No. 290: DON CHERRY, RON MacLEAN & ME: Among other things, my dinner at the Coach's Corner table
Sigh, one last word before my upcoming feature.
Sportsnet wrap party at Bellagio in Vegas June 2018.
I was going to write this with a dateline of THE EYE OF THE SHITSTORM, because that’s what it feels like after typing up the Ron MacLean-Don Cherry story that appeared in the Whig-Standard last week. Your expressed thoughts and prayers were appreciated and my thanks where they apply. As for the hate mail … I tried to find something I could share, but alas I couldn’t find one that was reprintable in a family SubStack.
The Whig piece wound up spinning out of a Cherry feature that I was working on—kind of a what-Cherry-means-to-Kingston. That piece will hopefully drop tomorrow and be available nationally. My first draft of it (A) was 11,000 words—originally, I was asked for 2,500 words, 3,000 at a top end. When a first edit (B) was sent back to me, I was told to get it down to 6,000. At that point I did what those who have edited me before know I’m bound to do—I added 4,000 words and then started cutting again. The second pass I submitted was 7,400 words. There is no method to madness and if I told you the timeline you wouldn’t believe it (from A to B was ~ 36 hours). It’s on me. My editor, Deb Stokes, was supposed to be on vacation and I was ruining it for her. I owe her heaps of thanks and apologies, and none would suffice for my imposition.
I gave some peeps peeks at it and they at least said they liked it. I dunno. I was so in the weeds I don’t know what to think. It’s bad news when someone asks you what the gist of it is and you’ve got no good answer.
As a 2020 arrival to Kingston, I can’t really claim to be a Kingstonian—the qualifying residency requirements for the title are measured not in years but generations. Thus, I am regarded with suspicion around town, but with my filing of the MacLean-Cherry piece last week I have earned no small degree of enmity in the burgh. That was just a small deposit on hard feelings that are bound to issue forth with the publication of the main piece, I’m sure.
I’ve written about Cherry before on this SubStack. This entry focused on him putting the boots to me on Coach’s Corner, which goes back to 1996, back to my time at the Globe and Mail: No. 86: DON CHERRY, PART I / When the Bully Loses His Pulpit: Advice if you should run afoul of Grapes from someone who has been there (You’ll need at least a trial paid subscription to access it.)
And I include the unfortunate episode in the memoir that I’ve written for ECW (working title A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hockey Scribe). I mention this here because I worked a quick account of my dose of Grapes’s wrath into the first draft of my Whig-Standard/Postmedia feature. And then I cut it entirely. Like I said, I had no idea what the gist of my story was when I wrote it, just sort of unconsciously. Not my usual approach.
At Sportsnet in 2018 I wanted to write about MacLean and Cherry and raised the idea to MacLean—that much I lay out in the TK piece, but I won’t say anything more about that here for fear of scooping myself. My conversation with MacLean last week brought one revelation that had been unimaginable to me: that Cherry liked me. Actually, MacLean went even farther than that. These are screen grabs of the automatic transcription of our conversation recorded on my TapeACall phone app (there are phonetic mistranscriptions of a few things, including the names of Pavel Bure and Shane Churla but you’ll get the general idea:
Yeah, in the course of a night I became a “great friend” of Grapes, according to MacLean. I never suspected that at the time.
This goes back to a Sportsnet wrap party in Las Vegas during the Stanley Cup final in 2018. Late in the scramble for seats at tables on the patio the Bellagio I wound up sitting right across from MacLean and Cherry. Not like I’d bring up the Coach’s Corner deal from 1996 or his woe-is-me about the harsh treatment of his IceDogs later on. I just tried to be decent company and engage in conversation. Did I tell a story? Probably. Banter? Yup. Suck up? Never. I certainly wasn’t trying to become Cherry’s friend or anything like it, but I did feel sorry for him—in the days in the run-up to the event I’d seen that Cherry was pushing pretty hard to fulfill his obligations and he was in attendance at the event because it was required by network brass. I respected that his commitment, but damn, I didn’t know why he’d keep on going through this.
Don Cherry standing at far right. Kelly Hrudey, Nock Cypress, Ron MacLean and me kneeling.
For all the heat I’ve taken about the piece last week and for the heat bound to come with the piece that will land shortly, I feel it’s worth mentioning that I didn’t go into this intending to besmirch or insult Cherry or trap MacLean. With the latter, I ’ve identified myself as a reporter to a public figure—I mean, he knew, as I texted and asked for an interview.
I feel like I’m not just within my rights to publish what comes out of an interview but kinda obliged to do that if it reaches a level of newsworthiness. That would clearly be the case with MacLean who works in the media and knows the drill. If the subject says something is off the record or on background, I note that and observe the rules of the road, always have,
I’m sure that people will say that I was looking to take down Don Cherry with the piece last week. As I wrote in this week’s earlier post, I wasn’t looking to write about Coach’s Corner and Hockey Night in Canada when I called Ron MacLean, wasn’t fishing for a story that way at all, was going in another direction. Cherry’s most faithful followers wouldn’t be satisfied with anything short of hagiography, so they’ll find fault with Ron MacLean and me as the messenger with regard to last week’s story and the one coming up. So be it.