Hockey on the radio can have a hypnotic effect. When there are extended stretches without goals, big hits, acrobatic saves or penalties, you can get lulled into a passive serenity by swooshing skates, clacking sticks and the low murmur of a crowd.
That’s where Pittsburgh Penguins play-by-play voice Mike Lange excelled.
Those were the moments that made him into a Hall of Famer. Lange managed to fill those lags with description, anticipation or maybe a charming anecdote.
Sometimes that unique, gravelly voice of his just filled the void on its own.
Despite decades of people associating Lange strictly with his trademark goal calls, there was so much more to his skillset that made him a master craftsman of hockey play-by-play.
No offense to Arnold Slick from Turtle Crick. I’m sure Michael Michael Motorcycle is a wonderful man. And I hope Sam and his dog enjoyed drinking on Mike’s tab for the past half century or so.
It’s just that when I heard Lange had passed away Wednesday night, I didn’t think of those guys first. Or hacksaws used as backscratchers. Or beaten mules. Or moose being hunted on a Harley.
I didn’t think of Mike trumpeting those beloved refrains above a billowing goal horn and a roaring crowd.
I thought of an understated, lower-pitched “Look out here.”
That’s it. That simple phrase. “Look out here.”
I thought of plodding up Interstate 79 from Washington in a snowstorm. It was deep into the final years of Lange’s career. I was listening to the Penguins game on the car radio during one of those elongated dips in the action.
They were losing by a goal or two. The crowd was quiet. Iceburgh wasn’t banging his drum. The Jumbotron wasn’t asking for noise. You could hear Mike Sullivan yelling from the bench.
My mind was elsewhere, probably on the slushy road. My ears weren’t really paying attention until Lange’s voice picked up its timbre as the Penguins started to move the puck out of the defensive end.
“Look out here.”
Just the way Lange said it let you know something was brewing.
“They might have something. Three-on-two if they hurry,” Lange’s pace and voice started to rise in the moment.
The crowd obviously couldn’t hear Lange’s call, yet it was almost as if he was forcing the whole arena to pay attention. It started to crest.
One stride ahead, Lange was pulling the audible swell of cheers along with the very rumble of his vocal cords. Out of the D-zone, through the neutral zone into the offensive end with an inevitable crescendo of “HEEEEEEEE shoots and scores!”
It coalesced with the goal horn as if Manfred Honeck was conducting the whole play with his wand in the lower bowl behind the opposing goalie.
Honestly, I don’t even remember who scored. However, I do remember watching it without seeing it.
I remember the whiteout snowstorm in front of my windshield becoming the white of the ice at PPG Paints Arena. I remember the center line of the highway becoming the blue line, then the red line, then the opposing blue line, as Lange scripted that call.
That’s what I’ll remember about Lange doing play-by-play. Goal calls are great. No one authored them better than Lange. That was his sizzle.
But he always served up a great steak too.
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In a fairly typical 4-2 hockey game, if you string together all the goal calls in a row, that’s less than three total minutes of air time. What about the remaining 140 minutes of the broadcast?
That’s where you really have to be good, and Lange so often was. His manipulation of tone, tempo, volume and pace was unparalleled.
In the fall of 2013, Mike Prisuta and I had just started calling play-by-play of Robert Morris University hockey games. My hockey play-by-play resume at the time was minimal. About two or three games into that season, I was talking to Lange outside of the press box, and he asked me how the broadcasts were going.
I remember bemoaning how one of the visiting teams had rounded numbers on their jerseys, and I was frustrated because I got behind on a few calls, fighting with myself over some player identification problems in the far corner across the ice.
“Watch the visiting team in pregame warmups,” Lange jumped in. “You’ll figure this out with the home team soon without even trying. You’ll know them cold by the end of the next home series. Watch the visitors during the pregame skate. Who is right-handed? Who is left-handed? Who pulls up the pads? Who has longer hair out the back of the helmet? How they skate. Anything identifiable. If you are 50-50 on picking out a number, that’ll help.”
It did.
So I’ve done that every game for 12 years since then. I thought that maybe it was just Lange passing along a little pro tip to someone wet behind the ears. Something that a “back when I was your age” vet says to a rookie but doesn’t really do any longer on their own.
Then I read Seth Rorabaugh’s post about Lange’s passing on Thursday here at TribLive. It featured a quote from former Penguins reporter and eventual team executive Tom McMillan.
“During the pregame warmup skate, everybody just talks (in the press box),” McMillan said. “I would go to Mike early in my career and realize you couldn’t talk to him then. Because he was so intently watching the warm-up skate. He was trying to, in his mind, visualize the way players on the other team skated. He wasn’t watching the Penguins. He was watching the other team. Because you can’t always see the (jersey) number and the game moves so quickly. He was really studying to see if he could pick up little quirks in anyone’s skating so he could know who had the puck during the game. Because how many times would you face the St. Louis Blues during the season? But he’d be up there for the entire warmup, staring at the St. Louis Blues.”
Well, slap me silly, Sidney!
Reading that quote shot the memory of my conversation with Lange back into my head. I could smell the cigarette smoke on his shirt. I could hear the encouraging tone in his voice. I could see the smile of someone who was just happy to be talking about the craft.
Lange practiced what he preached, and every hockey game he called was like listening to a sermon.
In his business, Mike Lange really was Elvis. And his memory will never leave the building.
Listen: Tim Benz and Pens PxP man Josh Getzoff discuss the legend of Mike Lange
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.