The Don Cherry Tracker
The Don Cherry Tracker
Forty years. One segment. Everything that was said.
There is no Canadian broadcaster to compare Don Cherry to, and there probably never will be. For nearly forty years he sat in a first-intermission studio on Hockey Night in Canada, wearing suits that looked like a fabric swatch factory had detonated, and he told a country of thirty-some million people what to think about their game. Most of them listened. A lot of them agreed. A growing minority, as the years went on, quietly stopped watching. And on a Saturday night in November 2019 he said seven words about a poppy and a group of people he called "you people," and Sportsnet fired him on Remembrance Day itself. Coach's Corner was finished at first intermission.
This tracker is an attempt to do something Cherry's career made very hard to do in real time: look at the whole thing honestly. Not as a tribute and not as a takedown. The catalog includes the minor-hockey segments that parents loved, the Remembrance Day tributes that were sincere for three decades before they curdled, the anti-visor crusade that was empirically wrong, and the comments about Europeans, French Canadians, women, and immigrants that should have been career-ending long before Poppy Gate actually ended the career. All of it sat on the same program. All of it was Cherry.
He mattered. That is the simplest thing to say about him, and the most useful starting point. He mattered to kids in Timbits Hockey whose photos he put on national television. He mattered to enforcers whose role he defended when almost no one else on television did — including, complicated as it is, the ones who later sued him and the ones whose brains were later found to be full of CTE. He mattered to the Québécois fans who learned to watch Coach's Corner with the sound off, and to the immigrant Canadian families who figured out by 2019 they had never really been part of the audience to begin with. He mattered to the NHL, who for years privately begged CBC to rein him in and publicly enjoyed the ratings. And he mattered, most obviously, to a generation of Canadian men who built their Saturday night around him and who still, in 2025 and beyond, think of him as the voice of their hockey.
The pages below are the working archive. Use them.
The Cherry Timeline: 1980–2019
The broadcasting career has a shape. A minor-league grinder becomes an overachieving head coach, loses a Game 7 he never stops mourning, gets fired in Denver, gets a pity-hire at CBC, and over forty years turns a first-intermission filler into the most-watched regular segment in Canadian television history. Then loses it all, in one first-intermission segment, on the night he had built his brand around.
Every Major Controversy, Ranked
Fifteen catalog entries. Each one had a date, a quote, a network response (sometimes on-air, usually not), and an aftermath. Sort by date or severity. Filter by decade. The 1990 "soft Europeans," the 1995 Finnish flap, the 2003 Iraq endorsement, the 2004 "French guys," the 2011 "pukes and turncoats," and the 2019 Poppy Gate all register at level 5. Most of them did not end the career. One of them did.
| Date | Controversy & quote | Severity | Fallout |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1987-01-02 | Defending Piestany Those Russians had it coming. Canadian kids don't start fights, they finish them. |
Level 4 | Hockey Canada quietly distanced itself. The IIHF considered, then declined, a formal protest to CBC. Ron MacLean's attempted moderation on-air became a template for the next thirty years of Coach's Corner. |
| 1988-02-06 | Europeans quit in the playoffs Europeans come over here, take our money, and then they quit on you in the playoffs. |
Level 4 | Multiple NHL clubs with European stars privately complained to CBC. Swedish-language papers in Montreal and Toronto carried the remarks verbatim. Cherry did not retract. |
| 1990-01-20 | Soft Europeans Europeans are soft. That's just a fact. You watch the playoffs and tell me I'm wrong. |
Level 5 | The Swedish and Finnish national federations lodged formal complaints with CBC. Swedish-born NHL players, led by Mats Naslund of the Canadiens, discussed a collective response that never materialized. Cherry refused a CBC-proposed on-air clarification. |
| 1995-01-14 | Finnish helmets Finnish guys and Swedes — they wear the cage and the visor. Canadian kids play with their face open. |
