Cornered

by Ron MacLean

  Wayne’s brother-in-law Kip, Brett Hull, Rob Blake and I went to a house party an hour north of Oslo. It was about 3 a.m. and we were walking around the neighbourhood with our hosts while they introduced us to their friends, calling us the “NHL people from Canada.” Brett Hull was the life of the party and the last man standing. He was great. I really enjoyed everyone’s company that night.

  We headed for Stockholm for our next broadcast, and I decided I’d had enough partying. I was going to pull myself together so I’d be ready for the rest of the shows. I took it easy on the Friday night, and on Saturday we did the broadcast. After the show, we were at the bar again. I headed off to get Bob Cole a rum and Coke, and a beer for me. Bob is a very interesting drinker. He would drink an entire tumbler in two gulps—shooting half, pausing for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then shooting the other half.

  Bob had a lot of wisdom. His stories were fascinating, and he was a good sounding board. He always had time for me in my young career. During my rookie year I’d done a Friday night game for CHCH, and Bob said, “Don’t change a thing.” That’s all he said, and it meant a lot.

  Mark Messier had captained the Stanley Cup winners in two different cities, Edmonton and New York, which no one had ever done before. Wayne had tried to win a Cup in Los Angeles, but he couldn’t get it done. While we were on the road, I asked Messier, “Do you think Wayne envies the fact that you were able to win in New York?” He was quite angry with me for even hinting at that idea. He said, “No, no! We’re family. There would never be an element of jealousy in all that.”

  That night in Stockholm, as I returned to our table with Bob’s rum, Messier was sitting at a little cocktail table with two drop-dead beautiful blondes. The girls said, “Hello, Ron!”

  I said, “Oh, you must be from Canada.”

  They both started laughing. “No, Ron, you were partying at our house in Oslo two nights ago!” Mark Messier smiled. “Every man for himself, right, Ron?”

  The players started to get sick of the media, but I think I started to build a bit of a rapport, which was cool.

  Before we left for Europe, I had been doing some professional reffing for the Colonial Hockey League, which had teams in Ontario, Michigan, Ohio and New York, and I was reffing for the Ontario Hockey Association (OHA) at the Junior A, B and C levels. It was complicated to referee in two different organizations. I’d send the OHA a list of eight dates per month, which left six for me to work in the Colonial league. Depending on the year, I’d ref fifty to seventy-five nights. On top of my HNIC job, it got a little insane.

  When I returned home from the trip to Europe with the Ninety-Niners, I quit professional refereeing. I just couldn’t keep up with the schedule. I knew I was going to miss it. I had some interesting and rewarding experiences in the Ontario system. When I first moved there, I officiated a game between the Newmarket Hurricanes and Richmond Hill Dynes. Everybody came to see the game—there was a full house. It was a rough game, fast and furious. Richmond Hill was known to have a pretty fiery team, and pretty fiery fans, too. Six players were ejected for fighting in the second period. In the third period, with twelve minutes to go, a brawl broke out between the fans and the players. I looked up and saw fans spilling into the players’ bench, fists flying. Jamie Macoun’s dad, Charlie, a director and general manager of the Newmarket franchise, was standing behind the glass. Charlie ran everything. He paid the refs, organized the 50/50 draws, and recruited the PA announcers. I went over and said, “Charlie, I’m going to have to call this game because it looks like deep trouble. In fact, we’ve got to bring in the police.” Charlie said, “We’re fighting for a playoff spot, and if you call the game, we’ll still have to finish it at one time or another.” People were getting hurt, so I called the game and called the police, who showed up but said they were not in the business of policing hockey games.

  The crowd was in shock. Calling a game was unheard of. Later, the OHA said, “Ron, what the hell were you doing? You can’t call a game. It’s a black mark for hockey.” I wrote a letter back explaining that you have to have security at the benches if you’re going to have those kinds of wild nights. I was judge and jury that night, but there were no hard feelings. Afterward, Charlie and I went out for a beer.

  Don Cherry would have killed me for calling off a game like that. He would have looked at it as a black eye for the OHA. I don’t think he ever knew about it. I reffed a goalie who used to say to me all the time, “You know, you should listen to Don more. You really should.”

