VANCOUVER — In his working life with John Garrett, play-by-play announcer John Shorthouse remembers exactly two times that his broadcast partner lost his temper.
Once was in Columbus when the tired and hungry Sportsnet crew had to wait forever for a restaurant table post-game, then forever for the server, who when finally discovered informed them that the kitchen was closed. Garrett’s complaint lasted less than a minute.
“And the second time I saw him lose it — and I’ve never been more proud and more thankful for any person in my life — was when I was in a really bad situation in an emergency room in Philadelphia,” Shorthouse recalled Tuesday. “I wasn’t getting tended to and was not in good shape, and he finally lost it and went full Papa Bear on the staff in order to get me treated. I’ll never forget that. To me, that spoke to his unfailing and unshakeable capacity to be the perfect teammate. And he wasn’t just our teammate; he was our captain.”
John Garrett was more than that.
The legendary Vancouver Canucks television analyst was discovered Monday afternoon lifeless in his hotel room in Salt Lake City, where he had been working the first-round National Hockey League playoff series between the Utah Mammoth and Vegas Golden Knights.
The 74-year-old, who moved to a less hectic national schedule for Sportsnet from Canuck regional broadcasts three years ago, leaves behind his wife, Sharon, daughters Krista and Sarah, grandchildren and a generation of hockey fans in Vancouver whose soundtrack for games featured Garrett’s reassuring voice and folksy sense of humour.
“John was every guy,” Greg Shannon, his long-time television producer, said Tuesday after Sportsnet announced Garrett’s passing. “Put him in a room with 100 other people, and he'd be No. 99 among people that you thought would be an ex-NHL player and a nationally known broadcaster. He was the guy you chatted to pumping gas at the station, or your neighbour. He was the most humble person I've ever met. There's no bad John Garrett stories. There just isn't.”
Shorthouse’s medical crisis occurred during a road trip in 2015, when an infection from what was supposed to be a routine surgical procedure in Vancouver became gravely worse. Garrett and Sportsnet reporter-host Dan Murphy, the third amigo on Canucks broadcasts, made sure Shorthouse got treated in Philadelphia before packing him on to a flight home to Vancouver for an emergency operation.
“He’s a delightful human,” Shorthouse said. “Even when he’s messing up and would say something inappropriate, which didn’t happen often, he’s just so harmless and so lovely and so perfect. And he’s genuinely, next to my dad, the most selfless person I’ve ever met in my life. He literally puts everyone ahead of himself.”
If it’s true that no one is poor who has friends, Garrett died one of the richest people in the world.
Born in Trenton, Ont., in 1951, Garrett was one of seven children raised by John and Marvel Garrett in the nearby community of Glen Miller. His dad was a high school principal and Garrett’s parents stressed the importance of academics.
A star goaltender in junior with the Peterborough Petes, John Garrett was drafted by the St. Louis Blues in 1971 but began his career in the World Hockey Association two years later. His final WHA team was the New England Whalers, who were absorbed by the NHL in 1979.
One of the defining moments of Garrett’s 207-game NHL career was his incongruous appearance at the 1983 NHL All-Star Game in Uniondale, N.Y., four days after his trade to the Canucks.
Vancouver goalie Richard Brodeur, the star of the Canucks’ improbable run to the 1982 Stanley Cup Final, suffered a burst ear drum the first game after the trade and Garrett was sent to the All-Star Game as a last-minute stand-in during a time when the NHL mandated at least one representative from each team.
Garrett nearly won the showcase game’s MVP award, which was a Pontiac Firebird sports car.
“We start the third period and as I’m making saves, Lanny McDonald comes by and says: ‘You’ve got a chance to win this car,’” Garrett told me for a 2017 column for The Vancouver Sun. “I make a few more saves and we score a goal, and every stoppage Lanny is saying: ‘You’ve got the front tires. Now you’ve got the steering wheel.’ So this Cinderella story is developing: What the hell is this guy doing here? And then (Wayne Gretzky) comes out and scores a goal. Lanny says: ‘Oh-oh, you better start to worry.’ Sure enough, next shift, Gretz scores again. He ended up he got four goals in the third period and won the car. I think he gave it to his uncle or something because Wayne had already won about 13 cars.”
All of five-foot-eight, Garrett also famously jumped in to defend bantamweight teammate Gary Lupul in a fight with a Pittsburgh Penguin rookie named Mario Lemieux during the 1984-85 season.
