By Jay Teitel
Sportsnet magazine
If Don Cherry were King Lear, this October—the month of “pukes, hypocrites and turncoats”—would be Act V, the Catastrophe, and the end would be nigh for the deluded monarch. Like Lear at his most tragic, Cherry has faced slings and arrows before, but never ones he couldn’t dodge or deflect. But this time feels different. Not only was his now-notorious Coach’s Corner rant, which zeroed in on a trio of ex-NHL enforcers, met with near-universal condemnation, but his unprecedented apology (in the old days he would have winked his way out of it without breaking a sweat) elicited mainly thunderous silence. And this reaction has come not only from the true-blue rock ’em sock ’em hockey fans who always loved Cherry, but from the “pinko liberal” hockey fans who may have loved him more. No one, it seems, is in the mood to forgive Grapes this time—least of all the CBC, which has emphatically distanced itself from his opinions, and may be wondering about renewing his contract next season.
But as an amateur historian who thought George W. Bush’s war on Iraq was a terrible idea once told me, “Still, if your friend gets into a bar fight and he’s in the wrong, are you just gonna leave him there on his own to get beat up?” The amateur historian was Don Cherry, which is why I’m going to take a shot at defending him now. I’m not going to defend what he said; who could? It was poisonous and unsubtle, loutish and, not least, inaccurate. What I plan to defend is what he didn’t say.
Because it’s possible, if you listen closely to the way Cherry’s tone changes during that ill-starred Coach’s Corner—from braying drone to the sound of genuine injury—to hear a subtext. And that subtext is spoken not by a parody of an autocratic blowhard, but by a complex, sensitive everyman who has a large capacity for self-deprecation, a wicked sense of humour, and something invaluable to say about loyalty to comrades, and human fragility.
It just got lost somewhere in translation.
In the past 20 years, I’ve interviewed Don Cherry twice—not a huge total, except that those two times accounted for some nine hours of conversation in all. The first interview took place in the early 1990s, when Cherry was still in the first flush of being Grapes, when his dog Blue was still as famous as he was, and when his suits were outlandishly sharp (they’d later become outdatedly sharp, and then just weird). I met him in the early morning at his hotel, and we drove in his car to Kingston, Ont., his hometown. We went first to his parents’ home, the house he’d grown up in; we took off our shoes at the front door, and then adjourned to the kitchen where his mother made us breakfast, and he immediately turned into a very polite, sheepish 14-year-old. When I mentioned to Mrs. Cherry that, being Jewish, I unfortunately couldn’t eat the bacon that came with the eggs, she said, “That’s all right. Don’ll eat it for you.” (He did.) From the Cherry household, we took a ferry to Wolfe Island in the St. Lawrence to visit Cherry’s cottage; Blue took advantage of the trip over to try to take a bite out of my foot—if I hadn’t been wearing a pair of steel-toed hiking boots, I’d still be limping. In the cottage, Cherry told me how he’d grown up surrounded by books, how his father had walked into the house every day, lit up a pipe, sat down in his chair and read. Lately, he said, he was into James Clavell, the Asian Saga series of books. He also told me that what he admired most about Bobby Orr, who’d played for him during the Boston Bruins 1970s golden era, was how he never celebrated after he scored a goal, he just put his head down and skated back to the blueline. After one particularly brilliant goal on which Orr had made an opposing defenceman look foolish, Cherry said, Phil Esposito had come up to hug him, and Orr had literally pushed him away. “He’d embarrassed the defenceman enough with the goal. He didn’t need to embarrass him more by celebrating.” At this point Cherry jumped up suddenly, concerned I’d miss my train back to Toronto, which his mother had admonished him not to let me do. He got me to the station with a half hour to spare.
Special magazine trial offer: Sign up for four FREE issues of Sportsnet magazine and get a discounted price on a subscription. Satisfaction guaranteed. Order now!
The second time I interviewed him was some 15 years later, in 2005, in his home in Mississauga, Ont., where he lived with his second wife, Luba. (Rose, his first wife, died of breast cancer in 1997.) I took my shoes off there, too—it was during this interview that he told me his 49th-parallel theory about the practice: Canadians take their shoes off coming into a house, Americans don’t. By this time, Cherry had become a national lightning rod. On the one hand, he’d just been voted onto the ballot for the CBC’s Greatest Canadian contest (he ended up finishing 7th, behind Lester B. Pearson and in front of John A. Macdonald). On the other hand, a comment he’d made about French Canadian players and visors had recently triggered an investigation by the federal official languages commissioner, and a seven-second delay on Hockey Night in Canada. But what struck me most, sitting in his living room, listening to him tell stories, were two disparate things: one, James Clavell’s historical fiction was just a diversion; he’d been reading actual histories about Sir Francis Drake since the early ’60s, and was now probably one of the premier experts on that 16th-century explorer outside of a university. And two, he was more intuitively sensitive to hockey (or any sport) than anyone I’d ever met. “I’m not saying there aren’t people who know more about hockey than I do,” he told me. “I don’t know the stats, I can’t pronounce the names right, and other people can explain the technical aspects better than I can. But no one knows hockey better than me. What I see is what the people are feeling. The players, the coaches, the guy who runs the parking lot, everyone. That’s why I notice things that sometimes other people don’t.”
