A FAN’S NOTES

Coach’s Corner Consigned to Glue Factory; Don Cherry Hoarse

I love Don Cherry. I love Don Cherry because of his one immortal moment of epic ineptness in 1979 when he mismanaged his Boston Bruins bench as time wound down in a crucial sudden-death hockey game against the Montreal Canadiens. Too many men on the ice. The Canadiens tied it during their resulting power play and went on to win that seventh and final game of the series in extra time. God bless you, Don Cherry.

Cherry is a pro hockey lifer from a different era: wool sweaters, felt pads and no helmets.  He played the game when the National Hockey League had just six teams; Cherry was skilled enough to play just one game in the NHL. His career winning percentage as a coach is mediocre and probably somewhat enhanced by the boon of Bobby Orr lacing up in his dressing room at its start. Orr’s career was winding down and he was skating on one leg but Bobby Orr was that good, otherworldly.

Canada is a winter country; hockey matters. When I was growing up there were three television channels available across the country. Two of them broadcast hockey on Saturday nights. Quebeckers watched the Canadiens on Radio-Canada and the rest of Canada watched the Toronto Maple Leafs on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC).

Cherry, a failure to date in both his capacities in the sport seemed like a good fit for HNIC. As a former Bruins coach he was something of a bad guy; as a native of Ontario, “a Kingston boy,” he was an unabashed Leafs homer in Canada’s largest television market. After HNIC threw the animated Peter Puck over the boards into the snowbank, the show presented Canadians with another cartoon, a sharply dressed, unfiltered, concussed old school buffoon. And really, nobody expected the CBC to elevate cerebral presenters such as Barbara Frum and Rex Murphy to the gondola at Maple Leaf Gardens.

And we laughed. Don Cherry was vaudeville. His Coach’s Corner segments featured an earnest and expressive straight man feeding him cues. This was satire with spittle hoarsely spraying instead of seltzer-water. This was the Royal Canadian Air Farce comedy troupe digging even deeper to be more idiotic than their HNIC lampooning “Big Bobby Clobber” sketches. This was genius, subversive, Canada’s Saturday Night Live. Cherry hated anybody who didn’t wear Toronto’s blue or Boston’s black. He hated Russians, Finns, Swedes and French Canadians but within a hockey context or so we thought; they weren’t “good Saskatchewan boys” like Gordie Howe.

But it wasn’t a joke. This was professional wrestling commentary for Sun newspaper mouth-readers. This clown was for real. Cherry didn’t embrace hockey’s “quicksilver ballet” aspect so much as its potential for high speed violence. He made a modest fortune selling Don Cherry-branded video cassettes of hockey fights. Canadian hockey fans eventually realized their insane, beer-swilling uncle had exchanged his usual table in the neighbourhood tavern for a national platform.

Cherry could have and maybe should have been fired for any number of inappropriate remarks since he first graced the airwaves in 1980. Hockey matters here in Canada, but the game is mere entertainment, a distraction. While no sports network executive in their right mind would want a bland and gray colour commentator with whom all viewers agree, Cherry’s “everyman” shtick was always grating. Through four decades it grew tired and then stale before finally devolving into the sub-moronic nadir we ignored until last Saturday night.

I can only surmise that Cherry over time deluded himself into believing he was HNIC’s main attraction and was therefore as important, and perhaps even bigger, than the game itself. Abrasive and inarticulate, Cherry suits the gaudy coat of the ignorant modern populist patriot. He can dumb down Charles Dickens for the lowest common denominator: You people may not know it but hard times were the best of times and nothing tops an economic depression or world war to inspire a homogenous community to pull together.

The arena lights had dimmed. Outside on rue Ste-Catherine jubilant Montreal Canadiens fans celebrated a miraculous, nerve-wracking, come-from-behind victory. The visiting Bruins had blown it. FUBAR! The spring of 1979 had arrived in the city but even better, the hockey team was moving on down the road toward its fourth consecutive Stanley Cup championship. Boston would fire its coach.

Goodnight, Don Cherry. At least one of your great many colossal gaffes will never be forgotten here at meGeoff. I love you. Goodbye. Godspeed.    

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