Wrong word can plague a sportscaster

Some things have to be shared. This is one of those things. Peter McNab is a former NHL player, including time with the Bruins, and is now a broadcaster with the Colorado Avalanche. We worked together for six years covering the New Jersey Devils on television.

We are good friends and laughed a lot when we were broadcast partners. We still laugh a lot.

Last Sunday, I was in Anaheim, Calif., to broadcast the Avs-Ducks game for ESPN. Peter was there doing the same for Colorado. Before the game we were talking in the locker room runway when Joe Sakic, the star of the Avs, came along to do a pre-game interview with Peter.

The next time I see Peter, he’s coming down the hall in the upstairs press box. We have a running joke about Peter’s ability to sweat like nobody else on earth. He can go through six shirts a broadcast and there’s not a dry spot on any of them. It’s not a tension thing, it’s just how his body works.

As he comes down the hall I can see the water shadows on his shirt, but even for him, this is excessive. It looks like the Great Lakes are coming at me.

“Well,” he says, “you’re going to love this. I just finished a live interview with Sakic.”

McNab tells his story:

“So, we get to the end of the interview and I wanted to wish Joe continued success on the remainder of the trip, but instead I said, ‘Joe, continued great sex on the road trip.’ He looks at me like I’m crazy. I suddenly realize what I said and there is nothing else I can think to say. He just says, ‘Thanks.’ My God, he’s got a wife back home watching this who’s expecting twins.”

By now, I am pounding on the wall, crying laughter. Peter is roaring his rolling laugh, as only he can, with his wonderful sense of life’s humility.

For the rest of the night, every time he goes by our booth between periods, everyone in the booth hollers out to ask McNab how the road trip is going. Somehow, everyone in the press box seems to have heard the story. Wonder how that happened?

I walked down by his booth at one point and he is getting ready to go on the air during a break and I ask him if there is anything else he’d like to tell the players’ wives back home. He gently sends me a signal commonly rendered in New York when one driver cuts off another.

For the entire game, every time Sakic touches the puck, I want to burst into laughter. When the game finally ends, McNab heads out of the booth. I tell him we are doing a post-game interview with Sakic and wonder if he might like to do it.

Since this is a family newspaper, we’ll just leave it there.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and CBS sportscaster.