It was true then, and it’s true now. To sit down for five minutes of one-on-one with Cherry is to know that at the heart of most of his crankiest, wackiest and most offensive diatribes is a subtle response that goes way beyond the knee-jerk politics of “pinkos” and “pukes.” Everything is acutely personal with Cherry, and on that level he vibrates like a precision tuning fork. When he said of his “intellectual” hockey-fan detractors, “A lot of them love me, you know,” he was right—even though lately a lot of them might disagree. (“Was a time Don could provoke a reaction from me almost every Saturday night,” says Sportsnet 590 The Fan’s Bob McCown. “Now I mostly dismiss him as a lunatic and ignore 99 percent of his rants. I don’t know. Is that love?”)
The iconic hockey analyst when I was growing up in the ’60s was Howie Meeker. Meeker’s antenna was technical; Cherry’s is emotional (not sentimental, he saves that for politics) and largely tuned to the feelings of people he thinks are being wronged. The result is a kind of weird gallantry. Witness his complaint about Sidney Crosby, which started when Crosby was a junior and, in Cherry’s view, unnecessarily humiliated an opposing goalie (whose parents were in the stands, a critical point) by scoring a trick goal from behind the net, with the score in the game already lopsided in Crosby’s team’s favour. Witness Cherry’s perennial campaign to discourage graduating junior players from personally attending the NHL draft, to avoid the devastating possibility of being the last candidate left alone and undrafted in the stands. Witness his indignation at a series of suggestive ads that ran a few years ago, aimed at overbearing hockey parents (made of course, by “pinko left-wing ad agencies in Vancouver”), not because they were suggestive, but because they were hurting the majority of right-minded hockey parents. “I understand what the intent is, but they don’t know what they’re doing…They’re hurting people…Because after a while you wonder, what kind of a monster am I? I don’t do anything like that at the arena. But the term hockey parent has become a dirty word.”
Witness his assessment of the practice adult officials have at kids’ hockey games (by his own calculation, Cherry watches more hockey of all age brackets than anyone else in the world) of sending all players to the bench when another is lying on the ice with a possibly serious injury. “I know why they do it, but it’s a mistake. You never send everyone off when a kid gets hurt, everyone’s too afraid already. You find the captain, or better still, a couple of guys to stay out there and to hold his hand. Because he’s all alone.”
Witness, yes, Cherry’s rant against Stu Grimson et al. on Coach’s Corner. As wrong-headed as it was, I’m 99 percent convinced that at the core of it, he was responding to an instinct that someone in the equation, the down-and-out party—probably the fighters of today’s game—were being wronged. Wronged, and more, threatened with extinction, which must resonate ominously for Cherry.
Fighting in hockey, it should be obvious now to anyone, is a dead man walking. The speed of the change has been dizzying, but inevitable. The NHL is currently tying itself into knots trying to get head shots and concussions out of the game (with senior VP of player safety Brendan Shanahan teetering from saviour to sacrificial lamb), and what is fighting but head shots and concussions? The paradox was underscored recently when Pittsburgh’s Arron Asham, a veteran enforcer, knocked out Washington Capitals rookie (and non-enforcer) Jay Beagle with a single punch, and the uproar it inspired was not because someone had just suffered a possibly career-ending injury, but because Asham had made a classless gesture of triumph afterwards. Even in the NHL, collective insanity can’t last forever. And Don Cherry knows it. It’s no accident that his commendation of Asham for apologizing immediately for his crass pantomime had a hollow ring to it, or that it followed on the heels of Cherry’s own apology. “It takes a big man to apologize in front of two million people,” he said of Asham, a transparent pat on his own back, and less than his finest moment.
The problem is that so few people have a chance to sit down with Cherry anymore—figuratively or literally—and hear him tell stories. (During our 2005 conversation, he told me I was the first writer he’d ever asked to come to his home for an interview.) Where he was once irreverent, now he’s increasingly strident. Where the suits were once costumes, now they’re straitjackets. (Even as early as that 2005 interview, he refused to be photographed for any article in anything but a Don Cherry suit.) Mostly now we see the dark, unfunny side, the side that always distinguished Cherry from his closest American equivalent, the now-retired John Madden. As King Lear found out, even when you have a clever fool as a sidekick (Ron MacLean, anyone?), it isn’t easy to back down from being a demagogue. But this is one left-wing bleeding heart who hopes that Don Cherry can figure out how to do just that—to rediscover the self-effacing humour and cockeyed timing that made him not a pontificating hockey-head or even the Great Canadian, but just Grapes, an original character with something unique to tell us.
The other legacy that looms now isn’t just sad; it’s not right.