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Wednesday, December 15, 2010
December 15, 2010,Times Colonist
by JACK TODD
Spare us Cherry’s phoney, hateful ranting
There he is in Toronna, old Sour Grapes himself, invited to the mayoral inauguration of Rob Ford, decked out in a jacket of Liberace pink, dripping sarcasm and hatred.
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, ya left-wing kooks,” Don Cherry bellows, among other sweet nothings to issue from the loudest mouth in Canada.
The lingo is a half-century old and mostly American, left over from political battles now in the history books. “Pinkos.” “Tree huggers.” “Left-wing kooks.” But the hatred, and the ugliness it fosters, is very much alive.
The problem is not so much what Cherry says (we’re accustomed to the bile he spews), it’s where he says it.
Like his appearance at the coronation of Ford, whose first act as mayor was to flush down the toilet the $130 million Toronto has already spent to upgrade its transit system.
Public transit, in the eyes of Ford and Cherry, is for bike-riding sissies, like the minimum-wage, blue-collar workers who rely on a transit system to get to work. Why don’t they just take a limo, for heaven’s sakes?
When Cherry dives in to right-wing politics with both feet firmly in his mouth, he is over the line — the line that separates commentary on hockey from such complex issues as public transit, health care and the war in Afghanistan.
Shameless to the core, Cherry has even devoted one segment of Coach’s Corner to his own self-aggrandizement as Canada’s self-appointed No. 1 soldier. But Cherry the soldier is as phoney as Cherry the blue-collar guy.
Cherry wants us to believe that he is blue-collar, while guys like me are the elite, bicycle-riding columnists.
I grew up with a tough, blue-collar guy. A real one, not a phoney. A father who was a combat veteran of the First World War. An ex-boxer with his hands all smashed up, his nose broken, his brain addled after 70 pro fights as a light-heavyweight.
My father had just about every fault in the book, but he was real. He voted solid Democrat. He stood up for the working man and the little guy. When he had almost nothing, he would give part of what he did have to a family that had nothing at all.
And he would have spotted a phoney like Cherry a mile off.
I thought I had said all I ever wanted to say about Cherry. But lately, the man has morphed into Glenn Beck in sequins, out to prove that he who shouts loudest is always right. It’s always the same thing: The rage, the name-calling, the complete absence of reason. Every time I see a Tea Party rally or listen to Cherry rant, I wonder: Why are these people so angry? All these rich, fat, angry white men and rich, thin, angry white women, what is their problem?
They aren’t begging on the street in Delhi or taking a bus and two subway trains to spend the night cleaning an office in Toronto. Yet to hear the rightwing elite tell it, it’s one of the great outrages in history that government actually wants them to pay taxes.
Cherry is entitled to his opinion, ignorant and wrongheaded as it may be. But if he wants to take up politics for a living, let him leave Hockey Night in Canada and go out on the campaign trail, where he might at least have to debate the issues, rather than pulling the rant-and-run that is his signature move.
Because when challenged, Cherry turtles. He doesn’t debate, he preaches. He doesn’t respond, he rants. And when all that fails, when his complete lack of rational thought or reasonable ideas is about to become obvious, he falls back on name-calling. “Left-wing kooks.” “Tree huggers.” “Pinkos.”
The CBC has done some dumb things over the years, like dumping the theme, or Hockey Night in Canada killing while keeping The Tournament the insipid Little Mosque on the Prairie on the air. But the worst thing our national, taxpayer-supported network ever did, by far, was to allow itself to be taken hostage by Cherry. It’s time for the network to show some spine and say “enough.” Politics or hockey commentary, but not both.
Meanwhile, we left-wing kooks will continue to support the right of working people to have affordable transit. We will insist that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home.
We will ask why the world should be run by the same investment bankers and right-wing politicians who triggered the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We’ll try to find ways to stop the wholesale destruction of our environment, so that the legacy we leave our children is something other than an infertile, ruined desert.
We’ll even attempt to persuade hockey players to wear visors, so that a player doesn’t lose his vision on the ice.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Don. Just don’t get ashes on the pink jacket. Liberace’s ghost wants it back.
