A Cannonading Drive

Danny Gallivan: “A scintillating Savardian spinorama!”
Announcer” “Danny, there is no such word as scintillating!”
Danny Gallivan: “There is now…”

November 22nd, 1963 was one of those days – I remember all the hoopla and tears, but a month short of 6, it was how I saw the event that was most important.

My Dad had just returned from a trip to Vancouver, not sure why – maybe union business, or a chance for him and my Mom to get away for a day or two. But in the back seat of the blue Belair was a huge box with RCA Victor stamped on the side. Yes, TV had arrived at our house!

Black and white, 26 inches of CBC bliss, as long as the southeasters didn’t swing the aerial around backwards. Suddenly spending the whole day beachcombing was bookended by Friendly Giant at 10:15, The Forest Rangers at 4:30.

But nothing captured us like Hockey Night In Canada! No Sirree! In a house where dinnertime was 6 pm precisely, the arrival of HNIC on CBC meant tv trays and dishes that waited until the 2nd intermission!

And the rivalries began, my Mom and oldest brother cheering for the Leafs; my Dad and older sister diehard fans of Les Bleu et Blanc et Rouge! The rest of us fell in between, cheering on Toronto when the big, bad Bruins came to town, poking fun at them when Bobby Hull and the Blackhawks skated onto the ice.

Nasally broadcasters like Foster Hewitt, Dick Irvine and Ward Cornell became household names, my friends and I mimicking their every call as we walked to school on Mondays. For me HNIC was Danny Gallivan – not content to simply call the play he would wax poetic on Bobby Hull’s ‘cannonading drives’ or Ken Dryden’s toe save executed in ‘rapier-like fashion’. Danny G. even coined a new phrase that is still used today  – the  spinorama.

It was perhaps the Golden Age of hockey, or perhaps just a young kid’s first taste of the CBC.  But whether it was a ‘snowy’ broadcast on Vancouver Island, a frigid Saturday night in northern Canada, or even a two week old video of the game in a mess hall east of Cairo, Hockey Night In Canada and CBC just seemed to ‘fit’.

50 years later a 65″ flat panel commands the living room and 3 – 24″ monitors crowd my desk. The colour is true and vivid, my sharks and whales screensaver swimming silently in a cyber sea on the Linux box. Hockey seems to be on the tube 7 nights a week, dulling the lustre on a Canucks game at 10pm Eastern on a Wednesday night. And the news is a 24 hour cycle of wars, carjackings and government corruption.

Makes me almost pine for those nights twisting the aerial pole in the rain, my Dad’s head poked out the front door…

“Left, left, back a bit… THERE!”