Welcome to the club, Bob McKenzie

The original Hockey Insider goes from semi to full retirement, well earned after 48 years in the newspaper and TV business

Judging by the crowds in Ottawa for the Canada Day celebration yesterday, there were probably not a lot of people who stayed on their couch to watch the Free Agent Frenzy show on TSN.

Courtesy IG @bobbymargarita

That’s probably just as well as most of the big names had already made their decisions by the time free agency officially opened in the NHL, especially the trio of Panthers (Brad Marchand, Aaron Ekblad and Sam Bennett) who could have broken the bank if they had looked to leave Florida, while Mitch Marner is now considered a traitor in Toronto for orchestrating a sign and trade to go from his hometown to Las Vegas.

The biggest news came at the end of the broadcast and if you didn’t catch it, it can easily be found on the web: that’s when Bob McKenzie announced that he was going from semi-retirement to full retirement after 48 years in the media business, the last 25 with The Sports Network that he helped put on the map at the original Hockey Insider.

Ottawa’s own James Duthie did a fine job as usual to pay tribute to the “Bobfather”. Then the tributes started to pour in on Twitter — where McKenzie had over one million followers in his hayday — like this one from one of his protégés and successors, Pierre LeBrun.

Over my years at Le Droit, I did’t get a chance to get that close to Bob. But I did cover five world championships in Canada (Red Deer, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Halifax and Ottawa, of course), and we would of course cross paths during those tournaments, especially before the days of mixed zones where reporters that were not with the accredited broadcaster (TSN/RDS) were banished, while the TV guys had much better access to the Canadian team, in particular.

For one of the best scoops of my career (I didn’t get a lot of them, that was not my forte), I was able to beat him and Marc Lachapelle, then the best junior hockey reporter in Quebec for the Journal de Montréal, for the news that Claude Julien, then of the Hull Olympiques, was going to be appointed head coach of the National Junior Team (thanks for that one, Charles Henry). That was in the summer of 1999, for the 2000 tournament held in Sweden.

If Bob came across as a good guy that you would like to have a drink with on television, that was no accident: he was like that in real life as well. Here a two anecdotes of interactions I had with him to illustrate the point.

Fast forward to the fall of 2012, November 7th to be exact, and Bob is in the corner of the rink in Val-d’Or, Quebec, for the second game of the Subway Super Series which sees the candidates for Team Canada at the following WJC play a Russian All-Star team led by Nail Yakupov, a future bust as the number one draft pick. He is gathering info for the tournament and I happen to be there since one of the goalies for the QMJHL team is my son François, then of the Quebec Remparts (he would get the win in relief of Zach Fucale in that game).

Bob, who had previously written a book titled Crazy Hockey Dad about his own, let’s call it, “intensity” while his sons Shawn and Mike played their minor hockey, was kind enough to tweet about our short visit that night.

Fast forward again, this time to August 2022 and the Bobfather is visiting Ottawa to promote the drink he has come up with, the Bobby Margarita, on the occasion of the CN Canadian Women’s Open. He spent the better part of a day at the 17th hole of the Ottawa Golf and Hunt Club, which had been turned into a makeshift hockey rink.

Walking the course covering the event, I come face to face with him again and during a short conversation, I mention that I’m looking forward to trying that drink of his some day soon.

A while later, after the various press conferences of Brooke Henderson and eventual champion Paula Reto, there was a bit of a commotion in the press tent as a worker showed up with a couple of cases of, you guessed it, the green Bobby Margarita cans.

That was the kind of good guy Bob McKenzie was, quietly going about his business but making sure every bit of information he would pass along was verified, and that his colleagues in the media were well taken care of.

Enjoy retirement Bob, you’ve earned “fully and completely”, to quote your favorite band (and mine), The Tragically Hip. Hit them straight on the golf course, that maddening game you picked up late in life to torture yourself just like the Quizmaster did.