Maybe the best thing about this job is the incredible, inspiring people you meet. The other day one of them stopped by the office.
If you are even a casual hockey fan, the name Mike “Doc” Emrick is royalty to you. The longtime voice of the New Jersey Devils, the Stanley Cup finals, and the play-by-play announcer for Olympic hockey (you might have heard him calling the games from Vancouver earlier this year), Mike is regarded as the dean of hockey broadcasters and one of the greatest voices in all of sports. But I didn’t start out to meet Mike Emrick. He actually came to us.
About 10 years ago totally out of the blue he sent us a story about the influence Norman Vincent Peale had on his life. One of the editors showed it to me not knowing who Mike was (come on, Rick, admit it). “The Mike Emrick?” I shouted. “Unbelievable!”
We were proud and excited to publish it as a What Prayer Can Do feature in the magazine. We’d never had a hockey announcer in the magazine, let alone one of Mike’s stature. This was definitely cool.
But it gets better. I found out that Mike knows all about me too. He is a longtime reader of our popular annual devotional book, Daily Guideposts, and knew about my wife, Julee, Millie and all our other dogs, the Guideposts softball team, my roots back in Michigan (where Mike is also from), my mother’s Alzheimer’s and just about anything else I ever wrote about. I was impressed to learn that he puts his voicing talents to inspiring use by recording Daily Guideposts for his aging parents along with other inspirational stories from Guideposts and Angels on Earth magazines. Like me, he loves his dogs. Like me, he has a Michigan twang in his voice. And like me, he has a soft spot for the Detroit Red Wings.
That’s why he stopped by a few days ago—to drop off some tickets to the Red Wings game against New Jersey tomorrow night at the Prudential Center in Newark. I’m looking forward to the game but mostly I’ll enjoy visiting with Doc (Mike has his Ph.D.) and his broadcasting partner Chico Resch, the famed goalie of the great New York Islander Stanley Cup teams of the 1970s. That’s always the best part of going to one of Mike’s games.
Yep. You meet the nicest people in this job. Do you meet interesting and inspiring people in your job? I imagine you do. Tell me about them. Post below.
