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Jack Edwards has spent close to two decades serving as the play-by-play guy for the Boston Bruins, but plenty of fans who’ve listened to him call games over the past few years have argued it’s time for him to hang up his headset due to speech issues that have become impossible to ignore.
While he’s largely avoided discussing that topic, he’s finally broken his silence on the matter.
Edwards got his start in broadcasting in the 1980s and worked for a number of small regional outlets in New England before landing a job with ESPN in 1991. He spent more than a decade with the Worldwide Leader before shipping up to Boston to join NESN in 2005 to do play-by-play for the Boston Bruins.
Since then, Edwards has cemented himself as one of the most divisive broadcasting personalities in the NHL.
He’s an unabashed homer who is subsequently beloved by plenty of Bruins fans who appreciate his passion for their team, but that approach has also rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. In 2022, Edwards caught heat for a questionable comment about Pat Maroon’s weight, and he was also subjected to a ton of backlash for a retroactively ill-advised reaction to an injury a few years earlier).
However, even his biggest supporters have had trouble denying he’s been plagued by the increasingly noticeable speech issues that have plagued essentially every game he’s worked over the past couple of years to the point where many people are convinced he had a stroke or has been dealing with some other medical issue that’s caused him to slur and stumble over his words.
David Pastrnak with one of the worst shootout attempts you'll see 😭 pic.twitter.com/9huxKzfqE3
— Gino Hard (@GinoHard_) January 9, 2024
According to The Boston Globe, Edwards has firmly shut down that speculation while addressing those rumors, as he admitted he’s “slowing down all the time” but added there isn’t any concrete medical explanation, saying:
“I did not have some kind of accident. I do not have cancer. I don’t have dementia. I haven’t had a stroke. All of that’s been confirmed by Mass. General neurology.
They’ve done tests that seem like I’m going through some sort of science-fiction scene, but it’s really true. The images of my brain literally reveal nothing. That’s my joke with them.”
While that’s obviously good news, it still doesn’t address the fact that someone who is paid to speak for a living is having trouble translating his thoughts to words on a concerningly regular basis.
It seems like NESN is grooming former Los Angeles Kings broadcaster Alex Faust to replace Edwards at some point in the future, and while the veteran presence seems to be intent on doing his job for as long as he can, you have to wonder if the network will push him to step down sooner rather than later.