Rimer looks back on a career unlike any other

For 20 years, Jeff Rimer has said it all as the television voice of the Blue Jackets.

And in October, he did it again. In a retirement announcement of more than 2,000 words, Rimer thanked everyone who had a hand in an illustrious six-decade broadcasting career that’s included 48 years in the National Hockey League.

It was a heartfelt statement that also took Rimer “forever” to write, in his words, because he wanted to not just get it right but make sure everyone was properly recognized.

In all, stories were told and 54 names were mentioned – a hallmark of Rimer’s career.

As a young broadcaster, he secured an exclusive interview with Muhammad Ali and called the perfect 10s of Nadia Comaneci. In his career, he sparred with Pete Rose, befriended Hall of Famers and worked with broadcasting icons from George Michael to Billy Packer.

He fielded calls from disgruntled NHL players from the locker room and heard from execs who knew Rimer was often more plugged in than they were about what was happening around the league.

His Rolodex has ranged from such icons as Larry King to Michael Buble, a remarkable depth of field that has marked one of the most unique careers in broadcasting.

“I’m very, very fortunate, no question about that,” Rimer said. “I’m proud obviously of the accomplishments. I can’t tell you how many people tell me I should write a book about the experiences I’ve been fortunate to be a part of. And I might!”

Rimer tried to say it all at the start of the campaign when he announced his 20th season with the Blue Jackets would be his last, but the reality is there’s so much more to add.

So earlier this week, BlueJackets.com sat down with Rimer at the team hotel in Arizona to hear more about his incredible journey ahead of tomorrow night’s game vs. Pittsburgh, before which Rimer will be recognized in a pregame ceremony. (Fans are being asked to be in their seats by 6:55 p.m.)

Rimer’s voice has become synonymous with Blue Jackets hockey, and he’s had an incredible ride that’s still almost impossible to sum up in one article.

“He’s put the work in,” broadcast partner Jody Shelley said. “Everybody knows the relationships he’s built, the effort he’s put into everything he’s done. That’s why he’s been able to do it for so long.

“He’s gonna miss it so much. This last stretch is gonna be hard on him, but he’s making the right decision. He should be extremely proud of his career.”

Falling for Hockey

Rimer was born in Toronto and like many kids who are from Canada fell in love with the sport of hockey.

The Maple Leafs quickly became his passion in life, and Rimer was never afraid to try to get close to the game even in his early years.

“All I cared about was hockey, and in particular Frank Mahovlich,” he said of the Leafs’ six-time Stanley Cup winner and Hockey Hall of Famer. “My bedroom was plastered with pictures of him. And as a young kid, I would take the subway down and wait. I knew where the visiting players would come up from the subway to walk into Maple Leaf Gardens, and I begged them to take me into the rink on a Saturday morning to go into a skate. And a lot of them did.

“I met a lot of players. I met Tim Horton. Sid Abel, a Hall of Fame coach and former NHL player, bought me lunch one day at the Royal York Hotel because I hung around the hotel because I wanted to get autographs before autographs even became fashionable.

“I’m not saying I started the whole autograph trend, but I had Bobby Hull’s autograph on a ticket stub. Where that thing is, I have no idea, but it meant a lot to me.”

While Rimer was living and breathing hockey as a youngster, he had to endure the unfortunate reality that his father passed away before he was a teenager. Eventually, his mother would remarry, and the family moved when Jeff was 14 to Calgary, where a brush with greatness would soon follow.

Rimer walked into his homeroom class the first day at Henry Wise Wood High School and immediately met a friend for life in John Davidson, the current Blue Jackets president of hockey operations. The two shared a love of the sport and hit it off, not knowing they’d each spend decades as fixtures in hockey.

At the time, they were just teenagers who would skip class to skate on the rink that was outside. But while Davidson was blessed with the type of talent that would make him an NHL player by age 20, Rimer didn’t quite have the same abilities.

“He was a guy who loved sports and wanted to play hockey, but it wasn’t in the cards,” Davidson said. “He had a pretty good shot, but his skating wasn’t what it needed to be, so it wasn’t gonna happen. He was smart enough to figure that out and wanted to be in sports, and at a young age he moved into broadcasting.”

Still, Davidson looked out for Rimer, even encouraging him to try to continue playing hockey as long as he could. That came to a close when tryouts were held at the neighborhood rink in southwst Calgary.

“He talked me into trying out for AAA, and he said, ‘The extra ice time will do you good,’” Rimer said. “Of course, my career came to a sudden ending because I was told to leave the ice. Over 200 kids at Rose Kohn Arena, I got tapped and the shoulder and they said, ‘House league starts Monday, kid.’ I was on a snowbank Monday and I said, ‘You know what, this isn’t gonna work.’”

Getting Into Broadcasting

Rimer noted he had cousins who were straight-A students, and Davidson was soon to become the first goalie to go directly from junior hockey to the NHL.

Meanwhile, he admittedly wasn’t a great student, and he had to face the realization that his hockey career wasn’t going to take off, either. But if he had one trait that separated him from his peers, it was his fearlessness.