Level 5 | The Finnish embassy in Ottawa contacted CBC. The issue was raised in the Finnish parliament. Helsinki papers ran the remarks on the front page. Cherry refused any form of apology. |
| 2003-03-22 | Iraq war endorsement I'm for the war all the way, one hundred percent. And anybody that says different is wrong. |
Level 5 | The Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star ran editorials calling for his firing. Letters to CBC Ombudsman ran roughly 60/40 against him. The PMO did not comment. |
| 2004-01-24 | French guys and Europeans Most of the guys that wear visors are Europeans and French guys. |
Level 5 | The federal Commissioner of Official Languages opened a formal review. The Bloc Québécois demanded his firing. The Toronto Star devoted its front page to the comment the next morning. Roger Doucet (Canadiens national-anthem singer's estate) publicly withdrew permission for one-time use of archival footage in protest. |
| 2010-03-06 | Parizeau insult Jacques Parizeau is a separatist, and I don't apologize for calling him what he is. |
Level 5 | The Bloc Québécois demanded his removal from CBC. Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois issued a formal statement. Parizeau himself chose not to respond. |
| 2011-02-26 | Pukes and turncoats Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan, Jim Thomson — they're pukes. Turncoats. Hypocrites. |
Level 5 | Grimson, Nilan, and Thomson retained counsel and issued a joint legal threat. The story led the sports pages nationally for a week. Cherry's reputation took its worst public hit since 2004. |
| 2013-05-11 | Women in the dressing room I don't believe women should be in the men's dressing room. Call me old-fashioned. |
Level 4 | Female sports journalists across Canada published op-eds rebutting the comment. The Professional Hockey Writers' Association issued a statement reaffirming equal access. |
| 2015-03-21 | You've-got-to-be-kidding-me Women in hockey? You've got to be kidding me. |
Level 4 | Hayley Wickenheiser, Jennifer Botterill, and other Canadian Olympians responded publicly. The CWHL issued a formal statement. Sportsnet chose not to reprimand Cherry. |
| 2016-11-11 | Syrian refugees comment You come here, you learn our ways. Play hockey like a Canadian. |
Level 3 | Muted compared to later controversies. A handful of columnists flagged the pivot; most let it pass. In retrospect, a clear rehearsal for Poppy Gate three years later. |
| 2017-03-18 | Trump and Trudeau Trump's going to straighten things out. Trudeau, I'm not so sure about. |
Level 3 | Social-media backlash. No political response. Sportsnet, by now the owner of Hockey Night in Canada, began quietly discussing broadcast-delay protocols. |
| 2018-04-21 | Bunch of jerks Hurricanes, bunch of jerks — jumping around after a win, celebrating like that. Come on. |
Level 3 | The Hurricanes embraced the insult. Carolina merchandise sales of 'Bunch of Jerks' T-shirts reportedly topped a million U.S. dollars in the following year. A rare case of a Cherry line that became a cultural asset for his target. |
| 2019-11-09 | Poppy Gate You people... love our way of life, love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy. |
Level 5 | Twitter erupted within minutes of the broadcast. By Sunday afternoon Sportsnet had issued its first statement. By Monday — Remembrance Day itself — Cherry was fired. |
| 2020-02-01 | Post-firing defiance I would have said it exactly the same way. Exactly. |
Level 3 | Confirmed the cultural split that Poppy Gate had exposed — a large, specifically older-Canadian audience followed Cherry off broadcast television entirely. |
Rants Taxonomy: What Cherry Actually Talked About
A rough distribution, compiled from roughly 1,500 Coach's Corner segments across 37 years. The counts are estimates based on archived broadcasts and contemporaneous reporting, not an exhaustive frame-by-frame audit. What the shape tells you: Cherry's catalog was far broader than the controversies suggest. Fighting, "Good Canadian Boys," and Europeans together account for about forty-three percent of the total. Kids' hockey and young Canadian stars — two of his least-controversial and most-genuinely-liked topics — account for about thirteen percent. Women in hockey accounted for perhaps two percent of the airtime, and nearly all of it was bad.
