Can You Guess Who I ’am? I began my early life in Sydney, Nova Scotia. During my formative years in Sydney, I was a baseball pitcher on the St. Theresa’s parish team that won the Maritime Intermediate Baseball Championship in 1937. In the deciding game of the Championship game against the Pugwash Maple Leafs in the best-of-three series, I pitched a three-hit masterpiece, striking out 11 batters.
In 1938 I was invited to the New York Giants baseball club’s training camp as a power pitcher. Still, my budding prospects as a professional baseball player came to an early end when I suffered an arm injury.
Now that my sports aspirations had been dashed, I had to transition into a new field of expertise. After graduating from St. Francis Xavier University in 1942, I briefly taught high school algebra and Latin in Antigonish before eventually trying a stint in the Canadian Army. After my service overseas with the Columbus Hostel Auxiliary Services during the war, I returned to Antigonish to work as a sportscaster for CJFX.
In 1946, I moved to Halifax, where I became the St. Mary’s junior hockey team’s sports director and voice. I got my first big break while working a junior playoff game in Montreal between the Halifax and Montreal teams when a producer from Hockey Night in Canada noticed me and asked me to fill in for a sick announcer in 1950.
In 1952, I began a 32-year career with Hockey Night in Canada, mostly announcing games for the Montreal Canadians. From 1952 until my retirement in 1984, I would call over 1900 games for the Montreal Canadians, including playoffs, as well as sixteen of the Canadians Stanley Cup championships
After Bill Hewitt was forced to retire in 1981, I traveled to Toronto to call mid-week games for the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 1981-1982 season.
I had the privilege of announcing the first-ever Vancouver Canucks NHL game on October 9, 1970, a 3-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings on CKNW radio.
If you haven’t guessed who I am by now, then you haven’t KEPT YOU’RE STICK ON THE ICE.
I am Danny Gallivan. I am not the one who does the Cannonading; I am the one who described the Cannonading.
It was his unique and colorful style for which he became famous: Plante would make “a scintillating save” but often faced “a paucity of shots”; Harvey would “feather a pass to the streaking Rocket”; Ferguson’s ”pugilistic endeavors” would take him to the “box of punition”; Captain Beliveau will “take up the oratorical cudgel of his confreres”; Geoffrion’s “cannonading drive” would sometimes be “nowhere near the net”; Lemaire would “feather a pass” to Lefleur who would “successfully negotiate contact”; Robinson would “tip-toe out of his own zone”; Dryden would make “a save in rapier-like fashion”: Awrey would have the puck caught up in his “paraphernalia”; Savard would beat his man with his “patented spinerama”.
He was selected to the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame in 1980, the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 1989, and received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater in 1985.
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