‘”He had no fear. He had a tremendous amount of knowledge and he wasn’t just a hockey guy,” former Hockey Night in Canada producer John Shannon said by phone Friday from Toronto. “The key thing for all of us, and I say this tongue-in-cheek, was he could speak Canadian but be American. He knew our strengths and weaknesses, never a time you felt he didn’t know what we were all about, but he could still give us an American perspective and that was ever-so-important. He did an outstanding job with that. He was so fair. Those of us that read him on a regular basis always knew that.”‘