Jacques Doucet, the longtime voice of the Montreal Expos, died this week, and I wanted to say a few words about him.
I interviewed him 20 years ago this summer. I was an intern at a small daily paper in Washington, D.C., and I was covering a lot of Washington Nationals games that summer. During a week off between games, a few friends and I decided to visit a friend who was living in Montreal. While I was there, I decided to see if I could interview some people who had been connected to the Expos. It had been two years since the Expos left for D.C. The players had moved to D.C., but the fans, staff, and media stayed in Canada. I was curious: What happened to the people who the Expos left behind?
I’m not sure how, but I got connected with Jacques Doucet, and he agreed to an interview. He was the former French language radio voice of the Expos. He’d been the lead broadcaster for 33 seasons. For the two years before that, he covered the team as a newspaper reporter. As he told me, he was the guy who’d seen the team from the very start to the very end. When they left Canada, they left him without a job.
There was no real reason for him to make time for me. He had nothing to gain from the conversation, and all the reason in the world to be angry at anyone even remotely connected to the Nationals. And I was a 19-year-old summer intern. It would’ve been easy to have declined an interview request.
And yet: He invited me to his home, and we chatted for more than an hour. I wish I’d kept the tapes — this was long enough ago that the entire conversation was recorded on tiny cassettes in a tape recorder I’d purchased at RadioShack, and those tapes are long gone — but I remember how generous he was with his time and patient he was with my questions.
I only spent a bit of time with him, but it was so clear that he loved broadcasting, loved baseball, and loved bringing joy into the homes of so many people across Quebec. (In the years after the Expos left, he continued to broadcast baseball, even calling minor league games.)
When I think back upon that conversation, what I know now is that it’s not every day you get to talk with someone who truly loves what they do. Some people like their jobs, but I’ve only met a handful of people who truly loved theirs. That’s a rare thing in this world.
Thanks for making time for me, Jacques. I know you’ll be missed.