Bruce Arthur: Why Ray Ferraro stepped away from TSN and his hockey obsession

It was a Tuesday night last year and Ray Ferraro was at another game in another city, this one in Toronto for TSN. Ferraro was also calling games for ESPN as part of its return to broadcasting hockey, was the voice of EA Sports’s NHL franchise, and more. Ferraro loves his job. He was on TV before he even retired from the league.

But something wasn’t right. Ferraro works between the benches, and checks his phone during games because the broadcast team sends stats. Because he’s a human, he sometimes keeps fiddling. A text from a friend popped up.

“And it says, ‘Why the f- are you doing at a Columbus-Toronto game on a Tuesday night, for regional hockey, when you live in Vancouver?” Ferraro says.

“And I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Canada lost the best colour commentator in hockey this week. Ferraro had already stepped away from a daily hit at TSN’s flagship radio show, “Overdrive.” Once he signed with ESPN, he reduced his TSN schedule further.

But the 58-year-old announced this week that, after 14 years, he was leaving TSN entirely: no more calling NHL games, or the world championships, or the world juniors. He also dropped the 17 to 20 paid radio hits he was doing, and decided someone else can voice EA Sports.

He will do 65 ESPN games a year, including playoffs, and will keep his podcast with TSN’s Darren Dreger, but his schedule now amounts to three games every two weeks or so. It took a lot of thinking, because Ferraro has always wanted more, for reasons he can’t quite place. But then, Ferraro is trying to be different than the Ray he has been since he was young. The pandemic, oddly, helped.

“I got to a point where I just wasn’t happy with me,” he says. “It’s kind of new age-y and all that stuff, but I just wasn’t happy with me. I wasn’t happy with my temperament, my patience or lack thereof, my go-go-go, everybody else revolve around my timeline. I just … I didn’t want it. Well, I didn’t know I didn’t want it. I just didn’t like it.”

Ferraro was born in Trail, B.C., a little town at the bottom of a hill dominated by the lead and zinc smelter; that’s why the town’s hockey teams, including the 1939 world championship team, are called the Trail Smoke Eaters. His father had co-founded a small family concrete company, and their patient mother stayed home to raise the four boys. Ferraro was the second son, athletic and smart. His report cards invariably said he’d done well, but would do even better if he didn’t talk so much. His dad taught him about work.

“We had a split-level house, and he parked his truck underneath my bedroom window,” Ferraro says. “Every morning at 6:30 I’d hear the truck start, and I’d know Dad was on his way to work. And I play my games at 4:15 and Dad would come straight from work, still dirty and cold, right to the rink. He’d get there at 4:14 and watch the game. And so he was such a supportive force, but: you had to do your job.”

Ferraro was obsessed with sports from an early age. He especially loved the glory of scoring goals. People said he was too small and too slow and he more or less stumbled into his draft year without knowing it, and scored a WHL-record 108 goals in 72 games with the Brandon Wheat Kings. He was drafted in the fifth round by the Hartford Whalers; 18 years and six teams later, he finished his career with 408 goals and 898 points.

Ferraro was already on TV in the final years of his career, doing analysis for ESPN. He liked it, and he was witty and quick. It was a second career, ready and waiting.

Still, after Ferraro finally retired in 2002, he and his future wife, Hockey Hall of Famer Cammi Granato, went to a Canucks game as fans, the first or second game of the season. And when the players burst out on the ice with the music blaring and the lights flashing, Ferraro looked out and really realized it was over. He burst into tears.

He and Cammi built a life of parental logistics in Vancouver — Cammi stayed home and took charge of their boys Riley and Reese, who are now 15 and 12, and Ray would go out on the road and came back, out and back, never home for more than five days in a stretch in-season, and gone every Christmas. He spoke about his family with pride wherever he went. (Ferraro has two other sons, Matthew and Landon, from a previous marriage, and speaks of them with pride, too.)

And he worked. He obsessed. Ferraro has been driven by an existential sort of impatience his whole life, and a sense of not being enough, and he doesn’t know why. Goals meant too much to him, more even than wins. Being just one of the team chafed at him, for some reason. He wanted more, always.

“Like if you’re going to be any good you have to be beyond all in, at least that’s the way I viewed it,” he says. “I was too small, not tough enough, not fast enough, and I fought everybody in my mind. They didn’t know they were fighting me, but I was fighting everybody all the time.

“Like, I hear people, they go back through their childhood and they see why they were this, or that. And none of it’s there. My parents were not impatient people. They were not. My dad talked a lot, mom was the most pleasant woman on the planet. But everything for me was I had to win. I had to score. It was a confrontation. I had to beat the next kid, I had to. And I don’t know why. I don’t know where it came from.

“The other thing it festers, I think, is insecurity. And I know that with me, for sure, and it all comes from my head. I’m not good enough. I’m not popular enough. I’m not enough.”

“I think he’s wired like an Italian,” Granato says, dryly.

