Before he found his way back into hockey, Joe Vitale’s other major passion in life almost took him in an entirely different direction nowhere near a hockey rink.
A kitchen.
“I was always huge into bread baking,” Vitale said. “Ever since I was a kid, I always loved doing it with my dad. It was one of those funny things that was a hobby, and so I started baking a lot of sourdough bread.”
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Before we venture too far into Vitale’s culinary interest, let’s start with why he had to leave hockey.
A fight.
In the second year of a lucrative three-year contract worth $3.35 million, Vitale found himself a healthy scratch for the first four games of the 2015-16 season with the Coyotes. When he finally got into the lineup for the team’s fifth contest, he wanted to prove he should stay on the ice.
Early in the second period of a home game against the Bruins at Gila River Arena on Oct. 17, 2015, a scrum developed behind the Coyotes’ net. Vitale broke off from the group with rugged Bruins defenseman Kevan Miller and they began fighting. He absorbed a few wild right hands from Miller and then his helmet fell off. A quick right jab to the exposed left side of Vitale’s face ended the fight.
He never returned.
Vitale suffered a concussion as well as a devastating eye injury, which still hinders him more than three years later.
“I’m dealing with an eye injury that prohibits me from doing some daily activities,” Vitale said. “When I got in that fight, amongst the multiple broken bones in my face that I sustained, I’m still dealing with a vision issue. My eye dropped because the orbital floor fell and I really haven’t gotten full peripheral vision my left side yet. That’s what really kept me out of the game.
“To explain it, my left eye is about a couple of millimeters lower than my right eye. So when you go left to right really quickly, your eyes always want to see in sync and they always need to be in sync. If the left eye is seeing something at a different than the right eye, that kind of gets my head going kind of going a little kooky.”
Despite his considerable injuries, Vitale held out hope that he could resume being an NHLer, even if there were few visible signs of a complete recovery.
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“Up until I saw a doctor at Washington University in St. Louis and he said ‘Hey, we may have an issue with your eye,’” Vitale said. “That’s when he explained it. This was about a year and a half (after the injury). Up until that point, I felt that, man, you never know. I could wake up one day and just feel better, and I might come back. But when he diagnosed me with the eye injury that I have and it’s going to require surgery and surgery might not even help because of scar tissue and all the complications with it. … When he told me that, something really overwhelmed me saying that this could be it. I had already missed a year and a half, and I’m 31. I think this could be the end of the road.”
A seventh-round pick of the Penguins in 2005, he sought help for his injury from the Penguins’ first-round pick that year, Sidney Crosby. The Penguins’ captain missed parts of several seasons due to his own concussion issues.
“When I got my concussion, I saw the team doctors in Arizona, and I saw another doctor out west,” Vitale said. “Nothing was really clicking. Then it kind of dawned on me, ‘I’ll reach out to Sid.’ He gave me the contact information for the doctors, (Ted) Carrick and (Nathan) Keiser who were down in Atlanta. So I went down there for two weeks. Dr. Keiser did some really great things with my vision and my headaches. He helped me sleep a little bit better. I’d say I was about 80 percent better after seeing them.
“Sidney Crosby, (is) one of the best, not just players but just this incredible, humble, person that is compassionate that cares about you as a person as well.”
Vitale, now 33, finished the season on long-term injured reserve then had his contract traded to the Red Wings during the 2016 NHL Draft in a transaction designed to alleviate the Coyotes of some payroll. Officially, he retired as a member of the Red Wings despite having never suited up for that organization.
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What followed was lots of downtime and sleepless nights in his hometown of St. Louis.
And bread baking.
“Part of my concussion is I became a ‘narcolep,’” Vitale said. “I was up all night. I never slept more than two-hour stretches at a time. So I’d be up at 1 a.m., looking up at the ceiling. I needed something that was going to keep me really busy in the middle of the night where I’m not going to wake up my kids and my wife. For some reason, life really took me to this. I’m mixing water and flour, and I’m cultivating yeast, and I’m making it into bread. It was a weird scientific but also this organic, hands-on hobby of mine. It just really took over my life in some ways.
“It helped me from a mental standpoint. You learn to start forgetting about your problems and my headaches and all this other kind of stuff. I started giving bread away to people who really lifted me up. It gave me a sense of community. It was a sense of therapy for me as much as a hobby.”
Vitale went so far as to take some classes on baking bread in San Francisco and nearly pursued it as a new vocation.
“I came home, and I started giving it away to family and friends,” he said. “People were like, ‘This bread is amazing, can I get more?’ Then restaurants started calling and saying, ‘We want to sell your bread.’ I was like, ‘Light bulb, I can make some money.’ So I started doing that, and I started making some money. I actually opened a little wholesale bakery where I was like making bread out of my house and selling it to these restaurants.
