DCHP-3

gondola

DCHP-2 (Apr 2016)

Spelling variants:
Gondola

n. — Hockey, Ontario

the broadcasting booth in the hockey arena of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Type: 3. Semantic Change — The term derives from the broadcasting booth in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, from which Foster Hewitt, a sports-reporter legend, broadcast his signature play-by-play moves for decades. The original gondola was removed in 1979 (see the quotation) after being used since 1931. Its name was later transferred to the broadcasting booth of the Air Canada Centre in Toronto, the new home of the Toronto Maple Leafs, when it was completed in 1999 (see the 2007 quotation). Despite DCHP-1's general definition, the term is apparently not used outside Toronto, yet it has cultural salience (see the 1979 and 2004 quotations).

Quotations

1951
After years of climbing 265 tiring steps to the top of Maple Leaf Gardens and then traversing a perilous catwalk down to the gondola where he does his hockey broadcasts, Foster Hewitt has decided that he wants more security to assure a longer life expectancy.
1960
[...] he took eight-year-old Bill Hewitt up to the broadcast gondola of Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens.
1965
The winter I was eleven, an uncle of mine . . . arranged for me to watch a hockey game from the gondola at Maple Leaf Gardens.
1979
A big chunk of Canada's hockey history has gone up in smoke. Broadcaster Foster Hewitt's famous gondola has been consumed in the flames of the Maple Leaf Gardens incinerator. "I can't believe it," said the veteran Toronto voice of hockey last night. "That place was home to me." Added the gravelly voiced Hewitt: "It's typical of (Gardens' president Harold) Ballard. He has no feeling, no respect for memories or for nostalgia." But Ballard, whose staff fed the 48-year-old gondola to the flames last month, shows little remorse.
1987
The broadcasting gondola in Maple Leaf Gardens looked directly down from a vertiginous height upon a sheet of bluish-white ice.
1990
Those last four words, of course, are among the most repeated in Canadian sports history. Spoken first by Foster Hewitt, they form the wellspring from which [Scott Young]\'s book flows. Hewitt virtually invented hockey play-by-play, perfected it from his \"gondola\" at Maple Leaf Gardens, then made the leap into television.
1993
Overseeing the rinkside action from the gondola is a life-sized model of the original voice of hockey across Canada, the late Foster Hewitt. The Hewitt model, hunkered behind an old-fashioned microphone, moves as it peers from end to end while calling a game. His winter coat and battered fedora, along with a 1956 hockey calendar, hang on pegs behind him. Unfortunately, the model's face doesn't look much like Hewitt's, a flaw all hockey fans will notice.
1996
In 1991, during his first visit to Maple Leaf Gardens in nine years, Hewitt told the Star's Mark Zwolinski that he was "reminiscing a bit'' as he looked up to the spot where the famous gondola, from which he and his father called games, had been. The Leafs' owner of the time, Harold Ballard, had it torn down.
2000
From the memories of NHL greats to the back roads of Saskatchewan with hockey scouts, from the gondola in Maple Leaf Gardens, to the day Babe Ruth said goodbye to baseball, it's all there this year.
2004
Historically, it was Foster Hewitt, hockey\'s grand master of the Gondola, who made the building come alive \"from coast to coast in Canada and to hockey fans in the United States\" every Saturday night. Hockey as played at Maple Leaf Gardens played a huge role in Toronto\'s cityscape and Canada\'s sporting psyche.
2007
Members from CFB Borden, 8 Wing Trenton, HMCS York and Land Force Central Area who have served in Afghanistan will watch the game from the ACC's gondola.
2015
That success did not always translate onto the field of play, and since fans cheer for the scores, and not for the fiscal results, the chief executive became the target of frustration. "My advice to him? Don't sit up in the gondola," Peddie said. "Because you'd be sitting there, talking to whoever - from John Ferguson to Ken Dryden to Brian Burke - and everyone thinks you're telling them what to do."

References