VANCOUVER — In his working life with John Garrett, play-by-play announcer John Shorthouse remembers exactly two times that his broadcast partner lost his temper.

Once was in Columbus when the tired and hungry Sportsnet crew had to wait forever for a restaurant table post-game, then forever for the server, who when finally discovered informed them that the kitchen was closed. Garrett’s complaint lasted less than a minute.

“And the second time I saw him lose it — and I’ve never been more proud and more thankful for any person in my life — was when I was in a really bad situation in an emergency room in Philadelphia,” Shorthouse recalled Tuesday. “I wasn’t getting tended to and was not in good shape, and he finally lost it and went full Papa Bear on the staff in order to get me treated. I’ll never forget that. To me, that spoke to his unfailing and unshakeable capacity to be the perfect teammate. And he wasn’t just our teammate; he was our captain.”

John Garrett was more than that. 

The legendary Vancouver Canucks television analyst was discovered Monday afternoon lifeless in his hotel room in Salt Lake City, where he had been working the first-round National Hockey League playoff series between the Utah Mammoth and Vegas Golden Knights.

The 74-year-old, who moved to a less hectic national schedule for Sportsnet from Canuck regional broadcasts three years ago, leaves behind his wife, Sharon, daughters Krista and Sarah, grandchildren and a generation of hockey fans in Vancouver whose soundtrack for games featured Garrett’s reassuring voice and folksy sense of humour.

“John was every guy,” Greg Shannon, his long-time television producer, said Tuesday after Sportsnet announced Garrett’s passing. “Put him in a room with 100 other people, and he'd be No. 99 among people that you thought would be an ex-NHL player and a nationally known broadcaster. He was the guy you chatted to pumping gas at the station, or your neighbour. He was the most humble person I've ever met. There's no bad John Garrett stories. There just isn't.”

Shorthouse’s medical crisis occurred during a road trip in 2015, when an infection from what was supposed to be a routine surgical procedure in Vancouver became gravely worse. Garrett and Sportsnet reporter-host Dan Murphy, the third amigo on Canucks broadcasts, made sure Shorthouse got treated in Philadelphia before packing him on to a flight home to Vancouver for an emergency........

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