, and then go to the Super Bowl on Sunday.

  Mr. Reynolds was also responsible for me and my wife Nora attending the Fiesta Bowl in Tempe, Arizona, in 1999, when the Tennessee Volunteers defeated the Florida State Seminoles for college football’s national championship. It was the game in which Vol’s quarterback Tee Martin threw a seventy-nine-yard touchdown bomb to Peerless Price in the fourth quarter to put the game away. That’s all I really remember, other than the FSU band playing the Tomahawk chop-chop theme and the Tennessee band playing “Rocky Top” incessantly. Beyond incessantly. Like, I’m going to shoot all of you geeks if you don’t stop, incessantly.

  Thank you, Jim Reynolds. Regardless of the gifts of those two great junkets, he was indeed a great, great guy and a loving father. Rest in peace.

  ~

  Fatherhood would actually be the theme for flight number 500. Like a dream — a spontaneous flight home to witness the birth of my son in June 1999.

  Of course, Mom couldn’t dilate before I got on the ten-hour overnight bus trip to Medford, Oregon, for the start of a five-game series between the Boise Hawks and the Southern Oregon Timberjacks. She instead reached the point of no return five minutes after my head hit the pillow for the morning nap that ensued immediately after I got there. Up, to the Medford airport, Horizon Air to Portland, and then to Boise.

  A few hours later, I popped home from the hospital to take our Rottweiler out for a walk. Just after I got there, a doctor declared Mom ready to pop. I rushed back for a middle-of-the-night umbilical cord cut. My son fit into the palms of my two hands.

  The fact that this momentous event coincided with my 500th flight is uncanny, but that’s where the wicked-cool pattern stopped — until flight 1,000.

  Just for shits and giggles: flight 600 was Seattle to Anchorage on Alaska Airlines in November 2000; 700 was Detroit to Chicago on Southwest in 2002; 800 was Chicago to Philadelphia in December 2004; and number 900 was Boston to Ottawa in March 2006 on the Boston Bruins team charter. Nothing occurred out of the ordinary.

  The monumental 1,000th career flight came during a trip to Africa to film a documentary with Right To Play. In June 2007, Bruins defenceman Andrew Ference, Florida Panthers D-man Steve “Monty” Montador, Mark Brender of Right To Play, videographer Pat Gamere from New England Sports Network, and I all flew a domestic flight on Air Tanzania from Dar es Salaam, the big city on the coast, to Mwanza, the biggest city on Lake Victoria. Four of us stood in a line right next to the stairs of the airplane while Gamere took our picture. Monty held up a single index finger while the rest of us stood next to him and held up zeros. Brender screwed it up a bit; Andrew and I made zeros by making a little circle with our hands while Mark used the NBA referee technique, signifying zero by holding up his fist. No worries, Brender, it’s a cool photo to mark the milestone nonetheless.

  Steve Montador, Mark Brender, Andrew Ference, and Rob Simpson, all hopping on my 1,000th flight.

  Thirteen months later, the pattern of significant flights continued. Most of the previous year had been routine, but flight 1,100 was on Kenya Air from Nairobi to London, England. I was returning from another trip to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

  But big, round numbers or not, in terms of really unusual international flights, there will never be another like my 286th from Tokyo to Hong Kong. There can’t be. The infamous Kai Tak (Kye-tock) Airport in HK was replaced soon after the British returned the territory to the Chinese in 1997. In October 1996, I basically spent my life savings to go over before the transfer occurred. I had always wanted to see Hong Kong, and no one had any idea what changes might take place once the Chinese took hold of this bastion of capitalism and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I also had a connection with an old friend of the family, who had a connection with a local banker, who had a connection with a tailor near where I was staying, in the Tsim Sha Tsui district across the harbour. I’d stock up on some inexpensive designer suits for my upcoming career in hockey broadcasting.

  After spending a few days in Tokyo with Japanese friends I knew from Hawaii, I enthusiastically boarded a United Airlines flight for Hong Kong. Aside from one drunk having to be restrained by the flight attendants, what really stands out was the approach into Kai Tak. I vaguely remembered watching a TV news magazine segment on the subject a few years before. I was abruptly reminded of it when a U.S. Air Force veteran sitting with his wife one row back asked me out of nowhere during the initial descent, “Ever flown into Kai Tak before?”

  “No.”

  “Get ready.”

  “What?”

  “It’s crazy, man, we’re gonna dive bomb.”

  “Dive bomb?”

  “Oh yeah, wait ’til you see this descent. You come over some mountains, dive down, and level out through the neighbourhoods.”

  “What?” Dude was tickled to share this information.

  Just then, our 747 went into a steep nosedive.

  I didn’t know whether to grip and lean forward with the momentum of my body weight or fight it, push on the armrests, and press my back against the seat. It was similar to coming off the highest point of a roller coaster, only in this case, the drop seemed to last a couple miles.

