The 2010 Olympics are coming up in a week in Vancouver. Personally I am very excited to watch the Olympics, however the one thing I am not looking forward to is the announcing of the sports that people will be subjected to.
I live in Canada so I will be catching the Olympics on CTV, who have not shown the Olympics as far back as I remember. The problem is that we are going to be subjected to horrible announcing in the biggest sport in the winter Olympics which is Ice Hockey. With CTV hosting the Olympics they are likely going to use the announcers of there sister sport station TSN. TSN's main announcers Gord Miller and Pierre Maguire will likely get Team Canada's games and all the other big games. Miller can be good if he is into it, Maguire on the other hand, sucks so hard a vacuum cleaner is jealous. Instead of using some truly talented people such as Chris Cuthbert or Jim Hughson who are two of the best in the business right now, we get subjected to crap and told they are good.
I may have been spoiled though when it comes to play-by-play hockey announcers having grown up in British Columbia and cheering for the Vancouver Canucks. The two guys I have listened to growing up calling Canucks games are Jim Robson and Jim Hughson who are two announcers I would encourage anybody who wants to get into announcing to copy their announcing technique. When Robson or Hughson do a game, they know the numbers of all the players on both teams, they know the background of the players, (An example of this is Mark Hartigan who is from my hometown and played for the Junior B team there, the Fort St. John Huskies.), they are able to tell you how many points a player has very quickly which leads you to believe that they actually follow the game, and most importantly, they can make you feel like you are at a once in a lifetime event.
The other thing with the commentators for the Olympics is they can make something exciting make you want to go watch paint dry because it is more exciting. Case and point on this is watching Snowboarding Halfpipe in 2006 and the guy doing commentary was just going, "Wow, what a move, I think that was a 720 indy.", the guy also said this in an uninterested voice as if he was forced to do it. Second, if you don't know, don't say, it makes you look stupid, (The move was also a McTwist and was very sloppily done).
Bottom line to this is that we want good commentary for the events, not the guys who are suppose to be good that actually want to make us mute the TV.
My choices for interviewers and commentators to follow the lead of:
Jim Hughson (Current CBC lead hockey commentator, also does the rare Blue Jays game on CBC), Jim Robson (Former Canucks play-by-play for the Vancouver Canucks), Rick Jeanerette (Current play-by-play for the Buffalo Sabers), John Garrett (Current colour commentary for the Canucks), Chris Cuthbert (Play-by-Play commentator for TSN and does almost all the CFL games for the season), Craig Simpson (Colour commentator for CBC), Dan Murphy (Post game interviews for Canucks on Sportsnet, this is a difficult area because most of the guys are not good at this)
Commentators I usually suggest you push the mute button on:
Pierre Maguire (See above for what I think of him), Bob Cole (Did have some talent back in the day but has stayed around too long and his commentary sucks now), Harry Neale (Very inaccurate comments and says stuff that can be usually be covered by a half decent play-by-play man), Elliot Friedman (This guy would actually have to get better to suck, you could hire a kid who could talk and would be more relevant than this moron)
I should be back soon and God willing I will not go crazy listening to the moron that is Pierre Maguire and some other idiots they will find to call some of the other sports.
No comments:
Post a Comment