  One time when I was reffing a game, the crowd got out of hand before it started. We were in Port Colborne, Ontario, which is a half-hour south of St. Catharines, right on the northern shore of Lake Erie. I was the head referee. A veteran official named Steve Stasiuk was one of my linesmen. We were going into a playoff game and could hear bedlam in the arena as we got dressed. It sounded like a riot.

  Someone started pounding on our door, and Steve got up and locked it. We could hear the person shouting, “Ron, Ron, you’ve got to get out here, there’s a fight in the pre-game skate! There’s a war going on out here.”

  Steve calmly continued to get ready. He said, “Awww, don’t worry about it, Ron. They’ll settle it.”

  And by the time we’d finished lacing up and opened the door, sure enough, the donnybrook had subsided. As we walked toward the rink, one of the coaches came up to me and said, “Nothing here, Ron. There was nothing going on here.”

  19

  WITH A CHERRY ON TOP

  The first Stanley Cup final I worked on was in 1987. I received a last-minute request to speak at the NHL’s Stanley Cup luncheon on Tuesday May 19. It was a real honour. I had never done anything like that before, and certainly not in front of a thousand people paying $50 a plate and with the entire Toronto media in attendance. I only had a little over a day to prepare. I got up and told my jokes and got a few friendly barbs in return. For instance, when I introduced Scott Morrison, who was president of the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association, he said, “Ron was born in Red Deer, but his parents moved to Calgary. He found them two years later.” But the next day, I got carved in the newspapers. They said I was horrible. John Short wrote a column for the Edmonton Journal and said that I “tried hard to impress [my] new bosses at Hockey Night in Canada.” He called it embarrassing and said, “No luncheon could have been long enough to give MacLean time for all the stroking he directed at his bosses.

  “When MacLean aimed a couple of verbal barbs at [Edmonton Oiler president and general manager Glen] Sather, Sather fired back, ‘Where’s Dave Hodge?’ Nobody laughed because Sather was right on. Not kind, but right on.”

  At the morning skate, Don pulled me aside and said, “Look, Ron, those guys were just gunning for you. You were just great up there.” He was very good to me, and he said something else that day that resonated. It was something along the lines of “it’s hard to be a prophet in your hometown.” He got it from the gospel of Matthew. I tucked it away.

  Grapes says that, in Canada, we build people up, and when they reach the top, we tear them down. This really bugs him. Me? I don’t usually care. Refereeing was the greatest experience for thickening the skin. I knew there were times when my decisions would be unpopular. I knew there were times when I would be wrong. I knew that things happen fast and you can’t be perfect. I was conditioned to understand that we all say and do stupid things, the media included.

  Don was kind. I appreciated his remark, but I honestly didn’t care one way or another what they said. And I told him that. Don replied, “Ron, bums don’t care.” It was an expression his mom had used.

  I thought, “There is a part of me that is like that.” I don’t sweat it. I really don’t. You have no control over respect. Lots of people earn respect, and then it goes away. It’s one of those qualities I love and admire, but I don’t trust it. I knew I wasn’t great, I knew I wasn’t horrendous. I was a twenty-six-year-old doing the best I could. I didn’t overthink it by any stretch
.

  I can recall only one time where open criticism from the media got to me. Larry and Willy were a morning team on a Vancouver radio station. (They are now at JACK-FM Vancouver.) In 1992, they did a song parody called “He’s a Crotch-watcher.” It was to the tune of the O’Kaysions’ 1968 hit “(I’m a) Girl Watcher”: “He’s a crotchwatcher, he’s a crotchwatcher, Don Cherry’s thighs … my, oh my.” You get the drift. That one hurt. I’ve never had an easy ride in Vancouver. But I think it was a good thing, because it put the period on the end of the sentence for me. After that, I was able to tune out criticism altogether. I can’t recall ever being upset at anything like it since.

  That is the kind of guy Grapes is. He will always, always go to bat for the underdog. I did an opening for the Toronto Maple Leafs during my first season. I used the phrase “the hapless Leafs” because they had just lost about four in a row. Don looked at me and said, “The hapless Leafs, Ron? You don’t kick them when they’re down. Kick them when they’re up!”