  Steep descents are a necessity on occasion. Not steep descents like this. Finally, like that same roller coaster reaching the bottom of its drop, our plane just pulled up hard and levelled out, all in one amazingly smooth motion, as my innards sank into my seat. The drunk guy must have known what was coming.

  Just moments after being able to breathe calmly again, we banked incredibly hard to the right, and I looked out the window at lights and buildings and streets rushing by, then we straightened out again, passing laundry on clotheslines strung between tenement buildin
gs. We were looking straight out at the back porches of midrise buildings and at people’s TV sets. We were flying through town at dusk. This probably didn’t last as long as it seemed; we soon came to rest on the lone runway in Victoria Harbour. At the end of the runway, the plane pulled off to the side and parked. It was the first time I ever had to take one of those bizarre buses, with a door on each end and one on each side, from the tarmac to the terminal.

  The Chinese spent a couple of billion dollars on a new airport and closed Kai Tak and ruined our fun in 1998. (In America, San Diego is the closest experience to this. Landing from the east, you briefly fly through a part of downtown below the top of some of the highest buildings.)

  Flight 1,200 was significant, in that I had never flown to Sudbury, Ontario, before, and Porter Airlines took me there in January 2013. I was with co-producer/camera-gal Shannon Eckstein to shoot another hockey charity event, the donation of equipment to First Nations youngsters who otherwise wouldn’t be able to play. The trip involved a “Sudbury Saturday Night” and a lot of tequila shots with Norm Flynn and the boys from Heroes Hockey. Consider me indoctrinated. We buzzed into the Sudbury Arena for a few minutes to take in a bit of a Wolves game. It’s the absolute epitome of a classic Canadian junior hockey barn.

  The shoot was for a program I produced and co-hosted called Sports Access, on AMI, or Accessible Media, a national TV and audio network in Canada that receives tax dollars to service the nation’s blind and visually impaired audience. Added dialogue, description, and natural sound are key when catering to this audience, who have to be able to “see” every episode simply by listening.

  Sports Access also focused on sports for impaired and disabled athletes at a time when that movement was starting to boom. In 2015, we wrapped up its fourth and final season where I was once again coordinating producer and occasional co-host. Production quality was very basic, based on the network’s funding and infrastructure, but even with the limitations and an insanely tight schedule, we still managed to create AMI’s most popular original series to date.

  Outweighing all of the production and travel opportunities for me at AMI were the sheer number of inspirational stories in the blind and disabled sporting communities. Some of these remarkable features included a brother and sister who are totally blind and toss horseshoes in their yard on a breathtaking cove on the coast of Newfoundland, a blind skateboarder in Winnipeg, amputee sailors in Nova Scotia, watching a deaf-blind woman play hockey, blind triathletes training with sighted guides, sledge hockey players, wheelchair basketball players, high-school wrestlers and swimmers who are totally blind, and a hockey writer who is visually impaired, the list goes on and on. There were even blind downhill skiers who follow sighted guides down courses at 100 kilometres an hour while wearing walkie-talkie headsets.

  Let’s just say I was ready to run through a wall on countless occasions after watching someone do something completely ridiculous and inspiring, when you’d think they’d have no chance at all based on their physical limitation. Far more often, in fact, than the number of times I was inspired while covering the Maple Leafs those seasons, which I also did on a regular basis for the AMI audio channel.

  Flight 1,300 was Chicago to Buffalo on Southwest in August 2014, flight 1,400 was Buffalo to Baltimore on Southwest in April 2015. Flight 1,500 was somewhat monumental. Air Canada took me from Montreal to Fredericton, New Brunswick, in March 2017, to provide live coverage of my first ever University Cup, the Canadian version of an NCAA Frozen Four. Working with the Montreal Canadiens’ excellent TV tandem of John Bartlett and Jason York, I was brought in to provide live insight and interviews from ice level.

  Dropping in once or twice a season to handle a national television broadcast is a delight, but it’s also the ultimate challenge. I’m not seeing the same team forty times, or the opponent for the third or fourth time. All of the TSN and Sportsnet telecasts I’ve been a part of during the last five years have essentially been one-offs, featuring rosters the crew had never seen before nor would likely see again. It definitely keeps preparation at a premium. Thankfully, most of these gigs have been play-by-play, my optimum role, and all of the shows have come off without a hitch. Doesn’t hurt to be working with Cassie Campbell-Pascall, Louie DeBrusk, Craig Button, or Dave Reid.