When he realized the on-ice dream wasn’t going to work out, Rimer turned his focus to broadcasting. As a teenager, he convinced sportscaster Ken Newans to give him a show on high school and college sports; if he couldn’t make it on the ice, he was going to make it on the air.

“There’s the rink rats,” Rimer said. “I was a radio and television rat.”

One of Rimer’s most famous stories came when he was still a teenager and one of the most provocative athletes in the world came to Calgary. Muhammad Ali had been stripped of the heavyweight title because of his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War, and in the early 1970s he appeared in Calgary for an exhibition while trying to get his boxing license back.

A bevy of reporters from across North America descended on the Stampede City, and Rimer put on his best shirt and tie for the event. Without hesitation, he walked up to Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, and asked for an interview with the champ.

The detail he left out was that he didn’t have a camera or a microphone, and the interview would have to take place at a studio a mile away up the Macleod Trail.

“The guy laughed at him and said, ‘Jeff, he’s not gonna do something like that. Don’t be so damn stupid,’” Newans remembers now. “And Ali heard him say that and said, ‘Where is it? Where do we have to go?’ Ali went there somehow, someway, and did an interview.”

Simply put, Rimer had a tenacity others didn’t have, and Newans recognized it immediately.

“He said, ‘You know you’re gonna upset a lot of people because of your aggressiveness,’” Rimer said. “But if I wasn’t aggressive – how many 19-year-olds do you know who would go to a major press conference with television cameras and personnel from all across North America, after Ali is stripped of the heavyweight title of the world, and ask Angelo Dundee if I could talk to the champ?

“He said, ‘Sure, where’s your camera?’ I said I didn’t have a camera, but I had a studio up the road, and I had the guts enough to ask him to do it. Well, as Kenny said, ‘You’re gonna upset a lot of people, but you know what? You’re gonna go places.’”

As Newans now says, “The thing about Jeff is he had a tremendous desire to do well, and he carried that every place he went. He’s a remarkable guy, no question about it. Jeff had to survive quite a few things, people he worked with that weren’t happy with him because he was too conscientious and had a great desire to succeed. And he did.”

His career path included just about every sport and certainly wasn’t a traditional one, but it worked. He started his career doing radio and television work at CJOC in Lethbridge, Alberta, but one big opportunity came when Ernie Afaganis at the CBC in Edmonton hired him as a sportscaster.

A renowned broadcaster himself, Afaganis was soon promoted to hosting the CBC’s Olympic coverage, opening a spot for Rimer to serve as the voice of Olympic gymnastics for the network. His first big assignment was the 1976 Olympics, where Comaneci’s historic perfect 10s caught the attention of the entire sports world.

Eventually, Rimer’s biggest break came when legendary broadcaster Dick Irvin offered him a job to work in Montreal on broadcasts of Expos baseball and Canadiens hockey – the latter of which was simply too good to turn down. After seven years in Montreal – which included the birth of his son, Josh, and daughter, Kylie – Rimer moved to Baltimore to work for WBAL Radio and eventually picked up a play-by-play job with the Washington Capitals.

In 1993-94, he became the first NHL broadcaster to work as a play-by-play voice for two teams, doing so for the Caps and the Florida Panthers, and he eventually inked a deal to become the full-time voice of the Sunshine State squad.

Fast-forward to 2004 and Rimer was hired by the Blue Jackets – more on that later – leading to two decades as the television voice of the squad.

Rimer Being Rimer

Over the years, Rimer's duties have allowed him to intersect with athletes of all stripes, and many have become friends – while others are foils in the stories he’s collected.

One came to mind for Rimer as the Blue Jackets enjoyed a four-night stay in Arizona to play the Coyotes earlier this week. Almost three decades prior, Rimer was working with the Panthers and the team stayed at the same suburban hotel, where a couple of Florida’s players – friends Brian Skrudland and Paul Laus – played a prank he still remembers.

“We get our room keys, and Paul Laus says, ‘Rimer, what room are you in?’ I said, ‘I’m in room 4221.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna drop my bags off and I’m coming to your room.’ And I’m waiting and waiting and waiting, and Brian Skrudland calls me, and he said, ‘Rimer, where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m in my room, I’m waiting for Paul Laus to come.’ He says, ‘Well Paul Laus is here. We’re all at the pool. Come on down.’

“So I go down there, and as I’m walking in, if you remember the Macarena was real big. Guys are in the pool, they have drinks, and guess what? They put my room number on the open check. And instead of doing the Macarena, they’re doing the Maca-Rimer! They’re just howling.

“I was worried I was gonna be stuck with this $1,000 bill that was on my room. They’re laughing about it for a couple of days, and the night before we’re checking out, Skrudland, the guy that he is, goes and gets a bunch of nickels, dimes and quarters and puts them on one of those food carts. They come to my room and knock on the door and there’s all this money sitting there, like, ‘Here, pay the bill.’

