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
The racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia and assorted other hatreds were just the ingredients. It was the cynicism that baked the cake.
WHAT do I have in common with francophones, Sidney Crosby and David Suzuki?
Well, like other great swaths of the nation, some famous, the rest of us faceless, we’ve been attacked by Don Cherry, who has been gone from Hockey Night in Canada for a few seasons now and not soon enough.
The first rule of comedy is never punch down, which is just one reason why Don Cherry could never remotely be as funny as he imagined himself. Was he punching up at Sidney Crosby when No. 87 was lighting it up in Rimouski at age 17? No, he was just taking cheap shots at a kid with no platform to respond from. Was he punching up at David Suzuki when calling the scientist “a kook” for trying raise climate change awareness and pushing for policy change? No, he was just name-calling as if he were still on the playground. Was he punching up when he knocked francophones, European players in general, Russians in particular, or immigrants to Canada? No, you could claim he was an anachronism, a crazy, hateful, paleo-racist uncle, or, alternatively, you could claim he was ahead of his time, a portent of the anti-woke know-nothings who prove their supposed patriotism by inflaming, menacing and, yeah, parking Peterbilts in no-standing zones. (I’d go with both.)
Of course, it’s impossible to punch up if you believe that no one stands above you. Such conceit is ridiculous, but that doesn’t make it funny.
Cherry tried to inoculate himself against criticism by offering blanket immunity to the military and law enforcement. You want to challenge something he said? Be prepared, he’d use a dying child as a human shield. Can’t hit a guy waving a flag.
Give the devil his due: It was a great act, a sideshow that made him millions, and he suckered everyone who wanted a piece of the action. He squeezed every last drop out of the lemon.
I’m going to revisit the time Don Cherry went after me on Coach’s Corner. Set the Wayback Machine to the spring of 1996, Sherman.
I was writing a column for the Globe and Mail and scrambling for fodder on a slow news day. I seized the opportunity to write off an incident that went down a couple of nights before and details were only surfacing after the fact.
It started with something with Ashbury Park Press reporter Kisha Ciabattari asking Phil Esposito, then the GM in Tampa Bay, for comment after his Lightning lost a playoff game in Philly. Things went sideways in a hurry.
Esposito went off on Ciabattari in a way that caused a sorry scene The tirade discomforted onlookers and Ciabattari doubtlessly felt threatened.
Ciabattari didn’t include any detail from the incident when she filed her story to the Press, but a writer with the Tampa Bay Times did and Esposito and the NHL had a big, fat mess on their hands. Gary Bettman pressed Esposito to issue an apology and fined him ten grand to keep up appearances. Maybe the story would have been overtaken in the news cycle, but Cherry gave it a second life, when he defended Esposito on Coach’s Corner.
(Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that all the Bruins who played for Cherry are among those he offers the aforementioned blanket immunity. If you’re one of those ‘Broons, you were always “a good guy, my kinda guy” and ditto for vets who played with Cherry on Eddie Shore’s team in Springfield, anyone born in Kingston and every tough guy whose concussions given and concussions taken were appropriated without complaint for Rock’em Sock’em videos. )
Of course, Cherry ratcheted up his sermon from the bully pulpit—he’d always avail himself of a blowtorch for a job a match could do. He went on to argue that women reporters had no place entering a NHL dressing room with the rest of the media herd after games. If you didn’t know better, you’d have figure he was reading a script from a Harold Ballard biopic.
Yeah, with stuff like this to work with, it doesn’t take courage to take the moral high ground.
In the column that I filed I gently criticized Cherry for sticking up for Esposito and I tried to poke gently, as is my want. As Larry Murphy noted, my jabs were always so discreet and subtle, they didn’t start to hurt until you read a second or third time, which is to say that I suspected Cherry would miss it entirely. Below the headline and the regrettable headshot, the column excerpted appears in italic.
It’s the hope of the women who work in the puck press that they will be looked on as hockey journalists and not as women hockey journalists, that they will not be marginalized nor patronized because of their gender. This was the subject of Cherry's second dissertation about the growing diversity of this long-time Canadian-male bastion.
Cherry despaired about the now-celebrated case of Kisha Ciabattari, a reporter with The Ashbury Park Press. Ciabattari was on the wrong end of a profane tirade from Tampa Bay general manager Phil Esposito. The uncouth clod was opting for a form of intimidation one step below bench-jockeying. Clearly Espo never learned that thoughtful observations, like Dallas GM Bob Gainey is prone to provide, or natural displays of class and courtesy, like those of Jean Beliveau, are far more intimidating than four-letter words.
Invoking Esposito's on-ice credentials, Cherry launched a vague defence of the GM's actions and put the complainant on trial. He questioned the propriety of women working in hockey dressing rooms. Cherry's thinking was as lamentably dated as his wardrobe.
A lot of women work the hockey beat in the United States, although few Canadian papers have taken the initiative. (And where are they on HNIC? In the truck and in the make-up room?)
I'd bet a pay cheque that [Ciabattari and other women hockey reporters] work harder at their beats than do a lot of their male counterparts.
And later in the column I compared Cherry’s defence of Esposito to mind-boggling comments made by Bob Ringma, then a sitting Member of Parliament for the Reform Party. Just a week or two before, the otherwise obscure MP told a reporter that store owners should be free to move gay and black people "to the back of the shop", or even fire them, if their mere presence offended a customer, i.e., a bigot like himself.