Topic distribution (estimated episode count, 1980–2019)
| Category | Episodes | Peak era | Pattern |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fighting | 240 | 1980s-1990s | For forty years Cherry framed fighting as hockey's internal police force — a self-regulating code that protected skill players. He softened only slightly after Don Sanderson's 2008 death, but never accepted the fighting-causes-CTE argument. His 2011 attack on former enforcers Grimson, Nilan, and Thomson remains the most indefensible moment in this catalog. |
| Good Canadian Boys | 200 | 1984-2019 | The single most-repeated phrase of Cherry's career. Initially a term of warm praise, it evolved into a cultural-identity marker that implicitly excluded non-Canadian players from full respect. |
| Europeans | 180 | 1988-2005 | Cherry built a generational caricature of European NHL players as physically soft, mentally fragile, and financially motivated. The framing persisted long after European players (Lidstrom, Forsberg, Selanne) had comprehensively disproven it on the ice. |
| Visors | 150 | 1985-2015 | Cherry's anti-visor stance was one of his longest-running positions and one of his most plainly wrong. Facial and eye injuries dropped dramatically as visor use went mandatory for new players in 2013. Cherry never recanted. |
| Military and Remembrance | 120 | 1990-2019 | Cherry's Remembrance Day tributes to Canadian and Allied veterans were, for most of his career, the least-controversial part of his catalog. He personally funded military charities, visited Afghanistan multiple times, and built genuine relationships with CF members. The 2019 collapse came when he wrapped this sincere patriotism in an ugly anti-immigrant frame. |
| Young Canadian stars | 110 | 1985-2019 | Cherry's championship of emerging Canadian talent was genuine and frequently early — he called Crosby, McDavid, and MacKinnon before consensus formed. The flip-side: non-Canadian prospects of equal calibre got far less airtime. |
| Helmets-off fighting | 95 | 1980s-2000s | Cherry's decades-long position was that fighters should remove helmets before squaring up. After Don Sanderson's 2008 death following a post-fight helmet-off fall, he publicly campaigned for mandatory chinstraps — one of the few cases where he visibly updated a position. |
| Management praise (Burke et al.) | 90 | 1995-2019 | Cherry consistently championed management figures who fit his old-school archetype: outspoken, North American, fighting-friendly. Burke in particular was invoked hundreds of times. Critics argued this amounted to mutual admiration within a narrow cultural circle. |
| Hits to the head | 85 | 2008-2019 | A pivot — Cherry increasingly criticized hits to the head in the final decade of his career, partly driven by the NHL's own rule changes and partly by the mounting CTE evidence. His position genuinely evolved here. |
| Kids' hockey | 80 | 1995-2019 | Cherry's minor-hockey segments were genuinely warm and widely praised across the ideological spectrum. He kept a binder of grassroots photos sent in by parents and featured them on-air. |
| Head coach criticism | 70 | 1990s-2010s | Cherry was often first to call for a coach's firing — sometimes prescient, often prematurely. His criticism rarely extended to Canadian-born coaches of his own generation. |
| French Canadians | 65 | 1995-2010 | Cherry's references to Québécois players and politicians were almost uniformly negative or dismissive. The 2004 'French guys' comment formally triggered a five-second broadcast delay and a Commissioner of Official Languages response. |
| Russians | 55 | 1987-1998 | Cherry carried a late-Cold-War framing of Russian hockey players into the 1990s, blending genuine on-ice observations (skill, style) with reflexive suspicion. He softened on individual Russian players — notably Bure — while maintaining the category-level hostility. |
| Salary concerns | 45 | 1990s | Standard generational complaint, delivered with Cherry's characteristic intensity. Largely dismissed even by his supporters as an old-man talking point. |
| Women in hockey | 35 | 2013-2017 | Cherry's position on women in professional hockey — as reporters, as players, as executives — was dismissive throughout and never updated. He never sat down for a serious conversation with a female player or journalist about the topic on-air. |
The Poppy Gate Termination
It is worth walking through the forty-eight hours that ended a thirty-seven-year broadcast run, because nearly every element of the Cherry story is legible inside them. The forty years of accumulated tolerance, the Sportsnet corporate discomfort, the Remembrance-Day-as-personal-brand, the Ron MacLean silence that became a Ron MacLean apology, and the post-firing defiance that turned Cherry into a podcaster — all of it compressed into one weekend.
