Hockey Confidential (14 page)

On this night, nary a soul approached him during the game. But that's highly unusual, Tim says: “Sometimes it's just one long autograph session for him.”

Most times, Tim and Don will slip into the rink just as the teams are taking to the ice for the warmup, and if it's possible, depending upon which arena they're in—and they've come to know them all (Westwood, Chesswood, Buckingham, Vaughan, Etobicoke Ice, Herb Carnegie)—they'll take up their favoured spot in the corner at the glass.

Don will immediately identify a player or two that he likes the look of in warmup. He'll ask Tim what round the player is projected to be taken in.

“I'll say, ‘Fourth round,'” Tim says.

“And I'll say, ‘F---,'” Don adds with a laugh. “Then that kid will score a goal in the game or play really well. I won't say a word to Tim. Drives him crazy. He gets mad.”

Tim laughs. “It true,” he adds. “Does it to all me the time. Picks a guy in warmup and the kid usually scores. It's maddening.”

There are also unwritten rules. Such as, once Don starts watching a game, he can't leave it until it's over. It's non-negotiable.

“Even if it's 9–0, I can't leave,” Don says. “I can't do that to the kids. I can't have them looking at me and seeing me walk out on them and their game. It's not right.”

Even on the long-ago night when Tim and Don went all the way to Welland, Ontario, to see Jamie Tardif, who got kicked out of the Junior B game on his first shift. Most of the scouts there to see Tardif left the rink immediately. Don and Tim stayed to the bitter end.

“Tim said, ‘We can go now if you like,' and I said, ‘I can't leave . . . what will these kids think if we walk out of here right now?'”

Of course, there was one night when they did leave early. It was a Junior C playoff game in Uxbridge against archrival Little Britain.

“It was into triple overtime on a Friday night,” Tim recalls. “Unbelievable game. They're ringing shots off the post at one end and then at the other. Nothing was going in. It was 1 or 2 in the morning. It was really late—”

“So we had to leave,” Don picks up the story. “Everyone's yelling at me, ‘Hey Grapes, we can't believe you're leaving.' I'm apologizing to everyone. But I gotta work Saturday night. I gotta get home.”

The hockey gods, though, often smile on him. Tim says no one is as lucky as his dad when it comes to winning 50-50 draws. Don buys the tickets, Tim checks the numbers, Don wins time after time and, of course, donates all the money back. On the night they stayed in Welland after Tardif was booted out of the game, Don won a free pizza in a draw.

The two of them have stories. Oh, so many stories from over the years.

“Tell him the Tipoff story,” the father implores the son.

“Well,” Tim says, recounting a tale that has no doubt been told many times over, “[Matthew] Tipoff was a real good player on the same Markham Waxer team Steve Stamkos was on. Tipoff and a player from another team were battling in the corner in a tournament semifinal game. They were really getting after it, and just when it looked like it was over, they both looked over at Dad, who was right there at the glass, watching. They looked at him, they looked at each other, they looked back at Dad again, and then they really started whaling on each other.”

It was never deemed an actual fight, as the gloves never came off—much to the relief of Markham head coach Paul Titanic, who didn't want to lose Tipoff for the tournament final. Titanic supposedly asked Tipoff what he was thinking and Tipoff replied something along the lines of “Hey, what did you expect me to do? It was Don Cherry.” The story speaks to the reaction of 15-year-olds when they happen to be in the corner during warmups or the games and come face to face with Canada's most recognizable face.

Now, Cherry's critics, and he has more than a few of those, would cite the Tipoff story as Exhibit A on why Cherry's pro-fighting, old-school mentality is precisely what kids shouldn't be aspiring to. Trouble is, the first guy who would agree that kids shouldn't be fighting is Grapes himself.

“First thing, [Tipoff's] wasn't really a fight,” Cherry says. “Second, I was watching [kids'] hockey when it was worth your life to go on the ice in the old days, with the Streetsville Derbys, when everyone used to think it was good to intimidate. There was hitting from behind all over the ice. Well, you know what, the last fight I saw in this league was four years ago, and you won't see one here tonight, and that's fine with me. There's far less hitting from behind and fewer cheap shots than there was before. It's good, fast hockey. Best hockey in the world if it's reffed right. I love it.”

