
Hockey, Football, Baseball or Basketball? College or Professional? Television or Radio?
To ESPN’s Bob Wischusen, it doesn’t matter. He loves calling games for all sports, at all levels, on any platform or medium. For Wischusen, it truly all is about the love of the game. There are plenty of broadcasters who eventually lose the unbridled enthusiasm that they once had for calling games. But not Bob Wischusen. For him, doing play-by-play is a dream come true and over the years, he’s built up quite a following. Whether he’s in the New York Jets’ radio booth, ESPN’s hockey TV booth or somewhere else, Wischusen is one of one.
So, for this week’s Blittner’s Blue Line, we chatted with Wischusen to get his take on several hockey topics, as well as the differences between calling games on TV and radio and how he handles the constant switching of sports.
*Editor’s Note: Questions and Answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: What have you seen from The NHL this season?
Wischusen: “I see parody. There are certainly some very good teams out West. But, I don’t wanna shortchange the teams in the East and how good I think they’ve been as well. I don’t know if this is the year for Toronto finally or if the goaltending is gonna hold up. The Panthers are defending champions and they’re going through a bit of a lull right now. But I think they’re still a tremendous team.
“I’m shocked by Washington. I don’t think anybody had any clue they were gonna be this good. I think the Devils are a very complete team. Carolina’s sagging right now, but I think they’re really good. If you look at Winnipeg, Minnesota, Dallas, Vegas and Edmonton, the top teams in the West, I would probably favor whoever comes out of the West in The Final, slightly. If it’s the Panthers, I would give them their respect and I think some of those teams in the East that are legit contenders, are pretty darn good.”
Q: Will Alex Ovechkin break Wayne Gretzky’s career goals record this year or does he wait until next season?
Wischusen: “My thought would be that he would probably have to wait until the very early part of next season. Although, last year he had about the same number of goals that he needs to break this year after the All-Star break, which is pretty amazing. It was like 22 goals after the All-Star break last year. And he’s down to 20 or 21 that he needs right now.
“It’s hard to see at his age, him keeping it up all the way through the season, scoring two goals every three games or three goals every five games or whatever he has to average out the rest of the way for him to break the record. But you can’t put it past him. He has been remarkable.”
Q: What are your thoughts on what’s happened to the New York Rangers?
Wischusen: “The Rangers kind of going off of a cliff for as long as they did has to be the most surprising thing that’s happened to any team in The League all year. They kind of turned into a Greek tragedy there for a while. You put the memo out that you’re putting your two most senior players basically on the market and you trade your captain. I’m sure that created turmoil in that dressing room. You move on from one of your top picks in (Kaapo) Kakko.
“I don’t know if they can dig themselves out of this hole. I don’t know if they’re good enough. I mean, they’re right there. They’re what, four or five points out of a Wild Card spot? But they also have four or five other teams to jump over that are in between them and that last Wild Card spot that also have a lead on them. So, are they gonna outplay five or six other teams to get to one of those last spots? That’s hard to envision.
“Although, what they’ve done recently has been really encouraging. I mean, off of the stretch that they went through, basically through all of December, I didn’t see them winning games like they did at Vegas or at Utah. Being as competitive as they were at Colorado, beating the Devils. I went to the Devils’ matinee two days before Christmas and they (the Rangers) got destroyed. It was 5-0 and they were non-competitive. Now they come back two weeks later and beat them.
“They certainly have talent, but it’s hard to picture them getting over all of the teams they would have to get over to get to one of those spots.”
Q: You’re well respected as a broadcaster, particularly in football and hockey, which sport do you prefer doing the play-by-play for?
Wischusen: “I don’t really have a preference. It’s not like I’m at a hockey game saying, ‘I wish I was at a football game’ or I’m at a football game saying, ‘I wish I was at a hockey game.’ They’re both fun and great in their own way. I like the fact that I can do them both and that I’ve done basketball and I’ve done baseball and I’m someone who feels comfortable in any booth in any sport.
