Five Reasonable Discussions with Don Cherry

The first time I saw Coach’s Corner, I didn’t think Don Cherry was a real person. I thought it was a comedy sketch, and that at some point towards the end it would degenerate into utter surrealism, with beavers in tutus or something, like late-period Kids in the Hall. It wasn’t until the third or fourth viewing that I began to understand that this was, in some way, a serious thing, that this big, blustery man in his Muppet fur suits, who came on TV to, apparently, yell at children for four minutes, whose name was Mr. Cherry, was considered to be a real commentator, and not just a real commentator, but one of the great sages of the game.

I wrestled with how to take Don Cherry for a long time. It’s not the audacity of what he says- plenty of calmer guys in darker suits say the same stuff every day on TSN- but the theatricality of the persona. Hockey commentary is populated by pretty vanilla people, all in all, nice guys you could totally take out to a nice dinner at a nice restaurant and have a nice civilized conversation with, and then there’s Don Cherry, bellowing and waving his neon-pink arms, shrieking warnings, prophesies, and admonitions like some kind of resurrected Khazar shaman, with Ron MacLean sitting there ducking limbs and wearing look halfway between respectful attention and Jerry-get-me-my-tranquilizer-gun. Coach’s Corner is, for me, more like hypnotic performance art than hockey analysis, and for a long time I found it very hard to engage with the philosophy of Don Cherry because of that.

But no longer. Because tonight, I finally figured out the secret: you have to close your eyes. If you close your eyes, he loses his power over you, and you can hear the substance of his ideas. And so, now, I am going to try to actually listen to Don Cherry, and try to have a reasonable (although tragically one-sided) conversation about his principles.

Don Cherry [Showing a clip of a penalty.]: “Watch this penalty on Schenn. Watch. This is boarding. Imagine that. Watch, watch this, watch this here. That’s boarding? He hits his own head!”

E: You are correct, Don Cherry, if by your incredulous tone you intend to suggest that it is not in fact boarding. It is not boarding, it’s holding. Although I don’t believe that the NHL rulebook features a ‘no-callsies’ exception if you hit your own head in the course of committing a penalizable offense.

Don Cherry [Showing a clip of Max Pacioretty lightly shoving Zdeno Chara during a goal celebration]: “All you kids out there, I’m gonna save your life, gonna show you something. After you score a goal, never push a defenseman, because they’re infuriated. Watch what happens. Now watch, he pushes him for some reason. And lookit, now why would he do that? Now watch what Chara does after this, he goes bananas. A 6’9” giant, and you push him? Kids, leave the defensemen alone like that, because they always remember. […] All I’m saying is, he ticked him off, and he got it the next game. Leave the defenseman alone after the goal, because they always feel it’s their fault.”

E: Oh Don Cherry, it is not the responsibility of the Canadian children to ensure that they are not murdered by Zdeno Chara. The fact that Zdeno Chara is very large and is a defenseman and does not like to be scored on does not make him some sort of killing automaton. He is still, by all accounts, a human being capable of refraining from the murder of children and also forwards. If Max Pacioretty had left his keys in the ignition while he ran into the store for a Nutrigrain bar, that does not mean Zdeno Chara would be allowed to get into said car and drive away with it. If Max Pacioretty had been wearing a low-cut jersey and a lot of eyeliner and batting his eyelashes furiously, Zdeno Chara would still not be justified in slipping a rufi into his Gatorade and absconding with his unconscious body to the nearest motel room. Frankly, Don Cherry, as much as I admire your concern for the children of this land, I am also somewhat concerned about the message you are sending to the freakishly large defensechildren.

Don Cherry: “When you give an excuse to the players to not to hit, they will not hit.”

E: This is a very interesting thesis which, I must admit, I have not previously considered. I had always assumed that hockey players enjoy doing most hockey things, including skating, shooting, passing, hitting, hugging, and squeezing bottles of water all over their faces. Maybe some of them aren’t as good as others at one or another of these fundamentals, but it seems like generally speaking they are in favor of them. It had not occurred to me that they were all, en masse, secretly yearning for the end of contact. But frankly, if the players don’t want to do it, then why is there so much of it? Because the coaches force them? In that case, won’t the coaches keep forcing them under the new rules, only perhaps additionally pressuring them to be marginally cleaner? And isn’t that the objective of the stricter rules, to make hitting marginally cleaner?

