Hockey nights in Pittsburgh will never be the same.
After 46 years in the broadcast booth, the legendary Mike Lange has called his last Penguins game.
The team announced Monday that Lange, 73, will not return to play-by-play duties when the season begins in the fall. Lange will continue to provide commentary and voiceover work on the team’s radio network.
“This isn’t like something happened to him physically out of left field, thank God. I’ve been preparing myself for the last couple years for this,” said Phil Bourque, Lange’s longtime broadcast partner and close friend. “But still, when it becomes final-final, it tugs at your heartstrings because you know how much Mikey’s heart is into what he does.
“As much as you want to be happy because he is going to be around and still be involved, it is tough knowing that this is it, that he’s not going to be in that seat to my left again.”
Lange has been ramping down his schedule since 2017, when the team announced that Josh Getzoff would be handling certain road games.
Lange called only a handful of games after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’d be stupid to say that I don’t miss it,” Lange said in April. “But I also know I didn’t want to get covid-19. I guarantee not at my age and the situation. So, you’ve got to make a choice, and my choice is to try and be as healthy as I can.”
Getzoff, 32, will take the broadcasting baton from Lange, and under different circumstances, he could be walking into a tricky situation, trying to replace a legend. But Lange took Getzoff under his wing and never missed a chance to publicly give him his stamp of approval.
“When I first started filling in for him, the fact that he was OK with me going into that seat, I didn’t need to hear anything from anybody else,” Getzoff said. “That was the most important thing to me. If he would have been skeptical, then I would have been skeptical. From the second after he announced he was scaling back, he just kept saying, ‘You got it. You can. You can do it.’”
A native of Sacramento, Calif., Lange worked four years calling minor league games in the Western Hockey League before joining the Penguins in 1974.
Hitting the 50-year mark for his hockey career, which he did when he called a few games at the end of last season, was important to Lange.
“I didn’t get cheated in my quest to do what I have always loved,” Lange said in his retirement announcement.
In 2001, Lange received the Foster Hewitt award for broadcasting from the Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2019, the Penguins named the press box at PPG Paints Arena after him.
On the surface, Lange’s claims to fame are his signature goal calls, from “Michael, Michael, motorcycle” to “Scratch my back with a hacksaw.”
“I spend a lot of time deciding if and when I want to use a phrase,” Lange said in 2017. “And if I do use it, I want to really use it. The fans probably have a favorite, but they are all my favorites. It gives me a thrill to use the phrases at the right time.”
Below the surface, Lange is widely respected for his feel for the game.
“You could sense the momentum changing. You could sense the big moments arriving. He had an incredible knack for that,” Getzoff said. “I listen to the radio hardcore. I’m a nerd with that. There’s nobody in the league that calls a game like that. People try, and people do it to an extent, but nobody does it like Mike Lange.”
It’s an approach that has resonated with fans for five decades.
“To this day, our ratings are off the chart,” Bourque said. “We’re No. 1 for radio broadcasts in the National Hockey League. And it’s generations now. Not only guys that are 50, 60, 70 years old, but it’s even kids in their 20s that say, ‘It’s a hockey night in Pittsburgh.’ For them, it’s the way to kick off a hockey game. They know Mike Lange is the voice of the Penguins.”
It goes beyond being the voice of the Penguins, too. In its 262-year history, there are few voices – if any – more associated with the city of Pittsburgh than his.
“I think everyone (in broadcasting) around here tries to be ‘Pittsburghy.’ You know what I mean?” said former Penguins winger Colby Armstrong, an analyst for AT&T SportsNet. “Mike Lange had that charm to him of being a real Pittsburgh broadcaster. People would never guess that he’s from California, the way he speaks, his terminology, all the knowledge that he has within his calls. He’s a Pittsburgher.”
