Time to speak out and save Grapes

Don Cherry is a national symbol — don’t mess with him

Okay you kids out there, listen up. This is important. I’ve spent half a career arguing with Don Cherry. I’ve hated him longer than some of you have been alive. You know how it is: I’m one of those lefty kook tree huggers he’s always snarling about and he’s one of those pigheaded, narrow-minded, right-wing bullies I’ve been battling since fourth grade.

Cherry’s noisy support for Rob Ford? Eeesh. The maudlin way he wraps himself in the mantle of Canada’s Armed Forces (a trick borrowed by Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay) even though, like Harper and MacKay, he never served? Double eeesh.

But I want to say this, loud and clear: If the Don is turfed from Hockey Night in Canada, I’ll miss him. Because Cherry belongs on Hockey Night in Canada. Hockey Night in Canada belongs on the CBC. And the CBC belongs to us.

If Cherry had been fired from within HNIC as it existed until Tuesday, that’s one thing. But if he’s to be jettisoned by a big private corporation in pursuit of eventual control over the entire CBC network, that’s something else.

Perhaps that seems like an exaggerated response to Tuesday’s announcement of the 12-year, $5.2-billion deal between the NHL and Rogers Communications. I don’t think so. The scariest words I heard Tuesday came from one of the Rogers suits (sorry, I didn’t get the licence plate) when he said something to the effect that “we look forward to future partnerships with the CBC.”

(“Partnership”? That’s a good one. As partnerships go, the deal with Hockey Night in Canada is strictly of the “me master, you slave” variety.)

What worries me is that the brutally one-sided takeover of Hockey Night in Canada will become the wedge that leads to the eventual privatization of the CBC. Given that the deal also creates a horizontal and vertical monopoly for Rogers, you’d think the toothless CRTC might have something to say about it because monopolies are, by definition, bad for consumers — but expecting the CRTC to protect your interests is like asking a Great Dane to look out for your steak.

When I saw Gary Bettman and Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed chortling and pumping hands Tuesday, I got queasy.

It was like watching a couple of car salesman congratulating each other after they’ve just taken some poor schnook on a deal for a used Ford Pinto.

Because we’re that schnook and you just know that in the long run, we’re going to get taken. In the words of the old country song, they get the gold mine, you get the shaft.

What’s going to stand in Rogers’ way? Not much. They now own HNIC: lock, P.J. Stock and barrel. Given that our wretched PM would love to kill the CBC, Cherry is perhaps the only person in this country with the juice to prevent the death of Hockey Night in Canada four years from now and eventually, perhaps, even the demise of the CBC itself.

Why? Like it or not, Cherry is more than just Don the Broadcaster, Don the Loudmouth, that SOB Don or even Don the Institution. He’s a national symbol. If Rogers can tear him down, then nothing is safe.

If you want to know why the Rogers deal is so alarming, the fate of former Leafs GM Brian Burke is instructive. Burke worked for Rogers (and Bell) as an employee of MLSE. He was fired, not because he was a terrible GM, but because he ruffled the feathers of the suits. He wasn’t the kind of yes-man they require.

Eventually, if Rogers or Bell or some other private entity takes over the CBC, this is how it’s going to be. The bosses will claim (as they did Tuesday) that they won’t tell their employees what to say. And it will be true — because they won’t have to. Consciously or subconsciously, the journalists will censor themselves. So long, public network with something other than the corporate interest at heart.

Cherry is a bulwark against all that, simply because of his sheer, critical mass. Love him or loathe him, we watch him every Saturday night, in all his fluorescent, megawatt, wardrobe-by-Liberace, ungrammatical, name-mangling, xenophobic glory.

After hockey itself, our second favourite national pastime might be arguing about Don Cherry. The debate tends to obscure an essential truth at the core of the Cherry phenomenon: The man is a superb, instinctive broadcaster, a master of the sound bite. Cherry doesn’t attract attention, he compels it. He alone can compel enough attention to shine a light on the nastier aspects of this deal.

The suits from Rogers did not say that Cherry would be shown the door during that daylong drum roll that accompanied the announcement Tuesday — but they pointedly avoided saying that he would be retained.

Cherry’s fate is important because, beyond all the justifiable carping about the increasingly amateurish HNIC production, I believe profoundly in the CBC itself, and I always have.

It was sad to see the man, looking old and tired without his makeup Tuesday, asking reporters at a book-signing event, “Do I still have a job?”

We need to speak out, loud and clear: “Ya mess wit’ Grapes, fellas, and you’re messin’ wit’ us.”