Longtime play-by-play man with RDS says young, rebuilding Habs team is both refreshing and rejuvenating for him.
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It was Foster Hewitt who coined the famous phrase, “He shots, he scores!” as a play-by-play announcer on Hockey Night in Canada.
Pierre Houde is known for his phrase, “Le tir, et le buuuuut!” as the RDS play-by-play announcer for Canadiens games.
But Houde isn’t the one who actually came up with that phrase. It was René Lecavalier, who was better known for his earlier goal call of “Il lance et compte!” on La Soirée du Hockey.
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“René was such a master of the language and late in his career he confided to me and said: ‘I regret having been the origin of ‘lance et compte!’” Houde said during a phone interview Monday. “He said: ‘OK, you can ‘lance’ — you can shoot. But he said you can’t ‘compte’ a but. You can compte from 1 to 10 or you can compte on somebody — you can rely on somebody. So he said: ‘Lance et compte, Pierre, doesn’t make sense for a hockey goal.’
“A lot of people don’t remember that in the last stage of his career, René moved to: ‘Et le but!’ But René was very discreet on the air and he was not as passionate as I was. Richard Garneau (on La Soirée du Hockey) was later going: ‘Et le but!’ because René told him the same thing. But I had to call the first hockey game in my life (when RDS acquired the French-language TV rights for the Canadiens in 1989) and it came out naturally.
“It’s like my: ‘Et on roule!’ with Formula One,” said Houde, who has been calling F1 races on RDS since 1993. “It came out of my mouth naturally when I was calling an endurance race on the circuit here in 1990 and people said: ‘Whoa! We had goosebumps when you said that.’ So I said: ‘OK, let’s make it my call to start the race.’
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“But the way I do ‘Et le but!’ now is probably a more modern type of expression. I stretch it a lot and sometimes I will stretch it even further than I think is reasonable,” Houde added with a chuckle. “But, hey, people say when the situation calls for it it still gives them goosebumps. So I said: ‘OK, I’ll keep doing it.’ But I’m not at the origin of it. It comes from René Lecavalier being very self-critical about the ‘lance et compte’ he used in the past.”
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Last Friday, Houde was announced as this year’s winner of the Hall of Fame’s Foster Hewitt Memorial Award for outstanding contributions as a hockey broadcaster.
Houde, who will turn 67 next month, spoke about several topics during a 45-minute interview on Monday, including his game-day routine.
From 10 a.m. until noon, Houde updates by hand the personal database on his computer — using Microsoft Word — for all the Canadiens players stats and bios, as well as for the opponent that night. That is followed by a telephone production meeting with the RDS producer. He will then take an afternoon nap.
“Although I rarely sleep deeply, I’ve been doing this almost from Day 1,” Houde said.
That is followed by a workout and a shower before he heads to the Bell Centre at 3 p.m. If it’s a road game, he heads to the arena on the team bus from the hotel at 4 p.m.
After the game, Houde enjoys a “little glass of wine” to calm down.
“I usually sleep quite late,” he said. “It’s tough to come down from a game. So I usually go to sleep around 1 a.m.”
Here’s some more of what Houde talked about during the interview.
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On how he learned to speak English while growing up in St-Laurent partly by watching TV shows like Magic Tom, Romper Room and Friendly Giant with his older brother, Paul, who passed away in March at age 69 due to a complication following a major surgery to remove a mass from his brain:
“When I was a kid, I was led to absorb a lot of English content — good quality English content for kids. And then my main immersion was for two or three years I played competitive bowling when I was a teenager. We had very, very serious leagues on Saturday morning and every Saturday afternoon we had a tournament — doubles, Strike Nine, whatever the format was. The first part of that was in Chomedey at La Récréathèque and the other part was at Pare Lanes near the Orange Julep. So from 9 in the morning to 6 at night every Saturday I was in full English immersion. There were only a few francophones. I had some opportunity to practise English every week, so going from one language to another is pretty easy now for me. Although if I have not travelled for a while — like now — it will take sometimes a couple of minutes to get back to the fluidity of it. But all my life I’ve been able to go pretty easy from one language to another.”
