True Patriot Love - June 29, 2026


[Sneak Peek] The Death of Hockey Night In Canada ft Steve Lansky

Hosted by
Shara Micucci Mike Wixson
Guests
Steve Lansky
Mentioned
Dave Hodge Chris Katsopoulos Steve Lansky Harry Neal John Shannon Jim Van Horn Hockey Night Don Cherry Brent Musburger Danny Gallivan Ralph Mellenby Jim Poplinski Don Whitman Ron McClain Jim Robson Bob Cole David
[Sneak Peek] Manitoba in Focus： Affordability, Opportunity, and Canada's Heartland Hockey Night Canada： My Unforgettable Broadcasting Experience #Hockey

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

174.16

Word count

1,771

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Steve Lansky is one of the most experienced and accomplished producers in the history of Canadian sports television. At the start of his stellar career in the early 1980s, Steve was the youngest producer in the History of Hockey Night in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Steve Lansky is one of the most experienced and accomplished producers in the history of Canadian
00:00:08 sports television. You can follow him at Big Mouth Sports and get more insight from a man who at the
00:00:15 start of his stellar career was the youngest producer in the history of Hockey Night in Canada
00:00:19 and he joins us at ANTPL Media. Steve, how are you my friend? I'm great Jim, how are you? Good,
00:00:25 it's a thrill to have you on. I'm a huge fan of your social media content and your insight
00:00:29 to what life was really like in Hockey Night in Canada,
00:00:33 especially after the last few weeks with the shocking announcement
00:00:36 that no longer Saturday Night Hockey in Canada,
00:00:40 it is a bit of a stunner.
00:00:42 For someone who produced Hockey Night in Canada in the early, mid, late 80s,
00:00:47 explain to the listeners, what was it like in Hockey Night in Canada at that time?
00:00:51 I call it the golden age of Hockey Night in Canada
00:00:54 because I started as a statistician.
00:00:57 I was a stats guy for four years, 79 to 83.
00:00:59 and then I was a producer from 83 to 88 and to me that was the absolute heyday of hockey night
00:01:05 we I wouldn't say we own the network but we felt like we owned the network which
00:01:11 maybe those are two different things but they weren't to us and news cbc news and uh you know
00:01:19 the national and us were butting head to head every single time we did a show because we all
00:01:24 wanted to own and run the network and the cachet that came with that and we wore the baby blue
00:01:31 blazers I look back and I think I can't believe I was lucky enough to do that for a decade on
00:01:39 various levels it almost blows my mind and Steve you know as someone of my vintage you Don Whitman
00:01:46 Don Cherry, Dave Hodge, Bob Cole, Harry Neal, Jim Robson, Danny Gallivan, the names are on the
00:01:55 pantheon of the greatest this country's ever produced. You're naming names. And all I can do
00:02:02 is think of stories. And you said Harry Neal. Oh, my God, Harry Neal, the funniest man I have ever
00:02:09 met in my life, in my entire life. The funniest man. We're at the Minnesota airport one time
00:02:17 and Harry and I drive up and we're flying back to Toronto, I think. And so we pull up
00:02:22 and then a guy from the NHL that I won't name pulls up behind us. And he's an older guy. He's
00:02:28 probably, you know, 65 years old, something like that. So we get out of the cab and we're getting
00:02:34 our bags out and he gets out of the cab and this lady is driving the cab and she's not 65 she's
00:02:41 about 25 and pretty good looking and harry just looks at him and says hey what cab company is that
00:02:53 harry like it just it just it came out it never stopped it just came out with harry
00:02:59 and that was every day with all of these guys it was crazy you know and you had a front row seat
00:03:07 to the creation of ron and don steve and for me as a viewer as someone going going through school
00:03:13 getting into my broadcast career i felt don cherry became a tv star during the 1987 stanley cup
00:03:19 playoffs when did you realize that you had something special in don cherry and he would
00:03:25 become the icon that he did well he started i'm not if i'm not mistaken he got fired by
00:03:33 colorado and ralph mellenby who i cannot say enough about his creativity and his ability
00:03:40 to have built hockey night in canada into what it was ralph was like nobody i've ever seen
00:03:46 had an ego like nobody i've ever seen and he needed it because that's what he used so he
00:03:51 brought Don Cherry in in about 1980 and I did a bunch of shows where Dave Hodge hosted Coach's
00:03:59 Corner with Don and Dave Hodge had no patience and no time for Don. We were in Calgary one time
00:04:11 and we had a 15-minute window to send them Coach's Corner because we were the national game that
00:04:17 night. So Don went to where the national game was. So there'd be an early game in Toronto,
00:04:21 but then we were the national game in Calgary. So we had 15, a 15-minute satellite window to do
00:04:27 Coach's Corner, Dave and Don. It was all choreographed. It was all scripted. Nothing
00:04:33 was off the cuff. And at one point, Don had to talk about Chris Katsopoulos, who played for the
00:04:38 Hartford Whalers. And he could not, you know where this is going, he could not say Katsopoulos.
00:04:44 And instead of just letting it go, David stopped and said, Don, it's Katsopoulos.
00:04:48 Let's do it again.
00:04:50 Well, now we're doing this for the third time.