Don Cherry: “How many games would you give Scott Stevens? Hall of Fame-er. Everybody loved this guy. We used to say, ‘What a hitter, boy, what a guy, Hall of Fame-er.’ How many games would you give him for this one?”

E: Under the current rules? For the totality of the hits shown in those clips? Oh, Don Cherry, I would give him so many games. I would give him dozens and dozens of games. So many games that he would feel a true and deep shame, so many games that he’d just lie on his bed at home and stare up at the cracks in the ceiling and think, oh Lord, what have I done, what manner of man am I that I go around charging people left and right, elbowing their heads? Don’t try to tell me that getting into the Hall of Fame retroactively justifies everything a person did in his career. I was just reading a historical work which made mention of a playoff game wherein Maurice Richard whacked two separate Leafs in their two separate heads with his stick. As much as I understand how he must have felt, I’m not going to start supporting sticks-to-the-head just because Richard did it, and I’m not going to start supporting charging or elbowing just because Scott Stevens was a charging-and-elbowing enthusiast.

Don Cherry [Referring to the deaths of Boogaard, Rypien, and Belak, and the suggestion by some that fighting causes depression/drug abuse]: But the ones that I am really disgusted with… Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan and Jim Thomson. 'Oh, they reason that they're drinking drugs and alcoholic because they fight.' You turncoats. You hypocrites. It's one thing I'm not, it's a hypocrite. You guys ... you were fighters and now you don't want guys that make the same living you did."

E: There is a difference between ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘changing your mind’ or ‘having regrets’. Typically, we allow that people can stop doing things when they begin to feel those things are harmful to them, and suggest in turn that perhaps others should not do those things, because they might also find them harmful. According to your logic, Don Cherry, anyone who ever held up a few liquor stores would be morally obligated to continue holding up liquor stores as long as he could, and furthermore to encourage others to hold up liquor stores as a means of survival, and if that person ever renounced liquor-store-robbery, they would be a turncoat and a hypocrite. Personally, I am not anti-fighting, nor do I think that fighting ‘caused’ the deaths in question, but I respect that players who have done it and found it psychologically destructive have a right to say as much, so that others considering the profession may take their experiences under consideration. It’s not treachery, it’s advice, and like any advice, people are free to disagree with it, argue against it, or ignore it completely. But it’s not immoral to offer it.

Join us next time the Canadiens lose on HNIC for further installments.

Shanny and the Slippery Slope

Let it never be said that Brendan Shanahan, in his new role as head of player discipline, did not begin with the very best of intentions. NHL supplementary justice has, for generations (or generations of players at least) been renowned for its unfathomable workings. Colin Campbell, the previous occupant of the role, operated according to such inscrutable reasoning that his rulings were widely supposed to have no rationale whatsoever. Who could say, in the Campbell regime, what kind of offense was suspension-worthy? What was degree of aggression was permitted? Often, the judgments that came down seemed to be not judgments of the action but judgments of the people, a weighing of the role and value of the attacker versus those of the victim, a determination chosen according to the message it would send rather than the actual content of the play. The system was, if not literally corrupt, so inconstant that it might as well have been.

Shanahan’s regime, young though it is, has begun not only stricter than it’s predecessors but infinitely more transparent. Campbell used to throw cliché-stuffed press releases out of his high tower; Shanahan goes on the internet with video clips of the incident and the text of the law and lays out his reasoning process for everyone to see. He starts from the express presumption that law in the NHL can be clear, comprehensible, and predictable. Forthwith, he says, the hockey world will know what kind of offenses incur what kind of punishment, and if they disagree with the ruling, at least they can’t say they didn’t know it was coming.

From his first preseason suspension, there were those who thought Shanahan too strict for the conventions of the game, which is valid discussion to have but, for the moment, moot. If Campbell was allowed to persist as long as he did with his style of rulings, then Shanahan must be allotted the same privilege: so long as he is the judge, it is his prerogative to be of the hangin’ variety.