“It's all about speed now,” Tim adds. “If you're a step slow in this hockey, it's really noticeable now.”

The other surprising thing about Cherry and his love for minor midget hockey is that he's got a huge soft spot for the smaller players.

“Dad really likes all the little guys,” Tim says. “The smaller and more skilled they are, the more he likes them. He likes the underdog.”

“It's funny the way Mother Nature works,” Don adds. “The smaller the kids are, the smarter they seem to be. They have to be [smarter] if they're going to survive. Tim, who's that kid on Markham . . . Cocker? Crocker? Anyway, really small kid, really smart and skilled. I love
that guy.”

“Who's that white-haired guy over there [referring to Young Nats organizational manager Garry Punchard]? I see him at all the games. No one will ever give that guy credit, but you know what, if it wasn't for him and guys like him, sitting here in a cold arena, there'd be no hockey for these kids.”

Minor hockey arenas are bubbling cauldrons of emotion.
The vast majority of the time Donald S. Cherry is in the house, he views proceedings with a cool detachment, quietly sharing an observation with Tim, or maybe asking a question about this kid or that kid. But there are times . . .

There are three things that occur in minor hockey arenas that drive Grapes crazy and potentially could set him off. Tim knows them well, knows his dad well, and knows how to navigate around them.

One is the incessant blabbermouth, who positions himself within earshot of Don in the rink and talks loudly enough for Cherry to hear, in hopes of impressing him with his superior knowledge of the game of hockey.

“I'm watching and some guy will be talk, talk, talking the whole time,” Don says. “I get very upset. I hate guys yapping like that.”

“They're just trying to impress you,” Tim says.

So Tim is asked if sometimes he has to keep one eye on the game and one eye on his dad, to head off any potential trouble and take care of dear old Dad when he suspects there may be imminent danger of Don blowing his stack. Before Tim can answer, though, Don jumps right in: “No, he doesn't need to take care of me, but he might need to take care of the guy who's been yapping.”

Tim smiles, and adds, “I don't want to see Dad end up on the front page of the [
Toronto
]
Sun,
so, yeah, I'm always aware . . .”

The second transgression that could solicit a . . . uh . . . response is players hot-dogging or showboating on the ice. This was actually included as a scene in one of the Cherry biographical movies. It involved future Carolina Hurricane Ryan Murphy, a Cherry favourite, and his team, the York-Simcoe Express. Murphy's team was down 4–0 and the team in the lead was hot-dogging and showboating all over the ice. Cherry fumed, and at the end of two periods, Don told Tim that Murphy's team would come back to win. And they did.

“So we're walking out of the arena after the game, and the coach of the losing team sees Dad and says, ‘Hey, Grapes, we just had a tough loss. Would you come into the room and speak to the boys?'”

Don picks up the story.

“Tim says to me, ‘No, Dad, don't do it.' So I did it. I went in and gave it to them all: ‘You little [expletive deleted]. You had 10 times the talent, you were f---ing around, you turned everyone against you, looked like a bunch of soccer players.' We walked out of there, and it was dead quiet. The captain of the team was sitting by the door, and I whacked him on the shoulder and said, ‘You're supposed to be leading them. Smarten up.' The coaches just looked at me.”

Cherry's aggravation hat trick is completed by the thing that bothers him the most: mistreatment of the poor goalies. This one's personal. Cherry's grandson Del, Cindy's son, was a goalie in minor hockey. The experience left Cherry scarred.

“I feel sorry for all the people who have kids or grandkids that play net,” Don says. “You can never really enjoy the game. It could be going great, and in the last 10 seconds, the goalie lets in a bad one and everyone's mad at you.”

There was one game in particular when Don was going to see Del play. He arrived a minute after the game had started, only to find out from Cindy that Del had let in the first shot and the coach had pulled him.

“I told Cindy, ‘I have to leave now, because if I stay here, it's going to be murder.' And I left.”

Tim says many minor hockey coaches are too quick to pull the goalie, and if he sees it happening at a game with his dad there, Tim knows to tighten the reins.

