Pat Foley’s career as the play-by-play voice of the Chicago Blackhawks came to an end on Thursday night. He called his final game on NBC Sports Chicago. The following morning, Dan Bernstein reflected on what Foley meant not just to the city of Chicago, but to sports broadcasting as an industry.
Bernstein said he wanted to take any complicated feelings about the Blackhawks off the table. He acknowledged that many Chicago fans had stopped rooting for the team in light of revelations about covering up the sexual assaults committed by a former trainer.
He wanted to focus only on Foley, because he meant more to sports fans in the city than simply being the voice they heard on hockey games.
“It’s the Chicago-ness of him,” Dan Bernstein said. “We’re in a golden age of broadcast voices here with how many people are going to grow up with Jason Benetti and Adam Amin and people that are from here. It is one thing to be from here. It is another thing to sound like you are of a place.”
Bernstein invoked the name of another Chicago sports broadcasting legend in honoring Pat Foley. He said there were a lot of ways that Foley’s delivery mirrored Harry Caray’s. That is probably why he impersonated Caray so well.
It is a good thing for the person calling the Chicago Blackhawks games to sound like a Chicagoan according to Bernstein. He said that he likes when New York broadcasters have thick New York accents or when Southern teams have a broadcast that sounds Southern. He thinks it is important that Chicago had that in Pat Foley and worries that won’t be the same for future generations of sports fans in any market.
“That gives you that sense and that fabric, the texture to a broadcast. That’s going to go away because of broadcast schooling and because of what the ear of the average fan now understands.”
