Doc Emrick's unique verbiage analyzed on 'Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel'
For more than a decade now I have been meaning to count the number of different verbs Doc Emrick uses in calling a given hockey game, but never quite got around to it.
Let this be a valuable lesson to young readers: If you procrastinate long enough, sometimes someone else does your work for you.
So, thank you, "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel," for taking a game from last year's Olympics coverage on NBC and determining that Emrick used more than 150 verbs to describe the movement of the puck on the ice.
Correspondent Andrea Kremer reads some of them back to Emrick in a segment that premieres on HBO at 10 p.m. Tuesday:
"Careened, caromed, drubbed, galloped, hammered, ladled, fanned, knifed, muscled, nubbed, pitchforked, rifled, squibbed, skying, soccered, skittered. I don't even know what some of these words mean!"
Responds Emrick, "I did, once upon a time."
But sure enough, Emrick offers definitions for some of his puck-related verbs, including one of his favorites, "skittered."
" 'Skittered' is kind of like 'skeetered,' you know, like a little insect going along," he tells Kremer. "And so it's just pushed along, and it looks like a little ant or something like that. I guess that was where it came from first, and then it evolves into other things that look like a 'skittered.' "
Says Al Michaels, an avid hockey fan and Emrick's NBC colleague, "You don't even have to understand what the word is. It's different, and it works."
The piece covers Emrick's evolution into one of the most respected and personally popular figures in sports media, to the point Michaels himself laughed off the notion NBC would want him or anyone else calling hockey over Emrick.
"When I signed on to do the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver it was the 30th anniversary of the 'Miracle on Ice' and some said to me, including a few writers, 'Well, you know, you should really be doing the hockey in Vancouver,' " Michaels recalls. "And I said, 'Are you crazy? I can't do the game a tenth as well as Doc Emrick. I want to listen to Doc.' "
Kremer and Emrick engage in a bluntly worded exchange about the place fighting has, or should have, in the sport. Emrick remains an unapologetic traditionalist on that point, even after Kremer points out the harsh physical toll the role has taken on some former fighters.
"Most of them, though not all, will say they understood that when they got into it, and realized that," Emrick says. "Does it justify it? Probably not. But yeah. I am, I'm one of the guys that own up to the fact that, yeah, I like [fights]."
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
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