by Ron MacLean
Despite that one unbreakable habit, Stuartt was a great watchdog and companion. She loved to snuggle close between Cari and me. We had her for almost fifteen years, and then, as old dogs do, she got very sick. The most merciful thing to do was put her down. Cari made the appointment.
On her final day, November 25, 2003, I wrapped my dear old friend in her favourite blanket, picked her up and carried her outside. Before we got into the car, I held her face up to feel the warmth of the winter sun. I stroked her ears reassuringly and she licked my cheek. I sang softly to her an Edwin song that I’d first heard at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia: “It feels so good to breathe the air, another spin around the sun … Let’s find a star, a star to call our own and make a wish, maybe we can make it home …”
We stayed there for a long time, taking one last spin around the sun.
17
BLUE CHIFFON
We were in our little house that overlooked Dundas Valley until 1992, and then we sold it because the one-hour commute to Toronto was getting to us and we’d got a good deal on a house in Oakville. We bought it for under $500,000, although it was worth more.
In April 1991, for game one of the playoff series between L.A. and Edmonton, Don and I cooked up a slapstick routine in which Don dressed up like a gay pimp. We thought it was hilarious. There is a bit of a history to it. This faux interview stemmed from a remark Wayne Gretzky made the previous year on Roy Firestone’s ESPN television show Up Close. Wayne said that if the game were going to grow in the United States, we might have to eradicate fighting in hockey. And Grapes was upset at that, but it’s not easy to tug on Superman’s cape, so he used this pimp bit to respond.
On April 18, we were live at ice level at the Forum in L.A., just ahead of the Kings game. I had a hand-held mic and I was “interviewing” Grapes. He was wearing a fitted black jacket, with his signature big-collared white shirt and a black and white polka dot tie, a black fedora ringed with a white band, huge sunglasses and a large gold ring. A pirate earring dangled from his left earlobe.
In a soft voice and with a discernible lisp, Don began, “I’m out here and I’ve been reading the papers, and I can see how people say they really don’t want fighting here. And I can see that—the hot weather, the people, I can see why we shouldn’t have hockey here with fights.” He played with his tie and started waving his hands around. “Yeah. I can see that.”
I could see the Kings coming down the hallway toward us, ready to step onto the ice. Playing it straight, I said, “You want to talk about any of the players involved in this classic?”
Don gave a delighted little jump. “Yes! I want to first of all talk about Kelly Hrudey. Here comes Kelly right now. Here’s Kelly. He’s coming in right now.” As Kelly walked past, Don pointed to the blue headband covering Kelly’s mullet that stuck out from beneath his helmet. “I love the little blue string that hangs from the back, don’t you? I love him. You can see the little string there. I think it’s blue chiffon.”
At this point, it was all I could do not to break up. “What’s with the earring on the left side?” I asked.
Don lifted his hand to his ear and gently held the earring up to the camera. “Well, when it’s on the left side, that means I’m available. And not only that, hockey without violence is like a … silver ballet.”
I said, “Who are you pickin’?”
Don erased that idea with his hand in the air. “I’m not picking. Let the best team win.” He looked at me and chided, “Why keep score?”
Alan Clark, the head of CBC Sports, was in Victoria. He was not happy with us. Alan’s nose would get purple when he got mad. Some of us get flushed, but the blood from his face channelled to his nose. The darker the purple, the madder he was. He saw the skit, and he and Ron Harrison, who was now the executive director of CBC Sports, boarded a plane to Los Angeles. We had planned to plant Don in the crowd for the next game. Grapes had rightly predicted the winners for six of the first eight series and for game two of the L.A.–Edmonton series. In order to brag about it, he was planning to sit in the crowd with a sign that said, “Cherry picks 6 of 8 first-round series!” And then, when the camera shot the sign, he would lower it to reveal himself holding it. But when Alan showed up, we gassed that plan. Alan told us to stop goofing around, and get serious.