“Having no idea where this would go, it was just something that was preoccupying my mind. I was actually really close to starting a couple of projects with some local chefs in St. Louis like a bakery sandwich shop. They were very close to making a pretty significant financial investment into starting this thing.”
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Before that happened, the door to the hockey world opened back up.
“Out of nowhere, I got a call from the Blues,” Vitale said. “Chris Kerber wanted to sit down and have lunch with me. I asked what it was about. He said, ‘Well, Kelly Chase, after 18 years, is stepping down as the radio color analyst. We’re starting to interview people and your name came up being from St. Louis and recently removed from the league.’”
“Being that the job hadn’t opened up in 18 years, I just kind of felt obligated that a search needed to feel and be as complete as it could be,” said Kerber, the Blues’ play-by-play radio broadcaster, as well as vice president of broadcasting and content development. “Not necessarily just tap the next guy on the shoulder. … I just wanted to make sure I didn’t leave any stones unturned.”
Why was Vitale an option to the Blues? He never played for the organization and didn’t have a particularly distinguised NHL career.
“We sat down for about a two-hour lunch,” said Kerber. “He was well prepared. He had a resume and all of that. Very well put together. But what really jumped out at me in that in that initial interview quite frankly was more of the questions that he asked. It wasn’t ‘what does the job pay?’ or ‘I can’t wait to get back and travel again.’ It was, ‘what does the job entail? What kind of work goes into being a good broadcaster? How do you actually do the job?’”
Kerber granted Vitale an audition last summer with the two of them calling a mock broadcast of a period from a game during the 2017-18 season in the broadcast booth of Enterprise Center.
“He sent me a text a day or two before the audition period,” Vitale said. “He said, ‘We’re doing the Minnesota Wild game from earlier (last) season.’ So then I hop online, and I would look at the Minnesota roster, and I would look at the Blues roster at the time. Basically how you would prepare for a game now and I prepared for that game as if it was live. We went up in the Enterprise Center in St. Louis, went to the very top in the broadcast booth. They had a huge big screen set up with the game in the first period. They actually had the noise and the fans chanting. It was kind of a cool set-up where you kind of felt like it was a live game. Chris just pretty much just ran with the play-by-play, and I just jumped in with the color. I had never done anything like this before.”
Among the six people who auditioned for the role, Vitale was the closest removed from being an active player. The fact that the players on the ice were more or less his peers gave him an advantage over an older player from a different era.
Former Penguins center Joe Vitale is in his first season as radio color analyst with the Blues. He was recruited by play-by-play broadcaster Chris Kerber (right). (Scott Rovak/St. Louis Blues)
“In that period, I remember Devan Dubnyk, I played with Devan. I played with Paul Stastny, I grew up with Paul. So many of these players, I played with or against and I think was giving some different nuances to the game that maybe other people couldn’t really give because they never play against (the current players),” Vitale said. “I made a comment about Miiko Koivu’s faceoffs, ‘He’s heavy on the draw. He’s got that heavy stick. It doesn’t have that very hard flex. If you’re going to beat him, you’ve got to beat him quick.’ Comments like kind of stood out because of me being so recent to the game.”
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“He goes into the locker room and there’s people that he played with,” Kerber said. “We just played the Coyotes (Tuesday). There’s some great relationships there. Now, (older players turned broadcasters) like Darren Pang and Joe Michelleti and Jim Fox and all the other really good ones, they have found a way to continue relationships with the players even though they haven’t played for in 15, 20, 25, 30 years. That’s the great challenge and that’s what separates I think a great broadcaster from a just good one. Joey has some of those relationships with current guys just naturally since he had just retired.
“One of the things that also has played a role here is he is bringing the perspective of having just come off the ice. So, when you have younger listeners that are playing the game and growing up in the game today, the game he is describing and how he is looking at it is how the game is played and coached today and I think that relates to the listeners along those lines. It’s been a very positive adjustment and a different point of view that without a doubt freshened up the broadcast.”
Vitale also offers the viewpoint of being a Blues fan and not so much a Blues player. Having grown up in St. Louis and idolinzing Brett Hull, he offers a kinship with an audience that has endured over 50 years of futile pursuits of the Stanley Cup.
“When I got this job, I was sitting on the porch with my wife,” Vitale said. “We were splitting a bottle of wine. We just got the kids to bed. It was about 6 o’clock in the evening, a nice August evening. I had people driving by my house. I had no idea who they were, and they were honking and rolling down windows saying, ‘Congrats Joe! Let’s go Blues!’ I got more text and calls and feedback from fans, way more than when I made my NHL debut or when I scored my first NHL goal.”
Vitale’s path to the NHL out of St. Louis also appealed to Kerber.
