Paul McCann Talks Working Behind the Mic at Nashville Predators Games

"Thanks, Paul!"
When attending a Nashville Predators game, you can expect to hear more than 17,000 fans chant this phrase at the 19-minute mark of each period.
Speaking on Episode 179 of the Predators Official Podcast, Preds Public Address Announcer Paul McCann - the recipient of the now-famous chant - provided some insight into how the tradition came about.

"What's funny is that actually has been going on for a while]," he said. "It started out as 'Thanks, Bill,' went on to 'Thanks, Jim' and for some reason, it just took off with me. It's actually an old school thing that came from Yost Arena at the University of Michigan. A lot of our chants had their genesis in college hockey. Saturn Auto workers [would come] down here from Michigan and it kind of got started from them."
Originally from South Jersey, McCann has adopted and embraced the Nashville lifestyle after living in the Music City for what has now been several decades.
"My wife Denise and I were in the nightclub business," he said. "We were working out of Atlanta and we had the opportunity to come with a different company and had the choice to go to Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis or Nashville. Longtime Nashvillians will remember Fountain Square. There was a nightclub there that was part of a national chain of nightclubs that I went to work for spinning records, and Denise ran lights."
While being in the nightclub business for his full-time job, McCann has a background in radio, working in the industry all throughout college as well as during his time in South Jersey and Washington, D.C..
When he first moved to Nashville, he did some work with Y107 before it became The River and even helped bring along Nashville's independent radio station Lightning 100.
But his career in P.A. announcing actually began with his son's youth hockey team.
"I was just playing around and my son was playing youth hockey," he said. "I'd bring a laptop to the game and just plug it in and I would announce for them, just to have fun with them and let the kids have a little bit of fun."
From there, McCann would meet Gerry Helper, the since-retired senior vice president and advisor for the Predators.
"I kept [asking] him, 'Let me do a preseason game and I'll check it off my bucket list,'" he said. "Then in 2007, when they decided to make the change, they called me and asked me to audition. I just did my best Dave Zinkoff impersonation from the Philadelphia 76ers way back in the day and ended up getting it."
Being a P.A. announcer is a dream come true for McCann, but not without its challenges: namely, pronunciation.
Fortunately, McCann explained that NHL P.A. announcers have some resources at their disposal to help with the sometimes tricky pronunciations of certain hockey players' last names.
"Most of the P.A. announcers in the NHL, we've got a private Facebook group where we share specific difficult pronunciations and share recordings of the pronunciations with each other," McCann said. "I also sit next to the Encyclopedia of pronunciation in Pete Weber, so if I ever have a question, Pete's the first person I ask."
You can listen to McCann's full interview on Episode 179 of the Predators Official Podcast, hosted by Darren McFarland and Kara Hammer, by
[clicking here
.
And the next time you're in Smashville and you hear a booming voice call out the remaining time in the period, don't forget to shout out your appreciation.