'Brief History of Triangle Sports': Highs and lows of the Carolina Hurricanes with John Forslund

By Lauren Brownlow, WRALSportsFan columnist/reporter

The first time some Triangle natives heard the words, "Hey, hey, what do you say!" boom across the airwaves during a hockey game, they were little boys and girls, falling in love with a local hockey team and developing lifelong obsessions.

John Forslund might have been the one saying those words, but in a way, those words led him to his lifelong obsession, too.

When Forlsund sat down with 99.9 the Fan's Joe Ovies for "A Brief History of Triangle Sports," he said his father would often greet people that way, whether they were friends or strangers.

And his father was his first color analyst.

"My dad became a big ally in terms of pushing me, very positive guy. He was my color man for many years by my side in the family room, as we called the Bruins games off the television," Forslund said. "Our house for whatever reason had the antenna that could draw the signal in basically as clear as picture as you could get in western Massachusetts, about 90 minutes away from Boston, and we'd do the games. They'd sit around and have few beverages and laugh, and Johnny would call the games and my dad would do the color. I always joke that I fired him when I was 16 because he wasn't prepping enough for me."

Forslund got his first paycheck for his dream fulfilled as a broadcaster — for the Springfield Indians, a minor league team out of the AHL, the local team he and his father had grown up rooting for — and he was understandably thrilled.

A day later, his father died at age 59.

"That season, and maybe the following season, I was just figuring out how to use that phrase, maybe. And I did. Then I started to use it more and then it became a personal thing. Then the team won two Calder Cups at the end of my run there and that's when people started to hear it. They were actually listening to the radio broadcasts, but in the past, just my owner would listen and maybe my wife and then they stopped," Forslund said. "People asked me about it then and then I finally told the story. But that one is totally, totally planned out and a tribute to him."

Forslund, oddly, didn't come from a hockey family. But he came from a hockey dad.

By the time he started calling games with his father, though, Forslund had already fallen head over heels in love with hockey.

And he remembers the day that happened, too.

"I was eight years old when I recall getting the bug for it, so that would have been in 1970. Bobby Orr scores the iconic goal for the Bruins and they beat St. Louis, they win the Stanley Cup. Mother's Day, May 10. I know exactly where I was, 1970. I was at my aunt's house. Other people that were there, which is my family, were in other rooms," Forslund said.

"I was alone watching Dan Kelly call that game on television on a Sunday afternoon on CBS. It was the cadence of the play by play that kind of hooked me into wanting to formulate this hobby of mine, which I did throughout my formative years as a teen and so on. And like a lot of people that get into this, you're a super fan, and you really immerse yourself in this hobby, which was calling games off the television."

Forslund, unsurprisingly, threw himself into the research, although that was at the urging of his mother. He'd even listen to sports radio at night, hoping to catch a game or sports talk if nothing else.

By the time he was a junior in college, he was getting an offer to turn pro early from a local NBC news station. He didn't take it because he wanted to finish school. But the news director told him that he had a knack for it, and that he should pursue it.

He got the call from the Indians and then he supplemented that work with whatever else he could get, working as many as 90 hours a week as he and new wife Natalie tried to get their footing.

He tried hard to get jobs for the big leagues during that time, but it didn't happen. Then a familiar name happened across Forslund's work and recommended that his franchise hire him:

Bobby Orr, from the Board of Directors of the Hartford Whalers.

But it didn't work out exactly the way either Forslund or Orr wanted at first.

"Initially, I was going there to be Chuck (Kaiton's) partner on radio, and work in the hockey operations department as an Information Director. They wanted to split PR and hockey information into two jobs. They wanted the PR guy to work with business, they wanted me to work on hockey event situations. The PR director had been there for a while, really got angry with this, didn't like the fact that I was joining the team and quit," Forslund said. "And when he quit, I got another phone call from the owner at the time, who brought me off vacation from Maine. He brought me to his house in Connecticut and offered me a PR job, which was a very substantial salary, which was an executive position, full benefits, 401k and all these different things that I didn't even know about. I had to grab it, so I did. But I did it under the auspices of I'm going to do this for a short period of time, and I kept my hand in broadcasting."

But then something happened that changed the lives of a lot of people, Forslund's among them: Peter Karmonos bought what was then the Hartford Whalers.

At first, Karmonos wanted to keep Forslund on in the PR role, but former Canes' GM Jim Rutherford told Forslund he'd do what he could to get him into play-by-play. In 1995, he did.

But Forslund barely had a full two years on the job before he'd be part of a big relocation.

He still remembers the emotion of calling the final Whalers' home game in April 1997 and the delicate wire he had to tightrope.

