Canadian broadcast legend passes

[Kevin Vahey <kvahey@megsinet.net>]

This was sent to me by a friend from up north


Did you happen to read that Rene Lecavalier passed away today?  I don't
know how well he is known outside the French speaking world, but I believe
he is hands down the best play by play guy to ever do a hockey game, and
yes that includes the late Danny Gallivan.  People talk about how Danny
Gallivan introduced words into the language, like "spin-a-rama", which I'm
not even completely sure he did (different people have told me that Fred
was using it to describe Bobby Orr before Gallivan used it to describe
savard), and "cannonading drive" .  Rene introduced a whole language to
hockey games, replacing English phrases with French phrases, and his
diction was impeccable.  I remember watching games with my dad and
grandfather and my dad would say that he could almost understand what Rene
was saying.  One of the strange things about the French language is that
you could learn the language, and not have any idea what a Frenchman is
saying to you because they speak so fast, and use such poor diction, but
people could follow the game as Rene called it.  He did the Radio Canada
hockey games from 1952 until about 10 years ago, but his passion was
baseball.  He did the Expo games with a former Expo, and one of the few
Canadian Major Leaguers named Claude Raymond.  They made the bumbling Expos
so much fun to watch back in the beginning, that despite my distaste for
anything to do with Montreal, I became a Expo fan.  The Expos had a lot of
fairly High Profile guys do the English broadcasts back in the beginning as
well, like Don Drysdale and Duke Synder, but given the choice I always
listened to Rene and Claude. He also did the 1976 Olympic Games in
Montreal, and the only Canadian to win a Medal in those games was a high
jumper named Greg Joy.  The only reason I know that is because amongst
French speaking people his call of Greg's Silver Medal jump is every bit as
famous as Red Barber's,  "The Giants Win the pennant, etc., etc.," or
even Dan Kelly's calling Bobby's goal in 1970. He was 81 years old.

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