Scott Young - Hello Canada!: The Life And Times Of Foster Hewitt

Does the man really need an introduction? Perhaps not now, this minute, when his voice still is heard from time to time in broadcasting retrospectives. But with the proliferation of media stars in the 1980s and onward, and with home sets hooked up to satellite dishes that bring in 150 signals worldwide, perhaps some day the question will be asked: who was Foster Hewitt? The answer is simple enough. He was the first media star in this country and he remained our principal media star for life.

There are two reasons for his longevity in that role. One was that his subject was hockey, precisely as Toscaninis was music. In much the same sense that music is the language of the world, hockey is the language that pervades Canada. The second reason for Foster Hewitts fame, which lasted through the twilight years when he was much more often in the public mind, or memory, than he was in the public eye, is that nobody could talk the language of hockey as well as he could. Nobody else could bring to it the excitement, the love, the awe. It was a gift.

Once, not long before his death, he was standing in front of an audience that had gathered to see him accept one of his numerous honors and awards. In many minds there was a feeling that it would be nice to know just a little more about why this smallish, unassuming, down-to-earth man had such a hold on the Canadian consciousness.

When he explained himself, it was as if nothing really had to be explained except how he got there in the first place, so he did it that way. Hockey has thrilled and entertained me since I was five years old and my father first started taking me along with him to watch a game, he said. From that point on its been a passionate love affair that has lasted most of this century. Its hard to explain why it means so much to me; its simply that to me hockey has always been the epitome of everything.

Courage, resoluteness, recklessness, speed, skill, stupidity, brutality, cupidity, the meek and the bully, the spirit that transcends the skill, beauty and the beast, noise, happiness, regretthose were part of his everything. It was what he saw and described, never really knowing how he did it except to relate it to a phrase like passionate love affair.

He was a famous person in Canada, because of radio, when he was twenty-four years old. He died at eighty-two, having simply kept on earning greater and greater fame. He was forty years and more into his career, and still rising toward his peak, before the official handers-out of awards (gongs, as the slang has it) realized that he was worth their attention. After that, it was a landslide: the Order of Canada (officer division), the Hockey Hall of Fame, Sports Hall of Fame, gongs in New York, Toronto and Montreal. In Edmonton an honorary degree was waiting but his final illness intervened. One award read: To the man who made Hockey Night in Canada a national institution and with his unique and outstanding contribution to the game taught Canadians from coast to coast to know better, and enjoy more.

It was typical, though, of the almost shy surprise with which he always acknowledged his fame that the recognitions he valued most were the relatively simple kind. He had gone every year to the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, riding the rides and eating the pink cotton candy. Every year, as he got older, hed find a day to wander the midway and look at the exhibits. In 1980 they asked him to open the show. As royalty had, and field marshals, and movie stars. Not bad, he laughed, not bad.

It was partly this, the simplicity, added to the passion and love and sheer understanding that he loaded into his communications with Canadian radio audiences, that made him what he was. Sometimes one-third of the nation listened to him, six million people back when we had eighteen million. Sometimes ninety thousand people a year wrote to him. Why? That is part of what this biography attempts to explain.

One major disappointment of his life was that the famous gondola from which he broadcast was trashed during one summers renovations at Maple Leaf Gardens. It should have been in the Hockey Hall of Fame, he thought, and when he discussed it with one friend he had tears in his eyes. He thought it represented an era, a long era, his era, and it did.