When Mario Lemieux joined the Penguins as the franchise’s savior in 1984, there wasn’t an abundance of ways to watch the team’s games outside of the Pittsburgh area.
After all, this was decades before the Internet made virtually every sporting contest on earth viewable through streaming services.
But you could listen to it. Especially since the Penguins’ flagship station at the time, KDKA-AM had a signal strong enough to be heard in much of North America. Even in the portions where English wasn’t the first language.
Such was the case in the Montreal neighborhood of Ville-Emard where Lemieux’s mother, Pierrette, would tune her radio to pick up KDKA from approximately 600 miles away to the south.
Fluent in French, she wasn’t quite sure what was being said but one phrase made it abundantly clear that her wonderfully talented son’s team was about to begin play.
“Hallelujah Hollywood!”
The person emitting that idiom was play-by-play broadcaster Mike Lange.
“Mrs. Lemieux knew she had the right station once she heard “Hallelujah Hollywood!” said Tom McMillan, a former Penguins beat writer who eventually became an executive with the franchise. “There was some sort of press conference (in Pittsburgh) and Mike was trying to introduce himself. She didn’t understand what he was saying. He was trying to say, ‘I’m Mike Lange, the broadcaster’ and she didn’t understand. Then he pointed to himself and said ‘Hallelujah Hollywood!’ and she knew who he was immediately.
“Those phrases meant different things to different people.”
Lange meant so many things to so many people in his spectacular tenure as a radio or television broadcaster with the franchise.
From his arrival in Pittsburgh during the mid-1970s to his retirement in the early 2020s, Lange’s voice, charisma and delivery of so many audacious goal calls or smooth descriptions of mundane sequences on the ice captivated anyone with a vested interest in the Penguins.
On Wednesday, Lange died at the age of 76. There was no immediate word regarding cause of death. He retired in 2021 in part due to health concerns.
His death had reverberations around the NHL, particularly those who crossed paths with him in Pittsburgh.
Much like Pierrette Lemieux, Seattle Kraken coach Dan Bylsma knew of Lange’s calls before he knew Lange himself.
“I knew ‘Scratch my back with a hacksaw!’ I knew ‘He beat him like a rented mule!’ I didn’t know that was Mike Lange in Pittsburgh,” said Byslma, who led the Penguins to a Stanley Cup title as head coach in 2009. “Long before I got to Pittsburgh, part of hockey for me was (those sayings). I’m in the basement with my son playing knee hockey saying those things long before I got to Pittsburgh.
“Fortunately enough, I had the opportunity to meet that voice and meet that person, that person who gave life to hockey. That’s what I think broadcasters have the ability to do and that’s what I think Mike Lange was.”
Lange’s energy as well as his affable nature is what largely made him so endearing to those who encountered him.
“He was my partner on the air and he was my mentor,” said Penguins broadcaster Paul Steigerwald, who shared a booth with Lange, primarily when the team’s games were on the former KBL cable channel. “He was the guy who essentially made me feel comfortable when I first started on Penguins’ broadcasts even though I was completely nervous and feeling like I was in over my head. He sensed that and he was very kind to me in the early years which I greatly appreciated.
“But he was also tough on me in the sense that I wanted to please him. I didn’t want to screw up the telecast. I wanted to make sure I was honoring his greatness by either not saying anything or making sure I said things that were of value. In that respect, he made me better.”
Lange’s signature trait will always be his fanciful goal calls. But for anyone blessed to see him go about his vocation off air, his meticulous and detailed preparation was profound.
Morning skates were opportunities to get anecdotes from players to spruce up sluggish moments during game broadcasts. And Lange would routinely rewrite — by hand — printed game notes on a yellow legal pad to have those details committed to memory allowing him to add further context to his commentary.
“During the pregame warmup skate, everybody just talks (in the press box),” McMillan said. “I would go to Mike early in my career and realize you couldn’t talk to him then. Because he was so intently watching the warmup skate. He was trying to, in his mind, visualize the way players on the other team skated. He wasn’t watching the Penguins, he was watching the other team. Because you can’t always see the (jersey) number and the game moves so quickly. He was really studying to see if he could pick up little quirks in anyone’s skating so he could know who had the puck during the game. Because how many times would you face the St. Louis Blues during the season? But he’d be up there for the entire warmup staring at the St. Louis Blues.
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“With hockey, it’s not just stats. It’s being able to pick up the players in flight, in motion because the game turns so quickly. You don’t always see the numbers and names. And the numbers and names weren’t always so conducive to television and radio in the early years. … That’s just another example of how hard he worked.”
That approach was something Lange was willing to impart to other broadcasters.
Current Columbus Blue Jackets play-by-play television voice Steve Mears — who formerly had the same position with the Penguins — learned from Lange.
“That yellow legal pad, the long list of ‘nuggets’ (notes) that he would have on the sheet he taped to the glass next to him in the radio booth, there was no stone unturned with him,” said Mears, a native of Murrysville. “He was just such a great influence. Learning the preparation was such a big part of the job. I saw that right away. …. I saw the way he observed the morning skate at … and the way he talked with the players. The way he got notes from the other broadcasters. These were all things I was observing. I was so lucky that I saw him do that.
“Just taking in as much information, knowing full well that if a game is good, you don’t even use a quarter of that information if you don’t have to. But you never know. You have to be ready for any kind of game scenario. He was always prepared. I always marveled at the diligence he put into his craft.”
Lange’s mentorship wasn’t exclusive to fellow broadcasters.
