Coach, Commentator, and the Loudest Man in Canadian Hockey
There has never been anyone quite like Don Cherry. Not in hockey. Not in Canadian media. Not anywhere. For more than three decades, he sat in a television studio wearing suits that looked like they were designed during a fever dream, and he told an entire nation what to think about their national sport. The remarkable thing wasn't that he did it. The remarkable thing was that most of them listened.
Cherry was a contradiction in almost every way. A man who never made it as an NHL player but became the most famous voice in hockey history. A coach who never won a Stanley Cup but is remembered more vividly than many who did. A patriot whose love of country became so fierce it eventually consumed his career. He was adored and despised, often by the same people, often in the same sentence.
This is the story of how a kid from Kingston, Ontario became the most powerful figure in Canadian hockey—and how it all came crashing down on a November night in 2019.
Before the suits, before the rants, before "Coach's Corner" became appointment viewing for an entire country, Don Cherry was a hockey player. And not a particularly successful one.
Born on February 5, 1934, in Kingston, Ontario, Donald Stewart Cherry grew up in a hockey-mad household. His father, Del, was a dedicated sports fan, and young Don took to the ice with the single-minded intensity that would define his entire life. He was tough, physical, and absolutely fearless. He was also, by his own admission, not especially talented.
"I could hit, I could fight, I could play defence," Cherry once said. "I just couldn't skate well enough to do any of it in the NHL."
The numbers tell the story. Over a 20-year professional career, Don Cherry played exactly one NHL game—a 1955 playoff contest with the Boston Bruins. One game. That was it. The rest of his playing days were spent grinding through the American Hockey League, primarily with the Hershey Bears, Springfield Indians, and other AHL outposts that dotted the northeastern United States.
In the AHL, Cherry was respected. He accumulated over 800 games and racked up penalty minutes at a rate that suggested he took the physical side of the game very seriously. He was a team leader, a locker room presence, the kind of player coaches trusted. But the NHL call never came. Not really.
"That one playoff game haunted him," a former teammate recalled. "He'd talk about it years later—not with bitterness, exactly, but with this awareness that he'd been right there. Right on the edge. And the edge was as far as he ever got."
The minor league years shaped everything that followed. Cherry developed an understanding of the game from the bottom up—not from the penthouse of NHL stardom but from the bus rides and cold arenas and two-dollar meal money of professional hockey's basement. He knew what it felt like to be overlooked. He knew what it meant to fight for every inch. And he carried that chip on his shoulder for the rest of his life.
Don Cherry's path to the Boston Bruins' bench was improbable. After retiring as a player, he coached in the minor leagues, working his way through the Rochester Americans and other AHL clubs. He was loud, demanding, and fiercely loyal to his players. His teams played hard. They fought. They won.
In 1974, the Bruins came calling. Boston had just lost Phil Esposito and Bobby Orr was battling the knee injuries that would soon end his career. The team needed an identity, and Cherry gave them one.
"Grapes changed the whole culture," said one former Bruins player. "Before him, we were a team that was trying to replace guys we couldn't replace. After him, we were a team that was going to outwork and outfight everybody. It was a completely different mindset."
Cherry's Boston teams were built on toughness. Players like Terry O'Reilly, Stan Jonathan, John Wensink, and Al Secord set the tone. They would skate through you, over you, or simply beat you up. The Bruins under Cherry made the playoffs every year, reaching the Stanley Cup Finals in 1977 and 1978, losing both times to the Montreal Canadiens dynasty.
Cherry won the Jack Adams Award as NHL Coach of the Year in 1976. His record behind the bench was extraordinary: 250 wins, 153 losses, and 77 ties across five seasons. But the stat that mattered most to Cherry was how hard his teams competed. He demanded full effort, every shift, every game. Players who didn't comply found themselves in the press box.
If Don Cherry's coaching career had a defining moment, it came on May 10, 1979. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup semifinals. Boston versus Montreal. The Bruins were winning 4-3 with under three minutes to play. The Forum was tense. A trip to the Finals was within reach.
Then it happened.
Too many men on the ice. A Bruins player jumped on while another hadn't come off. The referee's arm went up. Montreal scored on the power play—Guy Lafleur, of course—and then won in overtime.