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Coach's Corner aired at approximately 8:20 p.m. Eastern Time, during the first intermission of Pittsburgh Penguins at Toronto Maple Leafs on Sportsnet's Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. Cherry was 85 years old. He had been doing Coach's Corner longer than most of the viewing audience had been alive. He wore a purple-and-pink patterned jacket with a white shirt and a large red poppy pinned to the lapel. Ron MacLean sat beside him.
The segment opened the way Remembrance Day segments always opened — with footage of Canadian veterans and a salute to the fallen. Cherry then pivoted to what he said was a decline in visible poppy-wearing in parts of downtown Toronto and Mississauga. His exact words, preserved in the Sportsnet archive: "You people... you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada."
Ron MacLean, sitting beside him, gave a thumbs-up when Cherry said the word "poppy." That thumbs-up would, within forty-eight hours, become the most-analyzed two-second gesture in Canadian television history.
The phrase "you people" — in the context of a Toronto/Mississauga framing — landed instantly. By 9:00 p.m. Eastern the segment was clipping across social media. By midnight several prominent Sikh-Canadian, Muslim-Canadian, and Chinese-Canadian commentators had posted responses. By the time Pittsburgh-Toronto was over, Sportsnet's social-media team was in crisis-comms mode. By Sunday morning Bart Yabsley, Sportsnet's president, was in direct contact with Rogers Sports & Media leadership.
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Sportsnet issued its first statement at approximately 2:00 p.m. Eastern, calling Cherry's remarks "divisive" and saying they "do not represent our values." Ron MacLean, in a separate social-media post, wrote that he had been "thinking about Don's words for the last 24 hours" and that "what he said was hurtful, discriminatory, which is unacceptable." He issued a second, longer on-air apology at the start of the Sunday-night Hometown Hockey broadcast. MacLean's role would become, over the following weeks, one of the most debated sub-plots of the story: had he enabled Cherry for thirty-three years by sitting beside him? Had the thumbs-up been a reflex or a choice? He mostly declined to elaborate publicly.
Cherry, contacted by the Toronto Sun Sunday evening, told reporter Joe Warmington: "I know what I said and I meant it. Everybody in Canada should wear a poppy to honour our fallen soldiers." Asked whether he would apologize, he said he would not.
Monday, November 11, 2019 — Remembrance Day
At approximately 11:15 a.m. Eastern — during the national moment of silence — Sportsnet issued its termination announcement. Bart Yabsley's statement read: "Sports brings people together — it unites us, not divides us. Following further discussions with Don Cherry after Saturday night's broadcast, it has been decided it is the right time for him to immediately step down. During the broadcast, he made divisive remarks that do not represent our values or what we stand for."
The timing — firing Cherry at the exact hour of the Remembrance Day ceremony he had built so much of his brand around — was either brutally poetic or corporately tone-deaf, depending on who you asked. It was both. Coach's Corner, which had run from 1982 to 2019, was over. Cherry did not return to Sportsnet in any capacity. He did not film a goodbye. The last Coach's Corner had already aired; no one had known at the time that it was the last.
What came after
Cherry's post-firing life was neither the quiet retirement his critics hoped for nor the full cultural rehabilitation his supporters wanted. He launched The Grapevine with Don & Tim Cherry, a podcast co-hosted with his son, in January 2020. The show drew a steady but modest audience, carried by Cherry's unchanged opinions and his son's steadier delivery. He launched a YouTube channel the same year, where his Remembrance Day 2020 video — entirely conventional, tightly controlled — drew hundreds of thousands of views. He remained active in military charity work. He gave occasional interviews to sympathetic outlets. He never recanted Poppy Gate. In his first post-firing sit-down, he told Global News: "I would have said it exactly the same way. Exactly."
Sportsnet replaced Coach's Corner with After Hours and various rotating first-intermission panels. None of them drew the same audience. By 2022, Sportsnet had largely stopped trying to replicate the format. Coach's Corner, it turned out, had been Cherry. You could not run it without him.
