Reaugh calls winning Foster Hewitt Award ‘bizarre’

Daryl Reaugh has spent a 30-year career in broadcasting as the NHL's thesaurus, with superlatives such as elephantine, mastodonic, mammoth, larceny, buxom, velvety and more spilling out of his mouth with excited ease like a rock star jamming out his greatest hits.

Ironically, Reaugh, a voice of the Dallas Stars since 1996 and famously known for his "Razori-sms," can now use some of his deep vocabulary to describe the award he is receiving Monday.

"It's bizarre," Reaugh told NHL.com.

Reaugh is being honored by the Hockey Hall of Fame with the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award for outstanding contributions to hockey broadcasting, a fitting tribute to a man who characterizes himself as an analyst who once was a goalie with a 27-game cup of coffee in the NHL, not a goalie turned analyst.

"Thirty years of complicated air flow versus eight years of banging around the minors and playing a little bit in the NHL," Reaugh said. "So, I'd say I'm a broadcaster who used to play."

Reaugh grew up a Montreal Canadiens fan in the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s listening to the legendary broadcaster Danny Gallivan on “Hockey Night in Canada.” He said Gallivan was a hockey hero to him.

"His use of the English language always resonated with me, just the idea that there are better ways of saying good job or great 50 times a game," Reaugh said. "That was my thing. I thought it was a more interesting way of describing or explaining our sport. So, I went deep into the thesaurus."

But before he did, he had a playing career with Kamloops in the Western Hockey League and with the Edmonton Oilers and Hartford Whalers in the NHL. He played 27 NHL games, going 8-9 with one tie, a 3.47 goals-against average and .885 save percentage.

But his passion for the game and desire to make a broadcast entertaining and informative led him into the booth.

He first learned about the nuances of the profession by going to the Northeast Broadcasting School in Boston at the same time his wife was going to school in the city.

"I really didn't want to sound like just another dumb former player with a Canadian accent doing color," Reaugh said. "I went to one of those trade and technical schools. What it did was it gave me some different tools. I didn't go to college. I played junior hockey and then pro hockey. So I did that. It was like an eight-month course. You look back on it and it was a very important thing at the beginning to just give me a few tools going into this. Then you just use the people and the game to try to get in the door. That's how it all began."

He started with the Whalers for a season. John Forslund, now the voice of the Seattle Kraken, was his first broadcast partner. Reaugh said Forslund taught him the importance of preparation, focusing on information, continuity and entertainment during the broadcast.

"It's a good way of approaching your broadcast," Reaugh said. "Give the people the information because they thirst for it. Give them what they expect and make sure you're prepared. And then the entertainment part, which I probably lean heavily into and enjoy. That's what it's supposed to be anyway. We're in sports entertainment."

He said former coach and NFL analyst John Madden was a role model.

"All the information, all the football knowledge, you knew what you were going to get from a Madden broadcast and it was always entertaining in original different ways," Reaugh said.

Reaugh went to Dallas in 1996 and made it his home. He is in his eighth season working alongside Stars play-by-play broadcaster Josh Bogorad.

"Of course, he's the guy who has the Razor-isms and says the words that nobody has ever heard of and they don't know what they mean and that makes him notable just on its own," Bogorad said. "You could be that guy without necessarily having substance and still probably be pretty successful, but what is so impressive about 'Razor' is it's not that. He's very, very entertaining but he's also incredibly insightful about the game. He points out things that aren't necessarily obvious to everyone, lets you know what you might be about to see, and then intricately explains what you just did see."

And with it is a vocabulary that can get the audience to turn to Google to find the word Reaugh just used to describe an important save, a good pass or a big hit.

"That's my juice in the game," Reaugh said. "I still enjoy preparing for games, but I like to find ways to describe things. It's infinitely easier in 2025 than it was in 1995. Through the internet you can have stuff just flow into your life all day long as far as words and phrases. You can overkill that too, but that was one way I could be a little bit different than some others."

He won't admit to any favorite Razor-isms that he might have, but he said his goal every season is to keep them fresh.

"Every broadcaster, especially when they're in their third decade of it, you've got to watch out that you don't turn into a cartoon character that you're always forcing your catchphrase or line in there," Reaugh said. "So you try to come up with original ones and retire some of the older ones. I don't know if I'm a very good gauge of my best hits through the years, but anything that resonates is a good one with me."

He said sometimes he says something and wonders if he's going to have a job the next day.

"The goal Jamie Benn scored against Carolina when I said it was 'like poop going through a goose,'" Reaugh said. "You hope you're still employed after the game sometimes, but those are the things that resonate with fans and that's the whole purpose of this."

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