Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  “There they go!” Cherry would bark and above him, across from him, around him, television screens would fill with the video fists of Bob Probert and Keith Crowder. Every half-hour or so the same punchout, the same raw result—and yet each time the bar would stop dead and stare and shout as if the fight were live, the outcome unknown.

  “Who’s the toughest, Don?”

  “Pretty hard to beat Probert.”

  “Who’s your favourite player, Don?”

  “Gotta go with Neely, eh?”

  “Who’s the best you ever saw, Don?”

  “Right there.” Cherry points to the screen, where Bobby Orr skates by every half-hour or so with a grace not seen since the early 1970s. “There’s the best. I was behind the bench when he scored that goal, you know, and I got tingles down my back then and I still get tingles every time I see it. Never been anyone like Orr.”

  But now, with the coffee forcing a break in the action, the prodding has accompanied him to the washroom and Don Cherry, who is nothing if not accommodating to his fans, can take no more.

  “You think Lindros should be forced to play in Quebec?” the voice barks from behind the stall door.

  “Yeah, I do,” the young man says.

  “Well I don’t. And I happen to think he’s a hell of a fine young man, too.”

  The man is flustered. “I—”

  “Shut up. I heard you out, now you listen to me. Eric Lindros is a friend of mine, okay? Where do they get off calling him a snot and a punk and a racist and a bigot? Who the hell do those politicians think they are saying he should be dropped from the Olympic team? If someone ever said those kinds of things about a Queee-bec kid they’d take him to court. Now whaddya think about that?”

  “Okay, eh? I just thought I’d ask.”

  Moments later, Cherry is back at his coffee, stirring angrily as he recounts the story of the washroom encounter. “I tell you, the closer I get to the Quebec border, the worse it gets.”

  This being an inward-looking country with but two mad obsessions, hockey and politics, it had to happen that someday someone would come along to harness them together and, in doing so, create a brand-new power base. Don Cherry has become the Prime Minister of Saturday Night, a voice now so popular that hockey has become the only television sport where the audience goes up during intermissions.

  In Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, the fans are taping up banners calling for him to take over the country as well as the intermissions. He has even become a national figure without the grace of a second language, for it is said that between periods in the province of Quebec the channels switch by the tens of thousands from the French broadcast of the game to the English—so that no one will miss the most outrageous act on Canadian television. Bashing foreigners, spoofing gays, celebrating fighting, he is so politically incorrect it is a wonder he survives on television. Yet he not only survives, he thrives, his popularity soaring by the week.

  But is it an act? His close friends will say Don Cherry is, at heart, a fairly quiet fifty-six-year-old man with a gentle, sentimental streak who happens to go on instantly at the sight of a microphone or a potential fan, but none will say Cherry does not hold dear the wild opinions he serves up each Saturday night.

  Thirty years ago when he was an unknown player in the American Hockey League, no one had to listen to him but his wife, Rose, who now cashes in on those dues by doing headache commercials with him. To fill in time between games Cherry would go shopping with Rose, and rail all the way home about those in the grocery line he’d seen handing over food stamps for steak when he, a working stiff, could barely afford hamburger.

  If Don Cherry had never gone farther than the AHL—the scrappy defenceman did get in one game for Boston in the National Hockey League in 1955, leaving behind a career record of no goals, no assists and, more surprisingly, no penalties—no one but Rose would ever have heard about the abuse of food stamps. Nor would millions have sat by their television last winter while Cherry decided to ignore the tedious hockey game in progress and instead harangue viewers for their wimpishly feeble support for the Gulf War.

  After sixteen years in the minors, he had a nickname, “Grapes,” a wife he met in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a daughter, Cindy, a son, Timothy, and a lifetime supply of anecdotes—he likes to claim, for example, that Montreal once picked him up in a trade for two rolls of tape and a jockstrap. But he also came out of the AHL with a philosophical base, and it did not grow out of what he picked up on the ice and the bench, but what he picked out of books late at night when the game was still playing through his veins and he could not sleep.