“I love the fact that he went from high school hockey here, played all four years of high school hockey here (with Christian Brothers College high school), to college (at Northeastern),” Kerber said. “And took the college route (to the professional ranks). I just felt that, especially for a United States market, that’s a relatable path.”
There was another connection at play when Kerber formally told Vitale he had the gig.
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“While he was kind of recovering from the injury and the concussion, he started doing some work with his dad’s concrete company here in St. Louis,” Kerber said. “So when we offered him the job, I just thought it would be cool if I offered to him up in the broadcast booth of (Enterprise Center). Say, ‘Hey, how would you like this to be your office?’ The summer before … the building had gone through three years of renovations. One of the first things they did was they put in a new ice plant and then obviously had to re-do the floor. It was his dad’s company that actually did the concrete pouring. We were literally up there to offer him the job and you could see the concrete floor. I said, ‘The pour started there.’ He said, ‘I know, I worked on it.’ I went, ‘What?!?’
“He was actually one of the crews working that helped pour the concrete on the floor that is now Enterprise Center.”
Vitale has approached this job much the same way he did as a fourth-line center who regularly had to battle to stay in the NHL.
“(Television play-by-play announcer) John Kelly was out on the trip to Los Angeles (when there was no local television broadcast),” Kerber said. “Joey asked John to sit in on the broadcast booth, put the headset on and take notes and critique how he was doing it. Then a couple of weeks later at the morning skate in Columbus, those two sat down for 40 minutes and went over the notes that John had for him.”
Vitale even sought advice from national voices in other sports.
“He knew someone that had the connection with Joe Buck,” Kerber said. “He went to coffee with Joe Buck after getting the job to say, ‘What do you like in an analysist that works with you?’ You could see his commitment level there.”
One aspect of the job which caught Vitale off guard is the arduous preparation that is required.
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“I am more tired as a broadcaster than I was as a player,” he said. “You have to constantly have to be on top of what’s going on in the league. The prep work that goes into a game is almost exhausting because you have to hit every angle. You have to prepare for every single event and every single player being spotlighted. So you spend hours prepping for a game and understand every player with the understanding that you’re only probably going to use about eight percent of everything you just prepped for.”
Learning the finer points of the job is still a work in progress. Vitale is trying to find the balance between being a broadcaster and being a former player, especially when he speaks with current players. His former Penguins teammate Pascal Dupuis got into some hot water this season when he suggested on French Canadian television there was a rift between Mike Sullivan and Evgeni Malkin, as well as Phil Kessel, based on an informal conversation between the former teammates.
“When I’m talking to players, I want to talk to them like a player because I am a player,” Vitale said. “You can’t talk to them like a player all the time because you are interviewing them. I have to be careful because I don’t want to lose their trust. I don’t want to hear something they’re saying and put it out there because they trust me and they confided in me because we’re just talking hockey, we’re just one of the guys. I don’t want to abuse that trust by putting it public something that shouldn’t be public.”
“We ended up seeing the Penguins in Toronto earlier in the year,” Kerber said. “Both teams were practicing. You see Joe go over and chat with Sidney and some of his other teammates. A couple of his old other teammates were asking Joe about Oskar Sundqvist. Then they were talking to Joe about what they thought of Oskar Sundqvist. Then here you have Sundqvist having a terrific season. And it goes in line with what some of those Penguins players said this kid could be. The guy that brought that insight to the table is Joe and he did that because he had relationships with some of the current guys.”
Vitale will be in Pittsburgh Saturday to call a game against his former team. He called the Penguins-Blues game in St. Louis on Dec. 29. He’s been in PPG Paints Arena plenty of times and even sat in the press box as an occasional healthy scratch.
His first game as a radio broadcaster in Pittsburgh will carry special significance.
“I’m from St. Louis, but I’m truly known around here as a Pittsburgh Penguin,” he said. “That’s the greatest sum of my NHL career was my years in Pittsburgh. I feel like a Pittsburgh Penguin. Everyone knows me in St. Louis as a Pittsburgh Penguin.”
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Having found a rewarding post-hockey existence back in hockey, Vitale realizes there is a unique responsibility to this role, particularly as a native of St. Louis.
“I was that fan, I still am that fan,” he said. “Now, to think you’re a part of that. I remember listening to games, listening Chris Kerber or Dan McLaughlin or Jack Buck, all these great names across St. Louis with the Cardinals or the Blues. You recognize the game and you recognize the sports team with the voice of who brought it to you. I approach my job very seriously for that reason because I don’t remember necessarily who Mark McGwire was playing when he broke the (single-season home run) record. But I never forget Joe Buck, his call on the home run.
“Those kind of memories, it jolts you where you think that you can be a part of someone’s memory, you can be a part of history.”
(Top photo: Brian Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images)