"That was really hard. And that was hard because you had to be a pro. You had a job to do. You had a ton of emotions. There was some excitement, backdoor excitement, in terms of a new frontier that we were going to, to be lucky enough to be included in that. Not everybody did," Forslund said. "You're leaving behind some great friends that you worked with. You were costing some people income, like the people that worked on our shows. They had the Celtics, they had us and now we were leaving. They were left with the Celtics. There was a huge void there. You were leaving a fan base that was pretty passionate, been kicked around a lot."

Forslund believes that if the local authorities in Connecticut had played ball, it wouldn't have come to moving. But they didn't, and it did.

That night made it real for everyone.

"It was a tough day because of the finality of it all. Now, it was real. It was like a bad dream. And how do you do this? How do you not get lost in emotion? You're going to get choked up, you're going to sound sappy, you're going to say the wrong thing. Are you going to tick off the owner, your boss? Is he going to get angry with something you say? Is that going to affect your career moving forward? I didn't have the presence or the experience to just say whatever I felt," Forslund said.

It took fans and critics alike some time to warm up to he and Kaiton, but warm they did.

He still gets plenty of criticism for other parts of his personal style. But just because other regional broadcasters are comfortable being fans of their team doesn't mean Forslund is.

To him, it's about trust.

"If you overpraise too much, no one will believe you when it's really something good. So understand and tell the your superiors that you're cautious with praise because when they need praise and they get it, people say, 'hey, Forslund thinks this is good, it must be good.' Not 'Forslund is always saying things are good so we can't believe him.' You have to build that trust," Forslund said. "And then there's the never selling down a goal or a big save regardless of which team it is. I really abhor announcers that when the other team scores and you're doing a home broadcast, just, 'score', and then when the home team scores a team you're you're broadcasting for, it's like the best goal that's ever happened. No.

"A goal is a great moment for that player. You dial it back down on a home telecast or regional telecasts. National telecasts, obviously, you sell it all out both ways. Same thing with a save. You never want to ruin that moment for the player. That's the players moment, that's a player's family's moment. And if they elect to use your call, whether it be the lead or as it goes now onto the internet, and it marks time for that player, that player deserves that. And I've always felt that so that's how I've done it."

Forslund is tough and honest, but he's also fair. He said in all of his years, he's only had one player confront him over what he said on a broadcast. And even that player's wife told him Forslund was right.

And doing what's right is important to Forslund, both in terms of how he acts and how other treat him.

It's why Rutherford and Karmanos continue to be important figures to him, both before the team moved and after.

"I'll never forget, we had an organizational meeting before we left Hartford, a conference call with Mr. Karmonos and he is addressing the group that's going to North Carolina. And I'll never forget what he said, and the players were included in this. He said, 'I'm never going to put any of your people or your families in a bad spot. Trust me.' And all of us went 'yeah, right'. I didn't believe him either," Forslund said.

Forslund had one year left on his deal when the team moved, and he wondered if he'd get another job. He wasn't getting national expoxure as much as he wanted, and he felt like that was hurting his chances for advancement.

Then Rutherford called him in.

"I did wonder, what am I doing here? I'm glad you asked this because I haven't really talked much about this. I didn't know what was next until I met with Jimmy. And Jimmy brought me in. And he gave me my first long term deal. I can't speak enough for Jim Rutherford. Obviously, fans will always have positive and negative takes on whatever GM does. But he really looked after me," Forslund said. "He knew what I wanted to do, he gave me a lot of positive feedback in terms of how I do my job. But most importantly, he backed it up with years of security that he gave me in a very important time so we could lay down roots and we could start this mission, this journey with the team. So I made a decision and we were going to stick it out. After we got there and we got to see what North Carolina was all about, we looked around and said 'wow, this is going to be okay.'"

He watched the area fall in love with hockey in 2006, then fear commitment in the immediate aftermath of the Stanley Cup run and a lockout before coming back in droves during the Canes' recent streak of success.

But he couldn't have imagined it would get to that point when he first started calling Canes' games in Greensboro.

Forslund was just a part of another expansion's team's launch, becoming the broadcaster for the Seattle Kraken when he wasn't re-signed by the Hurricanes in 2020. And two were ... different.

"I'm not sure many professional franchises have moved in four months. And you're not an expansion team. So you look where I'm at now in Seattle, there was a two-year build up for this. There was a totally different world in terms of social platforms and everything, in terms of promotion and organization. Everything's buttoned down and launch it and away you go, everything's great," Forslund said. "We didn't even have an arena. We were new to the area. We came to virgin territory. North Carolina in 1997 was way different than North Carolina in 2022, like night and day difference. ... But it was just so different to us and foreign. And we felt — I don't want to say like outcasts, but in the National Hockey League, we were. Because we were villains."

But worse than being hated is not noticed at all.