  He has read, he claims, every book ever written on Horatio Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar. And since childhood he has carried with him an admiration for Nelson and Sir Francis Drake and the way in which they commanded loyalty from men. As effortlessly as he regales the crowd with tales of the AHL, Cherry can tell the stories of Trafalgar: Drake’s irreverence and impatience with authority, Nelson’s insistence that all the men, including his captains, write letters home before he would begin the battle. Cherry adopted this way of thinking for his own: The men around him would matter more than the men above him, loyalty would be given the highest value, and all battles were to the death.

  When he became a coach this philosophy served him magnificently with his players but invariably poisoned his relations with his superiors. A league championship in the AHL brought him to the NHL as coach of the Boston Bruins, and the great Bobby Orr, who would become Cherry’s closest friend.

  In Boston there were enough spotlights shining down that Cherry soon found one for himself. He dressed differently—at one time in suits so tight he literally could not sit down in them—and he sure talked differently: loud, controversial and colourful. He called the game his stars played “lunch-bucket hockey” and he became a minor idol of those who believe that life, like hockey, goes to those willing to grind it out in the corners.

  Cherry’s coaching career in Boston and, later, Colorado, could be described as both success and failure. He won a lot, but he lost when it mattered—and never so dramatically as during the seventh game of the 1979 Stanley Cup playoffs when he sent too many Boston players onto the ice, allowing Montreal to tie the game on a power play and then win it in overtime. He was soon through in Boston. It was a mistake he admits to, but it cost him the job he adored, and more than a dozen years later he still hated to hear it brought up—which it is, constantly.

  When the stumbling Colorado Rockies fired him, Cherry stumbled into a new career when Molson Breweries began lining him up for banquets. He was a hit and soon Ralph Mellanby, who was then producing Hockey Night in Canada, began bringing Cherry on between periods to comment and entertain. The fans instantly fell in love, but Cherry was not an easy sell in the corporate offices of the CBC, where the new commentator was instantly under fire for his characteristic mangling of the English language. Imagine the example this is setting for young viewers, they asked Mellanby, the irony never seeming to strike that while Cherry was dangling his participles the Zamboni was often icing over the blood from the previous period’s fistfights. Mellanby said he would quit himself if Cherry was dumped, and Cherry soon became a Saturday night fixture.

  When it comes to cleaning up hockey, the consensus among those who would act decisively is that, in Don Cherry, hockey has created its own monster. There are people at the highest levels of the game who despise Cherry’s persona at the same time as they like, and protect, the man. It means they will not go public with their criticism, and it means that they have accepted that his extraordinary popularity makes him untouchable. But they still wish fate had delivered hockey’s most important platform to someone with an appreciation of hockey’s troubled image.

  Cherry would argue that there is no image problem, and he can point to the fact that his thirty-minute videotape, Don Cherry’s Rock’em Sock’em Hockey, has sold more than 150,000 copies, making it the top-selling video in Canada, and two more best-selli
ng volumes have followed. There are no hot videos of Adam Oates’s greatest passes.

  “Isn’t it ironic,” Cherry says in his Nepean restaurant as Volume III of the series pounds over his head, “that when there’s 17,500 at a game—fans who have all paid, incidentally—that when there’s a fight there’s 17,250 on their feet yelling?”

  The videos and his redneck stance on hockey have made Cherry into the goons’ own protector in the hockey world, and in the world of the loud bar fan it has served only to increase his popularity. There are now thirteen such restaurants. He has a successful radio show which is syndicated to a hundred stations. He makes commercials, sometimes with his British bull terrier, Blue II, and sometimes with Rose. And he now makes far more per year than the top-paid coaches in the NHL.

  The wealth and the fame, however, have changed his lifestyle very little. The house in Mississauga is large but it contains the same two people each night, Cherry in the basement watching his television, Rose upstairs watching hers. He has no hobbies, plays neither golf nor tennis, takes no vacations. He has little to do with the various businesses but willingly contributes to charities, particularly the kidney foundation—Timothy was the recipient several years ago of a life-saving gift from his sister, Cindy.

