Barry Melrose Brought Hockey Home

Go ahead and listen to this. (For the real perverts, use this one; you just know you're about to stay up until 1:00 a.m. for a particularly shitty Sharks–Mighty Ducks game.) What does it evoke? What do you think of? More specifically, who do you think of? You immediately know you're about to spend some time with Barry Melrose, the formative face—and hair—of an entire generation of American hockey fans. Melrose died Wednesday at age 70, three years after he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which forced him to retire from ESPN, where he had spent more than three decades years as the network's lead hockey analyst. Paired with John Buccigross in the studio or Steve Levy in the booth, or sometimes Bill Pidto or John Saunders, Melrose was simultaneously a voice of reason and an outsized cartoon character. If a team was ass he'd say they were ass, in a way that few, more diplomatic broadcasters ever would. And he'd deliver his pronouncements from within an immaculately tailored suit and beneath one of the continent's finest and most immovable mullets. His style imparted a sort of hockey gravitas—you wouldn't trust a guy like that to sell you a used car, but you'd sure as hell trust him to tell you what's up with the Calgary Flames' power play.

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