  I learned from Grapes early on that it’s important to bring something that no one else has. And he will protect this information like a Cerberean hound at the gates of Hades.

  On December 10, 1988, while playing for the New York Rangers, Guy Lafleur broke a bone in his left foot. He was hit by a Bruins shot midway through the second period. We got the news early in the third. I said, “Wow, we have to hurry upstairs to report that for the sportscast.”

  Don said, “Bullshit. I found it out. I’m telling that story.”

  I said, “Don, people aren’t tuning in to Coach’s Corner to find out if people are injured. We don’t do news bulletins.” But I couldn’t talk him out of it. It was his story and, like all of us, anytime he was on, he wanted it to be interesting. And if he didn’t have something interesting, he wasn’t afraid to hang me out to dry.

  In 1994, the New York Rangers had just beaten Vancouver in a big, big Stanley Cup final. It was the most watched hockey series ever. We had time left after game seven, so we asked Don to come on at the end to help us wrap.

  He said, “I have nothing. I have nothing to say. What am I supposed to say? You’ve been on for half an hour kissing up to the guys. I don’t want to be on, gushing like all you other guys. You have nothing to say, but you’re blabbering anyway about how wonderful everything is. Keep me off.”

  I said, “How about you talk about the fans? You’ve had a lot of interaction and feedback here.”

  He said, “All right, I’ll do that. Leave that for me.”

  Then, at the last minute, unannounced, they brought Arthur Griffiths, the owner of the Vancouver Canucks, into the studio. So what the hell was I supposed to talk to him about? I had to talk to him about how the fans had been great during the run. Meanwhile, Grapes was in this little washroom in the studio. He always hides. He doesn’t want to see the players because he has too many enemies.

  I was desperate to fill time, and Grapes had his head around the washroom door, watching me do the interview with Griffiths. He was in my eye line, and he gave me a look that said, “Don’t you mention the fans.”

  I knew this, but I was stuck. I didn’t know what else to ask Griffiths. So I asked about the Vancouver fan support. That sealed my fate. No way was Don going to come on now. I finished with Griffiths, and I threw to Bob Cole and Harry for their final thoughts, but they were not available. It was going to be me for two full minutes. We went to a commercial, and I begged him, “Don, come on, you’ve got to help me out.”

  “And talk about what? The fans? Forget it.”

  I filled the two minutes without him, bluffing something that was brutal. We finished up and I was hot, really mad at him for leaving me out there. There was a pail of iced beers in the room, and Grapes was passing them out to everybody. He was smiling and joking because he hadn’t had to make a fool of himself.

  He said, “Ron, aren’t you having one?”

  I continued packing my stuff. I wouldn’t even look up at him. I said, “No, because I have to do the NHL awards show open tomorrow morning.” (I was scheduled to tape the opening with actor Leslie Nielsen.) I added, “Some of us actually work, you know.”

  Don said, “Here! Have one!” And he fired a beer at me at about a thousand miles an hour from about five feet. I downed two and called it a night.

  Don always seems to run into the guys he’s ripped. In 1996, at the World Cup of Hockey, Canada was leading 2–1 with less than five minutes to play. Claude Lemieux came from the right wing down into the left corner in his own zone, and shot the puck around to the right point—a giveaway. Don climbed all over him. He said there was no way Claude should have done that, and he just ripped him. The next morning, we were at the airport and there was only one other person in the Air Canada lounge. Claude Lemieux. But he was cordial.

  And Don had a funny night in Vancouver with Donald Brashear in 2000. It was not long after Marty McSorley had taken Brashear out from behind with a stick to the head with three seconds left in a game between the Canucks and the Bruins. Don said, “[Brashear] ridicules an old warrior—I’m not saying what Marty did was right—it was wrong … [but it happened] because he ridiculed Marty. You don’t do that … if he hadn’t ridiculed him, it wouldn’t have happened.”

  A couple of games later, when we were back in Vancouver, Brashear walked into the studio. He was not dressed for the game that night because he was still out from the McSorley hit. He laid into Grapes, and Grapes challenged him. “What do you want to do about it?”

