Joe Bowen didn’t just call Maple Leafs games — he became the sound of Leafs Nation. Long before the era of mega-TV contracts and corporate rights battles, there was a young play-by-play man from Sudbury calling minor-league hockey games in Halifax, Nova Scotia. On a whim, Bowen applied for the Maple Leafs’ gig in Toronto, and, much to his surprise, he was hired in time for the start of the 1982 season. More than 40 years later, that same voice still greets fans with the iconic call that’s echoed through decades of highs and heartbreaks: “Holy Mackinaw!”
And yet, in what’s expected to be Bowen’s final season behind the microphone, the team he’s served so loyally is choosing to send him off in the cheapest way imaginable. All because Rogers Communications — now majority owner of the Maple Leafs after buying out Bell for an obscene sum of money — can’t seem to spare a few bucks to send Bowen and colour man Jim Ralph on the road for the Maple Leafs’ 41 away games. Instead, the pair are stuck in a Toronto studio, calling games off TV monitors like a couple of interns running a booster-club podcast.
This, from a franchise ranked most valuable in the entire NHL — worth $4.25 billion — and owned by a parent company dripping in money. The cost to send Bowen and Ralph on the road? Peanuts. The cost to the product? Immense.
Even more absurd, Rogers owns the very radio station — and TV network — these games run on. Laughably, they’re weakening their own broadcast — their own brand — just to save what amounts to pocket change. It’s corporate brilliance of the highest order: buy the whole sandbox, then refuse to pay for the shovel.
Fans shouldn’t be surprised. This is the same Rogers/Sportsnet group that turned Hockey Night in Canada from a national institution into a running punchline. The bloated rights deal Rogers signed years ago — and recently doubled down on — drained every ounce of creativity from the broadcast. The result: pre-game panels that drag, intermission segments that miss, and production values that scream “cutbacks.”
Through it all, Joe Bowen’s voice has remained the one thing that feels genuine — a comforting constant in a sport drowning in corporate polish. And now, as he wraps up a legendary career, he’s calling road games from a TV screen in a downtown office tower because someone at Rogers thinks that’s fiscally responsible.
How ironic: The very radio station airing Leafs games today was originally owned by Foster Hewitt, the man who invented hockey play-by-play on radio — the very craft Joe Bowen has carried forward for four decades. If Hewitt could see how Rogers/Sportsnet is treating Bowen, the radio station, and the hockey broadcasts he pioneered, he’d be spinning in his grave.
Then again, disrespecting the franchise in the name of profit has been a Leafs ownership tradition long before Rogers ever showed up. Just look back to the day the decision was made to turn Maple Leaf Gardens — hockey’s cathedral — into a grocery store. Yes, a grocery store.
Rogers wasn’t the first to put profit ahead of legacy, but they’re certainly doing their best to keep that ugly attitude alive and well. Here’s the reality: Joe Bowen deserves a seat on that airplane. Any seat he wants.
Holy Mackinaw, indeed.
(Note the Joe Bowen tribute on this YouTube link here)
