Alan Roach | The man behind the Super Bowl voice

The self-respecting sportsman certainly felt a sense of deja vu while listening to the Canadian-Avalanche duel on Saturday evening. The voice of the Ball Arena’s house announcer will indeed sound familiar.

Casual Football fans, who stick to the Super Bowl, will have heard this voice before. The courageous fans of the Minnesota Vikings, who are still waiting for their first championship, will undoubtedly recognize it. Fans of the game series Madden et FIFAfrom EA Sports, will have a sudden urge to bring out their console.

This feeling of familiarity is felt as soon as our man picks up the phone to answer the call from The Press. His simple “Hello”, in a voice so deep that it tickles the eardrum, confirms it to us: we have dialed the right number.

It’s the voice of Alan Roach, which he projects from the height of his 6’8″. If Michel Lacroix, through his work at the Bell Center and the Olympic Games, is the best-known voice in our sports arenas, Roach is his American, even global, equivalent, given the scope of the events on which he works.

The list of his mandates is dizzying. Sixteen Super Bowls, six Olympic Games, a World Cup of Soccer, the Football Hall of Fame, the Little World Series of Baseball and, why not, the Denver Airport Train. Added to these one-off events are his permanent jobs with the Vikings (NFL), the Colorado Rapids (MLS) and the aforementioned Avalanche.

Listen to some clips of Alan Roach at Work

Through his voice, Roach absolutely became a celebrity.

“Generally, being an in-house announcer for a game is $100, lunch and parking. It’s quite hard to make a living from it, explains Roach in a telephone interview. So until 2015, I had a full-time job at local radio. When I worked at the Super Bowl, I had to take time off from that job!

“In 2015, after 26 years of service, the station determined that I was too expensive and fired me. I told my wife, it’s okay, I’ll work at Home Depot full time and I’ll still be the Super Bowl announcer. But I worked instead to scrounge up contracts left and right. Ultimately, being fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. Announcing bike races is a lot more pleasant than getting up at 4 a.m. to read sports results on the radio! »

Early starts

Roach, whose real name was Kelly Burnham, aspired to become an undercover agent for the FBI. But contacts with this environment were rare, while in the media, a door quickly opened.

In a high school course, his class had to record a speech by John F. Kennedy on KLIZ, the station in his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. “There were 25 students, each had to read around 20 seconds of the speech. I recorded my part, the station manager listened to it and asked me: “Do you want a job?” I must have been 16! »

One thing led to another and he began to accumulate contracts which allowed him to play all sports. Beyond advertisements and public service announcements, each sport comes with its own particularities. In baseball, his job is essentially to call out the batters one after the other. In hockey and soccer, goals and infractions.

“But in football, it’s practically description. On every play, you have to say who carried the ball, how far, the downs, the tackles. »

No matter the sport, however, its primary goal remains the same: to pronounce names correctly. “The biggest mistake an advertiser can make is guessing the pronunciation,” he insists. You have to succeed 100%, because that’s the main reason we’re here. »

Hockey is special, with Swedes, Czechs, Finns, Russians, but also Quebecers, to test the announcer’s good diction. If in doubt about a name, he asks the public relations officer to record the player in question saying his name.

“Hockey players, in particular, have names that are becoming Americanized. But when we arrive at international tournaments, they like the pronunciation to be like in their language,” he argues.

He gives Peter Forsberg as an example. “In Swedish, it’s pronounced “Forsbéré”. So at the Turin Games, I said “Forsbéré”. »

The many French-speaking players pose another type of challenge. “My two best advertising friends are Michel Lacroix and Sébastien Goulet. I always joke with them, I tell them that I just cut the last letter of the name, like Jonathan Drouin. And “Goulé”, not Goulette. Sébastien was of great help. When I can’t take a contract, he’s always the one I refer. »

From Lacroix, Roach learned “professionalism,” he says. He knew the Canadian’s in-house announcer at the Salt Lake City Olympic Games in 2002. “I learned more during my two and a half weeks with him than during any other two-week period. He taught me how I want to sound, how I don’t want to sound. Four years later, we worked together again in Turin. I like it very much. People like him not because he’s a star or has a big voice, but for the person he is. »

Roach has experienced some events. His favorite?

“That’s what’s incredible about my work. I always get asked this question and it’s impossible to answer because the list is so long. But one of the first events that comes to mind is in 2001, when Joe Sakic gave the Stanley Cup to Raymond Bourque. From my position, between the penalty boxes, I was 30 feet away from them. »

Patrick Roy, far from the cameras

Since we were talking about this generation of the Avalanche, we had to ask Alan Roach if he had an anecdote about Patrick Roy in his repertoire. It did not disappoint us, although “it had nothing to do with [s]we are employed,” he warns. The story, therefore, takes place somewhere in the early 2000s. Daylon, the son of his partner at the time, was a goalkeeper for Arvada, a suburb of Denver. “And we were playing Littleton, where all the sons of the Avalanche players were playing,” Roach continues. Patrick was at the game, his son was playing for Littleton. They were vastly superior to any other team. We lost 11-0, Daylon scored all 11 goals and I don’t think we crossed the red line once! I had to leave immediately after the match, so it was my partner who stayed to wait for her son. Patrick went to see her and asked: “Is your son the guard? Is it okay if I come and talk to him?” And Patrick went to see him for three minutes. He told her: “Hockey is a team sport, it wasn’t 11-0 because of you. Keep your head up, keep having fun and don’t let it get you down.” Patrick had no, no idea that he was my stepson. »