"Mesdames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen. Accueillons nos Canadiens!"
Forty-one (soon to be 42) times a year, plus playoffs, Michel Lacroix exhorts the crowd at the Bell Centre in Montreal to welcome their Habs to the ice. He's been the full-time voice of the Canadiens since 1993, taking over from the late Claude Mouton, but he got his first taste of the job way back in 1977.
"To be honest with you, it's been a heck of a ride," he laughs. "I was working for a local newspaper and I was hosting corporate events and somebody said, well, you've got a good voice, maybe you should do some sporting events."
"So I went and did some preliminary competitions for the Olympic Games back in 1976. Then I was hired as the PA announcer for the junior team in Laval, where Mike Bossy played at the time. At the same time I was lucky enough to announce track and field competitions and I was asked to be the voice of the Olympic Stadium for the Olympic Games.
"Later, Claude Mouton needed to go back in the press box, so he came up to me and said well, if you're good enough to announce the Olympics maybe you should give it a try with the Montreal Canadiens. So in 1977 I worked my first game."
"And I was maybe at the right place at the right time."
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Now, all these years later, Lacroix is almost as well known as the players whose highlights he announces to the faithful.
"I saw somebody standing in Rome wearing a Canadiens T-shirt and I shouted 'Go, Habs, Go' and this guy turned around with a big smile," he recalls. "I remember vividly, I was covering the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia in 2000. And when I got there, somebody came up to me and said, 'Hey, you're Michel Lacroix from the Montreal Canadiens.' Then you go to Lillehammer, a little village in Norway and there's some kind of a sports store. And the only thing they had in their window was a Montreal Canadiens jersey. Wherever you go, there's always somebody."
"I was in Italy two years ago, walking slowly. Somebody shouted 'Are you having a tough year?' My girlfriend looked at me and said 'Don't wear your Habs hat in Rome, please.'"
Everywhere he goes, people want to ask him about the Canadiens.
"You just say yes, I'm part of it. And you do realize that it is to this day a very special thing."
His pride in his work is earned. He's always careful to make sure he's as respectful as possible of the players and their names.
"When I'm not really sure of the pronunciation I go and see the player," he explains. "Like we've got a kid from Austria, Reinbacher. If we want to be picky with the pronunciation, the German pronunciation, it might be a little hard for our fans. So we basically tried to make it as easy as possible. So like Reinbacher, I went to see his father. I said, if I say it this way, will you recognize your son? He said absolutely."
"And for Demidov, we know that in Russian the accent is on the second syllable. So it should be Dem-ME-dov."
Once he's got all the pronunciations down, it's on to pre-game preparation and getting ready for the opening notes of Coldplay's "Fix You." Amazingly, after more than 20 years, he's still not tired of it.
"We needed something different coming back from the from the lockout," he recalls. "Coldplay is a fixture now. It's unbelievable. The way people react to the song is incredible. I mean, people stand up in in the middle of the warm up and start chanting. You say, oh, if they're that hot during the warm up, imagine what the things will look like when we score a goal."
"With Coldplay I think the setup is perfect. The timing is great. We know exactly what to do and when to do it. The goalie just jumps down when I say 'Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen.' As soon as I say 'accueillons,' bingo! They're with you every game."
He says the most fun part of the job is announcing big milestones and special goals, like Cole Caufield's 50th this past season.
"That was funny," he smiles. "When I introduced Cole after his 50th the crowd went wild with a standing ovation for about two or three minutes and I was excited, too. That was the longest I've ever seen."
Calling the three stars is also a highlight for him.
"It's a ritual. It's been going on for years and years and years. And the guys would come on the ice and go back. Now the first star stays up and they connect with the fans. So that's quite a quite amazing."
"Then again, we do have to get the the entire sequence done quickly, sharply so it won't embarrass our public and it won't embarrass the players. And we've got to do it also to fit in with the broadcasters. So technically it's a little harder than people imagine, but we do it in about what, two or three minutes? And that's perfect for us."
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Michel Lacroix been there through the Canadiens' highest of highs...and their lowest of lows. He says his most memorable night was captain Saku Koivu's return to play after undergoing cancer treatment.
"It was charged with emotion," he recalls. "The fans, the players his teammates, the entire organization. I remember Saku was looking at me saying 'OK, stop that ovation, we've got to go.' And I said, 'I'm sorry, but it's 22,000 against one, so you'll have to put up with that.' I just couldn't stop the people and they wouldn't stop because it was much more than the hockey game. It was a celebration of life. And that's a totally different story."
He was also there for one of the organization's biggest moves.
"I closed the Forum and I opened the Molson Centre at the time, now the Bell Centre," he says. "That was also amazing. And I remember quite vividly saying 'Last minute of play in the history of the Montreal Forum' that was also something special. And of course all the captains there and the torch and all that stuff."
Now he's cheering on a new generation of players. He enjoys Caufield's joy and energy, and Nick Suzuki's calm leadership, but it's the veteran players with whom he really connects.
"A guy like Mike Matheson is a charm talk to this guy or Phillip Danault," he praises. "I think these two are really special. They're calm, they're having fun. And they're not afraid to go up front and say yes we did have a hard time tonight. Or we're quite happy about the way things are going."
He's seen many versions of the Canadiens, but he thinks this one reminds him of another time.
"Well, I think I'm probably the luckiest guy in the world because the Montreal Canadiens is a wonderful organization. I've been with the team for close to 50 years now," he beams. "In that time, we had a fabulous team in the 70s winning four Stanley Cups in a row with a talented players like Ken Dryden and Larry Robinson and Serge Savard and Guy Lafleur and Steve Shutt. All these guys."
"Talking with these guys, hanging around with them when we were on the road, that was amazing for me. We were part of a family and that's mainly what I think is the greatest thing about the Montreal Canadiens."
"And then a new generation of players came in. We had a fun Stanley Cup in 1986 and then another one in 1993 with a different group of players. So it's renewal. You look at the 10 first ten years, then another 10, then another 10 then and there's always something different."
It's been decades since Lacroix has had the chance to announce a Stanley-Cup winning goal, but he's seeing signs that his wait might possibly be over soon.
"This team is a lot of fun," he says. "You do realize that these guys want to hang around together. They're having fun together and it shows. The same thing applied in in the 70s with all these great names and guys who were eventually inducted in the Hall of Fame. But you see guys like Caufield and Suzuki, (Ivan) Demidov, (Lane) Hutson, they're hanging around and they are having fun."
"My point of view is that the new generation is close to being the same that we had in the 70s. You can easily compare characters that we had in the 70s and characters that we've got right now with the team."
Lacroix will spend the summer doing other things like covering PGA tournaments for RDS. He says he'll get a few days off here and there, but mostly he's waiting for the new hockey season to start. And he's not ready to handg up the microphone any time soon.
"Not for now. I'm still hoping to get number 25 in. Oh, yeah," he says. "Oh, I want you to be able to announce that. That's it. That would be really something. Yeah."
"As long as they they don't ask me to sing the national anthem, I'm OK."
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