(Note: I wrote this for my Media Writing class for Elon University for a personality profile assignment.)
By Zachary Horner
Earlier this season, Carolina Hurricanes forward Zach Boychuk tweeted a picture of Tripp Tracy, the color commentator for the Hurricanes’ television broadcasts, doing pushups before a game. In his suit.
Recalling the incident, Tracy laughed.
“Zach’s a good guy,” he said. “I really hope he finds the consistency. He could be making $1 or $10 million and his attitude would be the same. He loves the game.”
Typical Tripp. He understands players. He gets along with players.
Maybe because he was once a player himself.
Tripp Tracy suited up for one National Hockey League game. January 3, 1998, for the Hurricanes versus the Dallas Stars.
“To be on the ice with a team who was a premier team in the league in Dallas.” Tripp shakes his head in amazement. “So we’re down 4-1. Pat Jablonski (Carolina goaltender) was not playing well. Paul Maurice (Hurricanes coach) looks down at me. And I give him a look like…” Tracy re-creates the look, the one when you are not sure someone’s looking at you. You silently ask, “Me?”
Maybe that hurt his chances.
“I don’t know,” Maurice says now. “Sometimes it is the feel of body language. Am I gonna put a guy in against the best team in the league when we’re already shelled?”
Tracy ended up not playing. A couple of days later, before he was sent down to the minor leagues for good, then-Hurricanes defenseman Sean Hill told him, “I saw what you did when Mo looked down.”
“Looking back now,” Maurice says, “I would have put him in. It would have been a great memory for him to have played in an NHL game.”
“Many years down the road,” Tripp says, “I say to myself, ‘I don’t care if I had gone in and stunk the joint up.”
Tracy, 37, uses the experience to tell young kids to enjoy their moments in the NHL and not be afraid of making a mistake on the big stage. Because he was once there.
Tracy hails from the Detroit area. His parents were not hockey fans initially, and neither was he. One day in his youth he ended up at the rink in his hometown of Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
“I saw these players wearing helmets and cages and I thought they looked cool,” he says.
After taking parental-required figure skating lessons, he played and turned out to be a good offensive player. Then one day his team’s goalie wasn’t there. He volunteered. By season’s end, a couple of travel teams were interested in Tracy’s services.
“That was a huge vote in our house,” he says of the move.
Tracy went on to play high school hockey at Milton Academy with his good friend and current Hurricanes assistant general manager Jason Karmanos. His freshman year, he went to the Beanpot tournament in Boston to see Harvard University and Boston University’s hockey teams play. He noticed that the two goalies Harvard had were freshmen.
Tripp remembers thinking, “I’m a freshman. When I’m a senior, they’re going to need two goalies to come right in and play.”
So he went to Harvard.
“I had a really good freshman year of college,” Tripp says. “My ego was the size of Texas. ” He won the Beanpot in 1993 and was drafted in the seventh round of the NHL Entry Draft that year by the Philadelphia Flyers. Then maybe that ego kicked in.
“Starting that summer, I got away from what worked,” he laments. “I lost some of the fundamentals that I never got back. I never had anywhere close to the same success.”
By his senior year, he felt his NHL shot slipping from his grasp. Philadelphia let him go, so he was a free agent, without a team. He called Peter Karmanos, his old friend Jason’s father who had become the owner of the Hartford Whalers, and was summarily invited to the Whalers’ training camp.
Tripp came to the team’s training camp in 1996 as a free agent, which meant he got to go through the drills with the signed players but did not have a contract. He went head to head with Jean-Sebastien Giguere, the Whalers’ prized 1995 first-round draft pick. After camp, he was sent down to the Springfield Falcons of the American Hockey League, the Whalers’ triple-A minor league affiliate.
In Springfield, he was in the same system as future Hurricane Manny Legace, who proved to be a burden.
“He was one guy who was a real crossroads in my career,” Tracy says. “When I saw him in Springfield, I saw just how quick he was. That was eye-opening for me. He had a definite edge on me.”
Tracy returned to the AHL the next year, this time to the Beast of New Haven. He played some good games for New Haven and got called up to the NHL.
“I knew the writing was on the wall,” Tripp says of his career post-call-up. “That I was, best case scenario, going to evolve into a call-up guy if injuries occurred.”
He retired following the season.
“I thought being the East Coast (Hockey) League my second year, ‘No way.’ When you look at how long it takes goalies to mature, there are very few jobs available.”