  Button and I did a Junior-A challenge championship game on TSN a few years back in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. Surprisingly, the two Canadian teams both lost in the semis. The final was between Russia and the USA. Unexpectedly having to memorize an absurdly challenging Russian roster overnight was interesting to say the least. Often times I’ll just study a roster over and over and over and repeat the names and numbers. In this case I actually made flashcards of the two teams, flipping through them time and again until the individual players and jerseys matched up in my brain.

  The fact that these two opponents were facing off in the final actually made Craig and me chuckle. Who the hell in Canada was gonna watch that championship game?

  In January 2015, I did an Ontario Hockey League game in Ottawa while suffering with my first and (so far) only ever urinary tract infection. It kicked in during my flight to Ottawa. I had full-on nausea, cold sweats, and uncontrollable shivers the night before the game, slept little, and had a fever and dizziness during the telecast. I have no recollection whatsoever of the match, I just know I worked with Debrusk and Kyle Bukauskas and the first-time producer was happy with the show.

  The University Cup semi-final and final in 2017 also featured a first-time producer. He did a great job. Me, I handled most everything pretty well for my first ice-level gig in three years, but I’ll never forgive myself for screwing up the open of the final. If you were to pick the one thing you least wanted to screw up, it would be the open to the championship telecast. For no particular reason whatsoever, for the first time in my career, I decided not to ad lib and instead read part of the open over the video clips. I lost my spot on my notepad and flip-flopped some players’ names. It drove me absolutely nuts.

  My audio guy put it in perspective. “Hey, nobody died.” Thanks. The rest of the telecast had to be flawless. I still think about that mistake — more often than I should. You can only hope the bosses remember the good stuff.

  Here’s to many more entertaining shows and to getting to 2,000 flights and beyond.

  ~

  Fun landing at Kai Tak found on YouTube: Boeing 747 Hard Crosswind Landing Hong Kong

  THE ICE-LEVEL MAN COMETH (AND GOETH)

  “That’s your last Rangers game.”

  Tom Renney, New York Rangers head coach as I boarded the team charter

  Coach Renney’s words were prophetic. It was indeed the last time I did a Rangers game. In fact, as of the spring of 2017 it’s the last time I’ve done a live NHL game telecast. November 1, 2008, marked the end of my ice-level existence on TV at the highest level of hockey. As is often the case for those holding the mic, destiny was determined by persons and circumstances beyond my control.

  At MSG the TV Network, as in Madison Square Garden, one of the many business entities under the large MSG umbrella, there were generally four on-air people working a Rangers telecast at the home rink and three on the road. That didn’t include the two or three people in the studio handling pre, post, and intermissions. As is still the case, Sam Rosen handled play-by-play, Joe Micheletti handled color commentary, John Giannone did the ice-level interviews and post-game scrums, while at home games, the iconic Al Trautwig would handle the live ice-level stuff between periods and bump Giannone to just post-game interview gathering.

  Having just wrapped up three years in Boston, working as the ice-level guy for the Bruins on NESN (New England Sports Network), I was invited to be the emergency backup reporter on TV for Rangers games in New York. I was also dabbling in some work with the NHL Network based a bit uptown at NHL HQ on Sixth Avenue and also in Toronto.

  Boston had been a tremendous experience, I felt I was on to
p of my game and, based on industry feedback, was one of the more efficient and knowledgeable third guys in the League. Aside from Paul Hendrick in Toronto, who is loaded with information and decades of experience, I felt I could match up my presentation with anyone’s. It helped that I had hockey in my blood.

  My brothers and I began skating and moving pucks on a pond in Michigan not long after we learned to walk. We all played house-league not far down the road and we were all religious Red Wings and NHL fans. My brothers played high-school hockey, I had quit playing and did play-by-play of the local games on our high-school radio station.

  Of course, the always-frugal NESN had different ideas. TV boy, as I referred to myself, was about to get a little expensive entering his fourth season, and I was dumped. Not renewed, more accurately, which was probably not a bad thing for my health as I had been living like a rock star.

  Besides the cheap factor at NESN, where well-known on-air persons work for relative peanuts, it also didn’t help that I refused to see eye-to-eye on all things with the network’s executive producer (EP). At one point before my final season at NESN, the then-EP asked my co-producer Sarge Kerrisey and me to come up with a way to include reporter Naoko Funayama into a weekly segment on our successful Bruins half-hour magazine-style TV show Rubber Biscuit. Why, we had no idea. The extent of her on-air experience at that point had been covering sports on a local cable network in Maryland and as a part-time reporter at NESN to help translate with the Red Sox Japanese pitchers. Stylistically, it was an absolute mismatch, and given that Rubber Biscuit was often shot on-location during road trips and that I was also working an 82-game live hockey schedule while hosting and co-producing the show, we simply ignored the request. We weren’t going to awkwardly ruin a really good program.

  He also probably didn’t like the fact that I was already producing and hosting a TV show on the side for EP Gord Cutler at the NHL Network.