A lifelong journey home

A young Ian Furness was barely old enough to talk when his Canadian grandfather would visit their Queen Anne home and, on Saturdays, insist upon listening to the weekly Hockey Night in Canada broadcast.

His grandad, Norm Buckley, had played semipro hockey in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and taught the young Furness all about his beloved sport. Before long, Furness and his family, including his Saskatchewan-born mother, Carole, his local television anchor father, Milt, and four younger sisters, were gathering Saturdays to watch the CBC broadcasts even when his grandfather wasn’t visiting.

“It was a religious thing for us in our house,” said Furness, 59, unveiled this week as the primary host of the new Kraken Hockey Network (KHN). “It felt like it was required watching. My grandfather was a semi-pro player. My mom had been a competitive figure skater. My dad worked in TV, so we always had cable in our house and could pick up the CBC affiliate as far back as I can remember.

“Every Saturday at 5 p.m. sharp we’d be in front of the TV watching either Toronto or Montreal play. Sometimes they’d also show Vancouver, but I was a big Montreal fan. It was back in the 1970s when they were winning all those Stanley Cups with Dryden, Cournoyer and Lafleur.”

In many ways, this Kraken role for the veteran host of The Ian Furness Show on Sports Radio 93.3 KJR was a half-century in the making. His hockey passion solidified those Saturdays listening to CBC legends Danny Gallivan, Dick Irvin, Bob Cole and Howie Meeker, eventually morphed into doing play-by-play for major junior teams throughout the Pacific Northwest and a minor pro squad in Utah starting in the 1990s and continuing more than three decades.

Only such hockey love could make Furness end his high-profile 14-year run at Fox 13 KCPQ covering the Seahawks once the Kraken came calling. He announced his football departure in late July, prompting much public speculation about what was next. Furness admits he’d struggled to stay quiet about his new hosting gig ahead of the official KHN launch, even keeping the news from his mother and sisters Megan, Alix, Stacey and Paige.

“I’ve been dying to share the news with somebody,” Furness said. “But I didn’t want to upstage the announcement. It’s been killing me because I’m so happy about this. I’ve wanted to do something NHL-related for years and I was at the point in my life where I wondered whether it would ever happen.”

Indeed, he’d devoted much of his life to hockey while waiting for the day an NHL team would arrive in town.

Furness, the Montreal fan, would phone his Toronto fan grandfather Saturday afternoons before the Hockey Night in Canada games, where they’d discuss the coming night’s matchup and “place a bet, usually for a Coke.” Afterwards, they’d break down the action of what they’d seen.

“When Ian was 6, we recorded him calling a game,” said Furness’ mother, now 87 and still living at the Magnolia home the family moved to from Queen Anne in 1975. “He just sat there as if he was actually at a game and did his imaginary broadcast.”

His mother said Furness and his grandfather “were very close” and that “Ian became obsessed about hockey” when they first began listening to the Saturday games together at age 3 or 4.

“My father explained everything to him,” she said.

His grandfather by then had moved from Saskatchewan to British Columbia, so he visited Seattle frequently.

And Furness having his own father, Milt Furness, as a local TV reporter and anchor during brief runs with KING and KIRO, then a much longer stint with KOMO, made him yearn to follow those broadcasting footsteps. Furness idolized his dad and listened closely to anything he said about his work.

“Milt would obviously be proud of Ian,” Furness’s mother said of her husband, who died in 2017 at age 84. “I remember him telling Ian that if he wanted to have a career in broadcasting, he had to pay his dues, start small and work his way up.”

And that he did.

While attending O’Dea High School, Furness worked as a busboy after classes and later would head to nearby KOMO and hang around the newsroom. After graduating from Washington State University, KOMO hired Furness to haul around equipment.

“Back then, I worked as a production assistant which meant that you carried cables and literally you carried the recorder and the umbilical cord of a news photographer,” Furness said. “Because back then it was a two-piece (camera) unit. And so, I just did a ton of grunt work because I wanted to get into TV news.”

Furness drove the station’s live news truck around for a couple of years and eventually pushed his way into KOMO’s sports department.

“You’d just sit around for about eight hours a day because I’d be waiting for us to go shoot a fire in Seattle with a live shot at 11,” Furness said. “So, I spent a lot of time in the sports office.”

Furness began writing scripts for KOMO sports anchor Bruce King.

He spent the next five years as a full-time sports producer but couldn’t get hockey off his mind.