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On what he likes most about this young, rebuilding Canadiens team:
“I think it’s so refreshing to start with. When you think about the fact that your captain (24-year-old Nick Suzuki) is barely in his 20s, that’s pretty amazing. But I like the freshness of it. I like (Juraj) Slafkovsky’s contagious smile. I like (Cole) Caufield coming up to me and giving his condolences when my brother passed. I like Mike Matheson, who wrote to me yesterday (about his brother’s death). But what I like about this group, it’s really refreshing. I get rejuvenated to be associated with this renewal or reconstruction or whatever you want to call it. It brings me a new energy as well.
“I think it’s important to say I’m first and foremost not a hockey groupie and I need and I force the border between the players and myself because I think it’s good for them, but it’s good for me as well. I need my space and I want to have my freedom, so I don’t look to go beyond a professional relationship with hockey players. But it will happen sometimes that some of them are extra generous to reach out. Mike Matheson is such a nice person. Mike didn’t have my phone number. He got it from David Savard, I think. He wrote me the nicest message yesterday. Tomas Plekanec still writes to me from Czech Republic when he wants to pass along a message.”
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On getting recognized when he walks around Montreal, or just about anywhere in Quebec:
“It always puzzles me because my face is not as much on the air (chuckles). I’m told that my voice is so recognizable wherever I am. Even from visually handicapped people. Sometimes they recognize my voice and they want to reach out to me. So I would say probably my voice more than my face. But, yeah, people say hi, some people stop for a chat. I always do my day-to-day thing. I go to Costco like everyone else (laughs) and I love to talk to people and most people are so friendly and so nice.
“The other thing that I’m told a lot these days — and that goes with my age — is the fact that for a whole generation this is probably the only voice they ever heard on television for Habs hockey games. So a lot of people in their 30s, 40s, they say: ‘You are the link to our childhood, you are the link to us growing up.’ And that’s not only for hockey, but for F1 as well.”
On how he ended up calling Patrick Roy’s final game with the Canadiens — when the goaltender allowed nine goals before finally being pulled by head coach Mario Tremblay in an 11-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings at the Forum on Dec. 2, 1995 — in English for CJAD Radio:
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“Every year Mitch Melnick has a trivia question (on TSN 690 Radio) and every year he brings back this question: Who was calling this game on CJAD? (laughs)
“It turns out CJAD was celebrating I think their 50th anniversary and they had a chartered plane taking everyone from the station to the Bahamas or somewhere like that. They had a mechanical problem and (play-by-play announcer) Dino Sisto could not make it in time to call the game. So they called me in a panic around 5 p.m. There was a crazy snowstorm outside and I rushed to the Forum. I knew I would be working with Jim Corsi. But we had no TV monitor … we had nothing, basically. The coincidence is such that it turned out to be that game, the 11-1 result with Patrick Roy’s arms up in the air. So the bond with the English community is so heartwarming for me.”
What’s his best advice for young play-by-play announcers?
“Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work. Those who know me, those who are around me — including my daughter — the first word that comes from her mouth is work. She’s seen her dad work so hard. It’s always live. You never have a safety net and you have no control on the content of your communication. You have no control. It’s not like you’re painting something or you’re creating a poem or reciting a book. And it’s so fast-paced. So I guess there’s part of it that’s in your blood or your genes, but I would say one of the two key ingredients is to work as hard as possible to master whatever you’re going to call and whatever you’re going to say. The other ingredient, I suppose, is also stay as passionate as possible.
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“René Lecavalier used to have this piece of advice. He’d say: ‘Never lose la faculté d’emerveillement.’ Never lose the faculty of wonder. He said as long as you have that you may have a longer career than you think and he was right because he had a darn good one himself. The more you read, you work, you prepare, the better you will be eventually at play-by-play gigs. But you need a great dose of the passion and you need to be easy to get excited or passionate about the sports you call.”
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