It’s come to an end. The Jack Edwards experience is packing it up and moving on. From “high above the ice” on the 9th floor of the TD Garden; the voice of your Boston Bruins for the last 19 years (19 YEARS!!), is finishing out this season’s playoff run and saying goodbye to a generation of Black and Gold Faithful who’ve never known another voice as their soundtrack for Bruins’ TV coverage. And Martha… he had quite the run.
“Who’s having more fun than us?” is a rhetorical question coming from Jack, as he clearly relished his time calling Bruins’ games and got to live out the wildest dreams of any hockey fan. Someone let this complete homer, totally biased, leather-lunged, long-winded superfan into the broadcast booth and oh man did we all love him.
I grew up with the broadcast tandem of Fred Cusick and Derek Sanderson (talk about a biased TV commentator) as the voice of “my Bruins” from my youth. Fred was a true professional and kept it mostly impartial. Derek was another story: but as a former star here in The Hub of Hockey, most people didn’t have a problem with his one-sided calls.
But Jack brought it to another level. He was one of us, the fans. He wasn’t a polished, by the numbers play-by-play guy, who kept it impartial and fair to both sides. Jack was the embodiment of your Uncle Charlie, 9 Bud Heavies deep, yelling from the 300 level to just SHOOOOOOOOT!!! Jack bleeds Black and Gold and would have fit in watching the games from Sully’s Tap as much as he did from behind the NESN monitors. Love him or hate him (and I don’t see how if you’re a Bruins fan you don’t love this man), his enthusiasm and genuine excitement and love for this team came through every time.
But the Jack I really love? That’s not the Jack of the Bruins wins, the excitable fan with an upbeat tempo to his timbre. No, I like the enraged Jack Edwards when the whole world is against the Bruins and he can’t believe the unfairness of it all. That’s the Jack I love.
I doubt he’ll ever read this, but if you do somehow ever see this my friend; I want to say thank you. Thank you for making the mundane exciting, thank you for being a voice for the fans, thank you for your soliloquies, and thank you for being the narrator to some of my fondest memories. I will miss your one of a kind sayings, I will miss playing Jack Edwards Bingo with my friends and I will miss your absolute love of the game and this organization.
Thank you and best of luck in whatever you do next (and if that includes coming on the podcast, we’d love to have you on as a guest). I mean, I can surely wax poetic with you about the Bruins glory days.
I’ll leave you all with a string of clips to view/listen to at your leisure. Jack’s one of a kind and we were lucky to have him calling games for as long as he did. To steal one from Dr. Seuss, “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
Thank you Jack. 2 U’s 2 K’s, all class, and all heart.
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