I'd like to get a little bit personal and onion-on-my-belt sort of story here so bear with me. When I was a little kid growing up we never had a tv but in the summers we would go up to my grandparents' place and they had a big tv so we would rent videos when we went up there. I must have been like seven or eight years old, around that age, and I would always get the National Geographic videos about like, dinosaurs or volcanoes or the one where they were diving down to the Titanic in that robot submersible, and I would always get Rock 'em Sock 'em hockey because hedid an in-depth review of the previous year's playoffs, so that was how I stayed caught up with what was going on in hockey, because other than that I just listened to Canucks games on the radio, and watched the local WHL team, and played street hockey with the neighbourhood kids, read those draft preview issues of The Hockey News, and bought hockey cards at 7-11 with my allowance cause in those days you could get a pack of hockey cards for like eighty-nine cents or something.
So for knowing what was going on in the NHL and actually seeing the players, Don Cherry was my go-to. When I did get a tv I always watched Coaches Corner, the early 90s way of doing the intermissions is the way it "ought" to be in my memory, with the Satellite Hotstove and After 40 Minutes, too. Later on as the quality of the coverage slipped and they had guys like Kypreos and Healy and PJ Stock instead of John Davidson and Dick Irvin, Cherry was reliable, you knew where he was coming from, you knew what you were getting, it was from the heart and he never just said things to say it. If one of those other guys criticized or praised somebody it meant nothing, they'd say something different the next day and everyone knew they were crap anyways. If Cherry praised or criticized someone, it was meaningful because he had that cachet. So, you had to tune in. Watching Coaches Corner was more always more important for me than watching the first period of the Leafs game, and you knew he'd show all the important stuff anyway.
So now we get to the stuff with the people being all touchy about people saying things now. I think Cherry would understand because this is about sending a message. Just like the way you'd send out your toughest guy to take a piece off of the other team's toughest guy, you send a message here by going after Cherry and taking him out. The people who cared about Coaches Corner are the sort people who, according to certain folks, need to just go away. We don't want those sorts of people to exist anymore, they are dinosaurs and old fogies and if they aren't then their views are outmoded and they need to get with the programme. If they are gonna be around then looking forward it's best for everyone if they keep their mouths shut and everyone can ignore them and forget they are out there and go about their business.
Especially in Canada you don't have a lot of people in the public eye acting as a symbol for that sort of point of view; even though he was just a sportscaster Cherry was one of the more prominent people in the country in that regard. Although he only occasionally got political everyone knew what he was about, so taking him down in the way they did it, and for what it was over, sent a message to anyone associated with anything like that: we can get to Cherry, so you'd better believe we can get to you. You'd better not go to the tough areas or you're gonna get blasted. Stick to the perimeter and don't dare crash the net or you'll be next.
The problem with this analogy is that society is not a hockey game. We aren't on two different teams in a zero-sum competitive environment where one side wins and the other loses. This kind of thinking will destroy social cohesion and undermine everything we have. I see the end of Coaches Corner as a sort of canary in the coal-mine as far as the state of communications in contemporary culture. I'll talk about Don Cherry, at some length as you can see. But there is a list of topics I won't talk about, with anyone, and that list is growing fast. Some people think that's a good thing; I don't think it's good but I do think it's how it is and it's going more that way, not less.