TRUE STORY: This is Not the First Time Don Cherry Has Been Fired!
Here’s a hint to anyone aspiring to land a career somewhere in the public forum. Never preface any point with “you people.”
It surfaced last Saturday on a Sportsnet Coach’s Corner segment where Don Cherry took aim at immigrants who apparently refused to wear poppies to commemorate Canada’s war dead. After a fierce social media backlash, Cherry was fired – ironically on Remembrance Day.
Cherry has since claimed he didn’t mean what he said, and whether he’s to be believed is irrelevant from this vantage point. He’s long scored points with a reactionary audience as a loudmouth provocateur, and hardly an articulate one at that.
In print, he was barely even coherent. I should know. You see, more than 20 years ago, I fired Don Cherry.
We have to rewind back to 1996, when I left a job as an editor of Vue Weekly during the madness of its media wars with SEE Magazine. I landed at Vogel Publishing, which promised a substantially larger paycheque for editing satellite TV guides that had a North American reach. Thankfully, I never had to comb through the cumbersome channel grids that made up roughly 200 pages of those voluminous monthlies. I was given 24 pages of editorial to fill with TV highlights and features of personalities on the hottest shows. I had the pleasure of interviewing scores of celebs including William H. Macy, Tim McGraw, Jacqueline Bisset, and future U.S. senator Al Franken back when he hosted a talk show on Robert Redford’s Sundance Channel.
Don Cherry had a monthly column in the Satellite Entertainment Guide – and it was my job to go through his copy. His debut may have been in the early ‘90s when the magazine’s late publisher and founder Gerhard Vogel met the hockey legend and thought he’d be a great addition to the editorial lineup.
Editing Cherry’s material was an agonizing experience. It always came in via fax machine and was written in longhand. Translating the loopy, spotted screed as if Cherry brandished a quill pen to put thoughts to papyrus was hard enough, and probably fast-tracked my eye appointments. Once you were able to make out the words, they never made sense. I remember a few of his pieces about the glory days of the Original Six NHL franchises that would start with one tangent and end with another. Splitting sentences became an art form. Another story amounted to simply being one extraordinarily long sentence from start to finish. And if you were expecting any tirades about cheating, stick-slashing Europeans, you’d be sadly mistaken. Ditto for those Godless Ruskies. He seldom took on those topics.
Instead, Cherry would gush over the good old days, when men were men and didn’t need helmets or all that padding for protection. I do recall one piece when he fawned over the badass attributes of one high-profile goon, who loved to bash every opponent in sight. I remember having to siphon off some of the bloodlust, given that I was working on a family-oriented publication. Too bad. That was the best part.
Somewhat subliminally disturbing were frequent references to his favourite player Bobby Orr, a Boston Bruins legend that Cherry had the pleasure of coaching during his prime. The text over how graceful Orr was on the ice or how he could mix it up in the corner and “blast that puck from the point” was almost homoerotic.
Sometimes Cherry would latch onto some current topics of the time – like the New Jersey Devils, which were major league contenders that played in Cherry’s cherished Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em style. One story I remember best was his abhorrence over how teams used their farm systems to bring up younger players, only to abandon them at the height of their athletic prowess. I especially remember the wind-up when he declared, “They’re killing the goose that laid the golden eggs because the goose is the best goose of all!” I remember having to rewrite it along the lines of “What they’re doing is akin to killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Which is too bad, because they’re slaughtering the greatest goose of all.” Something like that.
Aside from letters I sent to Cherry (e-mail was still foreign to him, I guess), I never once communicated with the notorious commentator about his copy. I always saved editing it for last, often perilously close to deadline, so I didn’t bother talking to him about his material. He always sent his stories to former Edmonton Journal writer Greg Kennedy, who was my predecessor, and addressed by Cherry as “George Kennedy.”
One day around 1998 or so, Steven Vogel, who had succeeded his late father’s role as publisher, strode into my office and declared I should get rid of Cherry on grounds that his hockey-heavy content didn’t fit with the more TV-oriented editorial flow; it just didn’t resonate with an audience that included a lot of NASCAR-crazed subscribers from the American South. I felt it was a decision long overdue. Cherry’s horrendous writing didn’t help his case.
It took light-speed rattling on the keyboard to fire off that letter thanking Cherry for his contributions, and that the publication was heading into a new direction. You know, the usual B.S. dismissal letter.
Vogel Publishing heard nary a peep from readers about his absence – unlike the madness surrounding Cherry’s recent Sportsnet dismissal.
It looks like Cherry might have the last laugh, if scuttlebutt from the extreme right wing is to be believed. Rebel Media has since railed against Sportsnet’s firing of the legendary coach, naturally playing the free speech card, a tactic that’s been more than convenient for the ultra-conservative muckrakers. Rumours are rampant that Rebel might even hire Cherry – presumably as a sports contributor. In a rather perverted way, it makes sense.
