Don Cherry hits the American press (and NBC)
From today’s LA Times:
There is something not quite right about Don Cherry.
It’s not his trademark visage — a pugnacious mug that sprouts from one of his outrageous pink-flowered sport coats and beckons: “Go ahead, take a swing. I dare you.”
It’s not his oft-uttered proclamation: “I’m a redneck.” And it’s not his matter-of-fact self-analysis: “I can go a little insane sometimes with guys who cross me.”
Rather, it has to do with what an adoring Canadian audience senses in the 73-year-old hockey analyst that perhaps he does not. Namely, his sensitivity. Oh, yes, and his vulnerability.
Eh? What? This brutish champion of hockey fights? This insulter of French Canadian and European-born players? This lout who once referred to the talented, then-long-haired Jaromir Jagr as teammate Mario Lemieux’s “daughter?”
Yes, that Don Cherry. The one a poll by the CBC network identified as the seventh-greatest Canadian of all time, ahead of Wayne Gretzky.
I’ve written before about the experiences the poet Richard Harrison and I had trying to explain Don Cherry to a group of American students. The more we tried, the less they seemed to get it. Maybe having him on NBC briefly will help a bit. The LA Times gets it, sort of. That said, I don’t think there’s a much better way of capturing Don Cherry than Richard Harrison’s poem “Coach’s Corner” from his marvelous collection Hero of the Play.