‘I’ve been through some ordeals’: Ron MacLean is the last Canadian icon

The Stanley Cup Playoffs, which begin Saturday night, are infamous for being a war of attrition unlike any other in sports. Two months of blocked shots and bodychecks, games every other night until the winner collapses over the line.

Ron MacLean — arguably Canada’s last iconic TV broadcaster, after a career of ups and downs — knows something of survival himself.

Moved into hosting duties in his rookie season with Hockey Night in Canada in 1987, when Dave Hodge departed after protesting a programming decision on-air, MacLean has been part of the hockey staple every year since, spending Saturday nights in Canadian homes all winter and for the better part of two months straight in the playoffs.

He’s seen the program avoid brushes with death, go through ownership changes, and move networks. He lost his hosting job but got it back again a couple of years later and has witnessed the departure of friends and colleagues like Harry Neale and Bob Cole and, most controversially, Don Cherry, who was fired in 2019 after he refused to apologize for complaining about immigrants who didn’t wear Remembrance Day poppies. Coach’s Corner, the long-running, first-intermission segment with Cherry and MacLean, has never returned.

And through all that, MacLean, 65, seems almost certain to end his broadcasting career with the program with which he is most associated, after Rogers Communications and the National Hockey League announced this month that their 12-year contract for the NHL’s Canadian rights will be extended by another dozen years, this time for the remarkable price of $11 billion. The deal came as a surprise to many in the industry who assumed that the league would look to bring in new partners rather than keep the whole thing, at least initially, under the Rogers roof.

MacLean says that at his age, he wasn’t worried about life after the next NHL broadcast deal, but he was pleased for his younger colleagues when the new Rogers contract was announced.

Back in his early days with the show, he recalls, there was something of a turf war over its rights between production companies, advertisers, the CBC and a couple of large brewers.

“There was some thought that the rights were going to disappear entirely away from CBC,” MacLean says. “None of that happened. But I remember, I was at a golf course, Chedoke in Hamilton, and that was the date that there was a report that Hockey Night in Canada was not going to be the same, that it was going to change ownership and potentially go to another network,” he says.

“That uncertainty when you’re young is not great,” MacLean says. “And so it was just a nice relief that I felt for a lot of my colleagues when the deal was announced.”

Whatever might have been planned in NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s New York offices for the next Canadian rights deal, the massive success of February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, and Rogers’ role in it, might have put the broadcaster back at the centre of the league’s plans.

“No one could have anticipated the political backdrop,” says MacLean of an event that began as U.S. President Donald Trump was musing almost daily about a casual annexation of Canada. Anthems were booed lustily. Wayne Gretzky, of all people, became a villain. “There was just so much going on that it was a perfect storm,” he says.

And then it ended, of course, with Canada defeating the United States on Connor McDavid’s overtime goal in the gold-medal game.

“It had built to a pitch (in the arena) that when McDavid scored, it was just such a great relief, as well as a joy, that I honestly couldn’t even believe that it had happened,” MacLean says. “It wouldn’t have upset me if the Americans won, but it just felt like a nice, really nice result, right?”

He notes that the McDavid goal fits with some other Canadian hockey moments: Sidney Crosby in Vancouver in 2010, Gretzky-to-Lemieux in 1987. The ones who should score, do, he says.

“That always seems to be a kind of justice,” he adds.

MacLean speaks about these moments with an appreciation that suggests he doesn’t take them for granted.

“I moved to Oakville in 1986 to start my career at Hockey Night, and I ran into an older gentleman — who’s now my age, but at the time was an older gentleman — a guy named Cecil.”

“And we were just at Bronte Park, and he said, ‘You know, Ron, for my generation, the people on television are kind of our family. Our kids left the nest, so we tend to have you as our as our extended family.’ It was a nice way of framing it.”

“I’ve always said that what Hockey Night does, and what shows like it do is, a lot of people who are loved are in our care,” MacLean says.

“And, you know, I’ve been through some ordeals, obviously, with (Cherry) and with even Dave Hodge when he left. It hasn’t been a smooth ride, but it’s a good ride in terms of, you know, how do you deal with these adversities? How do you cope with your grief? How do you justify your place? Do you feel a need to apologize or to excuse? You have to think about all those things for everybody that’s on the show, not just you. So that’s what people, I think, hopefully, say when they when they say, ‘Ron, you’ve been a part of all these different things, and it’s been a part of my life.’ So, I love sharing that.”

MacLean and his Hockey Night colleagues begin their annual run as long-term Canadian houseguests on Saturday, when the playoffs start anew.

Almost 40 years in, he has some Stanley Cup stories to tell.

During last year’s Cup final between Edmonton and Florida, commercial travel was so challenging on tight schedules that the NHL arranged a charter flight to transport its Canadian and American broadcast crews, plus officials and some league staff. The teams had their own jets.

Because of the distance, the 767 would take off from Fort Lauderdale, land in Kansas City to refuel, then carry on to Alberta.

“And I was sitting in the pouring rain,” MacLean recalls of one stop in Missouri. “Rain just pelting on the windows, and I look out, and I see Connor McDavid sitting in his plane, across the tarmac.”

“I just thought,” MacLean says, “it was such a neat run.”

It was also a full-circle moment, in a way, because MacLean, began his Stanley Cup playoff career with Hockey Night in Canada in Missouri in 1987. Then, it was to cover the Toronto Maple Leafs visiting the St. Louis Blues in a matchup from the now-defunct Norris Division.

“I remember Bob Cole, Harry Neale, Don Cherry and myself, driving to and from St. Louis to the old rink there. And for me, that’ll always be the highlight,” MacLean says. “I opened the telecast at the Zamboni entrance, and then they dropped the puck, and there were two guys slammed into the glass behind me, and I realized, ‘Wow, the ferocity,’ you know, this is going to go on for two months.”

“I kind of got an understanding right there and then of what it takes to win a Stanley Cup.”

One thing that’s always in the back of his mind at this time of year is the 2007 playoffs, when Kevin Bieksa, now a Hockey Night panelist, was playing with the Vancouver Canucks. They had the late game against Dallas on the first night, a Saturday as usual, and it went to four overtimes.

“I got home at five in the morning, and we start up again the next day. And I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that’s day one of possibly 65 nights.’ It’s important to be rested, I guess, is the lesson.”

And as the playoffs begin, MacLean says up front that he would like to see a Canadian team win the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1993. There’s no cheering in the press box, but he’ll still hope for that. “It’s mind-boggling that it’s been so long,” MacLean says.

He tells one more story: last year, he was booked to host an event two days after the Stanley Cup Final’s seventh game — as it happens, a Toronto gala tied to the National Post’s Heroes Among Us series on Canadian war heroes. But had the Oilers won, he probably would have had to host parade coverage.

It’s been 32 years; you can forgive a guy for forgetting to plan around the possible parade.

“So this year,” he says, “I’ve kept those dates clear, just in case.”

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