Where are they now: Islanders radio broadcaster Barry Landers

Barry Landers is 82 and living in North Carolina now, but those are mere details.

He still follows the Islanders, still reads Newsday, still spins yarns from the early 1970s about life on the road with the Long Island Ducks of the Eastern League.

You can take the Long Island announcer out of the Island, but you can’t take the Island out of the announcer.

“It was an exciting time,” Landers said of his long run in metropolitan-area sports, notably from 1981-97 as the Islanders’ radio play-by-play man, including the last three of their four Stanley Cup-winning seasons. “The Islanders years were fun.”

Landers was one of the soundtracks of that era.

“For Barry to go 17 years, it was an incredible run,” said Chris King, current holder of the radio job. “When I was home [as a young fan], it was Jiggs McDonald [on television]. When I was going to the games, it was Barry in the car. Those are my mentors, my idols.”

The unique bond that radio announcers have with listeners made that Landers’ preferred platform. “Radio really makes you describe the scene,” he said. “I always enjoyed that . . . It was just my predilection.”

The only problem is that often the radio crew does not get the preferred view, something never more evident than in one of Landers’ most memorable games. It was the Easter Epic of April 18-19, 1987, a thriller at the Capital Centre that the Islanders won, 3-2, in Game 7 of a first-round series against the Capitals.

Pat LaFontaine won it at 8:47 of the fourth overtime.

Problem was that with so many national media outlets on hand, Landers found himself with one of the worst seats in the house for the game-winner.

“We were visiting radio, so we’re lowest on the totem pole,” he said. “Instead of sitting at center ice, they stuck us in the end zone, in the seats, to call the game. They gave us a little TV monitor and a little table, and that was it.

“I made a good call on [the winning goal], but I was lucky, because it was at the far end of the ice. I couldn’t see the numbers or anything . . . Your worst fear is you’re going to blow that call.”

The game ended at 1:58 a.m. By the time the team flew back to Long Island, Sunday morning had dawned. Landers was too fired up to consider sleep. So he put on his softball clothes, headed to Commack Middle School and made it to practice for his Dix Hills Jewish Center team at 9 a.m.

Landers grew up in the Bronx, attended City College, went to Ohio State for a graduate degree in broadcasting and landed an internship at WCBS radio in New York.

His first full-time job was at WGLI in Babylon. “I went out for this job interview [in 1966] from the Bronx to Babylon, and I had never been further than Jones Beach on Long Island,” he said. “Babylon was like the end of the world.”

He got the job and soon found himself doing Mets pregame and postgame and later calling games for the Ducks, who played at Long Island Arena in Commack.

The former got him thrown into a celebratory shower by Jerry Grote and others after the Mets clinched the NL East title in 1969. The latter was a crash course in both hockey and colorful characters, including famed tough guy John Brophy.

“It was like working on [the movie] ‘Slap Shot,’ ” Landers said. “These guys were off the wall . . . They were crazy.”

Landers still was living in the Bronx at the time. For road trips, he would travel to the foot of the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the team bus would pick him up on its way from Commack.

He had another memorable hockey gig for the New York Golden Blades of the WHA, a team that was broke early in the ’73-74 season and was asked to leave its Madison Square Garden home. Landers was owed several thousand dollars by the team at the time. He finally got a paycheck on a Friday afternoon and made a mad dash across Manhattan to the team’s bank just before it closed at 3 p.m.

“I begged [the guard] to let me in,” Landers said. “I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to cash this check.’ The team folded the next day.”

Landers was around the Islanders in the mid-to-late 1970s as a radio reporter, including for their first Cup in 1980.

In 1980-81, the Islanders were simulcasting their TV coverage on radio. Some fans complained about that, and as an experiment, the team had Landers and Jean Potvin provide a radio-only broadcast.

“We did that, they liked it and they said, ‘Let’s continue to do that,’ ” Landers said.

“The first word that comes to mind is just ‘passion,’ passion for the game, passion for the broadcast,” King said of Landers. “I think that’s the biggest thing I learned from Barry was to have that energy level, the excitement level, how genuinely thrilled he was to go on the air each and every night.”

Landers stayed busy after leaving the Islanders’ job in ’97, including starting a production company that covered hundreds of high school games on Long Island.

He retired in the mid-2010s and split time between Long Island and Chapel Hill, near where his eldest son, Doug, attended Duke and where his younger son and daughter now live. He has five grandchildren.

Landers and his wife, Susan, sold their home in Dix Hills three years ago, but he still makes regular trips back to the Island and sees the Islanders play when they visit the Hurricanes in Raleigh.

He gets a better view there than the one he had at the Cap Centre.

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.