Buckley: Bruins voice Jack Edwards is latest 'family member' to evoke fond memories

We like to say that our play-by-play announcers are like “members of the family,” even if it’s easy to dismiss that as a cliche.

But then comes the news that Jack Edwards, age 67, the voice of the Bruins on NESN for 19 years, is retiring after this season. In the very same news cycle came the announcement that John Sterling, radio voice of the Yankees since 1989, is retiring, effective immediately.

This past Sunday, the Celtics held a halftime ceremony to honor Mike Gorman, the team’s television voice since 1981 when he teamed up with the irascible Tommy Heinsohn. This will be Gorman’s last season calling the games.

And as the Red Sox work to find their way in this new season, they do so with longtime radio voice Joe Castiglione quietly rehearsing the speech he’ll be making later this summer in Cooperstown, N.Y., as the Hall of Fame honors him as the 2024 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award for “major contributions to baseball.”

Members of the family? Yes. So often do we listen to these people do their work, so often do we see them on television, that, and here’s the line, they’re like members of the family. But it’s so much more than that. Let’s begin with the eccentric, sometimes over-the-top, sometimes quite pensive Jack Edwards, since he’s the latest play-by-play announcer to make plans to step away from the mic. Even in his prime, when he was on top of his game in terms of keeping up with the play and over the top with his verbal crusade to carry the Bruin shield into battle, Edwards could find himself at odds with even hardened B’s fans.

Sometimes you wanted more game action and fewer speeches from Jack. His penchant for pushing the envelope sometimes pushed him right into trouble, as happened last year when his comments about then-Tampa Bay Lightning forward Pat Maroon were widely criticized as body-shaming. Edwards later apologized to Maroon, who happens to play now for the Bruins.

It was hard to stand behind Edwards on that one, but beyond the predictable social-media harping there was no movement to remove him from the booth. That’s the way it is in most families: You’ll argue, you’ll grouse, you’ll hold grudges for a while, but seldom does anyone ask out.

NESN play-by-play announcer Jack Edwards (left), shown calling a Bruins game in 2019 with Andy Brickley, has entertained viewers for 19 years. (Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The drop in Edwards’ game over the past couple of seasons has been evident. He finally opened up about it, telling The Boston Globe’s Chad Finn in February, “The game is speeding up all the time. And I’m slowing down all the time.”

The reason for Edwards’ sometimes slurred speech?

“I did not have some kind of accident,” he told Finn. “I do not have cancer. I don’t have dementia. I haven’t had a stroke. All of that’s been confirmed by Mass. General neurology.”

Borrowing from an old line about the great Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, Edwards told Finn, “The images of my brain literally reveal nothing. That’s my joke with them.”

When a member of the family has slowed down or has trouble with the daily routines, you don’t turn away from them, you don’t turn your back. You’re there for them. Family. See?

In New York, the wonderful John Sterling sometimes got so wrapped up in his shtick, especially when calling deep drives by Yankee sluggers, that his play-by-play didn’t sync up with reality. This made Sterling ripe for social-media commentary — and, admittedly, some of it could be quite funny — but nobody could deny that this gregarious, well-dressed fellow provided a memorable narrative during a pulsating era in Yankees history when Derek Jeter & Co. were collecting World Series trophies. Like his sidekick Suzyn Waldman, like Michael Kay in the YES television booth, John Sterling is the Yankees.

That’s the thing with these announcers: They truly love the teams they represent. If that makes them homers, that’s because to some degree they’re supposed to be homers. Let the analysts analyze. Let the play-by-play barkers bark.

They’re not beat writers. They’re not columnists. They certainly need to inform, and, yes, point out the boo-boos, but they also need to entertain in a way that makes us want to listen and watch.

That’s what Jack Edwards delivered to the Bruins for much of his tenure in the NESN booth. As the years move on and our memories of the 2011 Stanley Cup champion Bruins are brought back to us via documentaries, highlight packages and our crafty searches on YouTube, it’s often Jack Edwards talking to us. Same as it was with Don Earle, Fred Cusick and Bob Wilson during the days of Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins.

They all slow down, the play-by-play people. It’s just that these family members are slowing down on live television or radio, and that’s tough at times.

Mike Gorman, for all his skills at knowing when to turn up the juice and then knowing when to take it back down again, isn’t always as crisp as he was during the days of the original Big Three. Go back before that, and the much-loved Johnny Most, who called Celtics games on the radio from Russell to Bird (and in the old days hosted Wheaties Scoreboard on television after Red Sox games), got old and sick and finally had to step away.

When I was a kid, Ken Coleman and Ned Martin were a delightful Red Sox play-by-play duo, alternating on TV and radio. I always felt Coleman was the better announcer when the ball was in play (his 1967 call on Carl Yastrzemski’s catch of Tom Tresh’s deep shot to left at Yankee Stadium to keep rookie lefty Billy Rohr’s ill-fated no-hit bid alive remains pure gold), and that Martin was the better announcer between pitches. His wry observations and occasional utterance of, “Mercy” when things were going haywire will long be remembered by fans of that era.

There came a time when Ken Coleman and Ned Martin had to stop. And now Mike Gorman has decided it’s time. As John Sterling has.

Now it’s Jack Edwards with an announcement that, while not surprising, is no less sad.

If you’ve stayed with Jack these past few seasons — and, heck, even if you haven’t — he’ll always be family. And in ways that are only now becoming evident.

Required reading

(Top photo of Jack Edwards raising a gold hockey stick before the Bruins’ game against Ottawa on Tuesday night: Rich Gagnon / Getty Images)