His longtime play-by-play partner, Gord Miller, says Ferraro worked so hard to be a great broadcaster, but that his best attribute is his ability to laugh at himself: at how bad he was defensively as a player, or how he gets flustered and irritated on the road. (The “What’s Bugging Ray” segment was the result of that.)

In the real world, though, it could flash as real anger, real impatience. Ferraro doesn’t travel smoothly; he gets lost easily, misreads itineraries, and sometimes boils like a tea kettle. Miller used to counsel him that people in a coffee shop might just have a job there, not a career.

“Look, travelling for a living is going to be a test of patience,” Miller says. “And it certainly was for Ray.”

“Impatience waiting in line. Treating somebody that’s in a store or something in a way that you just shouldn’t,” Ferraro says. “And I f- hate that about myself. I hate it. You know, I just want to be … I want to be the best version of myself that I can be. I mean, I’m 58. It’s not like I got 50 years to go.”

He picked up guided meditation five years ago from a fellow soccer dad who was so calm and centred that Ferraro, over coffee, just asked him, “Why are you like this?” The meditation helped; trying to be mindful and present helped. Not always, but some. He tried to rediscover faith — not the Catholic faith he was raised with, but faith in faith itself, that there is something bigger. And he tried to remember gratitude.

And then the pandemic happened. Ferraro came off a Leafs trip in California, and Reese made him a sign that said, “Welcome home for a month,” and Ferraro was so happy to see it. It turned into nearly two years. It was the longest Ferraro had been home since he was 20.

It was, he says, like waking up.

“Cammi and I spent a lot of time getting to know each other,” Ferraro says. “You know, like we were kind of zipping by each other for years, because we’re busy. Two young kids, everybody that has kids knows what those early years are like. We talked more in those in that first initial (pandemic period) than we ever did.”

They played board games as a family. They bubbled with his eldest, Matthew, who would come over with his own kids, and Ferraro would admire how well his son parented. Granato had become the NHL’s first female scout in late 2019 for the expansion Seattle Kraken — she has since become the NHL’s second female assistant general manager, with the Vancouver Canucks — but she was home, too. They struggled with remote school parenting — “We’re not smart enough, and we have zero discipline as far as keeping the kids on task,” Ferraro says. But as Granato puts it, the family loved going nowhere together.

And Ferraro slowed down. He breathed. His patience grew, his empathy, his sense of being where he was. He hated watching the world get sick — Ferraro is a man who can get a sniffle and Google his way to the worst-case diagnosis, and who reads history rather than current affairs because he gets too distressed and overwhelmed by news — but for the first time in years, he started to really think about what mattered most to him. He was home.

Still, the ESPN deal played to everything he had been doing for 20 years, and he convinced himself he could do it without leaving the job he loved, and it was crazy. Travel, game, travel, game, home, EA Sports, travel, game, all peppered with radio spots and preparation for the next thing. Cammi was trying to patch the parenting holes at home. Ferraro wasn’t happy.

“It became a runaway train,” he says. “I was chasing something … I don’t even know what I was chasing anymore.”

So he thought about it, really thought about it. He wanted to support Cammi the way she had supported him. He thought about how he had been home for Christmas four times since Riley was a baby. He wanted himself to be better. And he put his ego and his neediness aside and quit TSN, despite how much he loved it. As he puts it, the grind, the work, the sacrifice: He wasn’t proud of that anymore. He was more proud of the Ray he was trying to be.

“I don’t want to sound dramatic about it, but it’s … it’s an incredible change,” Granato says. “I just can’t tell you how proud of him I am for the journey he went on his own, and figured out on his own, and was dedicated enough to want to grow, to want to change, and to just have a new outlook on his relationships with people.

“I think Ray’s best quality was always his worst quality. Like, he just he had a fire in him that made him successful. And it did get in the way sometimes from a personal relationship standpoint, where he wanted to take back a lot of, you know, who he was.

“And I (told him) that’s why he was successful. So I encouraged him to not look back at that and feel guilt. You know, move forward and be who you are today.”

When Ferraro talks about Granato, he says, “I will never meet a better person.”

When Ferraro told Riley he was leaving TSN, Riley asked, incredulous: “You mean, everyone’s going to be here for Christmas?” Ferraro told Reese when they were in the car, and Reese looked solemn for a moment.

“And I said I’ll be home for Christmas. Every year,” Ferraro says. “The smile he gave me in that moment, I was like, ‘This is right.’ ”

Both boys have birthdays around Christmas, and Ray will be home for those, too. The pandemic has made a lot of people reconsider what matters to them: it’s been so awful for so many, and we will live in its after-effects for the rest of our lives.

But it’s a mirror in every way, and Ray Ferraro might have seen himself clearly for the first time in decades. He is grateful he did.

“It’s a historical event that we used to read about in the history books, that our kids’ kids are going to be reading about in their history books,” he says. “People will say, ‘Weren’t you around for that?’ And our kids are going to say, ‘Yeah, my dad tried to teach me math. He had no idea.’ ”

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