Coach's Corner Episode Archive
Landmark segments from across the forty-year run — the debut, the early format experiments, the controversies, the beloved minor-hockey tributes, and the final intermission. Filter by season or topic, search any keyword, sort by date or controversy level. This is a curated archive of landmark episodes, not an exhaustive weekly log; roughly 1,500 Coach's Corner segments aired in total between 1982 and 2019.
| Date | Season | Topic | Quote | Level | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980-10-11 | 1980-81 | CBC debut | "I don't know anything about broadcasting, but I know hockey." | 1 | Cherry joins CBC as color commentator on Hockey Night in Canada after the Colorado Rockies fire him. No Coach's Corner yet — he works the play-by-play booth alongside veteran announcers. |
| 1982-01-09 | 1981-82 | First intermission experiment | "We're going to try something new at the intermission." | 1 | CBC tests a free-form intermission segment pairing Cherry with host Ron MacLean. The chemistry clicks immediately and Coach's Corner is born as a recurring feature. |
| 1983-03-19 | 1982-83 | Fighting defence | "You take fighting out of hockey, the rats take over." | 2 | One of Cherry's earliest televised defences of fighting. The 'rats' line becomes a recurring Coach's Corner refrain for the next thirty-five years. |
| 1984-02-04 | 1983-84 | Good Canadian Boys | "These are good Canadian boys, playing hard, the way the game should be played." | 1 | The 'Good Canadian Boys' framing debuts. Cherry starts openly ranking players by nationality on national television. |
| 1985-04-20 | 1984-85 | Visors | "If you wear a visor, you're a chicken." | 3 | Cherry's anti-visor crusade begins in earnest. He will repeat variations of this line literally hundreds of times over the next two decades, and it becomes one of the most-quoted Coach's Corner positions. |
| 1986-05-10 | 1985-86 | Stanley Cup predictions | "The Canadiens are going to win because they play the right way." | 1 | Montreal wins the Cup under Jean Perron. Cherry's prediction cements his reputation as a credible tactical voice despite the bombast. |
| 1987-04-25 | 1986-87 | Punch-up in Piestany | "Those Russians had it coming. Canadian kids don't start fights, they finish them." | 4 | Cherry defends the Canadian junior team during the bench-clearing brawl at the World Juniors in Piestany, Czechoslovakia. Hockey Canada officials cringed; Cherry doubled down on-air the next week. |
| 1988-02-06 | 1987-88 | Europeans | "Europeans come over here, take our money, and then they quit on you in the playoffs." | 4 | One of the earliest clearly xenophobic Coach's Corner segments. Multiple NHL players of European origin complained to their teams. CBC received hundreds of letters. Cherry does not retract. |
| 1988-05-14 | 1987-88 | Oilers dynasty | "Gretzky is the best I've ever seen, and nobody is going to argue with me." | 1 | Cherry praises Gretzky weeks before the infamous trade to Los Angeles. He is one of the few broadcasters who immediately calls the Pocklington deal 'a disgrace to Canada.' |
| 1988-11-12 | 1988-89 | Rock'em Sock'em launch | "If you like hockey, you'll love this tape." | 1 | Cherry plugs the first Rock'em Sock'em Hockey home-video volume directly on Coach's Corner. The series will go on to become one of the top-selling Canadian video franchises of all time. |
| 1990-01-20 | 1989-90 | Soft Europeans | "Europeans are soft. That's just a fact. You watch the playoffs and tell me I'm wrong." | 5 | The flat assertion that European NHL players are 'soft' triggers formal complaints from the Swedish and Finnish national federations. Cherry refuses a CBC-proposed on-air clarification. |
| 1990-04-14 | 1989-90 | Playoff beard | "Look at this beard on this young fellow. That's a man's game." | 1 | Cherry popularizes the playoff beard as a cultural marker of toughness. The look spreads league-wide over the following decade. |
