When the Devils arrived in New Jersey, they needed a good selling job. Big-time.
“Look at it this way,” says the club’s radio analyst, and former goalie, Glenn (Chico) Resch, “we had a lot of challenges to overcome and that included the franchise’s earlier failures in Kansas City and then Denver. We had to cultivate fans any way possible.”
Resch was Exhibit A: the quintessential role model as a solid, former Stanley Cup-winning goalkeeper with the Islanders who now adored the New Jersey fans as much as they loved him right back.
Exhibit B was a guy who nobody had ever heard of except, perhaps, his immediate family and close friends.
Larry Hirsch already had paid his broadcasting dues, starting with a college radio gig, then a radio news assignment, then broadcasting Yale hockey followed by a leap — albeit short — into the NHL realm doing play-by-play for the late and not-too-lamented…