“Remember the game at the Hershey Centre?” Don says, shaking his head. “Poor kid in net, gave up two in the first minute. Never had a chance on either of them. Tip-ins. From the point. Gets pulled. I felt so bad for that kid—a minute in—so I was going to go over there talk to the [coach]. I wasn't going to hit him or anything, but I thought, ‘You [expletive deleted].' Tim talked me out of it.”

You don't grow up as Don Cherry's kid without realizing controversy is a constant bedfellow. But that doesn't mean you surrender to it, either. Each Saturday morning, around 9 a.m., Tim phones his dad to get a preview of what Grapes is thinking of saying that night on “Coach's Corner.” If Tim thinks it's inappropriate or sounds too harsh, he'll tell his dad so. He knows once Don makes up his mind, though, it's tough to get the train off the tracks. On Sunday, Tim will tell his dad what he thought of the segment. Even Don's son occasionally finds some of what his dad says on the air cringeworthy, because he has a pretty good idea of what might do some damage beyond any given Saturday night.

“My mom was always Dad's sounding board about what to say on ‘Coach's Corner' and how to handle issues,” Tim says. “When we're at the rink together, when it's quiet, we talk a lot about what he's going to say on ‘Coach's Corner.' Mom might chastise Dad when she thought he stepped over the line. I don't do that so much. We'll also talk about things going on in my life. My dad is very good at helping to put things into perspective for me. He's the same with me as he is on ‘Coach's Corner.' He won't sugarcoat things. It's nice for us to be able to talk to each other about things. We are both lucky, at our ages, that we can share time with each other.”

Tim may be Don's biggest fan, but there was only one time, and it wasn't even on “Coach's Corner,” when Tim couldn't bear to watch his dad and had to turn off the TV.

It was in October 1992. Cherry was appearing on the CBC's
Friday Night with Ralph Benmergui,
a talk show. When Cherry's interview with Benmergui was over, the next guest was Scott Thompson, a gay member of the Kids in the Hall comedy troupe. Thompson came out and camped it up pretty good, telling Don he was a big fan because the European homosexuals cower in the corner when there's a fight in a gay bar. At one point, Thompson sat on Cherry's lap and they were holding hands.

Tim was at home watching it all on TV.

“I had to turn off the TV because I thought, ‘This is it, this is going to be the end of Dad's career and I'm not going to watch it.' It was live. I was afraid that Dad might have thought this whole thing was a setup to make him look bad, and who knows how he would react, what he might say or do. I couldn't even watch it. I had to turn it off.”

Cherry was quick on his feet that night. He camped it up himself with Thompson, made fun of the both of them, and disaster was averted.

“If I hadn't been sharp that night, I was in deep shit,” Don says. “Turns out it was the best show [Benmergui] ever had. It was all downhill [for Benmergui] after that.”

Don Cherry smiles as he says that. Then he laughs.

“The best hot dogs of all are at Herb Carnegie Arena. The same lady
serves them all the time. She's always been there, she's been there forever
and she stays right to the very end every night.”

“You're the first person who has ever stood with us for a
game,” Don tells his visitor to Victoria Village Arena on the cold December night. “No scouts, nobody ever stands with us.”

“I'm honoured,” the visitor tells Don and Tim Cherry.

“Well, [Ron] MacLean stood with us for one period once,” Don says.

Which leads to one more story.

“Ron came down to watch the second period with us at a game in Etobicoke,” Tim says. “Right at the end of the period, right in front of us at the glass, a kid got hit and the hit knocked the kid's tooth out. The tooth fell out over by the players' bench. The Zamboni is getting set to come on the ice, but the players and coaches are down on the ice, looking for the kid's tooth. So Ron and Dad decide they're going over to help look for the kid's tooth.”

Picture it: Ron MacLean and Don Cherry, on their hands and knees on the ice, looking for a kid's tooth. It gets better.

“The kid's mom was just livid her son lost a tooth,” Tim says, “and she comes steaming out of the stands and onto the ice—”

“I see the mother,” Don says, “and I get up [from looking for the tooth] and intercept her. Her kid is so embarrassed. His mother's on the ice and she's hot. I say to the Mom, ‘Ma'am, do you love your son?' She says, ‘Yes, but—' I cut her off, I tell her: ‘You're embarrassing him. Just get off the ice quietly. We'll find his tooth, but for your son's sake, please, just get off the ice right now.'”