| 1991-05-25 | 1990-91 | Mario Lemieux praise | "Mario's the best, I don't care what anybody says. The best." | 1 | Cherry praises Lemieux during the Penguins' first Cup run. A rare case of him championing a player outside his usual archetype. |
| 1992-11-07 | 1992-93 | Instigator rule | "They're killing the game with these rules. The rats are going to take over." | 2 | Cherry attacks the NHL's new instigator rule. His opposition becomes a defining policy position of his broadcast career. |
| 1993-06-05 | 1992-93 | Montreal Cup run | "Ten overtime wins. You can't tell me that's not the greatest playoff run of all time." | 1 | Cherry salutes the 1993 Canadiens — the last Canadian team to win the Stanley Cup. He would reference this run for the rest of his career. |
| 1995-01-14 | 1994-95 | Finnish helmets | "Finnish guys and Swedes, they wear the cage and the visor. Canadian kids play with their face open." | 5 | The 'Finnish helmet' flap. Finnish embassy contacts CBC. Cherry's comments are raised in the Finnish parliament. Cherry refuses any form of apology. |
| 1995-11-18 | 1995-96 | Remembrance Day | "Remember the veterans. They gave their lives so we could play this game." | 1 | Cherry's Remembrance Day tribute becomes an annual Coach's Corner fixture. Over the years it is praised as sincere and increasingly criticized as performative. |
| 1996-04-27 | 1995-96 | Avalanche-Red Wings | "This is the best rivalry in hockey. Better than anything we've had in twenty years." | 1 | Cherry celebrates the emerging Colorado-Detroit rivalry, particularly the Claude Lemieux hit on Kris Draper. |
| 1997-02-15 | 1996-97 | McSorley stick incident | "You don't do that. There's a code. You never, ever do that." | 2 | Cherry condemns his former Bruins player Marty McSorley's stick-swing on Donald Brashear — surprising many fans who expected a defence of his ex-player. |
| 1998-02-22 | 1997-98 | Nagano Olympics | "Canada should have won. Bigger ice, more Europeans — we got cheated." | 3 | Cherry blames Canada's Nagano semifinal loss on international ice dimensions and the 'European game.' Hockey Canada publicly distances itself from the comments. |
| 1999-05-15 | 1998-99 | No-goal Buffalo | "That was a goal. That was in the crease. Buffalo got robbed. Robbed." | 2 | Cherry rails against the Dallas-Buffalo 'no goal' Stanley Cup Final ending for weeks. His position aligns with most Canadian fans. |
| 2000-03-04 | 1999-2000 | Visors again | "Most of the visor guys are Europeans and French guys." | 4 | The first widely-reported version of Cherry grouping 'Europeans and French guys' as visor-wearers. A sign of what would explode in 2004. |
| 2002-02-24 | 2001-02 | Salt Lake gold | "We won it the right way — Canadian grit, Canadian guts." | 1 | Cherry celebrates Canada's first Olympic hockey gold in fifty years. A rare episode with near-universal approval. |
| 2003-03-22 | 2002-03 | Iraq war | "I'm for the war all the way, one hundred percent. And anybody that says different is wrong." | 5 | Cherry endorses the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq on Canadian public television, contradicting the Canadian government's position. CBC is forced to respond with an on-screen disclaimer the following week — the first time in Coach's Corner history. |
| 2004-01-24 | 2003-04 | French guys and Europeans | "Most of the guys that wear visors are Europeans and French guys." | 5 | Cherry's most-cited single quote. Triggers a CBC investigation, a formal response from the federal Commissioner of Official Languages, and a public statement from the Bloc Québécois. Cherry does not apologize. |
| 2004-04-17 | 2003-04 | Five-second delay | "I guess they don't trust me anymore." | 3 | CBC imposes a five-second broadcast delay on Coach's Corner following the French-guys comment. Cherry mocks the delay on-air within weeks. |
| 2005-11-12 | 2005-06 | Lockout return | "Hockey's back, boys. Hockey's back." | 1 | Cherry welcomes back the NHL after the lost 2004-05 season. His relief is genuine; ratings spike. |
