Pierre McGuire: If I Told You Once, I Only Have Six Thousand More Times to Go

TSN'S Pierre McGuire, with piehole semi-closed (photo obviously retouched).

Proposed:  a new verb, “to McGuire” (v. tran.); to repeat or reiterate a concept an inordinate number of times, so as to induce vomiting, rickets and spontaneous human combustion among those within earshot of the speaker’s voice.  An eponym, from the bald-headed pedantic broadcaster who apparently refuses to believe that anyone could possibly absorb the full substance of his exclamations after but  a single iteration.

Canada’s leading non-medical cause of tinnitus, Pierre McGuire, was in peak aneurysm-inducing form earlier tonight during the Canada/Switzerland World Junior Hockey Championship semi-final. Those of you who have had your ears assaulted by  Mr. McGuire’s work in the past will know that he is in fact a knowledgeable hockey person.  The problem is that he unfortunately is apparently predisposed to sharing his every thought with all the variety and nuance of an eight-year old in the backseat inquiring of the family vehicle’s progress toward Disneyland.    There are a number of things that drive me crazy about the content Mr. McGuire adds to TSN hockey broadcasts;  his insistence, for example, on over-intellectualizing basic concepts is infuriating.  It is absurd and asinine to refer to the act of one hockey player propelling the puck to his teammate as a “puck distribution”.  He did not “distribute” the puck, he “passed” it.  Jerk.

Worse than that laughable assault upon common sense and the English language, however, is Mr. McGuire’s apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder, which evidently compels him to constantly re-visit one or more observations earlier made and thoroughly covered.  This evening, his refrain concerned the Swiss goaltender’s alleged superior “initial puck-stopping ability”, a talent so remarkable that it evidently required not one, not two and not three, but fully a half-dozen mentions by the five-minute mark of the second period.  We may have heard more about the Swiss netminder’s “initial puck-stopping ability” (and my head might have fallen right off my neck and rolled under the end table next to our couch) but Pierre was also essentially chanting an incantation to the effect that Canada needed to “cycle the net and not the corner”.  This particular phrase was repeated with such rhythmic urgency, consistency and frequency that I fully believed he was employing some sort of black magic spell in an effort to create an army of zombie broadcasters hell-bent on eating my brain from the inside out.

The shame of it is that Mr. McGuire knows his hockey;  his analysis is not wrong, it is just unnaturally and infuriatingly recurring, like a particularly spicy bit of salami or a chili-coated Burkie dog.  Nevertheless, it won’t surprise me in the least when next season’s big winner on Dragon’s Den is the guy who has invented an audio filter that focuses on those specific portions of the audio spectrum in which Mr. McGuire’s repetitive exclamations reside and which digitally processes the signal to remove him entirely, leaving the relieved viewer to enjoy Gord Miller’s splendid call of the World Junior games in blissful ignorance of the observation du jour.

Update:  Also, Jerry D’Amigo (a Leafs prospect, 6th-rounder) appears to be awesome.  I thought he was good in the New Year’s Eve Canada/U.S. round-robin game, though he spent a little too much time trying to impale Nazem Kadri for my comfort;  in tonight’s game against the Swedes, he was fucking nails.