On Frozen Blog

From my weekend visit to Hershey I had an opportunity to meet Tim Leone, whose work for the Patriot News covering the Bears I’ve admired for years, and John Walton, whose impassioned radio pitch I first encountered last spring during Hershey’s spectacular run to the Calder Cup. There’s a predictable purity to their work outside of the bright lights of the big leagues: here in D.C., men and women on the pro beats are expected to be beat reporters, radio and TV personalities, bloggers, and short-order cooks, but out in AmericaLand, beat reporters, refreshingly, just cover their beats. As reporters. From just a few hours of working beside the Hershey pros I was reminded that the minor leagues are in some instances staffed with big-league talent.
During Saturday evening’s first period Mike Vogel sprung a pleasant surprise on me: he and I were going to be Walton’s second intermission guests on the radio, and discuss our recent trip to Moscow to cover the Worlds. We walked into Walton’s press box broadcast booth and found him and him alone in headset and microphone. A circus has three rings, but in the American Hockey League broadcast booth it’s Walton doing the play-by-play, Walton coming up with the color, Walton keeping the stats, Walton producing and conducting the intermission interviews. And in his spare time, he heads up communications for the Bears. I forgot to ask him, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he thinks he has one of the best jobs in America.
One of my favorite memories from Moscow was witnessing Vogel making mischief with Walton via instant messenger during Walton’s broadcasts of Hershey’s second-round series with Wilkes Barre. I was able to see a bit of it in the booth Saturday night. The three of us had a blast with the segment.
Some of our readers likely have yet to follow the Bears on one of Walton’s available-on-the-’Net broadcasts either of the past two springs. Please do yourself a favor and settle in one evening with John Walton’s work. You won’t regret it.
Leone sat down with Vogel and me at the Bears’ Den after he’d completed his work for his paper. We were wonderfully deep into Saturday night without any agenda but talking puck. Leone was the embodiment of the lore of hockey beat writers being great post-game puck chats over a beer.
Early in our conversation I expressed to him my wish that we had his likes on our hockey beat here in D.C. It was only hours later, on my ride home, that I realized that talented beat reporters ultimately will be beaten down without the support of their editors, and so in addition to Leone we’d have to relocate all of his editors here as well to get things up to par.
It was a pleasure watching Leone and other Pennsylvania press carry off their craft in the Giant Center press box. During the game they actually watched the action, scribbled notes, and freely conversed with their press box peers about the game. After the final horn we went downstairs to attend Coach Boudreau’s press conference, inside the Bears’ room to chat up some players, and then back upstairs to draft.
Well after the last Bears’ fan had departed and the lights were dimmed on the Giant Center ice up in the press box I heard only the hum of laptop keyboards interrupted only by individual voices phoning into their newsrooms to alert copy staff of file transmission. It wasn’t lost on me that in the very same week the helping hand of the Washington Capitals had seen to it that I’d shared press boxes with a global syndicate of puck media pros.
Then I had this thought: The further ones moves from the big city and its big league beats, it seems, the closer one gets to the heart of the matter.