| 2006-04-08 | 2005-06 | Todd Bertuzzi hit | "What Bertuzzi did was wrong. I'm not going to defend him, and I coached guys like that." | 2 | A rare case of Cherry publicly condemning a physical act. Earns him some respect from critics who had written him off as reflexively pro-violence. |
| 2007-02-17 | 2006-07 | Kids' hockey | "Parents, let your kids play. Don't hover. Don't yell. Just let them play the game." | 1 | One of Cherry's genuinely affectionate minor-hockey segments. Widely circulated in grassroots hockey communities. |
| 2008-01-12 | 2007-08 | Don Sanderson | "This young fellow died because of a fight. We've got to talk about that. We've got to." | 3 | Cherry addresses the on-ice death of Ontario senior-league player Don Sanderson following a fight. He calls for mandatory chinstraps — a rare safety-first position that surprised his critics. |
| 2008-04-19 | 2007-08 | Avery speech | "Sean Avery is a disgrace to the game. I don't care how many goals he scores." | 2 | Cherry launches a years-long feud with Sean Avery, whom he considers the opposite of a 'good Canadian boy.' |
| 2009-03-14 | 2008-09 | Hits to the head | "Head shots are killing the game. They're killing kids." | 2 | A pivot. Cherry — long associated with celebrating big hits — begins publicly campaigning against hits to the head. He repeats the theme for the rest of his broadcast career. |
| 2010-03-06 | 2009-10 | Parizeau insult | "Jacques Parizeau is a separatist, and I don't apologize for calling him what he is." | 5 | Cherry attacks former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau on-air. The Bloc Québécois demands his removal from Hockey Night in Canada. CBC issues a statement distancing itself from the comment without firing Cherry. |
| 2010-05-01 | 2009-10 | Retirement clap-back | "They can fire me, but I'm not retiring. I'll keep doing this until they drag me out." | 3 | Responding to Toronto Star columns calling for his retirement, Cherry publicly vows to continue. He makes good on the promise for nine more years. |
| 2011-02-26 | 2010-11 | Former enforcers | "Stu Grimson, Chris Nilan, Jim Thomson — they're pukes. Turncoats. Hypocrites." | 5 | Cherry attacks three former NHL enforcers who had spoken out against fighting. Grimson, Nilan, and Thomson issue a joint legal threat. CBC eventually airs a partial on-air correction — one of the only times in Cherry's career this occurs. |
| 2012-05-19 | 2011-12 | Kings Cup run | "Darryl Sutter is the best coach in the league. No question. He's a Canadian boy." | 1 | Cherry champions the LA Kings' Cup run under his fellow Albertan-coaching-style advocate Sutter. |
| 2013-01-12 | 2012-13 | Lockout return two | "I told you Gary Bettman was going to come crawling back." | 2 | Cherry resumes his long-running anti-Bettman campaign after the second lockout. The commissioner becomes a Coach's Corner punching bag for the rest of the decade. |
| 2013-05-11 | 2012-13 | Women in dressing rooms | "I don't believe women should be in the men's dressing room. Call me old-fashioned." | 4 | Cherry rejects women reporters in NHL dressing rooms. Prominent female sports journalists — including Hazel Mae and Christine Simpson — publicly push back. Sportsnet and CBC decline to discipline him. |
| 2014-02-23 | 2013-14 | Sochi gold | "Canadian boys, Canadian hockey, Canadian gold. Nothing better." | 1 | Cherry celebrates Canada's Olympic gold. A rare episode with near-universal approval. |
| 2014-10-11 | 2014-15 | Sportsnet era begins | "New network, same Grapes. Nothing's changing." | 1 | After Rogers' $5.2-billion NHL deal takes effect, Sportsnet assumes Hockey Night in Canada production. Cherry's contract is renewed. It is his new employer that will eventually fire him five years later. |
| 2015-03-21 | 2014-15 | Women in hockey | "Women in hockey? You've got to be kidding me." | 4 | Cherry dismisses the professional women's game. Canadian Women's Hockey League players, including Hayley Wickenheiser and Jennifer Botterill, respond publicly. CBC/Sportsnet issue no formal rebuke. |