“He was also a teacher to me,” said Bylsma, the Penguins’ coach for parts of six seasons. “He gave me a list, a handwritten note, on a scratch piece of paper of 10 ways to deal with the media. It’s 1-through-10 and it’s handwritten. It might be stained. It’s kind of ripped off a notebook that I’ve kept since then. It’s 10 tips on how to deal with the media. At different times, the conversations that we did have was him helping and teaching me.”
In many ways, Lange was just passing the favor on.
When he joined the Penguins initially in 1974, he worked with iconic Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster Bob Prince, who occasionally called Penguins games.
“He came into the Penguins’ world just as Bob Prince was leaving the Pirates’ world,” Steigerwald said. “And Bob Prince actually got a chance to do some hockey games and Mike got a chance to work with him. They traveled together on a bus up to Cleveland for a preseason game against the Cleveland Crusaders of the World Hockey Association. He remembered traveling with Bob Prince and getting a big kick out of him. He was really amazed at how popular ‘The Gunner’ was. People would recognize him everywhere he went. That really rubbed off on Mike. He knew Pittsburghers would take to the sayings and stuff because they had already done that with Bob Prince. He carried the torch for Bob Prince as a folk hero in Pittsburgh.
“That grew over time as the Penguins became a great team and more popular. But anyone that followed hockey and was not pleased with how the Penguins were playing still loved listening to the games because he was calling them. … They could vicariously feel the same thing Mike was feeling when he was calling them. Even if was painful, they enjoyed the process because he made it enjoyable.”
The respect and camaraderie Lange carried with the team were seemingly universal. Be it the 23rd man on the roster or luminaries such as Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr or Sidney Crosby — who maintained a relationship with Lange even after his retirement — Lange was regarded more as a peer than anything.
“Players also see the work ethic,” McMillan said. “They see the passion for the team. They recognized it. They know if you’re all in. Everybody that came through that door knew that Mike was all in. As his career went on, he became iconic and guys wanted to meet him when they got here. He’s the guy, there’s the guy. Players throughout the league would hear his phrases.”
Visiting teams occasionally knew more of Lange than the team he broadcast.
“They knew about his legendary calls,” Steigerwald said. “There were people who used to (ask) all the time, is that the guy who said ‘Scratch my back with a hacksaw?’ People in other cities knew of his sayings and thought he was hilarious. They all loved his style. The players, they liked it. They really got a kick out of it. They would sometimes mimic him, they would say one of his sayings to him just to let him know they were well aware of his (presence).”
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His presence was particularly strong after games for Bylsma. Perhaps Lange’s most famous saying is routinely blared over the public address system following victories.
“One of the most memorable and most enjoyable things about winning hockey games in Pittsburgh was — especially at the Mellon (Arena) — we win a game and we’re walking across the ice (to the dressing room). As we’re walking across the ice, it’s ‘Elvis has just left the building!’ My first win against Montreal (Feb. 19, 2009), that’s my most memorable moment to be quite honest. We win that game and I’m walking across the ice and Mike Lange’s voice booms over the loudspeaker.
“Just a beautiful human being that loves and is passionate about the game.”
Lange’s notoriety was a byproduct of the dedication he applied to his craft.
“His standard was so high,” Mears said. “He was such a perfectionist. I asked him, ‘How many times did you walk away from the arena and think (he) nailed it? A perfect broadcast? He said, ‘Ohhhh, I don’t know. In about 45 years, I’d say about 10 times.’
“We all know that number is way, way higher but in his mind, there was always room for improvement and there was something that wasn’t quite perfect. That’s how you became the greatest of all time.”
Much of the foundation of that greatness was laid in the 1970s and early 1980s when Lange was often the primary attraction for what was an unremarkable franchise before Lemieux’s arrival.
“The team wasn’t any good,” McMillan said. “There wasn’t much excitement. Mike was the reason to follow the team. He got you engaged in hockey. Completely different time, completely different media landscape, obviously. But he made the game so entertaining. He was so different (with) that unique style. The team wasn’t that good. There wasn’t really a legacy here.
“There wasn’t really a tradition so you could be out of the box. And he was out of the box at the beginning. It became tradition but it was very much out of the box when he started. Then Mario came along and those two kind of lifted the franchise together. You think of all the great moments in Penguins history, Mike Lange’s voice is the soundtrack. He was there at every moment. He didn’t call every Mario goal … but he called most of them. He was there for all the big moments. And a fair amount of down times. Mike was there for two bankruptcies and five Stanley Cup (championships). That’s quite a run.”
The way Lange documented all of that was far from antiseptic.
“His voice was like an instrument for him — he had a love of blues guitar players — and he felt the game and then conveyed those feelings and elicited emotions through his voice and his feel for the game,” Steigerwald said. “That made him so compelling to listen to. You could tell Mike knew something was going to happen before it happened. He did have that unique quality because he had seen so many games and he got a feel for how things unfolded. He could convey that.
“It’s one thing to feel it, it’s another thing to be able to actually convey those feeling through your voice to the audience. That’s what made him uniquely great.”
It’s what made him a perfect fit for this team and city.
“The word legend is often overused but Mike Lange was a true Pittsburgh legend,” McMillan said. “He was a guy who came from California and became a Pittsburgher almost immediately. Immersed himself in the city and the team to the point that you didn’t know he was from California. You’d have thought he was from Brookline or something.
“He was beloved by the fans, by the players, by the coaches, by the management. He had an aura about him that most broadcasters don’t usually have.”