Larry Isaac knows all about the media spotlight. But the soft-spoken Coquitlam resident usually finds himself on the other end of the glare. This week Isaac will be among those inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.
"It was a combination of excitement and also being humbled," said the longtime TV sports producer. "Many times when there is a media or builder category, you will see announcers or writers so it was quite the honour when I was nominated just to think that they would be looking at a producer of live TV."
Isaac views his induction as more than just a personal accomplishment, but as a recognition of the dozens of people who work on the technical and production crews behind the camera.
"There's many times you're only as good as the entire team. When you have a strong director and then all the technical crew who deliver the show it's like a quarterback in football, he can be great but if he doesn't have the surrounding team around him maybe he can't go as far as he'd like to."
The producer is responsible for putting together the entire telecast, from the music played during the opening introduction to the highlights and graphics that will be shown during breaks in the play.
"Many times a great hockey game will give you two or three great replays at every stoppage," said Isaac. "But then there's many games and many sporting events that sort of plod along and you have to have other things ready to maintain viewer interest if you're having your third offside in the last 60 seconds."
Over a career that spans four decades, Isaac has worked on countless hockey telecasts, including 15 years with the iconic Hockey Night in Canada. He has worked Olympics from Athens to Beijing, as well as countless sporting events that have taken him across the country and around the world. He lists the 1994 Stanley Cup finals between the Canucks and New York Rangers as one of the highlights of his career. "That was just a great two-month run by the Canucks," he said.
The PGA and LPGA Canadian Opens are other events that stand out in his career because of the extensive coverage required to bring the action to the viewer.
"There's so much going on in golf compared to most sports where there's only one field of play. That's the most challenging sport for a producer."
Isaac's career began in 1976 when one of the 19-year-old's co-workers at the Safeway grocery store in Vancouver told him about a new TV station called CKVU that was about to go on the air.
"I had been a sports nut all my life as a kid, so I took down all my scrapbooks and statistical files I had done and they hired me instantly to be a researcher and statistician," said Isaac, who moved to Coquitlam in 1989.
Not long after joining CKVU Isaac was given the opportunity to produce when a nightly show called Sports Page took to the airwaves. In 1980, Isaac moved over to BCTV where he was able to work on weekly Canucks and Whitecaps broadcasts. He started his own production company in 1984, allowing him to work with all of the networks.
"There's a few of us freelance producers in the country, so that allows me to pick and choose the events I want to work on," said Isaac, adding he does a lot of work with Sportsnet because of their coverage of the three NHL teams in Western Canada.
And now that he's reached the pinnacle of his career, Isaac is showing no signs of slowing down. He just returned from covering the Tour de Alberta cycling race that traversed the roads between Edmonton and Calgary.
"I had gone there four months prior and did the whole 900 kilometers just to plot cameras and exactly how are coverage plan would be," he said.
Isaac will be inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame Sept. 19 at the Banquet of Champions at the Vancouver Convention Centre. He will be joined by fellow inductees Kevin Alexander (lacrosse), Dawn Coe-Jones (golf), Brent Hayen (swimming), Robert Hindson (rugby), Peter Reid (triathlon), Larry Kwong (hockey), the 1965 Ocean Falls Amateur Swimming Club, coaches Kathy Shields and Ken Shields (basketball) and former Vancouver Canucks coach and GM Pat Quinn.