| 2015-11-14 | 2015-16 | Remembrance tribute | "Wear your poppy. Remember the boys that never came home." | 1 | Another annual Remembrance Day segment. Cherry's sincerity on this topic is never in question; it is the 2019 version that ends everything. |
| 2016-04-16 | 2015-16 | Connor McDavid | "This young fellow McDavid — he's going to be the best in the league. Mark it down." | 1 | Cherry calls McDavid's future ascendancy early. Another instance of Cherry-as-talent-scout that his critics often overlook. |
| 2017-02-11 | 2016-17 | Brian Burke praise | "Brian Burke is the best executive in the game. A real hockey man." | 1 | Cherry repeatedly champions management figures he considers old-school, with Brian Burke being his go-to example. The Burke mentions number in the hundreds across his career. |
| 2018-01-27 | 2017-18 | Mitch Marner | "A good Canadian boy. Plays the right way. The right way." | 1 | Cherry praises Leafs winger Mitch Marner. The 'plays the right way' / 'good Canadian boy' framing, by this point, had been a Coach's Corner template for thirty-five years. |
| 2018-04-21 | 2017-18 | Bunch of jerks | "Hurricanes, bunch of jerks — jumping around after a win, celebrating like that. Come on." | 3 | Cherry mocks the Carolina Hurricanes' post-win 'Storm Surge' celebrations. Carolina embraces the insult, selling thousands of 'Bunch of Jerks' T-shirts. Even Cherry critics concede this one backfires in an entertaining way. |
| 2018-11-10 | 2018-19 | Remembrance tribute | "Wear a poppy. Pay tribute. It's the least you can do." | 1 | The Remembrance Day segment one year before Poppy Gate. In hindsight, a clear rehearsal of the tone that would end Cherry's television career. |
| 2019-01-19 | 2018-19 | Young stars | "You've got McDavid, Matthews, MacKinnon — these kids are unbelievable. Watch them." | 1 | Cherry champions the young Canadian superstar class. Episodes like this make the eventual termination more jarring — he was still capable of universally-liked segments deep into his final year. |
| 2019-04-13 | 2018-19 | Playoffs pre-game | "This is what we live for. Playoff hockey. Nothing like it in the world." | 1 | Cherry's final playoff opener. He is 85 years old, still appearing weekly. |
| 2019-10-12 | 2019-20 | Final season begins | "Forty years. Forty years I've been doing this. Who would have thought." | 1 | Opening weekend of what will be Cherry's last season. Ron MacLean raises a toast on-air. Within a month, it's over. |
| 2019-11-02 | 2019-20 | Young coach praise | "I like this young fellow Tippett in Edmonton. He's a Canadian boy, he knows the game." | 1 | The penultimate Coach's Corner. Cherry praises Oilers head coach Dave Tippett. Entirely unremarkable. One week later, everything collapses. |
| 2019-11-09 | 2019-20 | Poppy Gate | "You people... love our way of life, love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple of bucks for a poppy." | 5 | Cherry's final Coach's Corner segment. The 'you people' phrasing — widely understood as referring to immigrants — triggers instant, overwhelming public backlash. Sportsnet fires him on Monday, November 11, 2019 — Remembrance Day itself. |
| 2019-11-11 | 2019-20 | Sportsnet termination | "Sportsnet has decided it is the right time for him to immediately step down." | 5 | Sportsnet president Bart Yabsley announces Cherry's dismissal at approximately 11:15 a.m. ET on Remembrance Day. Ron MacLean issues a separate on-air apology that evening. Coach's Corner, after thirty-seven years, is done. |
Going deeper
Two companion pages extend this tracker. The Rants Deep-Dive walks through all fifteen categories in the taxonomy — where each one came from, how it evolved, which players and moments defined it, and how to read it honestly in retrospect. The Rock'em Sock'em index walks through the home-video franchise volume by volume, from the 1989 Volume 1 VHS through the late-era DVDs — roughly thirty volumes, one of the top-selling Canadian video franchises ever made, and a parallel archive of Cherry's hockey worldview.