Jack Todd is a sports columnist with The Gazette in Montreal.
by JACK TODD
Spare us Cherry’s phoney, hateful ranting
There he is in Toronna, old Sour Grapes himself, invited to the mayoral inauguration of Rob Ford, decked out in a jacket of Liberace pink, dripping sarcasm and hatred.
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, ya left-wing kooks,” Don Cherry bellows, among other sweet nothings to issue from the loudest mouth in Canada.
The lingo is a half-century old and mostly American, left over from political battles now in the history books. “Pinkos.” “Tree huggers.” “Left-wing kooks.” But the hatred, and the ugliness it fosters, is very much alive.
The problem is not so much what Cherry says (we’re accustomed to the bile he spews), it’s where he says it.
Like his appearance at the coronation of Ford, whose first act as mayor was to flush down the toilet the $130 million Toronto has already spent to upgrade its transit system.
Public transit, in the eyes of Ford and Cherry, is for bike-riding sissies, like the minimum-wage, blue-collar workers who rely on a transit system to get to work. Why don’t they just take a limo, for heaven’s sakes?
When Cherry dives in to right-wing politics with both feet firmly in his mouth, he is over the line — the line that separates commentary on hockey from such complex issues as public transit, health care and the war in Afghanistan.
Shameless to the core, Cherry has even devoted one segment of Coach’s Corner to his own self-aggrandizement as Canada’s self-appointed No. 1 soldier. But Cherry the soldier is as phoney as Cherry the blue-collar guy.
Cherry wants us to believe that he is blue-collar, while guys like me are the elite, bicycle-riding columnists.
I grew up with a tough, blue-collar guy. A real one, not a phoney. A father who was a combat veteran of the First World War. An ex-boxer with his hands all smashed up, his nose broken, his brain addled after 70 pro fights as a light-heavyweight.
My father had just about every fault in the book, but he was real. He voted solid Democrat. He stood up for the working man and the little guy. When he had almost nothing, he would give part of what he did have to a family that had nothing at all.
And he would have spotted a phoney like Cherry a mile off.
I thought I had said all I ever wanted to say about Cherry. But lately, the man has morphed into Glenn Beck in sequins, out to prove that he who shouts loudest is always right. It’s always the same thing: The rage, the name-calling, the complete absence of reason. Every time I see a Tea Party rally or listen to Cherry rant, I wonder: Why are these people so angry? All these rich, fat, angry white men and rich, thin, angry white women, what is their problem?
They aren’t begging on the street in Delhi or taking a bus and two subway trains to spend the night cleaning an office in Toronto. Yet to hear the rightwing elite tell it, it’s one of the great outrages in history that government actually wants them to pay taxes.
Cherry is entitled to his opinion, ignorant and wrongheaded as it may be. But if he wants to take up politics for a living, let him leave Hockey Night in Canada and go out on the campaign trail, where he might at least have to debate the issues, rather than pulling the rant-and-run that is his signature move.
Because when challenged, Cherry turtles. He doesn’t debate, he preaches. He doesn’t respond, he rants. And when all that fails, when his complete lack of rational thought or reasonable ideas is about to become obvious, he falls back on name-calling. “Left-wing kooks.” “Tree huggers.” “Pinkos.”
The CBC has done some dumb things over the years, like dumping the theme, or Hockey Night in Canada killing while keeping The Tournament the insipid Little Mosque on the Prairie on the air. But the worst thing our national, taxpayer-supported network ever did, by far, was to allow itself to be taken hostage by Cherry. It’s time for the network to show some spine and say “enough.” Politics or hockey commentary, but not both.
Meanwhile, we left-wing kooks will continue to support the right of working people to have affordable transit. We will insist that the best way to support our troops is to bring them home.
We will ask why the world should be run by the same investment bankers and right-wing politicians who triggered the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. We’ll try to find ways to stop the wholesale destruction of our environment, so that the legacy we leave our children is something other than an infertile, ruined desert.
We’ll even attempt to persuade hockey players to wear visors, so that a player doesn’t lose his vision on the ice.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Don. Just don’t get ashes on the pink jacket. Liberace’s ghost wants it back.
Jack Todd is a sports columnist with The Gazette in Montreal.
