CBC's Steve Armitage receives Sports Media Canada award for career achievement

Steve Armitage looks back fondly on his early days at the CBC in 1965 when he earned $35 a week as a part-time late-night sports reporter in Halifax.

If he wasn't assembling sports scores or writing one or two lines for the staff announcers "who knew nothing about sports," he was attending school at Saint Mary's University, where he starred at quarterback and tended bar at the frat house.

"I thought I had died and gone to heaven," Armitage, 73, remembers. "It was a real humble beginning. I was really lucky to get the job. I gradually did more and more and it led to going on air, radio and then television."

Fifty-two years later, Armitage received the Sports Media Canada award for career achievement at a Wednesday luncheon at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto.

He believes his career was launched in 1982 at soccer's World Cup in Spain, where Armitage's coverage earned him the Foster Hewitt Award for excellence in sports broadcasting. He has been honoured with three Gemini Awards that recognize achievement in Canadian television, including one for his work covering the 1986 FIFA World Cup, and was inducted into the British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame in 2006.

Armitage was prominently featured on Hockey Night in Canada for 29 seasons and has covered the Canadian Football League, including 27 Grey Cups and 17 Canadian Open golf tournaments. At the amateur level, he has worked 15 Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Canada Games broadcasts, calling a variety of sports and competitions.

Armitage accepted an award that many men he has worked with and admired have received, including Don Chevrier, Don Wittman, Ted Reynolds, Ernie Afaganis and Bill Stephenson.

"When I started in the business, they were already legends in sports," he says. "I often wondered if I could ever be like them and, of course, I followed in their footsteps."

Armitage feels the late Chevrier, the Toronto-born announcer who called everything from the first Toronto Blue Jays game, to the Kentucky Derby, to the Grey Cup to hockey, probably had the best voice he's ever heard in broadcasting.

"I remember thinking when I started in this business, I sounded like a choir boy and I would never, ever sound like Don Chevrier," recalls Armitage, who has a honourary PhD in civil law from Saint Mary's University. "I always wanted to have the voice that Chevy had."

He also wanted to cover a wide array of sports like the late Wittman, who broadcast curling, hockey, horse racing and track and field for the CBC. "He was accepted as a sports voice, and that's what I always wanted to be known as, for the variety of sports I did."

Mission accomplished.

Among the more memorable events Armitage has called, he shared the following:

• Catriona Le May Doan successfully defending her Olympic gold medal in women's 500-metre speed skating, victorious at Nagano in 1998 and four years later in Salt Lake City, Utah: "I remember it, vividly. She was the first Canadian to successfully defend an Olympic championship. That was a huge moment. I called the bulk of her races from 1998 to 2002."
• U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing China, eclipsing Mark Spitz's seven-gold performance at the 1972 Munich Games, Armitage's first as a broadcaster: "It will always stick in my mind as being a defining moment. To be part of that telecast was quite special."
• His first game with Hockey Night in Canada in 1979, working as the host of a Montreal-Vancouver broadcast, while Danny Gallivan did play-by-play and Dick Irvin Jr. was colour commentator: "I was working with the voice of the Montreal Canadiens [in Gallivan]. As a kid, I listened to Danny Gallivan. They welcomed me and made me feel comfortable. I was as nervous as hell. It was something I'll always remember."

Long before becoming nationally recognized describing athletes in action with a booming voice filled with passion, excitement and enthusiasm, Armitage wondered how he would sound after taking over CBC swimming coverage from Reynolds in 1990.

It takes a while to develop a style. It took me ... a while before I decided I had to do it my way.— CBC Sports' Steve Armitage on his early years in broadcasting

He hadn't called a lot of races up until then and remembers "floundering" while attempting to be Reynolds, Chevrier and Wittman, rather than himself.

"It took a while for me to gain confidence. It didn't happen overnight," says Armitage, who was raised in Dartmouth, N.S., and enjoys golfing near his current residence just outside Bridgewater, N.S. "I had a lot of help from a guy by the name of Byron MacDonald as my colour commentator. He made a big difference.

"It takes a while to develop a style. It took me certainly a while before I decided I had to do it my way."

Along the way, Armitage, surprisingly, had his detractors, who felt he went over the top with his delivery and yelled too much.

"There wasn't universal love," he says, laughing. "I felt if I backed off, it wouldn't be me. And I had to be me in order to make it work for me."

In July 2016, Armitage was forced to step down from CBC's Olympic broadcast team after being diagnosed with chronic heart failure, which doctors now believe was a virus.

"I feel very good," says Armitage, who is scheduled to call a World Cup speed skating event next month in Calgary before covering long-track speed skating at his 16th Olympics in February at Pyeongchang, South Korea. "My heart is stronger than it was prior to the incident."