Cole left impression on every game he called, everyone he met

MONTREAL -- The late Bob Cole’s first NHL play-by-play assignment for CBC Radio featured the first and only Stanley Cup Playoff overtime goal scored by Montreal Canadiens legend Jean Beliveau.

It came on April 24, 1969 -- 55 years to the day of Bob’s death Wednesday at age 90.

I’m considering this extraordinary fact as I recall having often joked to Bob that if they were still printing phone books, I’d sit and listen to him read one.

Bob had that kind of voice. If he had a microphone to call the play-by-play, he could make it exciting waiting for a traffic light to change.

If two cars and a pedestrian simultaneously ventured into the same intersection, he’d probably have cried, “Oh baby! EVERYTHING is happening!”

We started saying our goodbyes to Bob on Thursday with word that the broadcast giant had died. We’ll be saying goodbye for a long time to come, sharing stories, memories, meetings and the Cole-isms that became part of the hockey lexicon.

Bob Cole stands between Edmonton Oilers greats Mark Messier (second from left) and Wayne Gretzky with Sportsnet broadcasters Gene Principe (left) and John Shannon during the Farewell Rexall Place ceremony following the Oilers’ game against the Vancouver Canucks on April 6, 2016.

Bob and I would regularly bump into each other at Montreal’s Bell Centre or on the road at morning skates, in the media gallery and, perhaps best of all, in the dining room before Bob would head to the broadcast booth and I’d take my seat in the press box.

Our travels sometimes took us through airports together and he was always humbled by the attention, fans flocking to him for photos and autographs.

More than one asked him to record a signature phrase on a phone, to be used on an answering machine.

“Oh, baby… Joe’s not home right now, if you can believe it, so leave a message!”

Travelers who didn’t even stop as they hurried to their gates would see him and call out, “Oh, baby!”

We stood at a baggage carousel at Montreal-Trudeau Airport one afternoon, Bob in transit back to his home in Newfoundland, and airport security swarmed him like he was a rock star.

Which, in this country, he was.

Bob Cole calls the action during a 2019 game at Bell MTS Place in Winnipeg.

Bob called them all. Regular-season games that meant nothing more than two points in the standings. The Stanley Cup Playoffs. Stanley Cup Final. The Olympics. The landmark 1972 Summit Series.

His hockey career began in 1969 for CBC Radio, shifting to play-by-play in a “why not?” decision by a producer.

Bob had been doing color commentary for the national network alongside Bob McDevitt, but for Game 6, CBC made the switch to put Bob on play-by-play for a Stanley Cup semifinal game that would go to double overtime.

Beliveau, the Canadiens captain, ended it at 11:28 of the second overtime, a quick snap past Bruins goalie Gerry Cheevers at Boston Garden.

The goal eliminated the Bruins, the Canadiens bound for the Stanley Cup with a four-game sweep of the St. Louis Blues. It was the first of thousands of games that Bob would call behind a CBC or Sportsnet microphone.

Many years later, Bob and his great friend whom he called “John” posed for a photo in the Canadiens alumni lounge of Montreal’s Bell Centre, an image that Bob forever cherished. Beliveau would autograph it, in French, his words translated: “To Bob, In memory of a friendship that began in 1969.”

Bob Cole and Jean Beliveau in a prized photo from the broadcaster’s collection, and at the 2018 NHL Alumni Gala in Toronto.

Beliveau died in 2014, a little more than five years before Bob arrived at Bell Centre on April 6, 2019, to call his final NHL game. Together that night in the broadcast booth, we did inventory of the Canadiens’ retired-number banners in the arena rafters. Beliveau’s No. 4 was directly in front of us.

“Big John,” Bob said. “The best. The BEST.”

Bob was 85, the soundtrack to hockey for more than a generation of Canadians, the voice of countless games over five decades.

Rogers Sportsnet had announced a few months earlier that 2018-19 would be Bob’s final season, a 10-game limited schedule padded by six. The final brought him to Montreal for a game, fittingly, between the Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, a 6-5 shootout win for the home team.

Bob’s four children were in the building that night, arriving in the broadcast booth late in the game. Megan and Robbie came in from Vancouver, Christian and Hilary from Newfoundland.

“They’ve done it on their own,” Bob said of his family when we spoke for a pregame feature story that covered just a fraction of his career. “They wouldn’t even touch me with it because they knew I wouldn’t hear of it.”

He spoke of preparing for his final game exactly as he would any other, standing at a hockey stick’s length to the right of analyst Greg Millen.

Bob Cole, with analyst Greg Millen at left, calls his final NHL game on April 6, 2019 at Montreal’s Bell Centre.

