STRAIGHT SHOOTER : Kings Broadcaster Nickson Respectful of Los Angeles Hockey Fans’ Knowledge

When Nick Nickson began his NHL broadcasting career with the Los Angeles Kings in 1980, the team was as popular as a slap shot in the shins.

Nickson, fresh from a long stint as a broadcaster in the American Hockey League, where fanatical and knowledgeable hockey fans pack arenas in places like Hershey, Pa., and New Haven, Conn., could have been excused if he had dealt with the rampant apathy toward hockey in Los Angeles by tailoring his comments to the listener.

It could have gone something like this:

Marcel Dionne skates along the boards--that’s what we call the walls that surround the ice--and takes the puck--that small, black rubber thing--and passes to Dave Taylor at the red line--that’s like the 50-yard line in football. Taylor fakes left and shoots, and he SCORES! That, folks, means the puck went into the goal, which is the rectangular thing behind the goalie, who is the player who falls down a lot and doesn’t appear to be able to skate very well.

Nickson, however, did not do that. He spoke to the fans as if they actually did know the difference between hockey and the caber toss.

Today, after the arrival in 1988 of Wayne Gretzky, many more people in Los Angeles know the difference.

And Nickson--OK, Gretzky helped too--is a major reason.

On Sept. 18, Nickson, 36, of Saugus, will begin his 10th season as a Kings broadcaster. He has served nine years as the team’s color commentator, working alongside play-by-play announcer Bob Miller. But starting this year, Nickson will call the play-by-play on radio broadcasts and will, for Kings games that are not televised, share the play-by-play radio duties with the veteran Miller.

It is a major step in Nickson’s career, which began in 1976 in the frigid winters of Rochester, N.Y. He took the play-by-play broadcasting job with the New Haven Nighthawks, the Kings’ top minor league affiliate, in 1978, and moved into the booth alongside Miller for the 1980-81 season.

His knowledge of the sport, which is even deeper than his strong and steady baritone voice, has helped change the local perception of hockey as something to do at the Forum until a Lakers game breaks out to something that is actually--gulp!--trendy.

“The change has been a dramatic one,” Nickson said. “But never, even on the first day of my job with the Kings, did I ever consider talking down to our fans, to pretending they knew nothing about hockey and had to be taught. From the start I dealt with the Los Angeles fans the way they deserved to be dealt with. The fans who came to the Kings games back then and who listened to our broadcasts were as knowledgeable as any fans in any other hockey city.”

And they were fans. They had to be.

“When I started this job, the Kings put mediocre teams on the ice,” Nickson said. “We just never had a legitimate contender. Each year seemed like the year before. There was not a lot of excitement.

“And that didn’t really change until Gretzky came here.”

Today, it seems, most people in Southern California know at least a bit about the game. And for the 15,000 or so ticket-holding fans for each game and the thousands of others who regularly tune in to watch the telecasts or listen to the broadcasts, Nickson is thankful.

“The following has increased so dramatically,” he said. “Just a few years ago, it seemed like no one had ever heard of me. Now, people stop me in grocery stores or roll down their car windows at intersections and say hello. It’s a bit strange.”

It isn’t the first time strange things have happened to Nickson during his hockey broadcasting career. Much of the strangeness, however, occurred in the low-budget American Hockey League.

“It was a life of bus rides,” said Nickson, who moved with his wife, Carolyn, and sons, Nicholas, 9, and Tim, 5, into their new Saugus home a year ago.

Usually, those cold, winter bus rides lasted far too long.

But on occasion, they didn’t last quite long enough.

“One trip, after a night game in Philadelphia against the Firebirds, we headed back to New Haven on new buses, from a new bus company we had just signed a contract with,” Nickson said. “They promised us cleaner, more dependable buses than the ones we had used the previous season. And just outside New York City, we hear this loud thumping noise. Like a flat tire.”

The bad news was that it was not a flat tire. It was no tire at all.

“It (the wheel) had just fallen off,” Nickson said. “And it wasn’t even in sight. Just gone.”

The ensuing wait consumed all of the night and early-morning hours. A replacement bus finally rescued the Nighthawks at dawn and returned them, several hours later, to their apartments.

Nickson, who also worked as the public-address announcer at Dodger Stadium for seven summers until he gave up those duties this year, was born into a broadcasting family. His father was on the air for a Rochester radio station for 20 years and Nickson grew up listening to him on the radio and playing in the studio.

“It just seemed like a natural life for me,” he said. “I was always around it.”

Other factors, too, guided him toward the announcers’ booth. As a youngster in Rochester, he fell in love with hockey and played endlessly on the frozen ponds of upstate New York each winter. His hockey career continued in a highly unorganized mode through high school, because his school had no hockey team.

Until the year after he graduated.

“The next year, they form a hockey team,” Nickson said. “I was pretty angry.”

He then enrolled at Ithaca (N.Y.) College and looked forward to playing as a freshman on the junior varsity hockey team.

But the school abolished the hockey program just weeks before he walked onto the campus.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Nickson said. “My high school starts a team the year after I leave, and my college drops the hockey team the year I get there. Someone was trying to tell me something, I guess.”

And perhaps this was the message to Nickson: If you want to stay involved in the game of hockey, you will be doing it without skates.

Hordes of Southern California hockey fans are glad Nickson got the message.