“I mean, my dream was to do play-by-play of some sort,” he said. “I wanted to be (Hockey Night in Canada great) Bob Cole. Or (legendary Vancouver Canucks play-by-play man) Jim Robson. Robson was really great. That’s who I wanted to be.”

The Seattle Thunderbirds of the Western Hockey League in 1991-92 were on 570 KVI-AM radio and Furness – who’d started hanging around their Seattle Coliseum rink (now Climate Pledge Arena) – did voluntary pregame and intermission work with play-by-play man Rick Waltz and color analyst Dennis Beyak. But Waltz soon left to begin a longstanding baseball broadcast career and Beyak became the team’s general manager, leaving the play-by-play spot open.

“I did the play-by-play for the 1992 Memorial Cup championship game on KVI,” Furness said of the annual major junior hockey championship hosted by Seattle that season. “Because Dennis (Beyak) just said ‘Go do it’ and he did the color (commentary) for me that day. He turned the mic over to me and I did it. It probably sounded awful.”

But it was good enough that Furness – who’d “groveled and begged” for more on-air work -- was hired as the team’s full-time play-by-play announcer the following season for $100 a game.

“So, I left KOMO. I went from making about $30,000 a year to making about 10 grand – which of course, even back then you couldn’t live on,” Furness said with a chuckle. “My future wife’s salary kind of carried me.”

Furness did two seasons of Thunderbirds play-by-play before Beyak became GM of the Tri-City Americans and paid Furness “a living wage, thank God” to move to Kennewick and do TV, radio and public relations for that WHL team. One of his off-air assignments was helping lure Alaska-born future NHL star Scott Gomez to the Americans.

“I took him on a tour of all the schools in the city,” Furness said. “I left the year he started playing, but I recruited him to come to the Tri-Cities.”

Furness moved on after three seasons to do radio, TV and PR work for the Utah Grizzlies of the minor pro International Hockey League when they relocated from Denver to Salt Lake City in 1995. Over seven years, he worked closely with the team’s head coaches, including longtime former NHL players Butch Goring and Bob Bourne and ex-NHL head coach Don Hay.

From there, he took a sports radio host job for a Salt Lake City station. But hockey was never far behind. When Furness moved to Portland to join 1080 AM The Fan, he also did a handful of Portland Winterhawks games. And upon returning home to Seattle to work for 93.3 KJR in 2006, he soon did TV work for ROOT Sports and its new WHL package through 2016. And he continued to do televised Thunderbirds and Winterhawks games after that.

Furness had thought about a Kraken role when the team first arrived. In fact, when radio play-by-play announcer Everett Fitzhugh fell ill with COVID-19 at the start of the Kraken’s debut season, Furness was flown to New Jersey to work an opening road trip game against the Devils on 93.3 KJR.

Team and broadcaster kept options open from there.

Furness began immersing himself in watching TV footage of pre-and-postgame NHL studio work done by NHL teams in hopes of potentially landing a Kraken host job. And when KHN this spring pondered its first host, Furness and his local ties and extensive background seemed an obvious choice.

Furness didn’t need much convincing. He’ll keep his daily radio show while hosting the majority of KHN games – with special host Linda Cohn doing the others – and contributing to every broadcast.

Among NHL studio shows Furness studied most this summer in preparation were those from last spring’s playoffs involving Ron MacLean, long his favorite Hockey Night in Canada, host. MacLean first gained fame in the 1980s and 1990s as the witty on-air foil to the outspoken pundit Don Cherry in the show’s Coach’s Corner intermission segments.

“That was the other guy that, as time went on and I started hosting radio, I was like ‘God, I love what Ron MacLean does’,” Furness said. “Because I think he has the ability to make other people around him better. He brings out the best in all of those people.”

And Furness wants to do the same for the Kraken. Now living in Maple Valley with his wife, Tammy, their daughter, Briony, and son, Kiefer, Furness said he already tries to inspire his own children in their pursuits the way his father inspired him to get into broadcasting.

And the way his grandfather inspired him to make hockey a permanent part of his life.

“I think when I step behind that anchor desk for the first time with the Kraken, it’s going to be a pretty emotional moment, and there are two people I’ll think of,” Furness said. “I’ll think of my grandfather because he’s really the person who introduced me to hockey. And I’ll think of my father because he shaped who I wanted to be in broadcasting.

“And without those two people, none of this would ever have happened.”

The next chapter of Kraken hockey starts now, be part of it. Season Ticket Memberships are available.