The remarkable, historic story of first all-Black broadcast team for a televised NHL game
In February for Black History Month, Paste BN Sports is publishing the series 28 Black Stories in 28 Days. We examine the issues, challenges and opportunities Black athletes and sports officials continue to face after the nation’s reckoning on race two years ago.
When Everett Fitzhugh was a freshman at Bowling Green State University in 2007, he volunteered to serve as the color analyst on the campus radio station’s broadcast of the school’s hockey game. That match between the Falcons and the University of Alaska Fairbanks changed Fitzhugh’s life.
“I fell in love. I loved everything about broadcasting,” he recalled. “I loved being in the press box and being around the hockey team.”
Right after the game, he called his mother. He could barely contain his enthusiasm when he told her, “Mom, we’re going to put all the eggs in the hockey basket.”
His mother, Denise Fitzhugh, was living in the same house in Detroit where she’d grown up, where her siblings and mother were the first Black family to move into that all-white neighborhood.
They were trailblazers to be sure, so it was only natural that Denise’s son would blaze some trails himself: The Seattle Kraken radio broadcaster is the first Black play-by-play announcer in the NHL.
It’s been widely reported that Fitzhugh made history on Feb. 17 as part of the first all-Black broadcast team for a televised NHL game. Fitzhugh, who had moved to the TV booth for the game, and analyst JT Brown were the broadcasters for the ROOT SPORTS Northwest telecast of the Kraken’s game at Winnipeg. Because of the historic nature of the broadcast, NHL Network simulcast the Kraken’s television feed.
The simulcast permitted the nation to witness this historic event during a special time of year.
“The fact that it was during Black History Month is also a pretty remarkable coincidence,” Fitzhugh adds. “It made it mean even more.”
Fitzhugh didn’t grow up playing hockey. “My mom always thought it was a little bit too dangerous,” he said, laughing. “I love hockey, obviously, because that’s my passion. I love working in hockey, but I was actually a baseball player, and to this day, baseball is still my favorite sport.”
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When he’s at a Seattle Mariners game, "that’s my happy place,” he said.
In fact, the broadcast journalism major was watching his beloved Tigers in his Bowling Green dorm room when a buddy burst in to tell him about a campus organization that specialized in sports broadcasting. The two ran off to attend a meeting “and it was amazing. It was a bunch of guys sitting around talking sports, and as a 17-year-old freshman, what more could you ask for?”
This experience led Fitzhugh to take on behind-the-scenes responsibilities for the broadcasts of the university’s sports teams. The rest of the students in the organization were clamoring to work football and basketball games, so when the seemingly insignificant offer to do color analysis on the school’s hockey broadcast came along, the freshman didn’t face a lot of competition.
And the direction of his career path changed radically.
Through his sophomore and junior years, he was permitted to work more of the hockey broadcasts, always as an analyst. By the time he was a senior, the student doing the play-by-play had graduated. Fitzhugh and his best friend, Brian Fisher, were the two finalists to fill the opening.
“I got the job, but I always tried to do right by my friend,” he said. “I always gave Brian first crack at being my color analyst, for whatever games he wanted to do.”
The two are still close friends to this day. “Brian is out of broadcasting now, but he’s still a huge hockey fan,” he said.
Fitzhugh couldn’t land a broadcasting job when he left Bowling Green, so he settled on being a headhunter, searching for engineers to work at cellular companies.
“I needed a job out of school, but I hated it,” he said.
After six months, he’d had enough. A college friend had landed a position as the video coach for a franchise in the United States Hockey League, a junior hockey league. He recommended Fitzhugh for an opening at the USHL headquarters in Chicago.
“I’d never heard of the USHL. I didn’t know what junior hockey was,” Fitzhugh said.
He still accepted the job in December 2012. For the next year and a half, he wrote press releases, ran the league’s social media accounts and produced digital content.
In June 2014, Fitzhugh moved back to Ohio to work for one of the USHL franchises. He spent the next year doing social media, public relations, sales and, most important, broadcasting for the Youngstown Phantoms. He even made public appearances around town dressed as the team’s mascot.
“His name was Sparky, and he was a pink, purple, lavender-ish colored dragon," Fitzhugh said. “When you work in minor league hockey, you have to wear a lot of hats.”
Or costumes.
Fitzhugh didn’t have to leave the state of Ohio for his next job. Since his goal was to become an NHL broadcaster, he accepted a position that included play-by-play duties with the Cincinnati Cyclones of the East Coast Hockey League.
In addition to broadcasting, his duties with the Cyclones included public relations, social media and planning the team’s travel. His hard work was recognized by the league, which named him PR Director of the Year after his second season in Cincinnati. His appearance on the broadcast team for the 2018 ECHL All Star Game gave him his first taste of television work in pro hockey. The fact that the game was televised by the NHL Network was a precursor of what was to come.
Gaining experience in so many facets of operating a hockey franchise has been quite helpful to Fitzhugh. “I learned the business side,” he said. “I learned how to become well-rounded in my career. I became a better marketer. I became a better PR person. There are so many lessons you learn by wearing so many hats. It really helped mold me into a complete employee, into a complete person, not just a broadcaster.”
'Is this worth it?'
Still, Fitzhugh was keenly aware that he was the only Black play-by-play announcer in pro hockey.
