Doc Emrick — the American hockey listener’s most well-known walking two-in-one glossary/thesaurus — texted Terry Ficorelli before the latter embarked on his sixth decade in sportscasting.
Emrick is in his fifth season of retirement. From New York to Los Angeles, other ’70s startups have set their farewell tours. But Ficorelli, with whom Emrick broke into the pros on opposite sides of Michigan in the old International League, is starting his fifth year with his ninth employer in the minors.
In light of that, Emrick couldn’t help but playfully pillory his friend.
“He said to me, ‘Fic, you’re putting us all to shame!’” Ficorelli recalled in a phone interview with Awful Announcing.
Actually, Ficorelli is slaking a continuous appetite for a classic mom-and-pop experience in the business. He is in a familiar place in Muskegon, where 2024-25 will be his 20th overall season with one team or another. And he is catering to a familiar fanbase through an ostensibly obsolete medium that works for everybody.
“The Muskegon people here like their sports on the radio, they really do,” he said.
“I’m not a digital media guy,” he added. “Maybe I’m old-school, but I think I know the Muskegon market quite well.”
Other teams and leagues may rely heavily, if not exclusively, on streaming and webcasts. But the Michigan Independence Hockey League’s Muskegon Voyagers carry all 24 regular-season games — home and away — plus the postseason on 92.5 WWSN-FM. In addition, they are the subject of daily bulletins throughout the season plus weekly summer check-ins on a local talk show.
Those customs continue among many fixtures dating back to when the journeyman announcer was last in hockey’s Triple-A ranks. With the IHL’s Cincinnati Cyclones in the first half of the ’90s, Ficorelli emceed a weekly town hall with fans and player panels. That and other initiatives yielded his three honors as the city’s top sportscaster and his distinction as the only non-player to receive the league’s Man of the Year award for community involvement.
The town hall tradition carried over to Muskegon, where he had started on a stringing assignment with the IHL’s Mohawks while studying at Michigan State University in 1973-74 and returned 22 seasons later with the Double-A Colonial (later United) League’s Fury.
The “Fury Hotline Show” sometimes evoked the former MSU freshman hockey player’s coaching instincts. If the two-hour assembly started dulling, Ficorelli revamped the atmosphere by finding a go-to guy in the audience to speak. Or he might have a player unveil a hidden talent, such as the guitar.
“The show got pretty zany, but it was all for the sake of entertainment,” he said, “(The fans) came out to get to know the players. They wanted to see a different side of the players.”
When business resumed on the weekends, everybody saw (and heard) maximum competitive zest. In 15 years with Muskegon’s Double-A franchise, Ficorelli described four championship runs. Those rings enriched the Detroit native’s already ornate collection from his time with various Red Wings Triple-A affiliates. The Kalamazoo Wings won two IHL Turner Cups and the Adirondack Red Wings attained an AHL Calder Cup on his watch.
It all brought out the best in the self-described bibliophile’s vocabulary as well. By the time Ficorelli was in Cincinnati, fans showed up at Cyclones games with signs bearing any one of his countless catchphrases. Ownership took note, and with the announcer’s blessing, they started distributing a two-sided “Fictionary” at the turnstiles.

The Fictionary has since been woven into souvenir programs with its namesake’s subsequent employers. Every edition teems with Emrick-like arrays of rhyming, alliteration, pop-culture references, and dramatic metaphors. A forward scoring on the penalty kill might be dubbed a “shorthanded bandit.” A defender spooning the puck into neutral ice may either “kangaroo,” “aerial,” or “launch a rainmaker” with it.
To approve a goal scorer or other impact player, Ficorelli might exclaim “Yabba dabba doo!” or “Book ’em, Danno!” (He said he was old-school.)
A stealthy, imminent scoring threat for either party could be “lurking in the shadows.” Before the action even starts, the “bayonets” (aka sticks) come down for the faceoff.
Ficorelli’s 15 years with the Fury surpassed his 11 at his career-launching base in nearby Kalamazoo for his longest stay anywhere. Muskegon thus had the longest time for his expressions and personality to incubate and sink in with his customers.
