He may be a literal hall of famer, but that doesn't save Joe Bowen from a lot of good-natured teasing from his co-workers Jim Ralph and Paul Hendricks.
“We call ourselves the Seinfeld group,” Bowen said with a chuckle Wednesday, on the phone from California where his beloved Maple Leafs are on a road trip. “Any time any of us get a head that's a tad bit too big for their sombreros, we get brought right down to earth with the chirping that goes on.”
Known for his 'Holy Mackinaw' call when something on the ice catches his eye, Bowen was inducted to the Hockey Hall of Fame's media wing Monday. He's called more than 3,000 Leafs games, but growing up in Sudbury in the 1970s, Bowen was the voice of the Sudbury Wolves.
He says he knew for a long time he wanted to be in broadcasting, and got his start calling mostly basketball games at the University of Windsor's student radio station. It wasn't glamorous, but it let him work out the kinks in his delivery.
“I kind of honed a little bit of my skill because you were allowed to make a lot of mistakes and you were own best critic,” Bowen says of Windsor. “But even in high school, I knew I wanted to do this. So I guess I did prove to myself that I could do it (at Windsor).”
He started calling Wolves games for CKSO radio after that and was witness to future local stars such as Randy Carlyle, Dave Farrish, Ron Duguay and the recently honoured Rod Schutt.
“I mean, the names go on and on and they were all great athletes and great players,” Bowen said.
He worked with former Sudbury broadcaster Michael Cranston at CKSO, and when Cranston moved to a station in Halifax, it proved to be an opportunity for Bowen, as well. The rights to broadcast Halifax Voyageurs games were up for grabs, and Cranston thought Bowen would be perfect.
The Voyageurs were the AHL farm team for the Montreal Canadiens, just one step below the NHL.
“Mike sent me a note saying you got to come out here,” he said. “They offered me more money that I was making with CKSO, so I went out to Halifax and then was there for three years.”
He may be in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but Bowen says longtime Montreal Canadiens broadcaster Danny Gallivan is the gold standard when it comes to play-by-play announcers – even if Gallivan did call games for the Leafs main rival.
“He's at the pinnacle and the rest of us are floundering around,” Bowen says.
He met Gallivan while was in Halifax, and was blown away not only by how kind he was, but his amazing memory.
“The first time I met him was at a celebrity dinner or a sports celebrity dinner in Halifax, and I interviewed him for maybe two or three minutes,” Bowen said. “And he remembered that when I came to came to the league. How would he have ever remembered me?”
He's been with the Maple Leafs through a lot of lean years, including the end of the Harold Ballard era in the 1980s, and the team's resurgence under Pat Burns in the 1990s and Pat Quinn in the early 2000s. He's seen the league go from the high-scoring Gretzky era of the 1980s, to the low-scoring trap era of the 1990s, to the current edition where skill and speed is getting the upper hand on fighting and truculence.
“The game has evolved,” Bowen said. “It's obviously safer now, to some extent. It's certainly not nearly as physical as it was back then, but you enjoy the evolution of the sport because of what it brings — an enormous amount of skill level that you marvel at.”
While Burns and Quinn had some success – reaching the semi-finals – the Burns teams was older and Bowen says you had the sense their window to compete for a cup was small. And with Mats Sundin, Pat Quinn's team usually made the playoffs, but not deep cup runs.
“With the current group – which is a very young, talented, exciting group — you feel they going to be (cup contenders) for a number of years to come,” he said. “But there still is no guarantee. You can look at what happened with the Washington Capitals, who could not get by the Pittsburgh Penguins for years.
“But this young group should at least get multiple opportunities and that's all I guess you can ask for.”
He was inducted into the Hall of Fame along with New York Post writer Larry Brooks. It was odd, Bowen said, to have people asking for his autograph along with the players.
“Everything was coming so fast and you really didn't get a chance to kind of really sit back and enjoy everything,” he said. “But you know, as you reflect on it now, it's pretty neat and I've really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the festivities, the interaction we had with people from the Hall of Fame, with players, management, fans. It's really been quite gratifying.”
His dream call, as Bowen has said often this week, is a Stanely Cup win by his beloved buds. In such a competitive league, he said there's no guarantee it will ever happen.
“But if it happens on my watch, it's going to be great.”
