Josh Cooper

jcooper2@tennessean.com

CALGARY, Alberta

Here's a repost of an interview I did with Terry Crisp earlier this week. Seems fitting since he's a big deal here. He coached the Flames to a Stanley Cup triumph in 1989.

Terry Crisp is a mainstay with the Predators — the team's television color analyst for 16 seasons — but this has been a trying year.

In the offseason, his wife, Sheila, fought a staph infection (she's now OK). Then he saw his broadcast partner Pete Weber, also with the franchise for 16 seasons, suffer a heart attack before a game on Feb. 6.

I had a quick chat with Crisp on Tuesday:

Seeing Pete go down must have been tough. What was that like for you?

"If it was me, I could see it. I have the hamburgers, the French fries and everything else. Pete has been on a diet and been strictly to it for almost two years. No bread, no dessert, he was doing everything properly and exercising. But he has a history in his family of it. What was going through my mind was, 'he's in the best spot he can be in right now — the hospital where he should be.' That was my saving grace. I was never so relieved as when I walked in the room and saw him sitting up."

What was it like working two games with Willy Daunic on the television broadcast?

"Willy and I had worked before and I had done years of interviews with Willy, so I knew Willy. He had done a lot of it before. It's not the same as your partner after 15 years. One thing I enjoyed with Willy was he has the same sense of humor Pete has. That covers a lot for you. But the little nuances that Pete and I had — I knew his inflection when I'm taking over. He knows in my pauses when he takes it and runs with it — all those things you do with your wife after 25 years of marriage. With Willy it was sort of not seamless, but it was neat because if you have a sense of humor, you can work with anybody, and Willy has a sense of humor."

What does the future hold for Terrance Arthur Crisp?

"I'll be 71 this May, and I love (my job) and I still feel great about it. But it's sort of one of those things that has been coming. I think about it, and you know you've got to do it down the road. But my wife had a staph infection his summer. That scared us — really scared us. And we sat and talked when she got better and said, 'things could have been worse, we're blessed, but maybe it's time we start doing things we've talked about doing.'

"And one of the things was to spend more time together, more time with our family, more time doing things we want to do and quit putting it off. We started thinking of those things. At the end of this season we're going to sit down with the organization, and maybe plan a new strategy, a different strategy.

"They've sort of agreed to it, they've been really respectful of my feelings and my wishes, and probably next year there will be a new avenue, hopefully, of Terry Crisp and the organization, and we'll see where we go from there."