You will forgive me for not reflecting on Thursday night’s Jets-Blues game that saw the Winnipeg hockey club continue its quest for what is still an improbable berth in the postseason. Friday is a day of reflection for me — and one of Winnipeg’s best exports.
Saturday night in San Jose, on national television, Scott Oake will sign off on his final Hockey Night in Canada regular-season broadcast. He will do it in typical Scott Oake fashion — with self-deprecating humour and a low-key, humble demeanour.
For almost 30 years, Scott brought a level of class and dignity to the show that few others did. As someone who was already a high-profile announcer at CBC, Oake came to Hockey Night to be “one of the boys.”
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The show had expanded from a three-hour, single-game program to almost seven hours of television with a pre-game show and a doubleheader of hockey. In hockey parlance, Oake signed on for HNIC to be a second-line centre, after being a first-liner for the CBC for the CFL and the Olympics. He knew the role, understood the role and embraced the challenge.
Scott Oake was and is the ultimate team player.
The skills that Oake brought to the show were complete. Oh sure, there was a journalistic slant to much of those early years for Oake. After all, he was hired to front the newly created “Headliner,” which highlighted the NHL’s biggest story of the week. Every Wednesday night, he was told where he was going first thing Thursday morning to create content for the following Saturday, in addition to his role working the national game every Saturday, no matter where it was.
Scott brought a humanity to the job, and that showed every week, and that has continued all these years later, particularly with his post-game show, After Hours. The players learned to understand and appreciate his talents.
He did the job never forgetting his roots in Winnipeg, his adopted hometown. Privately, he always talked about his love and devotion to his family. And he did it, on the air, without showing the challenges of losing a son and the love of his life, in his time at Hockey Night. There was never a question of his devotion to Saturday nights. And now with the Bruce Oake Centre, and the soon-to-be-built Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre, we fully understand his devotion to family.
And while it’s sad that Hockey Night in Canada is losing a quality announcer, knowing that Scott Oake, the man, will be around for years making lives in this community better is certainly well worth celebrating.
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