This is no country for old men.
— W.B. Yeats (who had a dream a hundred years ago, about Don Cherry and the Sportsnet weasels)
Just to set the tone here: Three cheers for Don Cherry. And as that clearly seems insufficient — three more cheers for the grand old man.
Way to go Sportsnet. It takes a lot of what Jessica Yaniv was trying to get waxed to bring the guillotine down on an 85-year-old man, to toss him out — on Remembrance Day — for delivering a passionate sermon about the wearing of a poppy on … Remembrance Day. You guys are so tough you probably have to wear helmets and shin pads in the office.
For 39 years Don Cherry has been the face, the voice, and the proudest celebrator of the country’s chosen game, and Sportsnet snaps that career shut, hurls him off air, because what I will call “the usual crowd” got all huffy and screamingly righteous over what — at worst — was an indelicate phrase that was all of two words.
There is no career in all of Canadian sports history, and there will never be another one as successful, as entertaining, as continuously animated and enthusiastic as Don Cherry’s. And this is how it ends. No testimonial dinner. No gathering of hockey heroes, old and young, to toast and roast the master communicator of the game. No TV specials to celebrate the greatest television star that purely Canadian TV has produced. He is, you know.
Instead, without so much as time to take a breath, Sportsnet gives him the boot in an (ungrammatical) three-sentence press release that should be put in a museum for its rare blend of perfect corporate sanctimony and utter cravenness. He deserved — he deserves so much better and you crowd should be ashamed of yourselves for treating Canadian hockey’s No. 1 statesman the way you have.
[…]