00:04:52 And they're saying in Toronto, you only have a four minutes left on the window.
00:04:55 And I'm saying, guys, you can't stop again.
00:04:58 You have to do this.
00:05:00 So he gets it.
00:05:01 He kicks Katsopoulos again.
00:05:02 And Dave just goes, whatever.
00:05:06 And then they carry on.
00:05:08 And so they were just at loggerheads the whole time.
00:05:11 And then Ron took over from Dave after Dave flipped his pen, and Ron was kind of a kinder, gentler Dave.
00:05:18 He would kind of guide Don in a direction he thought would benefit Don, whereas I don't think Dave ever did that.
00:05:26 I think Dave and Don were just kind of an entertainment mechanism, and Ron and Don became more than that.
00:05:31 and so was it about that 86 87 88 that two or three year window where dawn went from being on
00:05:40 hockey night in canada being the guy in canada yeah that's probably right that's probably right
00:05:47 and he he had a few uh moments and opportunities i remember i was in montreal the night that the
00:05:53 flyers and the canadians fought before the game even started and i know ron and don were there
00:05:58 and I was in the studio, I was talking to Don and he got very upset at one point about something I
00:06:02 can't remember. He may or may not have lunged at me. I don't know if I can reveal that here, but
00:06:08 I think when Don had those opportunities, he was kind of at his best because he'd say, 0.81
00:06:14 this is ridiculous. This is crazy. This should never happen. That should never happen. So 0.98
00:06:18 I think those things kind of helped build him into a star. And I thought Ron was really good
00:06:23 at kind of molding that persona that had started back in the 80s
00:06:29 when it was really rough, and he kind of smoothed Don out a little bit.
00:06:33 So before we get into sort of any criticism of Ron McClain,
00:06:37 explain to the people watching this, Steve,
00:06:40 what was it about Ron that made him so good
00:06:42 that for so long in Canadian broadcasting?
00:06:45 Isn't that funny?
00:06:46 So John Shannon, who was our senior producer in Calgary,
00:06:50 and I, we have to replace Jim Van Horn, who's hosting the Flames on two and seven, a midweek
00:06:56 broadcast. And this is in 1984. Jim Van Horn goes to TSN. We have to replace him. So we're going to
00:07:04 audition 11 people. If I recall correctly, I've got it in my notes somewhere, but we're going to
00:07:08 audition 11 people and a bunch of people, guys from CFCN in Calgary, maybe another person from
00:07:15 Red Deer, a few more people at two and seven.
00:07:19 And we're gonna basically mock up an intermission.
00:07:23 We're gonna come back, Jim Poplinski, God love him,
00:07:25 came in and he was our player guest, yeah.
00:07:28 So all the guys would interview Pep.
00:07:30 And then we'd go to break, they'd have to throw to break,
00:07:33 they'd come back, they'd do some out of town scores.
00:07:35 We'd throw back to break, they'd come back,
00:07:37 they'd do a highlight pack from an out of town game
00:07:39 that we had built and given them a script for.
00:07:42 And then we would finish and we'd have recorded them
00:07:45 And then we'd look back.
00:07:46 And so we're working with the guys, you know, okay, stand by.
00:07:50 We're going to break now.
00:07:51 You can go to break in 10, 9.
00:07:53 We're counting them through just like producers do.
00:07:56 And then Ron sat down.
00:07:58 And Ron was just like he'd been doing this for 20 years.
00:08:03 He was so relaxed and so calm and so confident.
00:08:08 And he'd say something wrong and he'd go, oh, sorry about that.
00:08:12 But here's what I meant.
00:08:13 And he carries on, whereas everybody else would get flustered,
00:08:16 and you could see them.
00:08:17 A couple of the guys, you could literally see the sweat coming down.
00:08:20 And Ron was just like he'd been doing it forever.
00:08:22 And I remember I looked at John, and John looked at me and goes,
00:08:25 I know we have to finish this, but we're done, right?
00:08:27 And he goes, yeah.
00:08:29 And that was it.
00:08:30 That was it.
00:08:31 That Ron was in.
00:08:33 But in the last few years, as great as Ron is and the legacy he has,
00:08:38 he's had some stumbles.
00:08:39 What was Ron's weakness or maybe his ultimate downfall towards the end of his career?
00:08:46 So I think the issue started with Ron.
00:08:51 There was one year, and I don't have it in front of me.
00:08:53 I'm going to say 20, 25 years ago.
00:08:56 He and Don either held out or couldn't agree on money with CBC at the start of the season.
00:09:02 And there was a huge hue and cry from hockey viewership saying, oh, my God, we can't do this without Ron and Don.
00:09:09 And then they came back.
00:09:12 And I think when that happens, your head kind of goes and just gets a little bit bigger.
00:09:20 And unless you have a production team that says, no, we're going to stay in our lane.
00:09:26 We're not going to believe everything we read.
00:09:30 We're going to stay right here.
00:09:32 Unless somebody governs that, people will do what they're allowed to do.
00:09:38 and I think that was the start of the issue
00:09:40 because I found at the end, Ron wasn't in his lane.
00:09:46 Ron was in every lane on the roadway
00:09:48 and I don't, that's never been a host role to me.
00:09:52 I've watched a million,
00:09:53 I've been a sports television fan since the 1960s.
00:09:57 I've watched every host do their job.
00:09:59 Brent Musburger, Jim...
00:10:08 You