Doc

Mike Emrick bought my wife and I a drink once.

It was at the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association annual banquet and Doc was being inducted into the ISSA Hall of Fame that night, and just the fact he was there said everything you needed to know about the man. It was April and the middle of the NHL playoffs and Doc was already in a million halls of fame, but he was also an Indiana boy. And so here he was. 

He might have been the voice of hockey and maybe the pre-eminent broadcaster in any sport anywhere, but he'd found that voice in Indiana. And he's never forgotten that, or us.

I say us because he grew up just down the pike in tiny LaFontaine, and the voice of his winters was also the voice our winters, those of us who grew up in northeast Indiana. Like us, winter nights for Doc always passed to the accompaniment of Bob Chase's machine-gun patter coming out of the radio, talking about Len Thornson or Reg Primeau or Robbie Laird raggin' the puck all the way into the zone as the Fort Wayne Komets did battle with the Dayton Gems or Muskegon Mohawks or Toledo Blades of the old International Hockey League.

Doc Emrick learned his craft at Bob Chase's knee, and he never forgot that debt. That's why he showed up in Fort Wayne to call a Komets game with Bob one night, and surprised  him with another visit on Bob's 90th birthday. And so you'll be utterly unsurprised at what he told Justin Cohn of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette yesterday, on the occasion his retirement as a broadcaster.

"I'm going to do an interview on NHL Network later today, he told Cohn. "And the two jerseys I have hanging behind me for that will be the smiling spaceman (logo) from the 1950s orange-and-black, which was the Komets jersey at the time I watched my first game in 1960, and the other will be the first team I worked for in professional hockey, which will be the Port Huron Flags from 1973." 

The man does cherish his roots -- right down to Manchester University in North Manchester, of which Doc is a proud member of the class of 1968.

As readily as he can talk the Komets and the Flags and Chase and the old I, he can talk Manchester, too. He can tell you how he started in broadcasting there, and how the values that were instilled in him at home and fortified by his time at Manchester are values he holds to this day.

When Emrick announced he was retiring yesterday, the tributes poured in, as well they should have. A lot of them saluted his legend as a broadcaster, but as many paid tribute to his decency and his unflagging love for the game and his place in it.

And that is exactly the way it should be.

Thanks for the drink, Doc. Here's to ya.