Barry Melrose Rocks
The NHL regular season got underway last night, but for the first time in a very long time, it got started without ESPN’s Barry Melrose. Before the first puck dropped in Tampa a little after 5:30 p.m. U.S. EDT, Melrose issued a statement that he was retiring to spend time with his family after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.
With the exception of a few months when he returned behind the bench to briefly coach the Tampa Bay Lightning during the 2008-09 NHL season, Melrose has been at ESPN since 1996, holding ice hockey’s torch high even during the long period when the sport disappeared from the network.
Barry played the game. He coached the game. He knows the game. And he shared that knowledge with American hockey fans in an understandable and straightforward manner that millions of us embraced. As the years passed, and it began to feel like the sport would never return to ESPN, his continued employment there seemed incongruous and more than a bit unfair. Melrose deserved to be someplace that took hockey seriously, and not locked away working for a network that when it would notice the sport, it would be derisively, if at all. When Hockey Night in Canada showed Don Cherry the door, it seemed obvious to me that the producers needed to call Bristol and ask if Melrose would moonlight for them one night a week.
Whatever I might have thought, it was clear that Melrose was more than happy with what he was doing, something that was easy to see while he was doing it so well.
In the early days of hockey blogging, one of my favorite stops was Barry Melrose Rocks, a blog published by Kevin Schultz. And while Kevin deserves credit for being the first to say it out loud, everyone agreed, Barry Melrose rocks. Say it again and say it loud. Now more than ever.