During his time as a hockey player, Wayne Gretzky was known for, seemingly, predicting where the puck would go next—just as you were wondering what he was doing, the puck would show up on his stick. Nexus and Camosun Applied Communication (ACP) alumnus Nguyen Hoang Duy, who goes by Jimmy in English, says that being an ice hockey announcer is kind of like that. As part of Hockey Night In Canada’s International Night last month, Duy provided commentary in Vietnamese from Vietnam, where he currently lives.
“It’s almost like a Gretzky way of anticipating the game,” he says.
During his time at Camosun, Duy attended seminars hosted by sports announcers; they focused mostly on the preparation an announcer has to do for a game, like getting to know players and brushing up on stats and news. But Duy says it’s more about predicting what will happen next.
“Leading up to the games, I had prepared a handful of notes going into it, which, at the game itself, I didn’t think I prepared enough,” he says, “but then also, on the other side of the token, there just isn’t enough opportunity during the broadcast itself to bring up all of those notes.”
Sportsnet hosted the event, which enabled Vietnamese speakers living in Canada to hear Duy’s commentating.
“Knowing that, I basically went into the broadcast assuming that my audience would know a thing or two about hockey already,” he says. “So, I mean, there are certain hockey terms like a ‘power play’ or a ‘faceoff’ or ‘slap shot’, I would be saying that straight out in English where everybody would already know what I’m talking about, instead of saying everything in full Vietnamese.”
But, for Duy, commentating is a balancing act.
“At the same time, you also don’t want to insult your viewer’s intelligence,” he says.
A former communications intern for the Victoria Salmon Kings, Duy fell in love with hockey in the 2006 season, a couple of years after the Salmon Kings came to Victoria.
“I had been a soccer fan up until that point,” says Duy. “I had never seen a game of hockey before. A year after that, I got into the fantasy hockey league with the guys at the ACP program and at Nexus. It slowly built up my interest in ice hockey to a point where I’m talking about it and watching it everyday.”
With the time difference between Hanoi, Vietnam and where hockey is being played in Canada, the sport is difficult for Duy to watch live. If Duy were to tune in for the first Hockey Night in Canada broadcast at 7 pm Eastern Time, that would be 6 am the next day in Hanoi.
“It’s virtually impossible with the time differences,” he says.
Commentating comes back to Gretzky for Duy: it’s not as much about play-by-play as it is about him being able to anticipate what might happen before it does so he can keep up with the fast pace of play.
“Everything happens so quickly,” he says. “You have the puck on one end of the ice and then a couple seconds later it’s on the other end of the ice.”
Duy says the experience of commentating was nerve-wracking at first.
“After I graduated from the communications program at Camosun,” he says, “I never would have thought that I would be on screen, or on the air for that matter, ever again.”