"It's not a lot of fun when you go to a new place and you have a professional major league team, you feel, and you get to an area and they're like, 'why are you guys here again? What is this?' And then there were some people that really loved it and a lot of people that drove from Raleigh to Greensboro, but we had to get going in that arena. That was really hard," Forslund said. "And they were still building and finishing off the locker room on opening night. There were carpenters in the room when Paul Maurice was giving the pregame speech. I mean, you go to the mascot story, you go to all these different things. It was a calamity. It was really crazy. But then those two years we managed to get through it, opened the building in Raleigh, and away you go."

Oh, and during that whole time, his wife Natalie was eight months pregnant with a 1-year-old in tow. So she had a month to find a doctor that they trusted to deliver their second child after they had left all of their extended family behind in New England.

It was a risk. It wasn't easy. And they were fighting against, at best, being the Triangle's third or fourth priority.

"I think it was after they won the Stanley Cup in '06, they only sold out the building 17 times the next season. Now in most markets to be fair, and I love that market, but in most markets if you win the Stanley Cup, you're going to have 41 sellouts the next season," Forslund said. "But that didn't happen for a variety of reasons, because hockey was still pretty new. It went away for a full season (in a lockout). You canceled a season, and you expected it to just reappear in a virgin market like nothing happened. We lost people.

"And people don't want to really lock in that much. That's not what people want to hear. They want to hear about the Wolfpack. They want to hear about the Tar Heels. They want to really dig into college basketball season, head to head with us. So we fight for all of that and to fight for that, that's why (Rutherford) operated the way he did at the expense of losing draft choices, having a cupboard that was pretty bare, minor league teams that weren't very good, signings like Alexander Semin, I mean, these are things that you look back and revise history and say that was stupid. But in the moment, he was getting a so-called superstar to come to Carolina to play for for a lot of money."

Forslund might have had differences with his owners over the years, and he might continue to have some differences with them. But even if he likes Rutherford and some of the players and coaches he's covered over the years personally, he won't let himself be blinded by it.

At times, it means he has to distance himself from people he works around every day, but it's worth it to Forslund.

"In this job, there is some loneliness attached to it because you've got to be I think, and others don't agree. The pom poms are out. And I can't do that. I just can't do that because I think it ruins it for your presentation in terms of what you're trying to do for the fans," Forslund said. "Because what we're doing is for the fans, really. It is for the team. It is for branding that team, but that's how you build your fan base. And if you're not real for your fans, they're not going to spend their money on your product. That's what some of the people that are in management don't get. They don't understand that. That's how this works. You know if your fans believe you and it's a good show and good radio, good television, they're going to purchase tickets. That's how I feel."

Forslund didn't get to have a goodbye ceremony when he left the franchise he'd worked for for almost 20 years. The pandemic saw to that, among other things. But he was left without closure until the Hurricanes finally gave him some, honoring him back on March 6 when the Kraken came to Raleigh.

"When you leave like I did, without saying goodbye, without having a real end to what I thought was a decent career there, you feel like it was for naught. And in almost three years (in Seattle), I had a lot of those feelings. And when you live by yourself, like I have this season, all you do is think. When you when you think too much, you wonder what's what's this going to be like? I really didn't feel good about going there," Forslund said.

"I didn't know how I was going to do it. Here's why. I've done games there after this was over and I've certainly done national games there. But I'd never done a game against the Hurricanes as an announcer. I'd never been in the visitors booth other than to say hello to my colleagues there. I'd never worked with the secondary crew instead of the a crew that does the Hurricanes broadcast. So those were all different dynamics I had to digest. And then when the people reacted like they did and I saw that I was like, 'wow, this really is great.' It kind of closes the book and we move on.

"But it really resonated with me that what I did there was to promote hockey, was to promote what I think is the greatest game in the world because I have to think that way. Not everybody is going to agree with me. But if you give it a chance, you might get hooked on it."

Forslund is a big reason why so many more Triangle residents are, indeed, hooked on it.

And his recognition back on March 6? Yes, he was thankful to the fans and the organization for appreciating his work there.

But it was his new organization that really showed him how appreciated he is.

"That resonates with me as one of the great moments of my career because you don't get that. And I saw I've seen the videos people sent them to me, because I couldn't digest it. I got very emotional. I was a little choked up during that thing. But I saw even the players, some of the players tapping their sticks, and then our (Kraken) guys on the tarmac as we left to go to Toronto, our players," Forslund said, "and remember, this has been a weird season because of COVID. I don't have a lot of strong relationships with Kraken players yet. They know me, but we haven't had one to one contact with them, even if we're traveling with them. So they would come up to me on the tarmac and some of them had no clue that I'd had been there that long. Some of them knew. But every single one of them from the coaches right on through said that was a great moment for us. And I was taken aback by that. I was like wow, that's pretty cool. So that was great."