However, Tripp soon found a different job.
Dan Berkery, the father-in-law of Ted Drury, Tripp’s captain at Harvard, created an opportunity for the ex-goaltender at CNN Sports Illustrated on the SportsCenter-type show Sports Tonight as a production assistant.
“I had just settled into my place,” Tripp says. “Jason (Karmanos, who had become the Hurricanes’ assistant GM in 1998) called me and said Bill Gardner (the prior color commentator) had left to go to Chicago. I called and asked if they would ever consider me as an applicant as a guy with no television experience.”
John Forslund, a trained broadcaster who has been Tripp’s broadcast partner since 1998, had not met the young former player until he had become Forslund’s working mate.
“He was young, he didn’t have a lot of experience,” Forslund remembers. “I had some apprehension because he didn’t have any experience; it’s not the easiest thing to do.”
Tripp seemed to fit right in, though.
When he first got the job, there were a lot of former teammates of his that were either on the Hurricanes or on other teams. His connection to the players remains to this day.
“I still have some very close friends on this team,” he says, “and I enjoy my time with them very very much. Timmy Gleason, Eric Staal, Cory Stillman being back here, Cam Ward, these are guys that I’ve gotten to know really well through the years.”
Tripp has a unique perspective that not many color commentators have. Yes, like most sports, there are many hockey analysts who are former players.
Tripp suited up for just one game. Yet his commentary is fresh. He often notices things that the casual fan would not, looking instead at the pass or the keep-in or the poke check that led to a great play instead of the great play itself. Along with that, his relationship with the players allows the fans to see a different side of their favorite athletes, who are often closed and short with their answers.
“He does a good job of trying to look for something other than the bland question,” Hurricanes captain Eric Staal says. “It makes for a better answer. He gives people a different perspective of the game.”
“He loves coming to the rink, loves getting involved,” Carolina forward Cory Stillman says. “We try to sell the game as much as we can, and he does a great job of it.”
“I look up to him,” Hurricanes defenseman Tim Gleason says. “He’s a great friend of mine. He’s very competitive at the same time, which makes him good at what he does.”
Tripp has seen many things in his career as a broadcaster for the Hurricanes. The team has made five playoff appearances, three trips to the Eastern Conference Finals and two Stanley Cup Finals, winning in 2006.
During that 2006 Final’s Game 7, Tripp received the thrill of a lifetime when he was interviewed on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada in the second intermission by Ron MacLean, Kelly Hrudey and the extremely popular Canadian sports personality Don Cherry.
“I tried to play it cool like it was no big deal,” he says, “but it was great. For a guy that grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada, and have them ask me in the morning of Game 7 if you want to go on after 40 minutes.”
Tripp says that was the moment he realized he was in the right business.
“I feel like I’ve improved a lot,” Tripp says. “The beauty of this job is that you know every day there’s things you have to get better at.”
“I go by a word that means three things,” Forslund says of broadcasting, “ICE. Inform, concise and entertain and do it all at the same time. I think he’s (Tripp) doing that. He’s informative, concise, and he can still turn it up a little bit.”
“I can’t tell you how much energy I get, positively I get, from these kids who are such great kids,” Tripp says of this current Hurricanes team. “I’m 37 years old but I love going back (on the plane) and sitting with those guys. I can’t tell you I much I’ve enjoyed getting to know (Brandon) Sutter, (Jeff) Skinner. I see this young generation and it’s a different perspective. And I enjoy the heck out of that perspective.”
Tripp has been working in the Hurricanes broadcast booth for 12 years now. He has become recognizable in the community as a supporter of charities such as St. Baldrick’s, an organization that raises money to fight children’s cancer by shaving heads.
“He’s doing things away from the area of broadcasting that’s going to make him more relatable with various people,” Forslund says. He also says that people who have grown up through high school and college listening to them come up to them and talk about it. Forslund takes this as confirmation that what he and Tracy do really makes an impact.
“I was a guy who got called up for not even a cup of coffee in the NHL, not even an espresso,” he says. “If I ever try to talk to young kids, (I tell them to) enjoy the moment. Somewhere in my stretch, when the pressure was on, I was afraid of making a big play on the big stage. That’s the fine line that somehow I lost.”
But now, instead of sitting on the bench looking uncertain, he throws himself into the line of fire with confidence.