It’s Bombs Away for Cherry

TORONTO —  He’s been called the “Prime Minister of Saturday Night,” “the last real Canadian” and a “national embarrassment.” His weekly TV commentary quiets bars from Halifax to Vancouver. Even his dog rated a newspaper obituary.

He is Don Cherry. Every Saturday night, between the first and second periods of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s “Hockey Night in Canada,” Cherry ascends hockey’s highest pulpit to deliver his unscripted, six-minute jeremiad. Ratings show that more people tune in to watch him than to watch the game itself.

Cherry’s “Coach’s Corner” is a bewildering stream of bombast and reminiscence, prejudice and insight. He can make or break professional careers and has preserved an old-fashioned, hard-checking style of play. For him, as for his skating flock, hockey is not simply the national pastime--it is the closest thing to a national religion, a touchstone of Canadian identity and a metaphor for life itself.

The irony of Cherry’s popularity is that, in many ways, he appears to be everything Canadians are not.

In a country famous for politeness and peace-loving civility, Cherry’s commentary bristles with belligerence. He has branded players as weasels and wimps and threatened to punch out the teeth of co-hosts with whom he did not agree.

While politicians here love to trumpet Canada’s tolerance and cultural diversity, Cherry rants against Europeans and Quebec separatists, feminists and men who aren’t manly. As a defender of all things Canadian, he remains refreshingly immune to the national inferiority complex.

And those clothes! In garish, double-breasted plaid suits with 3 1/2 inches of starched white Victorian collar, Cherry mocks the first rule of Canadian fashion, which is never call attention to yourself.

Cherry’s secret is that he’s able to tap directly into Canada’s national anxiety about losing its grip on the one big thing it used to do better than anyone else. His message: If Canada can’t dominate in hockey, what’s left?

National pride has been badly wounded from a string of losses at the Olympics, the World Cup and the World Junior Championships. The pull of American money not only has driven expansion into cities that have never seen ice or snow but now threatens to rob Canada of most of the National Hockey League teams it has left. And while nearly every NHL player was Canadian only a generation ago, the figure has fallen to 57 percent as European players have come to the fore.

“What is this, ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ or ‘Hockey Night in Russia’?” Cherry once famously asked on the air.

At 65, Cherry is Canada’s highest-paid broadcaster and a one-man conglomerate. His name is over the door of 19 restaurants nationwide; he’s a TV pitchman for soups, weed-whackers and after-shave. His “Rock’em, Sock’em” videotapes, highlighting the year’s best NHL plays, hardest checks and most raucous fights, are favorite stocking stuffers. With former Boston Bruins great Bobby Orr, Cherry owns a minor league hockey team in Mississauga, Ontario. And a weekday three-minute kibitz with longtime CBC colleague Brian Williams is Canada’s most widely syndicated radio segment.

There was, however, nothing inevitable about Cherry’s success.

Donald Stewart Cherry was born in the Depression in Kingston, Ontario, where the first games of “shinny” were said to have been played on the frozen inlets of Lake Ontario. He dropped out in the 10th grade and soon was playing defense in the bus leagues of professional hockey: Hershey, Pa.; Trois-Rivieres, Quebec; Kitchener and Sudbury, Ontario; Spokane, Wash.; Springfield, Mass.; and Rochester, N.Y. His wife, Rose, who died several years ago, described him as a “good fighter and a semi-good skater.”

Cherry proved more skilled as a coach--first at Rochester, then for five years in the NHL with the Bruins in the glory days of Orr and Phil Esposito. Although the players loved him, his sharp tongue invariably got him into trouble with team owners, who fired him after an embarrassing loss in the Stanley Cup finals. After one disastrous year behind the bench of the Colorado Rockies, it looked as if his career was finished.

Cherry debuted on “Coach’s Corner” in 1981 after the show’s producer saw him on the hockey banquet circuit. Network executives worried that Cherry’s English was so poor he might be a bad influence on schoolchildren. But as the ratings climbed, they learned to love his confused syntax and politically incorrect provocations.

Although there’s no doubt about the genuineness of Cherry’s opinions, the volume and bluster with which they are expressed are part of an act that has been finely honed over the years. In person, Cherry is shy and gentle. He spends an enormous amount of time signing autographs for the hordes of kids who swarm around him wherever he goes, and quietly visiting and phoning sick children in hospitals. He is the financial engine behind a hospice for cancer patients that he founded and named after his late wife.

In any given week, Cherry will watch 15 hockey games on his home satellite dish, calling in to the CBC whenever he sees a play he might use for the next “Coach’s Corner.” On game day, he follows the same mind-clearing routine he did as a player: steak for lunch, a nap, then two cups of coffee to get pumped for a performance once described as “uncensored by reflection or etiquette.”

Cherry has waged a counterinsurgency against “politically correct do-gooders” who would eliminate fighting from hockey. “The image of hockey as the one place where a man stood up for himself, where there was honor--that’s almost gone,” he once lamented. “Now baseball players get in more brawls.”

“Have you ever seen anyone going out for a coffee when a fight’s on?” he asked following the taping of a recent “Coach’s Corner.” “I’m not saying there should be a fight every period. But you have to have it once in a while.”

Nothing gets Cherry more riled than somebody claiming that Czech, Swedish and Russian players are more skilled than Canadians. Cherry sees the Europeans as “sissies” who can’t give or take an honest check and feign injury to draw penalties while using their sticks to hook and trip their opponents in a most unmanly fashion.

“A lot of people think he is a Little Lord Fauntleroy,” he once said of Tomas Sandstrom of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, who has since signed with a Swedish team, “but let me tell you he’s a back-stabbing, cheap-shot, mask-wearing Swede.”

Even after nearly 20 years on the air, Cherry says it’s only a matter of time before he skates over the blue line of propriety and is benched by the CBC. But even that’s part of the act.

“He’s dumb as a fox,” said Alan Clark, former CBC head of sports. “He knows exactly where the line is.”