Almost seven years after his last NHL game, Chuck Kaiton is getting back behind the mic
Without fanfare or celebration, Chuck Kaiton was back on the broadcast level of the Lenovo Center a few weeks ago, giving a quick tour to a friend who was hosting him in a luxury suite. He walked past the radio booth where he spent so much time, and the faded spot on the wall where his portrait used to hang.
It wasn’t his first trip back to the arena since he and the Carolina Hurricanes parted ways after 39 years, back in the summer of 2018 — he reappeared in public, appropriately, at the team’s Whalers Night in 2023, having started his NHL career in Hartford in 1979 — but that distinctive booming voice still has not been back behind a microphone since the final game of the 2018 season.
Until this week.
Kaiton is making a brief and belated return to broadcasting Thursday, filling in on the St. Louis Blues’ radio broadcast at the Washington Capitals while their usual play-by-play man, Chris Kerber, is on bereavement leave.
Kerber called and asked the 73-year-old to come out of retirement for one night, and one night only. Kaiton, who still watches a ton of hockey on television, and hosts many of the visiting broadcasters when they’re in town for games against the Hurricanes, says his pipes are already warmed up for it.
“There’s nothing to it,” said Kaiton, the Hockey Hall of Fame’s 2004 Foster Hewitt Award winner and the 2014 North Carolina sportscaster of the year. “Come on! I’ve done it for almost 40 years. I don’t think I’m going to forget how to do it. It’s not going to be too hard. I’ve been watching all the games, with the luxury of the ESPN+ package.”
Kaiton‘s departure, over a salary dispute with then-new Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, hit him hard, especially when the Hurricanes replaced his radio call with a simulcast of the television broadcast on what is now FanDuel Sports South. He kept his distance for a while, until former general manager Don Waddell convinced Kaiton and equipment manager Skip Cunningham, two Whalers legends no longer with the franchise after spending almost 80 years combined with it, to come back for that game in 2023.
That was the right and proper thing to do for everyone concerned, and it broke the ice a little bit. He’s been back, more quietly, for a few games since. But Kaiton still misses the game, and the people, and even if he might have retired on his own terms by now, he still had the itch to get back behind a microphone when Kerber asked him to join analyst Cam Janssen in the booth at the Verizon Center.
“I really appreciated Chris reaching out and asking me to do it,” Kaiton said. “It’s very exciting to me. Let’s face it — even though I’m in my 70s, I obviously wish I was still working. Some days I do, some days I don’t, depending on the travel schedule, but I do miss the people. It’s going to be an opportunity to see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time who I really like.”
The fact that it will be in a Southeast-slash-Metropolitan Division building where he probably called 100 games offers a little bit of a comfort level that might not be there otherwise.
“I watch a lot of games. I talk to a lot of my colleagues. The job hasn’t changed,” Kaiton said. “I did a lot of visualization, knowing that arena. It’s a great place to do a game from. I know the engineer that works with me. He’s going to be shocked to see me walk in. I told them not to tell him I was coming.”
The Blues broadcast will be available on SiriusXM and streaming on the Blues’ radio rightsholder, 101espn.com, but if you were hoping for a return of Kaiton’s Korner, don’t fire off any emails about the Blues or the game of hockey in general to Chuck and the letter K quite yet. The Blues have an hour-long pregame show as well as the usual intermission and postgame programming, but Kaiton won’t have to host any of it.
“No intermissions! This is great!” Kaiton said. “I just do the game with Cam and that’s it.”
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at www.newsobserver.com/newsletters to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Almost seven years after his last NHL game, Chuck Kaiton is getting back behind the mic."
