She Has a Voice in These Matters

It’s the voice.

My guess is, everyone who complains about Cammi Granato stumbling over facts and face-offs is really complaining about something else.

It’s the voice.

We aren’t used to the voice.

Listening to Cammi Granato announcing hockey for the first time is like listening to your little sister tell a dirty joke.

It’s not believable. You don’t get it. You want it to stop.

One minute venerable Nick Nickson is using his fast, elegant style to describe a King power play . . . and the next minute it sounds like figure skating.

We haven’t felt this uneasy since the first time we saw a male nurse or a female road worker.

It’s the voice.

But we will eventually get used to it. Our minds will expand because of it. Our sports culture will be enriched by it.

In the meantime, as Cammi Granato struggles in her first year as the Kings’ radio color announcer, it is unfair to criticize her for not being something she can never be.

Namely, a man.

Lately, she’s been hearing a lot of stuff that sounds like that, getting ripped around town for being a publicity stunt, a dumb girl who doesn’t know the game like a, uh, you know.

As she did while fending off attacks while captain of the U.S. Olympic gold medal hockey team last winter, she’s not ducking it.

“I’m the first to admit that people are hammering me,” she said Tuesday from her hotel room in Calgary. “And yeah, it’s tough for me. To read where somebody is just slamming you . . . it’s hard.

“But what I say is, ‘This builds character.’ I keep telling myself, ‘This builds character.’ ”

Is she smooth on the air? No. Her comments are often rushed, forced. And sometimes she states the obvious.

But is any jock smooth during the first months in the booth?

Shouldn’t we give her the same respect and patience afforded the ex-hockey player she replaced, former color announcer Mike Allison?

Cammi Granato is no different from Allison at the same stage of his announcing career.

Well, OK, a little different.

According to Nickson, she’s better.

“She’s further along after 20-22 games than Mike was,” Nickson said. “But you didn’t have the reaction because Mike was an ex-NHL player. He was a man in a man’s sport.”

Not Allison, not Brian Engblom, not any male King announcer has ever been asked this question during the first minutes of the first postgame call-in show of the season:

“Cammi, what percentage of Olympic hockey players are lesbians?”

Nickson ran interference that night, quickly saying, “Well, we’ve gotten our first [smart-aleck] comment of the year out of the way.”

But the blow had been landed.

“I was like, man, I guess I’m just putting myself out there to be criticized,” said Granato, 27, who has a boyfriend. “I thought, ‘Oh well, just deal with it.’ ”

On another night, somebody called and said he wanted Allison back.

Then there was the letter in this sports section last week from a gentleman who asked this question:

“Did anyone from the Kings front office ever think to give Cammi Granato a tryout before naming her to the radio broadcast team?”

Some of the stuff is legitimate. King fans are the most loyal and passionate sports fans in town.

They know hockey. They know what they like. They deserve to be heard.

It would be unfair of the organization to expose them to an announcer who didn’t know what she was talking about.

But this is not that.

Granato knows the sport as well as even the most knowledgeable fan. Listen to her for 30 minutes and you will learn something.

She understands strategy. She knows the players and the plays.

The problem is that she has yet to fully understand how to tell us.

In the exhibition season, she talked over a goal. Sometimes Nickson cues her on the air by saying, “Well, Cammi . . . “

All of which, if she were a famous former male athlete, would be chalked up to inexperience instead of ineptitude.

“She is being judged as a woman broadcaster instead of just a broadcaster,” said Sherry Ross.

Granato is not the first female NHL announcer. That title belonged to Ross, for the New Jersey Devils from 1993-95.

As a former hockey writer, Ross knew the sport, and was embraced by the New York audience.

“I guess most of the criticism was behind my back,” she said. “I never had any trouble at all.”

Ross, now the hockey columnist for the New York Daily News, said she expects the same will happen to Granato.

“She will develop a little more thick skin, she’ll make adjustments, she’ll be great. You just have to give her time,” Ross said.

Just as soon as we all get used to the voice.

“At first, I was even startled by my own voice,” Ross said. “You are just used to hearing two male voices at a hockey game.”

For now, Los Angeles’ new female voice is working hardest not on KRLA 1110, but inside Cammi Granato’s head, telling her to hang tough.

“I go through all those things with women’s hockey, work so hard to break down walls, and then finally last winter those walls crumble . . . but now I’m back to Square One,” Granato said. “It’s like, I’ve taken a step back. It gets tiring.”

But, in keeping with her background as a hockey brat in a family of male skaters, she likes a good fight.

“The way I look at it is, this is another challenge,” she said. “And I’ve learned, you can’t get anywhere in life without going through a challenge.”

The least we can do is let the woman talk.