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You knew you were on the right side of Peter McNab if he called you “pal.” All good, pal? Need help, pal? I gotcha, pal. It’s over, pal. To be McNab’s pal was a badge of honor, worn close to the heart.
“When he laughed, not only did he have different pitches of laughter, he had a body laugh,” Avalanche television play-by-play man Mark Moser recalled Monday afternoon when I asked about McNab, his broadcast partner and franchise linchpin whose overtime fight with cancer ended at the age of 70.
“His whole body would move. It was real and impactful. It was 1,000% genuine.”
From Vancouver to San Diego to DU to the crow’s nest at Ball Arena, McNab made everybody around him better, a playmaker to the last. The Avs have a home division matchup with Nashville on Thursday night. Maxy’s old Altitude TV teammates have production meetings for said game on Tuesday, just a few days after McNab, who’s been with the Avs since Day 1, passed on.
“Nobody wants to talk hockey,” studio host Kyle Keefe stressed. “It’s going to be hard. I get emotional just talking about it.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him, because his mind was so powerful in that regard,” Moser said. “And his friendship was so powerful …
“I really don’t know, man. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.”
As good as he was a player, first with the Pios and then for 14 seasons in the NHL, as fine as he was an analyst, Peter McNab was an even better friend. You could tell Maxy anything. Professional or otherwise. Moser often did, in good times and bad. So did Keefe, who remembers McNab acting as his rock after his wife, Dana, had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Peter walked me through it,” Keefe recalled. “Anytime that I needed to call and just yell and vent, he would just listen to me. Sometimes he would laugh. Sometimes he would cry with me. He was that kind of guy.”
The kind you keep. The kind you cherish. The kind it hurts so much to lose. The kind who don’t ever want it to be about them.
There will be tears and tributes Thursday, grown men trying to keep it together, to bury the pain long enough for the show to go on.
If they laugh at all, it’s because McNab would hate the tribute part. With the passion of 1,000 suns.
“He’d say, ‘Don’t mention my name,’” Keefe chuckled. “He would be like, ‘Please don’t talk about me, I’m fine.’”
He wouldn’t want you talking about the bloodlines, how he was the son of a Stanley Cup winner. Or about his girls, whom he adored. Or the lives he touched with grace, humility and radio silence, skating beneath the radar.
“I would sometimes only find things out later,” Moser recalled. “I’d ask, ‘Where the (heck) were you all-day Saturday?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, I was with a group that took some former soldiers who’d had brain injuries out and we went fishing, we talked hockey and tried to raise their spirits.’
“It was all the time (with him). And with kids — he loved kids, was just great with kids. Just an amazing dude.”
McNab’s Altitude cohorts knew things had taken a dark turn before they’d headed to Finland last week. As much as they enjoyed the journey, their minds were back here, with Maxy, prayers pinned on saying one last goodbye in person.
Their return flight was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean when McNab finally passed. WiFi access came on again about two hours before they were due to land, telling everyone the news they’d been dreading.
Moser wrapped his head in a blanket and wept.
“That’s really hard, too, because you’re trying to be professional and trying to do right by the team,” he said. “We were so far away and (McNab fell into) decline really quickly. We tried to race home as fast as we could. As fast as the plane would go.”
Moser sat next to McNab on flights for much of the past two decades. While the rest of the cabin would be sound asleep at 2 a.m. during some snow-capped trek from Winnipeg to Ottawa, Moser would pick McNab’s brain on hockey and life.
“He had the best ear of any person I’ve ever been around in my entire life,” Moser said. “He truly cared … his guidance was more than I could’ve asked for. And more than I probably deserved.
“He had a way of listening that you really could tell him — not that you would, but you could tell him everything. He was almost like a human truth serum. That gift he had was amazing.”
Truth be told? This hurts. Thursday is going to hurt. Plane rides are going to hurt. Games, win or lose, are going to hurt. If an Avs broadcaster seems hobbled by an upper-body injury in the weeks to come, it’s probably the soul.
“We’ll do our job and we’ll do it effectively,” Moser said. “And no matter what we do from this point on, I’ll look over and he won’t be there. And there’s going to be a massive hole in my heart and a massive hole in my life.”
“(Thursday) is going to probably be the most difficult broadcast of my life,” Keefe said. “I have a hard time talking about Pete face-to-face. I can’t imagine doing that on camera. But this is life. Pete would want us to move on. He just would.”
It’s over, pal. Over too dang soon.
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