“I look back it now, the guys played pranks on me, but they did that because they respected me and liked me. And knew that I could take it.”

There were legendary back and forths with personalities like Rose, and friendships built with such Hall of Famers as baseball stars Gary Carter and Cal Ripken as well as hockey’s Dino Cicarelli. Even now, Rimer spends as much time on the phone as anyone in the league, checking in with friends like Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and reporters like The Athletic’s Michael Russo.

If we sat here and recounted every story Rimer told us for this article, we’d blow well past another couple thousand words.

“It’s amazing the stories he has,” Shelley said. “He has story after story. He has stories he doesn’t even remember!”

Shelley, of course, takes full advantage of that on the Bally Sports broadcasts. As Rimer has settled into his responsibilities as a play-by-play man over the years, prep work is key, and he takes it seriously. Over their 10 years as a broadcast duo, Shelley has learned the perfect times and the perfect ways to get Rimer into a story – or when to tweak him to add comedic effect to the broadcast.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Shelley said. “Part of this whole thing is having fun and enjoying it, and sometimes I see him getting really locked in and serious, and I like to make a joke to lighten things up. On the air, he’s taking it seriously, but there are some moments where we can have some fun. It’s fun to get a certain look from Rimer where he has a smirk and kind of a question mark in his eyebrows. It’s like, ‘Yeah, here we are.’”

Rimer’s proclivity for mentioning the famous names he’s come across over the years is well known, to the point his weekly segment on 97.1 The Fan is known as “Name Dropping with Jeff Rimer.” But as Davidson pointed out, the reason Rimer is able to mention so many people is because he’s built relationships with them.

“Those friendships have lasted,” Davidson said. “When you get around sports, it’s not just a game, it’s a lifelong, relationship-oriented business – if you want. It’s only if you want it to be, and you care about peoples’ families. It’s a loyalty thing. It’s important for a lot of people because when it’s over, when you finish, if you don’t have friends, what do you have? He’s always been a loyal guy.”

When asked about the subject, Rimer gave a very Rimer answer.

“I’ve made friendships for life,” Rimer said before noting some of the names that have approached him to chat during his final season – legendary coach Scotty Bowman as well as current GMs Chris MacFarland, Ken Holland and Kevin Cheveldayoff among them. “It’s been great.”

Coming to Columbus

For someone who had been so many places in his career, Rimer hadn’t worked in Ohio before he got the Blue Jackets job, but he did have one connection.

While working in Baltimore, he hosted a weekly football show with former Ohio State standout Stan White, and as the two became close, White took every opportunity to tell him about his college town.

“He just spoke so glowingly of Columbus and Ohio State,” Rimer said. “That stayed with me.”

Eventually, through his relationship with then-CBJ president Doug MacLean, Rimer had the opportunity to work for the Blue Jackets starting in 2004. While he enjoyed living and working in Florida, it was a time of uncertainty around the NHL lockout, and the Blue Jackets made him an offer he felt he had to accept.

It led to two decades in Columbus, plus relationships he’ll treasure forever.

“It’s the best career move I made, in my opinion,” he said. “Columbus is a special place. I tell everybody it’s still one of the best-kept secrets, in my opinion, in the country and in North America. There’s something special about the people of the Midwest, the sports fans of the Midwest, and Blue Jackets fans in particular. I’m just amazed at their support.

“I’ve broadcast here for 20 years, and I can’t fathom how many great people that I’ve met personally over those 20 years. I’m so thankful.”

When it comes to his favorite memories with the team, there's some obvious ones, including Game 4 of the 2014 Stanley Cup Playoffs when Nick Foligno brought the house down. But when it comes to an iconic moment that Rimer will remember forever, most CBJ fans can still hear his words when Rick Nash scored the most legendary goal in franchise history vs. Arizona in 2008.

Outlet pass for Rick Nash. Nash now tries to split the defense and walk in. Nice move! Another nice move! He scores! What a goal! It doesn’t get any better than this. Rick Nash, how do you do!

Looking back, Rimer says, “I knew something was going to happen because Rick took a penalty that shouldn’t have been a penalty. When he came out of the box, he was so upset. I’ve never seen him show so much emotion. He came out of the box and he was determined he was going to score, and he went through the whole team. It turned out to be the goal of the decade. That was a great highlight.”

There have been many over the years, but the time has come to move on to the next chapter. Rimer met his wife, Ferrel, on a blind date 48 years ago, and the two were engaged within a week and married two and a half months later.

He's said he’ll return to Columbus whenever he can, and it’s fair to say he’ll stay in tune with what’s happening in the NHL as well as the broadcasting world. But the NHL life isn’t an easy one, with months of travel each year, and the time has come for Rimer to spend more of his life with his family in Florida.

“She’s raised our kids,” Rimer said of Ferrel. “They’ve turned out to be great kids, and she’s responsible for all that. So now it’s time to be spend some time with them. She’s been my rock, and I owe her everything.

“This chapter of the book is closing, but there’s a lot more left to be written.”