“Football has its season and the games all feel like the end of the world because there’s such a finite number of them. Then, you fast forward through kind of a long regular season in hockey and everyone will always say there’s nothing like playoffs in The NHL. And I think that’s true. There’s nothing like playoff hockey. So yeah, it’s not like I’m wishing I was someplace else when I’m in either of those spots. I’m lucky enough to do both and I kind of like them on the same level.”
Q: Which sport do you find is more challenging to do play-by-play for, football or hockey?
Wischusen: “I feel like hockey is more challenging from the standpoint of the pace of it. Football is regimented enough where you call the play, you get out, the teams huddle up or there’s at least a pause in between plays. The analysts can kind of come in. Hockey is such a rhythm game, it’s so fast-paced and there are times when you kind of have to work your analyst in while the puck is in motion, otherwise, the analyst might go seven or eight minutes without being heard.
“There’s an art and rhythm to that as well, which is an awesome, fun challenge to take on. So, I would say that from a difficulty standpoint, the one where you really have to keep your concentration, hockey is probably harder.”
Q: What are some of the adjustments you have to make switching back and forth between TV and radio?
Wischusen: “The biggest adjustment that I had to make was going from calling football on radio to football on TV and understanding that you can minimalize, layout and let the crowd come in on TV. There’s not a lot of laying out in hockey, obviously, because of the constant motion of it.
“Football on radio or any sport on radio is really good preparatory broadcasting for doing hockey, even on TV, because hockey on TV is the closest TV call you get to a radio call because you are trying to keep everybody who’s watching the game informed of who’s got the puck and who the guys are because they’re hard to identify.
“During a wide angle shot on TV during a hockey game, a lot of the players look the same and it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s who and you count on the broadcaster who’s there to identify who these guys are. So, there is that natural rhythm or constant rhythm.
“What I had to tell myself when I was doing basketball or football or whatever on radio and then moved to TV in those sports is, ‘You can back off when you’re not speaking to a TV audience. That’s not dead air the way it is to a radio audience.’ That’s just the pictures and the atmosphere of the game taking over a little bit. So, that was probably the biggest adjustment that I had to make, from being a pure radio guy to transferring to TV and understanding that.”
Q: If you get the chance to only call one of these two events, which would you want to do, The Stanley Cup Final or The Super Bowl?
Wischusen: “That’s 50-50 to me. The Stanley Cup Final is a blast. Like I said, there’s nothing like playoff hockey and it could go seven games. You get a chance to call seven of those that lead up to that big moment and you get to enjoy it for two weeks. The Super Bowl, of course, would be amazing because it’s the preeminent television event in the world. It’s not just a sporting event. It is that singular day.
“So, how about, at some point before my career is over, I get to do one or the other? Hopefully both. That would be awesome. But I’ll take whichever comes because I haven’t had a chance to call anything even remotely close to that level at any point in my career. To kind of feel like you’re at the center of the sports universe when one or the other of those two things is happening would be amazing.”
Q: If you could choose any two Analysts to join you in the booth to call a game, who would they be?
Wischusen: “If I pick two, then that means I’m alienating all of the other guys who I’ve worked with. So, I would probably lean back on the guys who I grew up listening to and always thought to myself, ‘That would be an incredibly fun person to call a game with,’ that I never would’ve had a chance to call a game with.
“It’s kind of like, if you were gonna be at dinner with any three people, who would you pick? You’d pick Abraham Lincoln or somebody whose brain you’d want to pick. So, if I ever had a chance to call a football game with John Madden, like, to transport myself back in time, how much fun would that be?
“To even go back and have a chance to call a hockey game with John Davidson again. I had a chance to do that a couple of times when I was with the Rangers as a sub and that was a treat. I always thought that JD was as good as it gets from an analyst standpoint. He always seemed to have so much fun calling the games and being at the big event.
“I would probably want to transport myself back to my youth, to the guys who I had a chance to listen to when I was imagining that I someday might have a chance to do this and get a chance to call a game with one or more of them would be a blast.”