Kuch’s Corner: Quit Poppin’ the Cherry Already!

Over the last week every uppity critic in Canada has been taking a collective shit on our favourite syndicated senile uncle and national paramour Don Cherry. After three recent suicides in the NHL by players who were designated fighters, people have been clamouring for an end to all fighting in the game and opportunistically capitalized on the deaths citing the psychological consequences of pugilism.  In response, Cherry called some former fighters “pukes” and “turncoats” who allegedly were in favour of banning the practise, for potentially destroying a living that they benefited from, which was hardly the kind of shit-talking that could make a grown man cry. And to his credit, Cherry said that it was tasteless to link all fighters with suicide (and it is).

So in a moment of pure irony, these former tough guys who fought mouth breathing behemoths from Siberia, Saskatchewan, and beyond, threatened to sue Cherry for his family-friendly insults.

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As we all know Don Cherry is a loud, geriatric hockey commentator between periods on CBC’s Coaches Corner, with a goatee and that recycled Liberace style. Not to mention Cherry loves to spew his classic vitriolic attacks on just about anything his goofy old-man brain decides to tee-off on. Usually that means the French Canadians, “left-wing pinkos”, women, Liberals, pacifists, soccer players, and the Russians (in his mind this swath of barbarian land includes Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Poles, Latvians and Lithuanians), are never safe. And you can’t really blame the guy; I’m not even sure if he knows the USSR disintegrated or that women vote.  As you can imagine, it amounts to ten minutes a week of bat-shit gold:

Here’s Cherry in a vintage tirade against those darn Russians:

I agree, ladies need to stop “yapping away” at hockey games lest their face gets smashed:

Here he is innocently caressing Scott Thompson and asking for his advice dealing with the “fags”:

Cherry is just a grumpy old man and frankly, just like it was for Walter Mathau, is hilarious to observe in that “I’m a shitty old man and don’t give a fuck” kind of way. If I wanted some PG midget to crack jokes that weren’t funny in the fifties I’d watch Regis Philbin. Give me the old crusty borderline bigot any day.

To his credit he also champions black hockey players (of which there are like, three), sick kids, and fallen soldiers. He even had time to make a brief foray into rap music. And like any young Canadian of the last two decades who played way too much hockey, his Rock’em Sock’em videos were basically de facto parents to me on long bus trips to play against small town teams, or on snow days.

All the nostalgia aside, there’s no denying that he’s a terrible influence on political discourse in Canada (if you’re backwards enough to consider him an authority on the subject), but Cherry is an entertainer in a country full of passive aggressive broadcasters who never really come out and, well, say fucking anything. You have instead asexual robots with the personality of a fax machine, some shitty Sun Media company that looks like Conservatives playing intellectual dress up, and that balding ken doll named Peter Mansbridge lulling you into a Boomer coma. At least we all know Cherry is half-a-stroke away from the nursing home. So instead of freaking out and calling him a “bigot” and a “clown,” just do what you always do with your great-uncle Steve: pour yourself a drink and listen to him rail against “those damned Japs” at family dinners, awkwardly laugh, and then move the fuck on.

Seeing him be nationally emasculated over the weekend with a forced apology (he was clearly reading from a prompter) was one of the most disenchanting moments in recent Canadian television memory. Now Don Cherry will be just another sad and glassy eyed old guy sucking the Federal Pension Plan dry. He’ll have to scale back the crazy and become about as morose as the CBC really is; remember that this is the network that contains producers and execs high enough to think Little Mosque On the Prairie is funny. Especially when that show is even more culturally insensitive than Don’s odd anti-Slav barb.

So thanks Canada for fucking up the one funny thing our tax-paid-for network actually produced; have fun watching Being Erica or fucking Battle of the Blades.

@BMakuch