“I wouldn’t know how to prepare differently,” Bob said. “I can’t even say I plan to raise the tempo or my voice doing play-by-play. I never plan that. It’s feeling the game, feeling where I am. You get talking to the players, you get to know them, they’re all great.”

We were down the road from the old Montreal Forum, where on “Hockey Night in Canada” on June 9, 1993, Bob had called a moment that is branded into this city:

“And now, a 24th Stanley Cup banner will hang from the rafters of the famous Forum in Montreal (shouting above the crowd) ... the Canadiens win ... the Stanley Cup!”

Bob’s final game came three years after the publication of “Now I’m Catching On: My Life On and Off the Air,” written with journalist Stephen Brunt. In the book he detailed a number of health “challenges” -- his word -- that included a ruptured appendix, heart attack, stroke, abdominal aneurysm and colon cancer.

Clearly, the man could play hurt.

Bob Cole is saluted by Rogers Place fans in Edmonton on Dec. 9, 2018.

For years, Bob would sit with Red Fisher, the late, legendary Montreal hockey journalist, over a pregame meal in Bell Centre’s Jacques Beauchamp Lounge, the media dining room.

The yarns they would spin couldn’t be written as fiction, so I’d just sit and absorb them.

Fisher would sip Chivas Regal scotch from a plastic cup; Bob loved something lighter.

“I love the milk in Montreal,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re feeding the cows here, but it’s great.”

Three months before his final game in Montreal, we sat over pregame milk and coffee to discuss lineups for the Jan. 5, 2019, game between the Canadiens and visiting Nashville Predators. In this computer age, Bob’s lineups were handwritten on large index cards -- names and jersey numbers. He’d been buying the cards for years from a printer in Newfoundland and apparently had kept them all.

If the left and right defensemen and wingers appeared reversed on his cards, it was for good reason: when Bob lay the cards in front of him, that’s how the players appeared on the ice below.

Bob Cole with a handwritten lineup card on Jan. 5, 2019, sitting pregame at Montreal Bell Centre, and in the broadcast booth of Edmonton’s Rexall Place.

When Bell Centre was still on blueprints, then-Canadiens president Ronald Corey asked Bob for his thoughts about the construction.

“How about that?” he said. “Ron and I had a great chat about it that morning. Serge (Savard, then-Canadiens general manager) was in his Forum office, listening to it all. We had a great conversation about the positioning of the broadcast booth, especially for those from out of town.

“It’s so difficult, you’re so far away in some of the newer buildings now. It becomes tougher to feel the game. It’s hard work anyway, but there’s no way you can ever relax for a second because, well, everyone is wearing a helmet now. You hope you can see the numbers on the uniforms in a game that, my goodness, is so fast.”

It was impossible for Bob to catalogue his career highlights, so many historic games called. So I threw him a curveball in the final days of his career, asking for his all-time starting six lineup, whether or not he had called their games.

What a glittering lineup, 21 Stanley Cup titles and more silverware than your grandmother’s dining-room cabinet. He had multiple backups for every position, but settled on these:

Goalie Terry Sawchuk; defensemen Bobby Orr and Doug Harvey; center Wayne Gretzky; right-wing Gordie Howe; left-wing Bobby Hull.

Bob Cole chats with Montreal Canadiens goalie Carey Price on April 6, 2019, hours before the broadcaster’s final game.

“I haven’t begun to reflect on 50 years calling games,” Bob said. “Every now and then I say, ‘Fifty years, I can’t believe it.’ I don’t know what 50 years feels like. I’ve just known where I’m going the next Saturday. That’s been my winters. And then I can’t wait for the playoffs, city to city.”

Bob was very much in the moment every day of his half-century career, no time to reflect. But he grew emotional when he considered the body of work that was, indeed, his life.

“I remember walking into the Montreal Forum,” he said. “We’d go upstairs through the lounge area and then get out on the catwalk a couple hours before the game. There’d be no one in the building, maybe a half dozen or so. You walk out there in silence and you see the fresh, clean ice, the color of the seats… the atmosphere just gets you, even though it’s deathly quiet. And yet you explode.

“It’s an amazing feeling. It’s something I grew up with as a very young boy. We all wanted to some day play in the NHL. All of us. That’s part of lacing them up on a Saturday morning and getting out in the cold, playing six-, seven-, eight-hour games. It never stopped. And when it did, you couldn’t wait to do it again.”

Top photo: Bob Cole speaks at the 2018 NHL Alumni Gala in Toronto, at which he was honoured with the organization’s Keith McCreary Seventh Man Award.