  Cherry gets his exercise in the basement by rowing and then turns to the fifty-two-inch screen and his satellite dish, watching a minimum of fifteen games per week, sometimes including the local minor league teams on the community cable channel. He drinks three beer a night and talks to Rose on his way to and from the refrigerator and then, later, talks to his television when the news comes on. In his basement, he is prime minister every night.

  The political side of Don Cherry first began to surface at the banquets. Cherry would speak and the sessions would be thrown open to questions and soon Cherry would be discussing everything from the state of the game to the state of the country. On the hockey broadcasts he began ridiculing European hockey—“Alpo?” he once asked when the name of the Winnipeg Jets’ new Finnish minor league coach came up. “Isn’t that a dog food?”—and eventually his complaints about them coming over here and taking away jobs from good Canadian boys took him into the realm of immigration policy.

  His comments on the infamous world junior hockey championships, after the Soviets and Canadians held one of hockey’s worst brawls, took him into international affairs and, this year, his views on the Gulf War made him sound more like a war-mongering general appearing on The Journal than a former hockey coach appearing between periods of a hockey game. For a long time the view was that this was just Cherry. A bit humorous, a bit embarrassing, certainly not mainstream. But then, just as Cherry had predicted it would, the world began changing rather dramatically. His opinions began to sound more like the political philosophy of the Reform Party—or, as he would rather put it, the Reform Party began catching up to him. People began watching as much for the political tangents as for the hockey substance.

  “He has become,” says lifetime politician and hockey fan Senator Keith Davey, “the Gordon Sinclair of his generation.”

  And Cherry began to take his new role seriously. When Meech Lake died and few political commentators were aware of the “crankiness” that was sweeping the land, Cherry sat down and wrote Ontario premier David Peterson to let him know, “There’s a tinderbox out there—and you got a match.” Peterson didn’t listen.

  Cherry sees his role as speaking for the majority, not the minority, and says that Canada has gotten itself into such a mess because vocal minorities dominate and the silent majority does not fight back. “There’s nobody out there,” he says, “speaking for the people who are paying the freight, the average worker, the guys in construction and the mechanics and people like that, but me.”

  Cherry himself can claim he once worked in construction—between hockey jobs—and he certainly does talk the language of the construction site and the garage and the factory line, but he hardly looks working class. The love of fine clothes, he says, he got from his parents. His mother was a tailor at the Royal Military College in Kingston and his father, a big, handsome amateur baseball player, insisted on looking his best no matter what the occasion. From them he also got his passion for military history and two unshakable traits: “My mother insisted on honesty to a fault, and my father taught me to never, ever take a slight.”

  Both traits would make politics—certainly current Canadian politics—difficult for Cherry if he were to consider running for office, something that has often been suggested, particularly since the rise of the Reform Party, which he admits to admiring.

  “I’d be torn to shreds by the media,” he says. And he’s probably right: Journalists who today view him as a curiosity, a once-a-week entertainment, would see him far differently if he were making his pronouncements on the floor of the House of Commons instead of behind the desk he shares with Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean. Cherry would, for example, want to rewrite completely the rules for collecting unemployment insurance. He would knock the turban off the Mounties. He would put an end to metric. He would bring back the lash.

  “That’d put a quick end to guys beating up their wives and abusing children,” he says. “And I’d volunteer to do the lashing.” Cherry’s approach to politics is no different from what he brings to hockey. “I react,” he says. “I simply react. I was in hockey so long that’s all I know how to do.”

  It is, he suspects, what makes him so remarkably popular with the young bar crowd, those who, like him, have never conceded there might be a bit of grey out there between what’s black and what’s white. “I don’t know,” says Cherry, “maybe my mind never got over eighteen. I relate to guys eighteen to twenty-five.”

  He says on national television what they say in the dressing rooms and at the bar. They don’t, however, have his flair or his gift for lifting commentary off the ice so it floods the country at large. “To me,” he says when considering the competitiveness of minor hockey, “that’s just about the way Canada’s socialism goes. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter.”

