Scary good
Remember the extraordinary life and career of Rick Jeanneret
If you grew up in Buffalo, you know the calls by heart.
“May Day! May Day! May Day! May Day!”
“Top shelf, where mama hides the cookies!”
“La-la-la-la-la-la-la-LaFontaine!”
“Now do you believe? These guys are good! Scary good!”1
They are the calls of Rick Jeanneret, the longtime voice of the Buffalo Sabres who died on Thursday night at the age of 81. He spent 51 of those years as the play-py-play announcer for the Sabres. The team honored him 2022 by raising his name to the rafters of Key Bank Arena.
Jeanneret was, and is forever, part of the soundtrack of my youth. Jeanneret, Van Miller2, Ted Darling, all Buffalo area broadcasting legends whom I’m listened to from an early age. I grew up wanting to be a radio play-by-play announcer, and those three were the inspiration for those dreams.
I never formally met RJ. I would see him at the press box when I would cover Sabres games, of course, but I never had a conversation with him. When I was a student at St. Bonaventure, he spoke at the Dick Joyce Sports Symposium. I remember him being funny, kind, gracious and humble - he said he was a guy who never graduated from high school, and he seemed genuinely proud to be honored at a university.
Truth be told, I was always a bigger Ted Darling fan growing up. When I was in high school, I became a Toronto Maple Leafs fan. So I don’t have the deep emotional connection with RJ that so many Buffalo sports fans do. You can read their memories on social media - they are real and true and beautiful.
RJ was something special. It feels cliche to say things like “they don’t make ‘em like him anymore” or that he was from a different era, but it really does feel true. The man’s calls were legendary, and what made them special was that they were genuine. These were not catch phrases that were workshopped for a focus group. They were big and loud and fun.
In a statement released by the team Thursday night, GM Kevyn Adams called RJ “the voice for our city.” And that really is true. The Sabres have not made the playoffs in 12 seasons, the longest drought in NHL history. Until this past year, Sabres fans haven’t had a lot to cheer about on the ice (though the team should be pretty good this season). But they had RJ.
That mattered.
He mattered.
He mattered in the way that the team’s play by play announcers have traditionally mattered. We usually think of this in baseball, but it’s true in a lot of sports. It seems to be the case more in radio. I think there’s two reasons for that. One is that when you listen to sports on the radio, the play-by-play announcers is everything. They are your eyes, your ears. You rely on them completely, unlike on TV where you can see the action for yourself. And there’s something about the act of listening to sports on the radio. You’re in the car at night, or you’re at work, so they are much more of a soundtrack than an intense experience. They’re keeping you company when you need it.
And he mattered to Buffalo. The team might stink, it might be on their third rebuild of the decade, but you had RJ. You had the memories of the great moments and the great calls. You had his voice, his energy. There’s something so proudly defiant about his great calls that fits Buffalo’s energy. They were calls that said “Oh hell yeah, we are here, we are still here, and WOO HOO"!”
I think about place a lot in media, specifically in writing and journalism, but this applies to sports broadcasting as well. I have no data to support this, only vibes, but it feels like place matters less and less in our work. A Buffalo column is a Columbus column is a San Jose column is a Portland column. That’s not to say there aren’t great, vital voices in every community. Of course they are. But that element of being of a place seems to be less vital to our work than it was in previous generations.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Digital media and social media have flattened the media world in a lot of ways3. Our media ecosystems have become much more national — particularly in sports. Corporatization of sports has taken a lot of the personality out of our games. Corporatization of media has drained the personality out of lot of local outlets.
Which is why we celebrate people like Rick Jeanneret. Because they remind us of who we are, of what we had. They remind us of a time when sports was local, and local voices mattered. RJ was a voice of Buffalo the way that Chuck Pollock was a voice in Olean. They remind us that sports is at its best when they are not serious matters of state but when they are smaller, and when they are fun. You’ll notice I used that word a few times in this piece, and that’s on purpose. Because man, RJ was FUN. I don’t know if he was the most technically proficient broadcaster, but he made the games fun to listen to.
Rick Jeanneret was the voice of Buffalo, one that made a first-round playoff win could feel like the most important moment in the world. He was the voice of eternal hope and defiant pride.
He was good.
Scary good.
The older I get, the more this is my favorite of all of RJ’s calls. I find myself using it at least once per sports season.
One of the few times career I’ve ever been nervous about approaching someone was when Van Miller was honored at one of his last Bills’ games. I was covering the game for the Olean Times-Herald, and as Van walked through the press box, I worked up the courage to say hello, shake his hand, and say thank you. I was literally shaking.
To get nerdy and theoretical about it, this is an example of isomorphism. Isomorphism is when organizations within a given field closely resemble one another, and the tendency of organizations within a field to become more homogenous.