Jim O'Donnell: Bittersweet broadcast farewell of Pat Foley straight ahead
IN A PERFECT HOCKEY WORLD — hah! — there would be an imposing, golden, helium-filled ice skate tethered outside the United Center tonight.
Complete with passenger gondola, it would be waiting to triumphantly take Pat Foley up, up and away.
That's when the verbose icon of the Blackhawks airwaves will end his landmark 42-year span broadcasting local professional hockey games.
Foley and the revered Eddie Olczyk will do it one final time as the meandering Hawks host San Jose (NBCSCH, 7:30 p.m.; pregame tribute programming begins at 6:30 p.m.).
HE IS SAYING all of the right things about his “retirement.” So is team management.
There appears to be a deep desire by that battered Blackhawks brass to hope that the most fevered members of its declining public are buying the notion that Foley's departure is 100% happy and voluntary.
There is not enough evidence to prove otherwise. There is more than ample speculative fodder to suggest the disconnect is not completely we-are-family.
Whatever the reality, the evening will mark the end of the West Madison Street run of quite likely the most passionate, talented, homegrown Chicago play-by-play man of the past six decades.
WHO ELSE EVEN comes closes?
Jack Brickhouse, Harry Caray, Lloyd Pettit, Jim Durham, Wayne Larrivee — all technically foreigners to The City That Works.
South Side-spawned Ed Farmer?
He lacked Foley's extremely animated theatricality.
Ditto for Jeff Joniak (Hersey High, Class of '80).
Foley himself has called his career a “fairy tale.”
And who is to argue that point?
HE WAS BORN INTO privilege in North suburban Glenview. His grandfather started a North Shore car dealership in 1933.
Three decades later, his father — Bob Foley Jr. — returned home an honored Naval aviator and took over the family business.
His eldest son was in sports incubation at Loyola Academy, so-so at best when playing basketball or hockey.
Through his pop's connections, at age 10, a chance encounter with ill-fated Cubs play-by-player Jack Quinlan — killed in a 1965 car crash — put the dream of sportscasting in his head.
Following graduation from Michigan State, an ambitious Foley began making his puck drops as a minor league hockey caller.
In 1980, once again enter his father's networking.
THE BLACKHAWKS BROADCAST SCHEME was in shambles. The team had no TV outlet and only Ed Walters' cash-and-carry WYEN-FM (106.7) in Des Plaines prevented a complete electronic blackout of any live game coverage.
The stumbling franchise also had no play-by-play man set for the 1980-81 season.
Michael Wirtz — team exec VP and brother of fortunate son Bill Wirtz — frequently had his Buicks serviced at Foley Motor Sales.
Wiley dealer Bob Jr. saw to it that one of his son's audition cassettes was dropped into the tape player of a Wirtz sedan awaiting pickup.
Michael Wirtz liked it enough to give it to brother Bill. Four months later — for the princely sum of $200 per-game — 26-year-old Pat Foley was the voice of the Chicago Blackhawks on WYEN.
HIS CAREER HAS NOT BEEN without ruts. The roughest came in 2006 — 25 seasons in — when a peevish Bill Wirtz rescinded a new contract offer.
A scrambling Foley accepted the best offer that would not uproot his Glenview homestead. That was alongside Billy Gardner with the Chicago Wolves of the American Hockey League.
That exile-on-Mannheim-Road ended two years later, following a 2008 Calder Cup title, when the new-attitude Hawks of Rocky Wirtz and John McDonough hired him back.
McDonough was credited with being the executive conceptualist who effected the improbable reconciliation.
HE, UNFORTUNATELY, IS NOT expected to be in attendance nor one of the numerous Blackhawks alumni and others paying video homage to Foley at Thursday night's farewell.
The former Hawks president remains in that odd purgatory of shattered image undefended since his abrupt dismissal by Rocky Wirtz in April 2020.
The mysterious guillotining — for better or worse — is now contextualized as a prelude to the more widespread poleaxings that were executed after most of the sordid details of the sex abuse scandal involving Brad Aldrich became public last year.
What McDonough's maneuvering with Foley did do was enable the broadcaster to rightfully be on the call for the three celestial Stanley Cups of 2010, 2013 and 2015.
THURSDAY NIGHT, IT all ends.
Foley's golden helium skate may be waiting outside for transport to his next life segment. But don't bet Olczyk's Keeneland spring bankroll on it.
He has downplayed his own exit, repeatedly telling media, “By Christmas, no one around here will remember my name.”
That's false.
He is a Blackhawks forever man, in his own stead to be as enduring as Mikita and Hull, Kane and Toews, even the grand Pettit himself.
Now if only the fog-prone hockey world around Pat Foley could have matched his own ceaseless quest for perfection.
• Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears three times weekly, including Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.