McFarlane, Brian

The son of the prolific writer Leslie McFarlane, Brian McFarlane was born in New Liskeard, Ontario on 10 August 1931, and raised in various towns and cities such as Haileybury, Whitby and Ottawa. He accepted a hockey scholarship to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. and graduated in 1955. McFarlane is perhaps best known as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada for 25 years. He made similar broadcasts on NHL games for the major American networks CBS and NBC. His contribution to hockey also includes the creation of the character Peter Puck.

McFarlane is an expert on hockey history and has written more than 50 books on the sport, many for young readers, with such publishers as McClelland and Stewart, Methuen, and Scholastic. In 1995, after a lengthy career in broadcasting and journalism, McFarlane was inducted into the media section of the Hockey Hall of Fame. McFarlane has also been admitted into the St. Lawrence University Hall of Fame, the Ontario Sports Legends Hall of Fame, the Ottawa Sports Legends Hall of Fame and the Whitby Sports Hall of Fame and. His memoirs, published by Stoddart, Toronto in 2000, are entitled Brian McFarlane's World of Hockey.

More recently, he has turned to writing the Mitchell Brothers books, a series of young adult fiction, the first volume of which was issued in 2003. McFarlane currently resides in the Toronto area. He is married to Joan Pellet, also a St. Lawrence graduate, and the couple have three children: Lauren, Brenda and Michael.

2015-06-01

A. Wilson