  And from there, of course, it is a simple matter to leap straight into the future. “Change is coming,” he says. “People are sick and tired of it.”

  He reacts. It is bar talk on the public record, the image cast of a House of Commons where they might pump fists instead of pound desks. Pure gut reaction.

  “You know,” he says, “we never rehearse Coach’s Corner. We did it for a while but it was horseshit. Once I say something and I got to go over it again, I can’t. I think about it too much. That’s why I can’t rehearse.

  “It’s a modern miracle that I’m still on the CBC.”

  In 2011, the CBC extended seventy-seven-year-old Don Cherry’s contract through the 2011–12 season. He had long since become a Canadian icon, though an increasingly controversial one that polarized Canadians at a political and emotional level. His Coach’s Corner had become less about hockey and more about Cherry himself and his personal causes—in particular, honouring those in military service, police officers and firefighters who had fallen in the line of duty. Seen as a clown by many, as a hero by just as many, his popularity continues unabated.

  GRATOONY: THE IRREPRESSIBLE GILLES GRATTON

  (The Canadian, 1977)

  It is an empty sound, a hockey practice. Wood strikes rubber, rubber wood; the noise floats slowly up and fades into the rafters. Sitting alone in the stands you see the impact, wait for the sound. You watch as Johnny Bower kicks at pucks fired from the blueline by grown men old enough to be his children and cocky boys nearly young enough to be his grandsons. It takes but an instant for the puck to travel from the blueline to Bower’s pads, a little longer to hear the slap followed by a muffled explosion. It rings hollow.

  The Toronto Maple Leafs are working out. Bower, well into his fifties, is hanging out his life gift for all who are there to see. While many men his age have slowed to a crawl or stopped completely, Bower still has the reflexes of an active child. In the past, he
was a man who won the Vezina Trophy twice as the NHL’s best goaltender; in the present, he is a man who retired before expansion and the World Hockey Association came along to turn players’ salaries into living cells, multiplying as we watched. When Bower retired he had no riches to fall back upon; he had to find a job. The Maple Leafs found one for him as a scout and sometime practice goaltender. Today he makes his saves in the same Maple Leaf Gardens, but the glory that once filled the air is now all in the mind.

  If Bower looked behind him, back of the protective glass, he would see a young man with somewhat the air of a street punk passing by. He is Gilles Gratton, twenty-two, who plays goal for Toronto’s WHA entry, the Toros, and is on the first year of a five-year contract that will pay him $645,000. The Toros practised earlier, and Gratton is on his way to the parking lot; in his pocket, fingers play against the keys to a canary yellow Porsche 911-S Targa (value: $16,670), which was provided by the Toros free of charge. Every two years he gets a new one; it’s in his contract.

  When Maple Leaf practice is over Johnny Bower will change into grey flannel slacks and a blue Maple Leaf blazer. The blazer is provided.

  “Just look at him,” Gratton says, obviously impressed with Bower’s ancient abilities. “I’ll never be half the goaltender he was. But I’ll make more in the next five years than he made in his life. All he ever had was hockey—it was his world, man, and that’s why he couldn’t walk away from it. I see somebody like Bower playing and it makes me sad. He may love the sport, but it still makes me sad. For him there was nothing else …”

  A little later the Porsche is hitting 110 with fifth gear to spare. Gratton is explaining what hockey means to him: “My ambition is to never work. That’s what hockey gives me. I’ll play until I stack up enough money to float for the rest of my life. Then I’m gone, man, gone. I’m a specialist of nowhere—have no and want no responsibility. Hockey gives me free time and lots of money, but I hate it. I like to win, I admit that, but I hate the pain and I hate the stupidity. The last two years I’ve felt like I should just say to hell with it and go back home to Montreal. Sometimes I think, ‘Why am I in this rink getting pucks thrown at me when I could be home enjoying life?’ And I can’t answer the question, you know?”