  Brashear said, “What am I gonna do? Hit an old man? You’re nuts!” And he left. Grapes started down the hall after him, yelling, “Yeah, just like you ran on McSorley!”

  During the 2010 playoffs, Grapes was pretty hard on Dan Carcillo of the Flyers. Before game one of the final in Philadelphia, we walked down a hallway in the arena and there was Carcillo, riding a stationary bike. I thought, “Uh-oh, here we go. Dan’s going to say something snarky to Don for all the criticism.” But it was the opposite. He was kind—”Hey Grapes, how’s it going?”

  Later, Don came to me and said, “Can you believe that? I was hoping he’d say something nasty, and I was ready. Instead, he charmed me to death. I feel really bad now.” From that day on, he never said a bad word about Carcillo.

  Then there was Matt Cooke of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Grapes had carved him for a dirty knee-on-knee hit against Erik Cole of the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2009 playoffs. Cooke came up to Grapes in the bowels of the RBC Center in Carolina and said, “You had a lot to say on television. I wonder if you’ll say it to my face.” And Grapes said, “You’re damn right I’ll say it to your face!” They stood face to face, and Grapes said, “You’re a chickenshit, back-stabbing, no good rat! There! What do you want to do about it?”

  I don’t have a quick temper, but it’s a bad one. When I go, I go. Grapes says the only time he remembers me going wild was after a 1989 Coach’s Corner. We’d just been discussing a Calgary–Montreal game during the final, and Don was wearing this red coat he had been given. I defended a Flames player, and he said to me, “You should be wearing this Calgary Flames jacket, you being from Red River, you’re such a Calgary Flames fan.”

  I know I was probably too sensitive about it, but when we got off the air, I said, “You can’t say that! That’s very unprofessional. Now everyone is going to think that I am a Flames fan, and that does me no favours. I have to be impartial, I’m a sports journalist.”

  Don said, “What’re you talking about? Everyone knows I’m in the Bruins’ corner.”

  I was such a jerk about it. I said, “It’s different, Don, you belonged to the team. Ah, what does it matter, you’ll be off TV in two years anyhow.” I don’t know why I picked two years. Just wishful thinking, I guess.

  He loved that, of course. I learned it the hard way. The more defensive I got, the happier he became.

  Meanwhile, back in Red Deer, Garnett Eastcott, who was the father of a kid I’d grown up with named Kenny Eastcott, sent City of
Red Deer souvenirs along with a note to Don saying, “Look, Don, I know you’re just having some fun with Ron, but just like in Kingston, we have a proud hockey heritage. We in Red Deer have the Rustlers and a history of talented players. We’d appreciate it if you’d get the name straight. It’s Red Deer, not Red River.”

  I presented the souvenirs and the note to Don on the next Coach’s Corner. Even though he thought my remark about him being off TV in two years was funny, inside he was also mad and hurt. He just looked at me deadpan and that made the whole thing fall flat. Don was a grump for the next three shows, which didn’t improve my quality of life. But he wrote Garnett Eastcott back and said, “Garnett, my boy, you’re right. I was just having some fun with Ron, but from now on it will be Red Dear.”

  20

  I’M SICK OF YOUR THEORIES

  Despite his tough exterior, Don is soft-hearted. He reminds me of my mother that way. We’ll be walking along and there’ll be a dead bird on the road, and he’ll start singing that old hymn, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall.” And he’s very well read, with an unbelievable knowledge of trivia.

  In 1996, I was refereeing a hockey game in Streetsville, which is a little community within the city of Mississauga, Ontario, when a guy came into the officials’ room to make small talk before the game. He started talking about Don Cherry’s wife. He said, “Rose is really sick.”

  I said, “Oh, no. She had breast cancer three years ago, but I think everything is good now.” And he kind of looked at me as if to say, “My God, Ron doesn’t know.” And just like that, I knew.

  The signs were everywhere. I mean, they should have clunked me over the head earlier. Don was mentioning Rose more, and was fanatical about wearing the rose in his lapel. When we were on the road, I’d watch from my hotel window as he’d go for long early-morning walks by himself.