This year marks Pierre Houde’s 50th in the broadcast business, and only twice over the course of his career has he ever missed a day of work due to illness. That’s pretty impressive when considering that Houde has called over 3,500 hockey games and 600 F1 races on the Réseau des sports (RDS) TV network, plus everything from radio shows to Olympics gigs on other media.

The first sick day was many years back calling a Habs game in Phoenix when he came down with a 24-hour flu. The second came last Sunday when he was set to comment on the Dutch Grand Prix.

“I was still ready to go on with the Phoenix game, but others felt it wouldn’t be wise to have my colleagues in the broadcast booth exposed and I agreed,” Houde, 68, recalls. “But there was no way I could do Sunday.”

No kidding. Houde was in excruciating pain, having come down with a case of shingles that took hold of the left side of his face. Talking was a major ordeal.

“I’ve called games for half a season with pneumonia. I’ve called games with a torn ligament in my knee. I’ve called games with gastro. But never anything like this. It takes a lot for me to stay at home and sit out a game.

“I’m coming along now. The shingles are going in the right direction — down. And I’m as excited as I ever have been for the start of the NHL season in October,” he says. “I have been so blessed and so appreciative in my life and career. I’ve been given such good stamina to go through such a very unusual schedule.”

This coming from someone who sleeps four, maybe five hours, a night, sometimes coming back from Boston in the wee hours and having to call an FI race from Bahrain the next morning.

“I’m taking occasional naps these days, but the way I see it is that I will sleep in the next life,” Houde is fond of saying. “And look on the bright side: I get to cover the F1 races from the RDS studios here and not from the tracks in Bahrain, after doing a hockey game in........

© Montreal Gazette