This was also where he met his wife, Jhett, whose career as a paralegal lent more incentive to nail permanent pegs in the city. But in 2010, the ever-volatile minor-league landscape took the Fury (by then rebranded as the Lumberjacks) to Indiana, where they started fresh as the Evansville Icemen.
A new top-tier junior version of the Lumberjacks swiftly filled the void, but the 43% pay cut to broadcast that club was infeasible. So Ficorelli followed the pro franchise and stayed in Indiana for stints with the Icemen and the ECHL’s Indy Fuel.
But not before a moving chat with Muskegon Chronicle beat writer Ron Rop.
While Muskegonites on Facebook pleaded with the powers that be to keep their beloved broadcaster around, Rop editorialized one-on-one. As Ficorelli recalled, the Q-and-A lasted nearly 90 minutes, after which Rop went candid.
“He said to me, ‘I just want you to know this. When you came on the air to broadcast the game, you made it sound like the most important thing that was going on in Muskegon. It didn’t matter what game you were calling.’”
“I didn’t see it coming,” Ficorelli continued. “I never thought of it that way. I went, ‘Wow, that’s the best compliment I ever received.’”
By the turn of the following decade, the worst of on-ice circumstances came, but enabled a return to paradise.
In 2019, Ficorelli was back in West Michigan, though retaining a long-distance marriage with Jhett back in Muskegon. He was now the voice of the Federal Prospects League’s Battle Creek Rumble Bees, whose only victory out of 48 games obliged the host Elmira Enforcers to distribute free tickets for the next night’s rematch, per the terms of a “Guaranteed Win Night.”
Recounting that moment, his lively lexicon coming naturally, Ficorelli singled out goaltender Jack Eisenhower’s performance replete with “sprouting rubber limbs on demand” and many “larcenous saves.”
Fate robbed the Rumble Bees of any further ice chips of solace. Everyone was boarding the bus for another Elmira trip when the FPHL called to confirm that COVID-19 restrictions meant cancelling the balance of the season.
The Bees had folded by the time play resumed the next winter. But the MIHL was simultaneously inaugurating, with the Voyagers giving the Lumberjacks competition for fanfare.
“Everything happens for a reason, and we went back to Muskegon,” Ficorelli said. “Next thing you know I was being contacted.”
Though playing at a lower level and in a smaller venue than the Fury, the Voyagers sought to recreate as much of the town’s semipro glory days as possible. Part of that meant replicating the black and teal (later modified to jade) jerseys.
“The Fury had such a tremendous following,” Ficorelli said. “The people in the community still talk about Muskegon Fury hockey.”
The Voyagers’ other key cog was the voice who talked about the Fury action in real time, and even had a say in assembling the team. Ficorelli was frequently consulted by the Fury’s hockey operations staff on player personnel decisions. As such, he had more than just a “sixth man” hand in four Colonial Cup titles.
Now, with those credentials re-employed as the Voyagers vice president and general manager, he has built and broadcast three Bill Long Memorial Cup champions.
That makes double digits of banner years in Ficorelli’s first half-century of calling pro hockey. It punctuates the minor leagues’ unique pleasures of staying immersed in day-to-day operations and sustaining the bonds of competition and entertainment, team and fanbase.
It’s not that Ficorelli has never wondered how he has never nabbed an NHL gig besides calling a few Red Wings preseason games (alongside idol Bruce Martyn) at Kalamazoo’s Wings Stadium. Peers like Emrick have assured him that he merely “fell through the cracks” through sheer fortune, or lack thereof.
But prominent obscurity has served him well and still does in Muskegon. For someone who once thought he would go do something else when he turned 40, Ficorelli is now bent on reaching 4,000 career games.
He is at precisely 3,900 going into this Saturday’s season opener. He’ll need at least three MIHL seasons and change to reach that milestone.
For inspiration, he cites two other idols. Bob Chase, who called the storied Fort Wayne Komets franchise for 63 seasons, capped his tenure six months before he died at age 90. Baseball’s Ernie Harwell was 84 when he hung up his mic after a 60-year ride predominantly in Ficorelli’s native Detroit.
“I don’t know if I’ll make it that far,” he said. But Jhett, for one, has told him she projects another “seven or eight years” in the booth.
“And who knows you better than your wife?” he said.