I would tell the pimp story sometimes during a speaking gig, and I would always end with this joke: “When they saw the segment, head office sent us a fax asking, ‘What kind of drugs are you guys on out there?’ I went to find Don Cherry to tell him that we were in trouble, and found him in a hot tub with ten gorgeous California blonds … all really good guys.”
As a rule, the gay community has always gone to bat for Don, and if I objected to his shenanigans, we got emails and calls from the community telling me to mind my own business. They understood that Don has good command of camp, and what he does is no more offensive than La Cage aux Folles.
Don’s “silver ballet” crack was inspired by the hot water he got into in 1990 when he did a Sports Select lottery commercial, in which he’s running hockey drills and accuses a player of dogging it by saying, “What do ya think this is, a ballet practice?” The Royal Winnipeg Ballet invited him out for a lesson to shine a little sun on their upcoming season. He was good about it. We showed clips on HNIC, and my punchline at the end of Coach’s Corner was, “Until now, the closest you’d come to The Nutcracker was blocking shots in Hershey.” It was a little bit risqué. Alan’s nose held only a hint of purple when he heard it.
I was now making six figures, and Cari was still working for the Town of Oakville and making good money—we were doing well. But a watershed moment for me, financially, came in 1994 when Don Cherry went in and demanded to be paid what he was worth, which was over the half-million-dollar mark. I had been thinking of asking for a raise when my contract was up. It wasn’t like he and I were in lockstep. Neither of us was aware of what the other had done.
I knew that Don was dealing with a really nice guy, Jim Byrd, from Newfoundland. Jim was vice-president of English television networks at the CBC. He had been very good to Don, and he was good to me, too. He had our backs.
When Grapes and I went to Nagano to cover the 1998 Olympics, Don had a terrible cold he couldn’t shake. He was sick as a dog. We were seconds from going on air on February 21 when we started discussing Jean-Luc Brassard, a French-Canadian freestyle skier who’d won gold in 1994 at Lillehammer. Brassard had carried the flag at the opening ceremonies in Nagano, and then failed to win the gold medal the following day. He said that carrying the flag the night before the race had affected his performance.
I told Don this and that there was a storm brewing back home in Canada because Suzanne Tremblay, a member of the Bloc Québécois, had lashed out at the Canadian Olympic Association for having too many Canadian flags at the athlete’s village. She said they caused the Quebec competitors so much distress that they underperformed.
Suddenly, whack! We were on the air and Grapes went ballistic. He said Brassard was some French guy, some skier that nobody knows about, who cried because he didn’t win. And he said Quebec nationalists “don’t like the Canadian flag, but they want our money. We bail them out. I’ve never seen such a bunch of whiners in my life.”
Byrd began getting all kinds of calls from the press and members of Parliament, trying to find out if Don was going to be fired. Byrd feared that if the matter were left in the hands of Ottawa, the momentum to do something to Don would steamroll. He told head office, “Put out a press release and say it’s not CBC policy and it doesn’t mean that we agree with him, but we respect Don Cherry’s right to say these things. That’s what we hire him for.”
There was a great write-up in an American paper about it. The article said that you had to love Don Cherry’s CBC Olympic coverage because while most critics are woodpeckers, he carried a sledgehammer.
Two months later, Bell Canada, who had been sponsoring us for the past two seasons, pulled their ads f
rom Coach’s Corner during our broadcasts in Quebec. The next September, Bell announced they would no longer be sponsoring Coach’s Corner at all. They said they had done focus groups with some of their customers and found that some Ontario customers were also unhappy. Canadian Airlines stepped in and sponsored us instead.
I was at an event the night Bell announced they were pulling out, and Jim Byrd pulled me aside and said, “Ron, don’t even worry yourself about it. I’ve got it under control.” And that was it. He was an upstanding guy and a great leader.