However, what is more curious is that only weeks in, with all his laudable efforts at clarity and transparency, Shanahan already finds himself accused not only of being overly rigid, but of being arbitrary. If Smith’s head shot and MacArthur’s head shot were forbidden, why is Malone’s head shot (semi-)permitted? They are not so very different. How can such slight inclinations of angle, such fractions of intent, be the difference between playing and suspension? It is exactly these sorts of debates that the video-explanation approach hopes to avoid. Is it a bad omen for the Shanahan regime that they have already appeared, before the season is even truly begun?

Before that question can be answered, though, one must consider one of the first principles of hockey, which is that its system of justice is fundamentally different from other sports, and indeed from other areas of life. Hockey is not governed by absolutes, it’s governed by proportions. Other sports seek to prohibit certain behaviors unconditionally- do this, and you will be ejected/suspended, because we wish that no one would ever do this. They follow a strict, Judeo-Christo-Islamic sort of law. Hockey, on the other hand, operates more like karma. It defines certain actions as undesirable, but it still allows players to choose them, if they are willing to pay the proportional price. Hockey is one of the few sports the world over that has the notion of ‘the good penalty’, the hook you should hook, power play be damned. There is no expectation in hockey that a player will never, ever commit a penalty because that would be Wrong. It’s more a sense that, as much as possible, players should try to avoid committing too many penalties too often. The game doesn’t expect virtue, it just expects an average of more good than bad.

Every penalty in hockey, depending on the intensity with which it is committed, could draw punishments of varying degrees of severity. According to the rule book, the officials can dish out everything from two-minute minors to game misconducts to supplementary discipline on any violation of the rules. Theoretically, in hockey, you could get a multi-game suspension for a really hideously awful trip. But, in general, the culture of hockey errs on the side of laxity. Some of the rules on the books are extremely vague and elastic, and if called to the letter of the text would become oppressive to the flow of the game. Most open-ice hits could, technically, be considered charging. Every scrum in front of the net might generate three or four possible roughing calls. Tradition dictates that, although the referees have a high degree of latitude to call penalties according to their individual judgment, most penalties go uncalled.

So the person who finds himself in charge of hockey discipline finds himself in a very difficult position indeed. He is the final authority in a maddeningly complex system. He must balance the text of the rule book against his own individual interpretation against the interpretations of his advisors and colleagues, and these must again be considered in light of the customs and traditions of the community. At some point, one begins to understand why Colin Campbell hid behind the mystique of autocratic privilege to the degree that he did: because once one begins to debate these principles, the debate could easily never end. In fact, it never has yet.

Shanahan is trying to do something even harder by doing the job transparently. In refusing to fall back on the Wheel of Justice, he has chosen to be the guy who stands on the slippery slope. He digs in his heels at a certain point and says, this far and no farther. That point will be tested. There will be things that happen just half an inch within the bounds of acceptability, and things that happen just half an inch beyond, and people will say, How can the one be permitted and the other forbidden when there is only an inch of difference between? And sometimes, Shanahan will not be able to answer with anything more substantial than because I said so. The exact boundary point between right and wrong in hockey will always be somewhat arbitrary, there will always be an argument that you could push it just a little more one way or another. Eventually, the man in charge has to stop listening to those arguments, because it’s not his job to join the philosophical debate about hockey’s Higher Moral Values. The core of his work is not the defining of the boundary but simply the holding of it. Shanahan deserves credit for trying to do that in good faith, and so long as he continues to deal with the hockey community in the upright, downright, forthright way he has so far, he deserves some latitude on the apparent arbitrariness of the point he’s chosen to stand on. It’s not his fault. It’s the nature of hockey.

Hockey Exegesis #1: Sometimes They Hate You for a Reason

“Every boo on the road is a cheer.”
- Scotty Bowman


This is one of those hockey quotations that’s become famous solely as a one-liner. It’s popular as a lead-in for post-game recaps, a pre-game motivator in tough buildings, and one of those random sentences people put at the end of forum posts. It is never given any context or further explanation; rather, it’s taken as a scrap of transcendent wisdom. The attribution to Bowman is hardly even necessary, although it provides a certain pedigree: the winningest coach in NHL history must know whereof he speaks.