“I was chirping him,” Garrett said. “‘You’ll never make it in this league. You’re nothing but a goon. Anybody can score in that Quebec League.’ Mario still giggles about it.”
The intelligence and self-deprecating humour that helped Garrett survive as an NHL backup made him a natural for television after he retired as a player in 1986.
He replaced Ryan Walter in 2002 as the analyst on Canucks broadcasts, working first with Murphy and Jim Hughson before the play-by-play man moved to Hockey Night in Canada in 2008 and was replaced by Shorthouse.
With Shannon herding them, the broadcast crew rose with the hockey team to the Stanley Cup Final in 2011, and then continued to elevate their high standard and keep Canuck fans informed and entertained through a pile of challenging seasons that soon followed.
You know you’re woven into a city’s fabric when everyone identifies you by nickname: Shorty, Murph and Cheech. Garrett’s bushy moustache made him look a little like the character from Cheech and Chong movies of the 1970s.
In the broadcast booth, Shorty and Cheech would talk about food and pop culture and, frequently, Garrett’s love of ketchup on everything.
Fulfilling a promise to his mother to finish his education, Garrett completed an English degree from Queen's University over parts of three decades and once made a literary reference on TV to the 19th-century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson when San Jose Sharks defenceman Matt Tennyson played his first game against the Canucks.
“I think we all shared the same sense of humour,” Murphy said from Utah, where he was also working the Mammoth-Knights series. “We were all still juvenile in our thinking. I think you need a sense of humour and a way to see things in a positive and fun light when you cover a team for that long. It’s not always going to be great nights (for the team). We just thought the broadcast should be fun, regardless of whether the game was. If the game is good, inform. And if the game is not so good, entertain.”
Garrett, Shorthouse, Murphy and Shannon were largely inseparable on the road, sharing countless meals over many years.
“I don't know if 'meals' is the right word,” Shannon said. “We shared a mutual hatred of utensils, that's for sure. He was a big wings guy. He liked them extra crispy.”
And always washed down with Coors Light.
“Yes, ordered two at a time,” Shannon said. “But always in a glass. I do have a picture of him drinking a glass of wine in Philadelphia one night. When I tweeted it out, my phone almost melted because it was wine and not Coors Light. My caption was something like, ‘Hell has frozen over.’”
Murphy recalled futilely trying to upgrade the group’s dining choice one night in Chicago, where the go-to joint was a divey sports bar called Mother Hubbard’s.
He explained: “I texted the guys back, like: ‘We’re in Chicago. Honestly, can we please go somewhere else tonight?’ And five minutes later, after they had conferred, they said: ‘Fine, Cheesecake Factory.’ That was the upgrade.”
On Garrett’s final night in this life, he and Murphy and play-caller Harnarayan Singh went to a pub Sunday in Salt Lake City. Producer Paul Gris joined them for a drink.
“We had to find a place with vegetarian options for Harnarayan,” Murphy said. “We went to a pub that had a big-screen TV and watched the Habs game, which was crazy and fun. And we’re older now, so we were all back at the hotel by eight o’clock.
“I think I’ve worked one national game with Cheech since he left (Canucks broadcasts) three years ago. So I’m really happy we got to spend this last week with him to reconnect. And it was just like old times: beers and watching hockey games. It’s like we didn’t miss a beat. It’s heartbreaking what happened, it’s terrible. But I’m glad I was here, glad I got to see him the night before.
“I would honestly say, in 20 years of travelling, I kind of saw him in a snit for five minutes. Total. That’s it. He was always in a good mood, always agreeable, always kind, always generous. We were on the road for 100 nights a year, and multiply that by two decades. And having your last impression of somebody being the same thing as your first impression without it ever changing, it says a lot about the guy.”
Asked what he will miss most about Garrett, Shorthouse broke down while telling a story about his friend and television partner — the guy he and Murphy called their "second dad" — reaching out during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
“Because we were alone, he knew I was good at Sudoku and he’d always send me the Sunday Sudoku,” Shorthouse said. “The puzzles got harder during the week, so he didn’t bother Monday to Friday. But he’d always send me the Sunday one, so I would have something to do. But it was the connection, right? Except it wasn’t just COVID; he sent me the last one two days ago from Salt Lake.”
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