The final piece of a NHL jigsaw puzzle that has been Jiggs McDonald’s broadcasting life could be put into place Thursday.
“There’s a very good chance of it,” the 78-year-old said this week from his home in Fort Myers, Fla.
Nearly 50 years after his first broadcast for the 1967 expansion Kings, and more than 25 years after his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame, McDonald agreed to be the latest fill-in for Bob Miller on the Fox Sports West broadcast of the Kings-Florida Panthers contest in Sunrise, Fla., with a 4:30 p.m. PDT faceoff.
He agreed to make the two-hour drive from his home and across the Everglades to Florida’s East Coast more because of a soft spot for the franchise rather than for any sort of paycheck, a chance to reconnect with his first pro job since his official retirement as a full-time broadcaster in 2004.
“If I haven’t watched or checked for a score the night before, the first thing I do when I get up the next day is to see how the Kings did,” he said. “That’s where it all started. If not for (team owner) Jack Kent Cooke giving me that opportunity, who knows what would have happened.”
McDonald described the Kings’ first five seasons on radio and limited TV, with Ed Fitkin and Dan Avey as his colormen — both just professional broadcasters with no playing experience — and almost paired up with a young Forum intern named Al Michaels.
Born in Ontario, Canada, with the proper name John Kenneth McDonald, he had been referred to in his family occasionally as Jiggs, after a popular “Bringing Up Father” comic strip character. McDonald was one of five finalists for the first Kings’ play-by-play job, but on the application, he left a blank spot when asked to provide his nickname.
Cooke asked him about that oversight. This was at a time when Cooke was apt to give colorful nicknames not just to his players — Bill “Cowboy” Flett, Eddie “The Jet” Joyal and Real “Frenchy” Lemieux — but also insist the team’s colors of purple and yellow were “Forum Blue and Gold.”
When McDonald confessed to the “Jiggs” story, Cooke jumped on it — perhaps solidifying the job for him. And then it stuck with McDonald.
In the late ’60s, the Southern California hockey IQ was “minimal,” McDonald acknowledged, but “some knew the game very well, and I don’t think all of them were transient fans. A large number of them appreciated the game having seen (L.A.’s previous minor-league) Blades and maybe even the Monarchs.
“We also were fortunate to have a producer and director of our games who knew hockey, played hockey and knew what to expect,” said McDonald, referring to two former players with the Pacific Coast Hockey League’s L.A. Monarchs who had brief NHL appearances in the 1940s — Hec Highton, a goaltender for the Chicago Blackhawks, and John Polich, a right winger with the New York Rangers.
McDonald’s job was basically as a radio play-by-play man, but 20 games a year back then were simulcast on KTLA-Channel 5. All the replays came from the TV station’s studio, and McDonald couldn’t see them but had to describe them to the audience based on what a technician was telling him.
“This was all quite an experience for someone coming from a 10,000-watt radio station and having never done play-by-play on television,” McDonald said. “It was just, ‘Look out, here he comes, we don’t know what to expect.’”
McDonald could have been the one-and-only play-by-play man for the Kings for decades to come had Cooke only met his salary requirement in 1972.
“I had a number — I wasn’t looking for ‘Chick Hearn’ money — but with the cost of living in Los Angeles, and considering what other broadcasters were getting in other cities, I thought I deserved to have more put on the table,” McDonald said.
To put the negotiations into perspective, McDonald said he knew St. Louis Blues’ broadcaster Dan Kelly was getting $40,000 a year, but Cooke didn’t believe it. Cooke called Blues owner Sid Salomon to verify, even as the Blues were in the middle of the playoffs, and then called McDonald back into his office to proclaim that Kelly made only $39,500.
“Mr. Cooke eventually came back with is famous ‘firm and final offer,’ and I didn’t accept it and said I would resign,” said McDonald. “He got so upset and asked that he at least be afforded the opportunity to talk to the team’s main corporate sponsor. So that was a ‘firm and final offer?’ He went back and talked to the people at Atlantic Richfield, who I found out where on the hook for six-sevenths of everything I made. I had all I could take, so we left.”
The NHL was about to expand that offseason with two more teams — the Atlanta Flames and New York Islanders. McDonald ended up working for both. First came the Flames, but when they moved to Calgary in 1980, he joined the Islanders and spent 15 seasons, calling three of their four consecutive Stanley Cup championship seasons (1981, ’82, ’83). McDonald also worked for SportsChannel America, Fox and NBC during their stints as the national network for the NHL, for ABC and TNT during the Winter Olympics, as well as for the Toronto Maple Leafs and finally for the expansion Florida Panthers.
The lockout of 2004-05 gave him reason to pause and eventually retire, after logging what it believed to be a league-record of more than 3,000 broadcasts, still filling in occasionally on games here and there to keep a streak alive of broadcasting games every year since ’67.
In 1990, he received the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award for his broadcasting work — 10 years before Miller would receive the honor. When McDonald left, the Kings tried Roy Storey on play-by-play for one year before Miller was hired for the 1973-74 season.
While the reality is that the Kings have brought in several veteran play-by-play men to sub in on extended East Coast road trips for Miller, recovering from four-way heart bypass surgery in February 2016 and recently rehabbing from a mild stroke two weeks ago, McDonald’s return is more aligned with the team’s 50th anniversary celebration.
McDonald was in L.A. in October, part of the Staples Center ceremony for the Kings’ home opener where about a dozen players from the first 1967-68 squad came out on the ice for recognition.
“That was probably more fun than it should have been,” he said. “It was wonderful not just to be part of that, but to see the reaction the fans had, and the current ownership, to those first players. I just sat back with a sense of awestruck and what was going on. That was a very special time.”
More media notes on McDonald’s return as well as UCLA honoring Dick Enberg at Thursday’s college basketball at www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth
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