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Hockey commentator Ron MacLean warms up the audience at a gala dinner on Sept 28 2012.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail

On Wednesday morning, as the folks at Rogers Sports & Media were scrambling to save Ron MacLean’s career from a weird joke he’d made the previous evening during a Hockey Night in Canada broadcast, veteran sports producer John Shannon was offering unsolicited advice to the hockey world’s newest talking head.

“Wayne [Gretzky] will be good if he lets his guard down,” said Shannon, speaking on the Bob McCown Podcast, which he co-hosts. Gretzky’s multimillion-dollar signing as a lead analyst with the U.S. cable network TNT for next season had just been made official. “Wayne has a great sense of humour, he has a really, really sharp tongue, and he has a very good analytical mind for the game of hockey. … If he’s able to do a little bit of that on the air, then he will be really good.”

Too bad for The Great One, then, that Canadian sports broadcasting was at that very moment in the middle of yet another case study of Why You Must Never Let Your Guard Down When You Are On-Air

The MacLean gaffe was, like many of his interjected asides over the years, almost too convoluted to explain, but let’s give it a shot.

During Hockey Night’s first intermission segment on Tuesday, MacLean had joked with his panelists about an old photo that Kevin Bieksa had on the shelf above him. The pic featured three guys flexing their muscles for the camera, including fellow Hockey Night panelist Anthony Stewart with his shirt off. Current Leafs enforcer Wayne Simmonds was holding a bottle of something that had been blurred out. Stewart joked about what might have been in the bottle; to some of us watching, it sounded as though he was referring to a banned substance.

An hour later, during the second intermission, Bieksa said he was “the most positive guy on this panel,” but he couldn’t hold back from criticizing a Montreal Canadiens’ defensive lapse he had just discussed. As the other panelists laughed, MacLean quipped: “You have a photo of a guy with his tarp off, you’re definitely positive for something.”

What was that supposed to mean? The incident became a real-time Rorschach test for the masses. Many among the online horde assumed the worst, jumping to the conclusion that MacLean had implied something homophobic.

Inevitably – because MacLean had spent decades playing the straight man to Don Cherry’s Crazy Uncle shtick– the episode also spurred Cherry’s fanboys to call for MacLean’s head. Anything less, they argued, would be grand hypocrisy on the part of Rogers, given the company’s defenestration of Cherry after his insensitive comments about immigrants during a Remembrance Day rant in November, 2019.

(Many were making that argument in bad faith, but if that’s a surprise then I’d like to introduce you to something called Twitter.)

On Wednesday afternoon, MacLean issued a statement of regret and apology, saying that it was all a misunderstanding, that when he joked about Bieksa “ ‘testing positive’ … I meant the rum.” (Though, wait: Who tests positive for rum? Also, for the record, MacLean hadn’t actually used the words “testing positive” on-air, even though he did in his apology.)

Nevertheless, he said, he realized that his intentions behind the joke were not enough to exonerate him. He said he had “reached out to several guiding lights in the equity-seeking arena, my allies in the LGBTQ2S+ community and to my co-workers to receive their wisdom, and continue our joint effort to tend to the hearts of us all.”

Minutes later, Sportsnet issued a statement of support for MacLean, noting he has “a strong history of being an outspoken ally and continues to advocate for all equity-seeking communities.”

But, as he kicked off Hockey Night that evening, it seemed as though MacLean was a little spooked.

The ground has shifted beneath the feet of on-air broadcasters. As a breed, when the red light goes on, they operate on pure instinct, but if they can’t trust themselves not to offend, how can they do their job?

Last August, NBC Sports sent Mike Milbury home midway through the playoffs after he joked that the atmosphere in the NHL’s Toronto COVID-19 bubble had been ideal for hockey because there weren’t “even any women here to disrupt [players’] concentration.”

And earlier this month, veteran Chicago sportscaster Pat Foley quipped on-air that if he’d had to travel with the Blackhawks this season and follow strict COVID-19 protocols, “I might have put a bullet in my head.” He apologized within minutes, but the Blackhawks excoriated him the next day, saying they were “incredibly disappointed,” that he had “trivialized mental health and suicide” and that they would be “speaking to Pat further about his insensitivity.”

On Thursday’s Bob McCown Podcast, Fred Gaudelli, the executive producer of Sunday Night Football on NBC, was talking about the challenge of transforming a former pro athlete such as Drew Brees into a good colour analyst, especially in the current environment. “Words matter more now than ever,” he said. “Any off-the-cuff comment could get you fired – cancelled, forever.”

Words have always mattered: MacLean, after all, landed in his job in March, 1987, after Dave Hodge expressed exasperation on-air at the CBC’s decision not to show the end of a Montreal Canadiens game. Hodge had offended the few people who held power at the time; nowadays, the audience is the one calling the shots, making sure no one steps over the line.

You have to feel for the on-air talent. Over the past few years, the sports commentariat has exploded into a rambunctious and often ribald place – from podcasts to Twitter wars, live-stream chats on Twitch and YouTube and Discord – where everyone feels free to say exactly what they’re thinking, seemingly without consequence. Meanwhile, many of the legacy-broadcast outlets have become sterile, cautious, and corporate, terrified of upsetting their pro league partners, sponsors, or an influencer in their audience with an army of followers ready to go nuclear at a moment’s notice.

Most of the folks on air and behind the scenes got into the business to have fun, and to share that sense of joy with their audience. That can be tough to do when you’re scared of your own shadow.

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