Hockey Season Is Here Again, and It’s Time for Combat Corner, with Don Cherry

Hockey Season Is Here Again, and It’s Time for Combat Corner (Coach's Corner), with Don Cherry

Back in the day, when I was a kid (like one of the ones Don addresses weekly), Coach’s Corner used to be about hockey.  Since Canada entered Afghanistan, though, Coach’s Corner has been transformed into Combat Corner.  Links between the military and sports, especially in North America, have always been prominent.  But of course, historically, links between sports and arts and culture have always been prominent.  Crushing someone with force is part of sports, but so has been deploying finesse, discipline, training, practice, intellectual flexibility and mental stamina . . . and – the ineffable occasional outbursts of pure magic that result, utterly inexplicably, from all of the foregoing.

I’m a Don fan, and always have been.  We are at polar opposites, but he is very often right and has the shrewd eye for the game that those who loved and played it but weren’t good enough to be stars often do (think a Kubek, say).

Don is all over the news right now because he accused former fighters (Chris Nilan, Stu Grimson, etc.) of going against fighting now, despite the fact that fighting was what gave them a paycheque.  Now those former fighters are speaking back. 

Well, anyway, all of that is tedious.  I’m not sure what I set out for on this post, and that you may be able to tell, but I’ll write it by offering a few wishes:

1) that he doesn’t die or go to a cable network or whatever.  Although, again, Don and I are polar opposites, I can’t imagine life without him, and I know for sure my watching of hockey would be diminished in his absence.  Essentially because the NHL lost a golden opportunity to gradually reshape itself by enlarging slightly its ice surface when every team in the league got new arenas, the sport has become somewhat unwatchable.  Why are World Juniors and Olympics tournaments often popular?  Duh;

2) that Don and his handlers somehow learn to drop his petty insistence on his often being presciently right.  Live long enough, and you will be.  Week in, week out, Don looks more and more like what he isn’t—a petulant, childish, old man regressing into childhood.  Don’s right maybe 50% of the time, but nobody logs that.  I’d like to see someone take up the issue of Vinnie Lecavalier’s being the greatest player in the world with Don someday, for example.  It will never happen, but Don’s unchallengeability actually ages him and makes him look older and more pathetic than he really is.  Shame.

3) that Don didn’t have to address every remark to “you kids out there.”  Yes, I realize it’s a tic, like “hold it, hold it, don’t show it yet!” but boy is it tiresome.  Does Don think he really is addressing kids?  Possibly, but I don’t hold much with that.  Do kids watch Combat Corner?  Of course they do.  Don is aware of his pulpit.  Fine.  But again, that diminishes him.  Every time he yells: “you coaches out there!!”, he diminishes his own show which, inaccurately or not, is named “Coach’s Corner.”    If Don were really a man, and a hockey man, and his handlers weren’t pantywaists, then Don could just talk about hockey.  If Don just talked about hockey, he might actually get himself into _less_ trouble than if he kept pontificating as if he were hockey Dad to a nation.  The more he wants to extricate himself, often, the deeper he gets.  Nasty Swedes.

4) we could just have two different segments, finally, Coach’s Corner and Combat Corner.  It’s a truth universally known that the last refuge of a scoundrel is nationalism, and Don bucks this one up in ways that would make his ancestors turn away in shame.  True patriotism is something you feel on an almost divine and ethereal plane, and to speak of the flag, or to use a telecast as a teary opportunity to beat your own breast is the saddest desecration of the memories of the fallen.  You don’t touch the Cup until you’ve won it, and you don’t make ratings out of the deaths of servicepeople unless you’ve fought with them.  I’ve certainly never met anyone who didn’t “support the troops,” though I do know many who are against the war in Afghanistan.

Sadly, Don’s momentarily felt sentimental gushes have been popular enough with CBC brass fearful of being pantywaists that they have allowed him now to cut his hockey commentary back even further, so that he can hail police officers and firemen and just about anyone he can’t remember once he gets in his Lincoln outside the ACC at 8:35 p.m.  Let’s put one or two things in perspective, even if only for just a second.  To a much greater extent than it is in the U.S., or many other countries, military service in Canada is a _choice_.  You don’t have to serve, and you probably aren’t in a community so desperately dirt-poor, as in America, such that really there’s no choice but to enlist.  In Canada, too, minimal education can also be a gateway to astonishing wages and pensions and benefits as police officers or firepeople that most Canadians, often with notably greater training and education, cannot even dream of.  It is trotted out endlessly that the war in Afghanistan is to “kill scumbags” (to use Canadian General Rick Hillier’s term—a cut and runner if there ever was one, who cut out and took his pension after barely finishing the word “—bags” and getting hailed for it) and protect women.  But yet, if you look at the police and firefighters, and/or even the military, where are the women, the minorities, the small of stature?  Organizations such as the police and firefighters have constantly fought as hard as they could against any kind of recognition of other people—precisely what Canadian troops are supposedly fighting _for_ in Afghanistan.  Some irony.  If you filled out an application to be a police officer or a firefighter in Canada today, you would see precious little recognition of the fact that, every day, across the world, women and men of every age and colour and size and orientation and whatever are—actually—fighting crime and putting out fires and making their communities stronger.

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