I’m not into the concept of “stars,” but Byrd supported the idea that CBC should build recognizable personalities to represent the network. There were so many channels coming on stream at that time, so the CBC decided to sell Rick Mercer, Peter Mansbridge, Don Cherry and me, among others, because the network needed stronger identification than just its content. It was all part of a plan to make the CBC more personal to the public. Each year, our late-spring launch usually opened with a big fanfare and a video, but that year we opened with our on-air people all across the country, both local and national, introduced onstage, one at a time.
And that recognition is how I got to a higher level of salary. Whereas, my thinking was, “You’re going to get the best out of me, and I don’t need fame. So if you want me, this is what it’s going to cost you.”
In 1994, I started negotiating with Alan Clark. Labatt had just come on as our title sponsor, taking over from Molson. I handled my own negotiations. I had kind of an understanding of what players make and about market royalties. I’d read various reports of what different radio personalities were making around the country. For instance, I’d read that the average salary of on-air talent at CKNW was $300,000. I assumed that if CKNW, a local radio station, was paying $300,000, surely to God CBC television, on a national level, could afford at least that.
Alan and I met about it while I was anchoring the Commonwealth Games in Victoria in August 1994. He brought a bottle of wine to my hotel room and we sat down. I asked for a salary of $400,000. I picked the number out of the clear blue sky. I was totally talking out of my hat and was nervous to be asking for that kind of money.
Alan said, “Well, Ron, the president of CBC doesn’t make that kind of money.”
“Well, do you think the president of the Edmonton Oilers makes what Wayne makes?” I replied. I wasn’t comparing my talents with Gretzky’s, but that was the parallel. I really didn’t care about the figure. I did care that the CBC thought I was worth it. It felt like Monopoly money. I was going to throw out a number, and if they fired me out the door, I’d had a good run. I expanded on my reasoning. “Labatt is buying Ron and Don. It’s easier for CBC to go in to the advertiser and say, ‘Would you like to have Ron and Don and Hockey Night in Canada?’ than to say, ‘Would you like to have some guys they never heard of and Hockey Night in Canada?”
It was a simple argument. We had unscientific data to back it up. We’d been getting a lot of street feedback. Another thing that shored up my case was that, during a seminar we’d had at the start of the season, a senior producer for NBC named Glenn Adamo, who was now in charge of broadcasting with the NHL, came to speak to us. Glenn said, “Coach’s Corner is a rather interesting phenomenon. Hockey Night in Canada is the only property in all of sports television where the ratings go up [during the] intermission.”
I had noticed that whoever hosted Hockey Night in Canada became famous by default. The show gave you that. So a chicken-and-egg argument could be made. Alan could have said, “You’re only famous because you’re on Hockey Night in Canada.” The other thing I thought he might do was give me hell again for something we had done toward the end of the playoffs between the Rangers and the Canucks that year. Don and I were in Vancouver, and we were getting a little punchy. Try drinking light beers sixty nights in a row after games during the playoffs. Trust me, it puts hair on your chest. It led us to say something impolitic.
There were three big issues in the news. Americans were fighting with British Columbia over fishing rights to Coho salmon in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which is the outlet to the Pacific Ocean for the Georgia Strait and Puget Sound. B.C. fishermen were catching the salmon returning to Alaska, and United States fishermen were catching salmon as the fish made their way through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Both countries blamed each other for depleted stocks and endangering the fish. Between 1992 and 1998, they were not able to reach an agreement on it. At the same time, there was a spat going on off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland between Canada and the Portuguese about overfishing of turbot. While all this was happening, there was outrage and controversy over a human-rights story in which a war veteran, Lieutenant-Colonel Pritam Singh Jauhal, tried to enter the Royal Canadian Legion in Vancouver with five other Sikhs for a Remembrance Day celebration, and they were forbidden to do so because they wore turbans. The Legion rules did not allow headgear. They do now.
Bob Cole, Don and I were all at a morning skate, talking about the turbot situation, and, being a wise guy, I said, “Well, I asked Don about the turbot and he said he didn’t mind that the Mounties were wearing them, but no way they allow them in the Legions.” They rolled their eyes, and nothing else was said.
During Coach’s Corner, I squeezed it in. “One last thing—what about the turbot?”
