Hockey Night puts together rare double play

The opportunity for a broadcaster to call two NHL games in one day doesn't come around often, and when it does, it is fraught with potential problems.

Hockey Night In Canada's Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson pulled it off last Saturday, when they were in the booth at Rexall Place to broadcast the Colorado Avalanche-Edmonton Oilers game in the afternoon and then flew to Calgary for the Minnesota Wild-Flames game in the evening.

Everything went smoothly. Weather was good. The flight lasted less than an hour. They even had time to check into their hotel.

"It was very routine," Hughson said.

Hughson and Simpson were the first Hockey Night team to announce two NHL games in a day, and, perhaps, the first anywhere.

But single announcers have done it before. Unlike Hughson and Simpson, however, they found themselves in mad, hectic dashes to reach the second venue.

In the 1990s, Mike (Doc) Emrick called an afternoon Flyers game in Philadelphia for Fox Television, after which he planned to rush to a New Jersey Devils game at the Meadowlands that night. But time was tight, so a police escort was arranged to take him to a heliport 15 blocks from The Spectrum.

A helicopter flew Emrick to Giants Stadium at the Meadowlands. With the minutes ticking off before the 7 p.m. start, a cab was waiting to take him to the main entrance of the arena.

That's when trouble started. Emrick forgot his pass and a security guard was adamant about refusing to let him in.

Finally, a Devils employee appeared.

"I got up to the booth with about two minutes to spare," Emrick said. "That's about as close as you want to cut it. After having everything tailor-made that day, the one thing I hadn't counted on was a belligerent guard."

But Emrick's trip was a skate in the park compared with Dan Kelly's experience in 1986. He was in Detroit to call an afternoon game for CTV.

During the second intermission, Kelly asked Greg Innis, the statistician in the booth, if he would drive him to the airport outside Detroit at the conclusion of the game. He had to catch a 6 p.m. flight to Chicago for a St. Louis Blues-Blackhawks game that night.

But the Detroit game went into overtime and by the time Innis and Kelly reached the car, it was 5:35 p.m.

They raced to the airport and got there at 6 p.m. Innis pulled over and they ran into the terminal.

"The thing I'll always remember was, when we hurried through the terminal, I was about 150 feet ahead of Dan who was trying to keep up," Innis said. "He was smoking a cigarette and you could hear him huffing and puffing like crazy. I thought for sure he would collapse before we got there."

They reached the boarding gate to learn the flight was 15 minutes late. Kelly made it and he was able to get to Chicago to call his daily double.

Other, semi-doubles: In 1991, Don Chevrier called a Blue Jays game in Toronto and then drove to Hamilton to do the play-by-play of a Canada Cup hockey game at Copps Coliseum.

Years ago, after calling a playoff game for Hockey Night at the Boston Garden, Bob Cole, Harry Neale and Dick Irvin sat around a monitor in the arena to call the final 90 minutes of a playoff game involving the Washington Capitals.

China worries CBC

Scott Moore, the head of CBC Sports, in his blog, comments on reports that China will not allow international networks to shoot live footage from Tiananmen Square during the Beijing Games. "If this is true, it is something we at the CBC, and our colleagues from other networks around the world, need to be very concerned about. … It will be our position that when China agreed to stage the Games, they agreed to allow standard Olympic reporting. They need to live up to that. As an international rights holder, we need to keep their feet to the fire to ensure that they keep that promise."

• The Score's NCAA basketball tournament audiences are up 18 per cent from last year. The average through the first weekend was 46,000 viewers.
• The CFL has eliminated the Insight and Analysis section of CFL.ca. Several writers have been laid off. CFL games will be streamed on TSN.ca starting this season.

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