Don Cherry’s done it again. Canadians are getting used to seeing the Hockey Night in Canada icon in the middle of a big nasty heap of controversy.
But the CBC isn’t as willing as Cherry’s critics to part ways with the most identifiable Canadian hockey personality of all time.
The face of CBC sports is once again in the news for all the wrong reasons, after calling former NHL enforcers Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan, and Jim Thomson “pukes, turnstiles, and hypocrites” for their views on whether or not there’s a place for fighting in the NHL.
Grimson threatened to sue Cherry, but later backed off after Cherry apologized on the air during Coach’s Corner.
As if the rest of CBC’s hockey coverage – with dull personalities such as Pierre LeBrun and an also-ran NHL general manager in Mike Millbury – isn’t already painful enough in the first place. Where does that leave Hockey Night in Canada if Cherry gets the boot?
It might come as a surprise to Canadians that in 2004 Cherry was ranked the seventh greatest Canadian of all-time in a poll by the CBC, ahead of Sir John A. Macdonald, Alexander Graham Bell, and Wayne Gretzky.
Love him or hate him, a lot of hockey fans watch Cherry on Saturday nights during Coach’s Corner. People have been doing so for close to 30 years and for many Canadians, he’s become a symbol of the game.
But in the wake of Cherry’s latest gaffe, are hockey fans really starting to imagine Saturday night hockey without Don Cherry?
The CBC has already lost major pieces of its sports heritage. First, Canada’s broadcaster lost its CFL content to rival TSN. The 2007 Grey Cup between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers was the last CFL game ever broadcasted on CBC, before making a permanent move to TSN.
Football isn’t the only thing the CBC has let slip away.
In 2008, hockey fans were forced to adjust to a life of hockey on Saturday nights without their anthem. CBC lost the rights to their iconic theme song when they failed to strike a deal with Copyright Music.
TSN and CTV didn’t hesitate to rub salt in the wound, swooping in to steal the rights of the song and making Canada’s hockey anthem their own.
To top it all off, CTV won the rights to broadcast the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. That marked the first time since 1988 that the CBC didn’t give Canadians coverage of the event. That one really hurt.
Surely, the CBC isn’t ready to cut ties with the one remaining piece of what was once such a proud tradition in sports broadcasting.
Managers at CBC knew exactly what they were getting when they extended his contract last February, despite having to answer for many of Cherry’s blunders over the year.
No one should be surprised by Cherry’s ability to put himself in hot water – he’s been doing that since he first appeared on Coach’s Corner in 1980. In 2003 Cherry struck controversy with his political views when he criticized the Canadian government for its failure to back the U.S. in the Iraq War.
Many thought the final straw would come a year later, in February of 2004. Instead, a seven- second delay was imposed on Cherry after he said most of the players who wear visors are either European or French. Although he wasn’t wrong, protests by French-Canadians forced the CBC to take action.
The point is, through so many years of controversy, the legend of Don Cherry lives on. Nothing up to this point has silenced him – why would that change now?
In Canada’s sports television landscape, the CBC has lost most of its relevance as a sports broadcaster.
It’s becoming obvious that CBC Sports sits a long way back of TSN and Rogers Communications as leading sports broadcasters in the country.
If you take away Cherry, you may as well wipe CBC Sports off the map.
The CBC says people have been tuning into Coach’s Corner for so long because of Cherry’s insight and knowledge of the game. We might not always agree with Cherry, but he’s as Canadian as maple syrup.
Hockey’s a major part of our culture in Canada and for five decades, Cherry has driven that culture.
Cherry and the CBC are meant for one another and while his spirited rants or political outbursts may cause headaches now and then, it’s hard to imagine Coach’s Corner without him.