Don replied, “Well, I don’t mind the Mounties wearing them, but there’s no way they should have to have them in the Legions.”
We have such an understanding of each other that I knew he’d jump on the set-up line like a dog on a bone. We were being raunchy and belligerent. I knew it would cause trouble. I’m not proud of it. It’s a silly joke, but every so often you just get in a mood.
Alan’s nose was blinking when he talked to us after the show. He said, “Don! It’s the sixth game of the Stanley Cup finals! This is the best series we’ve had in twenty years, and are you telling me you can’t find something in that hockey game to talk about? Instead, you have to talk about the Legion turban policy?”
“Nope, there was nothing more important to me, Alan,” Don replied. Poor Alan. We always tormented him because he was such a sweet man and he wanted so much for us to behave. That just seemed to make us worse. Grapes was really happy that Alan, who was usually unflappable, was so mad. He loved it. Don would never do a thing to hurt Alan Clark, but when he thought it was harmless, he would have fun.
I thought maybe Alan might bring that incident up in my salary negotiation. Instead, he agreed to the money. I was stunned.
The first time Don and I got into political hot water over the Middle East was also in 1991. During the first war in the Persian Gulf, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney sent Canadian troops over to support the Americans in the war.
That year, the NHL All-Star Game was in Chicago. Chicago is always amazingly patriotic. During the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” everybody held these sparklers and cheered throughout. Everywhere you looked, you saw a celebration of America.
We were back in Chicago a week later, on January 26, 1991, to cover a game between the Leafs and the Hawks. Just before we started Coach’s Corner at Chicago Stadium, Grapes pulled out this enormous Canadian flag and draped it over our little travelling set. He stood there, looking like General Patton. “You know, Ron,” he said, “just a little something before we get rolling here. Just have to say, Brian Mulroney, me boy, you’ve ticked me off with a couple of things you done. You said you’re going to get rid of the GST. It hasn’t happened, I don’t know how come. But I have to say, Brian, you’re coming up absolutely roses right now with me, and I’ll tell you why. You’re the only guy that would have the nerve to stand up and send our military over there to help the Americans. Who do you think is going to be there in a time of need for us? It’s the USA. The whole world depends on them. Oh no, the big old left-wing communist media in Canada … everybody’s giving them a hard time for fighting over there. Where is it they’re fighting again? Lower Slabovia or something, but they’re doing a great job. The
Americans are our friends, and you always stand by your friends. Brian Mulroney, thumbs up in my books. All right. What’s next?”
I said, “Geez, Don, I don’t know if a hockey game is the best place to be espousing our views on the war.” Why I would say that, I don’t know. I guess I wanted to get him going. But he let it ride and we continued with the show.
When we got back to Toronto, we got called onto the carpet at head office for having talked about the war.
Alan Clark’s nose was a new shade of purple. He said, “Geez, you guys. It’s not whether we agree or disagree with what you said, Don, but this is Hockey Night in Canada! It really isn’t the forum to be talking about the war. The board of directors are upset, everybody is upset. That wasn’t premeditated, was it?”
And Don said, “No. Hell, Alan, of course not. I always travel with a 100-foot Canadian flag stuffed in my pocket. Believe me, it’s not easy.”
But the war was a taboo subject. A conversation in March of 2003 about the American invasion in Iraq almost got us both fired. We had an unbelievable Coach’s Corner. It is still so unpopular with the CBC that it has been stripped from the website. I must have had a death wish.
When I was in my forties, I became interested in political science. I read everything I could get my hands on—Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Anne Wortham and many others. My favourite writer, former Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham, had asked, “Why would you attack Iraq unless they have attacked you?” He said you couldn’t go on hearsay about weapons of mass destruction. You needed conclusive proof. I thought he was right. The events of 9/11 forced us to step back and wonder about our world. And when the U.S. broke the rule of law and walked into Iraq, searching for “weapons of mass destruction,” I saw an opportunity. I thought it was too important to let pass.