UWindsor alum Joe Bowen’s 44-year tenure as the Leafs’ radio play-by-play announcer is unmatched in franchise history and challenges the all-time greats of sportscasting. (PHOTOS SUBMITTED BY JOE BOWEN / University of Windsor)
By John-Paul Bonadonna
For more than four decades, the play-by-play of Toronto Maple Leafs hockey has been cast through radio waves into the living rooms, cars, kitchens and memories of millions.
The sound is unmistakable.
Especially the signature heartfelt cry that has become one of the most beloved and booming exclamations in Canadian sports — “Holy Mackinaw!”
Those words and the voice behind them belong to Joe Bowen (BA ‘73) — a University of Windsor alum, 2011 UWindsor Alumni Sports Hall of Fame inductee and recipient of the Hockey Hall of Fame Foster Hewitt Memorial Award in 2018.
After calling junior hockey games for seven years, the phone call he never dreamed possible arrived: an opportunity to become the radio voice of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“To come to Toronto — my favourite as kid, my dad’s (favourite) team — it was a dream come true,” he says.
Bowen’s 44-year tenure as the Leafs’ radio play-by-play announcer is unmatched in franchise history and challenges the all-time greats of sportscasting.
His stories, spirit and sound are part of the fabric of Maple Leafs fandom not only in Toronto, but across Ontario and all of Canada.
“People have said to me, ‘you were the voice in the car on the way home from practice,’ it’s incredibly humbling,” Bowen says.
As tributes have rained in, one letter stands out for Bowen: a man whose father, a lifelong Leafs fan, listened to Bowen call the game on the final night of his life.
“That hits you,” Bowen says quietly. “You realize that through this job, you almost become part of people’s families and part of their lives.”
Bowen was born in Sudbury and arrived on UWindsor’s campus in the early 1970s.
Windsor offered something unique: a Communication Arts program (as it was known at the time), and even more importantly for Bowen, a chance to get behind a microphone, for CJAM.
The student radio station, located deep in the basement of the St. Denis Hall building, became his second classroom.
“It was where I figured out I could actually do this stuff,” Bowen recalls.
The real magic happened just upstairs in the small, jam-packed gym known affectionately as “the barn.”
Bowen called games in the cramped quarters where crowds lined up early to squeeze in and catch the action.
“When the team went to nationals, CKWW asked me to call the games live,” he says.
“That was the moment I knew this could be a career.”
If St. Denis Hall was where Bowen found his voice, Huron Hall was where he found the stories.
The residence building was a converted motel tucked near the train tracks north of where the McDonald’s now stands.
“It had to be the greatest residence in the history of Canada,” Bowen says, only half joking.
“Security and building access were measured by how many people you could fit through the ground level sliding glass doors,” he laughs.
It was where Bowen, then a residence prefect, took in one of the famous moments in Canadian hockey folklore — the 1972 Summit Series.
Bowen packed 20 “or more” students into his motel-room-turned-dorm during the pivotal Game 8. When Paul Henderson scored the winner to clinch the series against the Soviet Union, the room erupted. Literally.
“The whole lot of them jumped on my bed and it completely collapsed,” he remembers.
“We didn’t care. We just kept celebrating.”
The group marched to the Dominion House to watch the replay that evening. Fueled by patriotism — and celebratory beverages — they decided it would be an ideal moment to parade across the Ambassador Bridge waving Canadian flags to “show the Americans how you handle the Russians.”
They made it a quarter of the way before bridge staff firmly suggested otherwise.
“That might have been the closest I ever came to getting arrested,” Bowen admits with relief.
Phew…or rather, Holy Mackinaw!
Of course, no discussion of Bowen is complete without his trademark saying.
The phrase originated with his father who used it as a family-friendly exclamation.
Bowen adopted it early in his career and over time it became inseparable from Leafs hockey — a perfect descriptor of joy, shock or pure disbelief that fans now repeat instinctively.
As his final season unfolds, Bowen has been overwhelmed by tributes from fans, colleagues and even players, many of whom grew up listening to him.
“It’s something I’m extremely proud of,” he says.
“To know you helped someone fall in love with the game is a tremendous honour.”
An on-ice tribute will celebrate Bowen on Dec. 16, when the Leafs host the Chicago Blackhawks, the Leafs’ opponent when Bowen made his broadcasting debut for the team on Oct. 6, 1982.
Bowen acknowledges that the final months of his career will move far too quickly and he’s making a point to savour every conversation, handshake and memory that resurfaces along the way.
And like every Leafs fan, he dreams — maybe more earnestly than ever — of seeing the team lift the Stanley Cup.
“If they win it this year,” he jokes, “the parade would stretch from Timmins all the way to Lake Ontario.”
But Stanley Cup or not, Bowen’s legacy is secure.
For generations of fans, Leafs hockey sounds like Joe Bowen. A minor hockey goalie from Sudbury who dreamed of playing for the Leafs. A Lancer alumnus shaped by CJAM, St. Denis and Huron Halls.
A dreamer whose dream came true.
And as he signs off for the final time this season having called more than 3,800 games, fans across the country will say it with him: “Holy Mackinaw! What a career.”