But for this series, I want to know more about these little bon mots. I want to know what motivated the person to drop this little pearl of insight: why they said it, to whom, and where, and when. In the case of a quotation as popular as this one, this is slightly tricky. So many people quote it out of context that it’s difficult to find it in context- and by ‘difficult’, I mean ‘requires three or four Google searches, rather than one.’

So here’s the back story: It’s May 1996, and the Detroit Red Wings are stumbling through the end of an otherwise glorious season. They’ve got 62 wins and 131 points in the standings, but their going into the playoffs on a cold streak, which is bound to make anybody a little irritable, and is making Scotty Bowman particularly tetchy, given that it’s his responsibility to turn this shit around and soon.

The Red Wings are playing against the Avalanche, who are at this time the up-and-coming team, and who in the future are going to defeat the Red Wings for the Western Conference Final and go on to win the Cup, but nobody knows this yet. In the course of this game, Claude Lemieux punches Slava Kozlov in the face. Scotty Bowman obviously disapproves of the punching of his players, so after the game he finds Lemieux in the parking lot, and tells him rather emphatically what he (Bowman) thinks of him (Lemieux), to whit, that Lemieux is a dirty son of a bitch who deserves to be suspended. Now, while both of these things may be true, at the time Bowman is yelling this, Lemieux is walking to his car with his wife and daughter, and there is a bit of a taboo against shrieking profanity at people in front of their children and womenfolk. It is not classy behavior.

Subsequently, Bowman (by his own admission) sends some tapes to the League and asks that Lemieux be suspended, and being the venerable figure that he is, he gets what he wants. The combination of these two events means that, the next time the Red Wings play in Colorado, every time Bowman’s face turns up on the screen, it provokes a wave of heckling from the Avalanche faithful. After the game, he says the following:

“Am I supposed to not try to win and not send the tapes to the league for review so I can be friends with the other coach? Your reputation precedes you. Often it’s a lot of balony. Boy, they were watching me tonight. Every boo on the road is a cheer.”

The thing that’s interesting to me about this is that it’s got nothing to do with players. Usually, when people quote the line, the implication is that it’s advice from the coach to a team. I always imagined it’s what the Canadiens’ opponents say to themselves before playing Le Centre Bell, an attempt to psychically counterbalance the wall of angry noise that will fall on them every time they do something successful. Remember, the people up there are against you. Their pain is your gain. That sort of thing.

But Bowman isn’t talking about his players, he’s talking about himself. He’s defending a linked pair of dickish moves: confronting Lemieux in front of his family, and using some of his guan xi with the League to get Lemieux suspended. The Avs fans aren’t angry at him because he’s beating their team; he’s not, he’s losing to them. They’re angry at him because he was being an asshole. And Bowman is basically saying that it’s okay for him to be an asshole so long as it’s against Colorado.

Which puts the real meaning of this quote not in the category of “Don’t let the bastards get you down” wisdom, but rather “You only hate Chris Neil because he doesn’t play for you” wisdom. It’s the justification of any and all behavior against opponents simply because they are opponents, and the parallel suggestion that there is nothing actually wrong when it serves your interests.

This actually gets to a long-standing debate in hockey theory: to what extent is the competition for the Cup an all-out war? Yes, over the course of the season, it is a zero-sum game, but over the long run players, coaches, and GMs participate in an ever-shifting web of relationships wherein employers (and therefore allegiances) frequently change. To a certain extent, everyone understands that your enemy today might be your friend tomorrow, and therefore doesn’t hold past aggressive behavior too strongly against possible future friends, but there are exceptions, breaches of collegiality so severe that they become ongoing black marks on a person’s character. Sean Avery has alienated himself from more than one franchise, and certain GMs don’t deal with other GMs over old offer-sheet grievances. Perhaps there shouldn’t be any limitations on what one does in the interest of one’s team, but practically speaking, there are. The pro hockey community is a small, small pond, and classy behavior can be the difference between a job next year and an early retirement.

That doesn’t apply to Scotty Bowman, of course. By the time he laid down this famous line, he was already well-established as a fantastically successful eccentric, a kind of coaching autistic-savant. He had secured his place in the hockey pantheon. He was in a position to do what he would and damn what people think. But as a piece of advice for the masses, this is not one to take to heart- or, if you do, please, take it out of context.

Source: Toledo Blade, May 26, 1996