Toronto Maple Leafs broadcaster Joe Bowen is set to call his 3,800th game before hanging up his microphone after this season.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
Joe Bowen stepped into the broadcast booth and called his first Maple Leafs game on Oct. 6, 1982, at the old Chicago Stadium. The contest against the Blackhawks ended in a 3-3 tie and began a love affair that still endures.
Some time in March he will provide play-by-play for Toronto for the 3,800th time. At this point he has outlasted eight Canadian prime ministers, 16 Leafs head coaches and 11 of the team’s general managers.
Holy Mackinaw!
He is 74 and tells stories with a twinkle in his Irish eyes. He speaks loud and fast, laughs often and elicits laughter around him.
“If I can still see the grass I’m good,” he said on Thursday about his advancing seniority.
He will retire at the end of the 2025-26 season and will remain an optimist until the lights go out on his extraordinary career. Improbably, he is just the club’s fifth radio play-by-play announcer since 1920.
“I’m going the rest of the season, including the playoffs and the parade,” he said as he sat in a booth overlooking the ice at Scotiabank Arena. “I’m very confident.”
On Tuesday, the team will celebrate his 43-plus years with the organization with a pregame tribute. He will also take part in a ceremonial puck drop along with his family and throughout the night videos will be shown featuring some of his greatest moments.
Bowen before an NHL game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators in September, 2023.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
“I’m very honoured,” Bowen said. “I think I am going to be overwhelmed. I know I will probably be quite emotional about it. It’s not the end, but it’s probably the beginning of the end.
“From that point on, I will kind of be crossing the games off the calendar with an X. I’ll do the best I can under the circumstances.”
He jokes that Taylor Berlett, the game operations manager with whom he has worked during home games for 17 years, has told him her main job on Tuesday is to make him cry at centre ice.
“It’s a bittersweet thing for me,” Berlett said. She has worked in game operations in her entire career and has been the director for nearly a decade. “He has done such a tremendous job that when I heard he was going to retire I thought, ‘No, Joe, don’t go.’
“I grew up a Maple Leafs fan and listened to Joe as long as I’ve known about Leafs hockey. I wasn’t even born yet when he started. He is such a lovable guy. He’s a big softie. I tear up when I think about him.”
Before he joined the Maple Leafs broadcast crew, Bowen spent seven years calling games for the Sudbury Wolves of the Ontario Hockey League and three years for the American Hockey League’s Nova Scotia Voyageurs. His son, David, currently does play-by-play for the Wolves and will pinch-hit for his dad on Tuesday while he enjoys free drinks and festivities.
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Bowen grew up in Sudbury, Ont., where his father, Joseph Charles Bowen, was a general surgeon.
“He delivered 3,000 Sudburians and always said there were only two mistakes,” Bowen said, setting up a one-liner. “Those were [journalist] Paul Rimstead and Eddie Shack.”
He watched Toronto games on television with his father who would blurt, “Holy Mackinaw” when there was a big play. His father died when he was 14 and Joe never got to ask where the phrase came from.
Recently, Bowen said he got an e-mail from a listener who told him the line was uttered by the Canadian actor Raymond Massey in the 1941 war movie The 49th Parallel.
Bowen, left, and Jim Ralph call an NHL game between the Leafs and Ottawa Senators in Toronto on Sept. 25, 2023.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
“I am not sure if my dad got it from that,” he said. “But he was a big history buff and I am sure he watched the movie.”
The exclamation has become Bowen’s calling card over the past four decades, punctuating big saves and important goals. On Tuesday, the team will sell ‘Holy Mackinaw’ apparel and serve Bowen-inspired menu items, including Holy Mack ‘N’ Cheesenaw!
After he calls his last Maple Leafs game, he looks forward to spending time with his three grandchildren. He loves to travel and is also a history buff and has a trip planned next summer, a Band of Brothers tour of Second World War battlefields.
He has never been much of a memorabilia collector, but has five or six pieces of artwork and photographs autographed by Johnny Bower, the great Toronto goalie.
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“That is my collection,“ Bowen said. “The best part about this job probably was that when I got it, I got to meet my idol. And I found out he was better as a person than what I could ever imagined or dreamed about in meeting a star athlete. An amazing man.”
Bowen’s dad told him that he was walking and carrying him as an infant when Bill Barilko scored the overtime goal that propelled the Maple Leafs to victory over the Montreal Canadiens in the 1951 Stanley Cup final.
He was 16 when Toronto won its last Stanley Cup in 1967. “What I remember is thinking it was going to happen every year,” he said. “Either we’d win it or the Canadiens would.”
He jokes that he going to have a T-shirt made that says, “Win one before I’m feckin’ done.”
His paternal grandfather was from County Cork. Feckin’ is Irish slang.
“Make sure you spell that right or it will get me in trouble,” Bowen said.