“The only Black (hockey) broadcaster I’d ever met was Mike Lockert, who did it for Notre Dame back when I was in college," Fitzhugh said. "He and I did a little research, and we found out that we were the only two Black broadcasters at any level of hockey.”
Lockert died in 2009.
Fitzhugh adds there were very few Black players in the NHL when he was growing up, and even fewer Blacks in the media reporting on hockey.
“There were no people that I could say, ‘Man, I want to be like him.’ So I was always on an island, and it could be a very lonely island sometimes," he said
“When you’re the only person who looks like you at just about every hockey arena, inside of every locker room, in every press box, it’s a lonely feeling,” he said. “There were times when I’d get home and look in the mirror and say, ‘Man, is this worth it? Should I be doing something else?’ But then I realized the love that I have for the game, the love that I have for the job. I knew the position I was in and that what I was trying to accomplish professionally was special. It was something that had never been done before.
“I don’t think anyone ever sets out to be the first person (to accomplish something), but when you find yourself in that position, you owe it to yourself, to the community, to the culture, to the sport, to take that challenge head on and be the representative figure that you never had.”
Two things changed Fitzhugh's professional life. First, he was invited to be the radio play-by-play announcer for a Washington Capitals exhibition game in 2018, three months after the team had captured the Stanley Cup.
“That game was cool because, in a very real way, I was able to test my skills and see how I would do in an NHL setting,” he said. “It let me know I was closer to this goal than I’d thought.”
When Seattle was awarded an NHL expansion franchise, it meant that they would need broadcasters. Fitzhugh “and every other person with a pulse in America probably sent their résumé into the general info email box for the Kraken.” None of those other aspiring applicants received a personal email from the president and CEO of the team -- but Fitzhugh did. The second break had occurred.
“When I saw Tod Leiweke’s name in the email line, I thought it was spam, so I didn’t answer for a day and a half,” he said.
Fitzhugh's then-girlfriend Shelly (now his wife), and his mother, persuaded him to reply. Leiweke said how much he admired the young broadcaster after reading about him.
This was just before the start of the pandemic; still, Leiweke was true to his word. He emailed Fitzhugh to say he wanted to start the interview process.
"I showed Shelly and we started jumping up and down, knowing that, hey, I was about to interview for an NHL team,” said Fitzhugh.
After a series of Zoom calls and a trip to Seattle to meet the team’s staff, the call came on July 14, 2020. It was Katie Townsend, the Kraken’s senior vice president of marketing and communications, calling to offer the broadcasting position to Fitzhugh.
The Kraken had hired the NHL’s first Black play-by-play announcer.
But Fitzhugh wasn’t done making history.
'You belong. You matter.'
Joining Fitzhugh on the Kraken’s staff is the television play-by-play announcer John Forslund. Serving as analyst on the team’s ROOT SPORTS Northwest broadcasts is another talented Black broadcaster (as well as former NHL player), JT Brown.
Brown and Fitzhugh became close friends. They soon figured out that a very special pairing was inevitable.
“We knew it was only a matter of time before John would be tasked with a national assignment," Fitzhugh said of Forslund. "He’s the best, right? We feel he’s the heir apparent to Doc Emrick as the voice of the NHL.”
Emrick is considered the dean of hockey broadcasters. He retired in 2020 after 47 years of calling NHL and Olympic hockey games. It might not be a coincidence that Fitzhugh graduated from Bowling Green State, because that’s where Emrick received a doctorate in broadcast communications in 1976.
When Forslund was asked to handle the play by play on the NHL Network’s national game on Feb. 16, it meant that Fitzhugh would need to move from the radio booth to join Brown on the TV side for the Kraken’s road game in Winnipeg the following night … thus marking the first time that both announcers for a televised NHL contest would be Black.
That’s not all. Even though there were 10 contests scheduled for the 17th, when the NHL Network learned that Fitzhugh and Brown would be handling ROOT SPORTS’ duties in Winnipeg, they elected to air that feed as the national game for the evening.
How did Fitzhugh feel when he learned earlier that week that his NHL television debut was going to be aired nationally?
“The honest answer is that I thought to myself, ‘You better not (screw) this up.’”
During the broadcast on the 17th, won 5-3 by the Jets, Fitzhugh and Brown worked quite well together. As Brown provided insights that only a former player could provide, Fitzhugh’s call was poignant. As the Kraken moved the puck up ice, the intensity in his voice rose appropriately. And when the Kraken put the puck in the net he growled, “Heee SCORES!”
Fitzhugh said the morning after the broadcast, its impact hadn’t yet hit him.
“It still may be another week, month (or) year before I grasp the true importance and meaning of what (that) night was about," he said. "Maybe this summer when I’m sitting on the couch with my newborn son (due in May), maybe it’ll sink in. I don’t know when that will be, but I do think that down the line, it’s going to hit me like a ton of bricks out of nowhere. I’m looking forward to that moment.”
Fitzhugh and Brown both hope the broadcast created something bigger than both of them and the immediate moment.
It's that "the next generation of Black kids, of people from historically under-represented communities, realize that they belong within the game of hockey," said Fitzhugh. "They are invited. They are welcome. They matter within the game. If you’re on the fence about the sport and whether you’ll be supported, whether you’re allowed, you are. You belong. You matter. Your voice matters. Your fandom matters."