Cherry fired for ‘divisive’ poppy rant

Don Cherry, a controversial hockey icon who was once named the seventh greatest Canadian in history, was fired Monday, two days after he delivered a confusing rant about poppies and newcomers on Hockey Night In Canada.

The 85-year-old former hockey coach and minor league player has for decades been the defining face of hockey broadcasting in this country.

Known for his garish suits and folksy manner, he embodied a particular vision of the English Canadian ideal: hard working, gritty, violent and, time and again, intolerant of outsiders.

In his weekly Coach’s Corner segment, broadcast Saturdays between the first and second periods of Hockey Night in Canada, Cherry teed off on French Canadians (“whiners”), Europeans (“sissies”), and opponents of fighting in the game (“pukes” and “turncoats”).

At his peak, he was incredibly popular. A 1995 profile in the Ottawa Citizen reported that 500,000 more people watched his segment every week than watched the actual games.

But in recent years, Cherry has come to seem more and more a relic of a hockey world, and even a Canada, that no longer exists. “He is a Canadian icon who has done a lot of good things, but they should have never let him stay that long on the air,” said Chris “Knuckles” Nilan, a retired player who Cherry once publicly attacked for being insufficiently pro-fighting. “Honestly, I think they set him up to fail. They could have let him go a little earlier, maybe when he was 80.”

Cherry’s firing Monday seemed somehow both inevitable and impossible. He courted controversy so many times without consequence that he came to be seen as all but untouchable. But his diatribe Saturday proved to be one rant too far, a sign perhaps of a man who no longer knew which lines he could not cross or a country no longer willing to accept a public figure so eager to cross them.

“It’s deserved,” Bhupinder Singh, a senior producer at CBC, which broadcast Cherry for more than 30 years, said of the firing. “It’s deserved because of what he did. When you act inappropriately, there should be consequences and that was the consequence.”

Cherry, a longtime booster of the Canadian military, spoke the words that ended his career on Hockey Night in Canada Saturday as part of a winding lament about poppies and Remembrance Day.

“You know, I was talking to a veteran. I said ‘I’m not going to run the poppy thing anymore because what’s the sense? I live in Mississauga, nobody wears — very few people wear a poppy. Downtown Toronto, forget it! Downtown Toronto, nobody wears a poppy.’” he said during Saturday’s broadcast.

That was fine enough, typical Cherry. But what came next changed it all.

“You people love — that come here, whatever it is — you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey,” Cherry said. “At least you could pay a couple of bucks for a poppy. These guys paid for your way of life, the life you enjoy in Canada. These guys paid the biggest price.”

The backlash online was swift and furious. Soon after the segment aired, #firedoncherry and #CherryMustGo were trending on Twitter. The NHL called Cherry’s comments “offensive.” Budweiser, the official sponsor of the broadcast, called them “inappropriate and divisive.” A spokesman for the Royal Canadian Legion decried them as “hurtful” and said they ran contrary to the Legion’s Articles of Faith.

Singh, a former host of Hockey Night Punjabi, said Cherry’s comments were clearly targeted at new immigrants. “The whole premise of what he said was so offensive, it was factually wrong and it completely glossed over and categorized people as ‘the other,’ without even understanding a lot of things,” he said.

National Post, with files from

Scott Stinson