It's remarkable that Cherry can still get his plot twisted over the issue of a woman's right to work in the dressing rooms. Like Reform MP Bob Ringma, Cherry would put those who offend the (in)sensitivities of Esposito and other misogynists in the back of the shop, which in hockey is the hallway outside the dressing rooms.
And there I thought it would end. Reader, it did not.
FAST-FORWARD to Coach’s Corner the night my column appeared. Ron MacLean, Cherry’s sidekick, raised my column and rather mount another defence of Esposito, the Donald went ad hominem. Yes, I was his punching bag.
I couldn’t track down any video of the segment, so I’ll have to reconstruct it in part here.
“Gare Joyce in the Globe and Mail criticized you for defending Phil,” MacLean said.
Cherry affected an effeminate voice and manner.
“Gare? What type of name is Gare?” he said, channelling his inner Charles Nelson Reilly.
(Brief aside: Would we really need to hear Cherry’s spirited defence of James Reimer’s shunning Pride etc.)
“He called you a misogynist,” MacLean said.
“Whadda’s that mean?” Cherry said.
“It’s someone who fears women,” the host explained.
“Me, afraid of women? Get outta here.”
You get the general idea, Cherry’s typical cheap shots fired off as if from a Gatling gun.
From Bill Houston’s media column in the Globe and Mail
THIS bovine feces was hard enough to watch and listen to when it played out during the first intermission, but it didn’t stop there. The Canadian Press wire-service picked up the story and there it was in the morning papers. This is how it appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, but versions of it appeared in dozens of dailies across Canada.
Cherry bomb shocks viewers
9 May 1996
Winnipeg Free Press
'Troglodyte' won't apologize
TORONTO - Don Cherry was unrepentant yesterday. Not about his stand on Tampa Bay GM Phil Esposito's dressing-room rant towards a female reporter, but about calling Hockey Night in Canada host Ron MacLean a twerp on national TV. ''Do you apologize, by the way, for calling me a twerp?'' MacLean asked last night between periods of the Detroit-St. Louis game. ''No,'' Cherry replied cheerfully. ''Sometimes I call them as they are. Or is.'' Cherry's seeming defence last week of Esposito's abusive tirade - which earned the GM a fine, believed to be $10,000 - drew plenty of reaction.
The Toronto Globe and Mail printed a transcript of the MacLean-Cherry exchange last week.
MacLean, accompanied by a graphic, listed off last night some of the descriptions Cherry had garnered.
Moron. Pinhead. Blather-mouth. Bully. Vain. Crude. Troglodyte. Butcher. Misogynist. ''They can call me anything they want. I'm a good old boy,'' Cherry said.
But the bombastic commentator seemed to invite more criticism by his reaction.
First, he suggested there was a double standard in that women could criticize him but not the other way around. Advised that some of the criticism came from a male - Gare Joyce of the Globe and Mail - Cherry then appeared to make fun of the columnist's name.
And on and on it went.
I didn’t feel honoured to have joined the club. Like I laid out earlier, this wasn’t a club, so much as a legion. I was pissed off but not particularly at Don Cherry, as strange as that might sound. No, I was pissed at Ron MacLean. He had said that I had labelled Cherry a misogynist, when in fact I had branded Esposito as such. MacLean knew he was misrepresenting what I wrote. Worse, the whole thing became a clown show when he offered up the definition of misogynist as “someone who fears women.” Would MacLean really think that’s what the word means? This guy makes puns when he plays Scrabble. He works in the English language, always has.
So I actually tracked MacLean down later in the playoffs. “WTF?” I politely asked.
“It’s television,” he told me. “I think you’ll agree it was good for business.”
I threw in the towel. Not that I was looking for an apology, just an acknowledgement. That was not forthcoming and the cynicism just made me that much madder. How good for business was Cherry going after a woman reporter in particular and women reporters in general? How good for business was Cherry punching down at francophones, European players, Russian players and immigrants to Canada? Well, I can assure you it was very good for the business of Don Cherry and, by extension, very good for the business of Ron Maclean, but—shocker—did nothing for my bottom line.
I let Maclean know exactly what Esposito had said to the reporter from the Ashbury Park Press: “Why don’t you [fellate] me, [expletive deleted]?” Yup, Esposito, one of those Cherry certified as “my kind of guy.”
That got a bit of a pained shrug from Maclean, though he might have know the details before and didn’t want to be reminded.
Yeah, between all the misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and random and assorted hatreds, you’d think I was writing about ancient times.
WE all know how this turned out. In 2019 Cherry said something that was not just bad for business but toxic. Coach’s Corner got zotzed. Small mercies: The timing spared us his insights in to COVID masking during intermissions. I’d defend Cherry’s right to voice his opinions about Doug Ford and the Convoyeurs and the like—I like most don’t want to hear it during an intermission of a game.
Some people have made the case for Cherry to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Surprisingly, I’d make a case for him to be honoured with a place there—I’d suggest a plaque at the base of a men’s room urinal.
I’ll end with this small irony: We ended up moving to Kingston a couple of years back, a place Cherry hasn’t lived for decades but where he has kept property. Not everyone here is his kinda guy.
Thanks for reading along. For those paid subscribers, the original column from ‘96 and other assorted material from ‘96 is below the paywall.
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