When the NHL schedule came out, Pete Weber was happy to see that his Nashville Predators would play in Buffalo on April Fools’ Day.
“I found that humorous,” Pete says, “because it is Paul Wieland’s favorite holiday.”
Months later, Pete found out that this year, April 1 is Rick Jeanneret Day in Buffalo. “And my first thought,” Pete says, “was that this could not be more perfect for me.”
That’s because Pete, 71, and Rick, 79, are old friends. Pete was at one time the radio voice of the Buffalo Sabres while Rick was their TV voice. They have known each other for more than 45 years and are mutual admirers.
“I couldn’t believe my good luck,” Pete says about the calendar lining up for him. So tonight he can offer his huzzahs in person along with the rest of the KeyBank Center crowd.
There is another part, too, that adds to the symmetry — a part that Pete is too modest to say.
Rick Jeanneret is to Buffalo as Pete Weber is to Nashville.
Rick has been a voice of the Sabres since their second season, in 1971. And Pete has been a voice of the Predators since their first season, in 1998. (It’s only right to use their first names here, since both have achieved first-name status in their cities.)
“With RJ, it is not just about the longevity,” Pete says. “It’s the impression he makes upon people. His style of call is emotional. He always has you riveted, and that’s really difficult to do.”
Pete came to Buffalo to work in radio in 1976. He left in 1978 to call games for the NHL’s Los Angeles Kings and then the NBA’s Seattle Supersonics, and came back to Buffalo in 1982. He stayed until Nashville came calling in 1998.
Pete listened closely to Vin Scully, the great Dodgers broadcaster, when he was in LA, and thinks Rick has some of Scully’s best qualities.
“Rick takes a very simple approach,” Pete says. “He takes the first page of the lineup sheet, and that’s really what he works off of. He watches the game and describes what he sees. I can’t think of a better way to approach life.
“Some guys — and I’m not going to decry what they do — but they get hung up on all the little notes. I think that gets in the way sometimes. It’s like when I was in LA: Ross Porter (on Dodgers radio) was the stats nut. And Vin Scully was the great describer. I think all of us prefer all the emotion and description that Vin put into his work.”
Minutiae can bog down a broadcast. That never happens with Rick. The game is fast, the puck capricious. But RJ keeps on the call — across the ice, and across the decades.
Even when someone swipes his beer.
Pete tells a story about one night, in the 1980s, when the Sabres played the Whalers in Hartford. Mike Robitaille set a beer down in front of Rick in their press box perch. “Just then a hand came up,” Pete says, “like Thing on the Addams Family.” A fan had grabbed the beer midgame and took off with it — and Rick didn’t miss a beat. Here’s how Pete remembers Rick’s call: “Here comes Housley to center, somebody stole my beer, and they dump it into the right corner.”
Pete hastens to add it was the puck, not the beer, that got dumped.
Maybe you know the pastime called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Well, Pete can draw connections to most anyone in hockey history through Terry Crisp, his longtime broadcast partner. Think of it as Crispy Bacon.
Terry Crisp and Rick Jeanneret? Oh, that’s easy. Rick was the voice of the Niagara Falls Flyers of the Ontario Hockey Association in the early 1960s when Crisp was playing there. Crisp, of course, would go on to be one of only a handful in hockey history who won Stanley Cups as a player and as a coach. He went on to be paired with Pete on air for much of their time in Nashville.
The duo are so beloved in Middle Tennessee that the bar inside Bridgestone Arena is called Pete & Terry’s Tavern. And there, framed on the wall, is a gold jacket that Weber wore in the mid-1980s when he was an intermission host on Sabres broadcasts. “Century 21 would be proud,” Pete says.
Pete’s gold jacket from his days as an intermission host for Sabres TV in the 1980s. It hangs at Pete & Terry’s Tavern in Nashville.
He believes there should be a bar at KeyBank Center named for Rick. Maybe they could call it Rick and Rayzor’s.
“If there is anyone who loves what he does, it is Rick,” Pete says. “I think that is why it has been so hard for him to separate himself from the job.”
Speaking of which: How many years until Pete Weber Night in Nashville?
“When they signed me to a new deal,” he says, “they said they wanted me to do the job for as long as I want to and am able. And I said, ‘I can’t see me doing it for too much more than 15 more years.’ ”
Crisp will turn 80 this summer within weeks of Rick doing the same. Recently Crisp announced that this is his last season as a host on Predators games. He and Pete will do a couple of farewell game broadcasts together on Easter weekend.
“People see me in the hallway and they say, ‘Don’t you retire, too,’ ” Pete says. “That makes me feel good, and sad — sad because Terry is going to retire.”
That’s just what Rick Jeanneret Night will feel like tonight. Sabres fans will feel good, and sad, all at once.
We’re going to miss him.
Far more than he missed that beer in Hartford.
