Review By Mike Gange

Walking with Legends: The Real Stories of Hockey Night in Canada

By Ralph Mellanby with Mike Brophy

Fenn, $32.95, 236 pages

Ralph Mellanby knows hockey. And he knows just about everybody who was ever in professional hockey. Mellanby was the long-time executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada. And in that position, he revolutionized the popular Canadian Saturday night television spectacle, making it more fun, more about hockey stories, more about the game.

Mellanby started working on the most popular television program in Canada in 1967, and has acquired an admirable career track record. He’s produced television broadcasts of 13 Olympic games and won five Emmy Awards for his Olympic presentations on U.S. networks. He has been named Canada‘s Broadcaster of the Year. And he was named to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

He helped relatively little known sports figures and broadcasters become household names in Canada, as he hired -- and thus launched the careers of -- such legendary broadcasters as Howie Meeker, Don Cherry, Dave Hodge, Brian McFarlane and Ron MacLean.

Through out his career, Mellanby has worked with hockey broadcasting luminaries such as Foster and Bill Hewitt, Danny Gallivan, Bob Cole, and players such as Rocket Richard, Bobby Hull, Frank Mahovlich and Bobby Orr. Mellanby had a history of breaking eggs to get his omelettes made. For example, he ordered Don Cherry, after his first broadcast, never to say “I think the Toronto Maple Leafs are going to make the play offs this year.” Instead, he instructed to Cherry to be more positive, more definite. Cherry, of course, took Mellanby at his word, and has been bombastic ever since, revelling in his own outspokenness on Coach‘s Corner, aired during the first period intermission every Saturday night since the 1980‘s.

But in spite of Mellanby’s revolutionary ideas about how to make the broadcast better -- ideas that must have rubbed some people the wrong way, such as those powder blue suit jackets on the hosts, a new logo and a new distinctive theme song -- Mellanby hardly says a bad word here about anyone. Boom Boom Geoffrion? A great guy, my good pal, a joker and a gentleman. Howie Meeker? A great guy, my good pal, smart and courageous enough to be willing to step on toes when he said players were making mistakes. Bobby Orr? A great guy, my good pal, gentlemanly, smart, revolutionary hockey player. Harold Ballard? A great guy, my good pal, had the best of intentions.

Well, you see where this is going. Mellanby likes everybody and he has mice things to say about them all. About the worst he will say is that somebody was hard headed. In a world full of egos that were being inflated by weekly nationally broadcast television, there must have been more than one hard headed broadcaster. Chapter after chapter of niceties about hockey? After a while, you want to say, “Oh, come on Ralph, take the gloves off. Deck somebody.”

Late in the book, Mellanby does speak his mind. He calls current NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman the “Reign of Error” and author of a litany of mistakes. “If hockey was the sport of the future under (John) Zeigler, it is close to being the sport of the past under Gary Bettman,” he writes.

If you are going to truly tell a story about hockey, there’s got to be some rough stuff and maybe a slash or two. Unfortunately, in Walking with Legends: The Real Stories of Hockey Night in Canada the clock had nearly run out by the time Mellanby actually gets into the game.