"That penalty changed his life," observed a hockey writer who covered the Bruins. "Not just the game. His life. He carried it like a wound. Decades later, you could see it in his eyes when it came up. The moment everything almost happened."
Cherry was fired after the following season—a brief, unhappy stint with the Colorado Rockies in 1979-80. His NHL coaching career was over. He was 46 years old, and the best part of his life was about to begin.
The transition from fired hockey coach to television icon didn't happen overnight, but it happened faster than anyone expected. Cherry had done some local broadcasting in the early 1980s, and the CBC noticed what everyone who had ever met him already knew: the man was an absolute force of nature on camera.
In 1986, "Coach's Corner" was born. The format was simple: during the first intermission of Saturday night Hockey Night in Canada broadcasts, Cherry and host Ron MacLean would discuss the game, the league, and whatever else was on Cherry's mind. The segment was supposed to last a few minutes. It became the most-watched regular segment in Canadian television history.
For 33 years, every Saturday night, millions of Canadians tuned in to hear what Grapes had to say. He talked about hits. He talked about fights. He praised "good Canadian boys" and railed against European players he thought were soft. He championed the military. He told people to stand during the anthem. He wore suits that could be spotted from low orbit.
"You have to understand what Saturday night meant in Canada," explained a former CBC producer. "It was church. And Don was the preacher. People planned their evenings around Coach's Corner. It didn't matter if they agreed with him or hated him—they watched. Every single week."
No story about Don Cherry is complete without the suits. They began as merely bold and escalated into something approaching performance art. Floral prints. Plaid in colours that don't exist in nature. Collars that could pick up satellite signals. Ties that seemed to be in active combat with the jackets they accompanied.
Cherry's suits were custom-made, and he owned hundreds of them. They became such a cultural phenomenon that they were exhibited in museums. Children dressed as Don Cherry for Halloween. Drinking games were built around guessing what he'd wear next.
"The suits were genius, whether he planned it or not," said a media analyst. "They made him impossible to ignore. You'd flip past the intermission and see this explosion of fabric on your screen and you'd stop. Every time. That's a broadcaster's dream."
Every great act needs a foil, and Don Cherry found his in Ron MacLean. Where Cherry was bombastic, MacLean was measured. Where Cherry was certain, MacLean was questioning. Their on-screen chemistry was unlike anything in sports broadcasting—a genuine tension that crackled through the television.
MacLean was smart enough to let Cherry be Cherry, but brave enough to push back when he thought his partner had gone too far. Their disagreements were real. Their friendship was real too, though it was tested repeatedly over three decades of live television.
"Ron was the only person on television who could handle Don," noted a longtime Hockey Night producer. "Anyone else would have been steamrolled. Ron had the intelligence and the backbone to hold his own. The show doesn't work without him."
Don Cherry didn't just court controversy. He set up a permanent residence in it. Over 33 years of live television, he said things that made half the country cheer and the other half reach for their phones to call the CBC.
His targets were many and varied. European players were "soft" and wore visors because they were "chicken." French-Canadian players were routinely criticized. He railed against the instigator rule, which he blamed for the decline of fighting in hockey. He questioned whether women should be in NHL dressing rooms as reporters. He made political statements about the military, immigration, and Canadian identity that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with his worldview.
"Don said what a lot of people were thinking but were afraid to say," offered one defender. "That's what made him important."
"Don said things that were hurtful and divisive, and he used his platform to punch down," countered a critic. "That's not courage. That's bullying."
The truth, as usual, was somewhere in the complicated middle. Cherry was genuinely passionate about the military and about remembrance. His annual Remembrance Day segments were often moving, featuring real veterans and real stories. But his passion frequently bled into rhetoric that excluded the very people he should have been welcoming.
It ended on Remembrance Day. Of all the days.
During Coach's Corner on November 9, 2019, Cherry directed comments at immigrants, saying: "You people... love our way of life, love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy." The backlash was immediate and overwhelming.
By November 11, Sportsnet had terminated his contract. After 33 years, Coach's Corner was over. Don Cherry was off the air.
"It was like a death in the family," said one longtime viewer. "Even if you thought it was time, even if you agreed he'd gone too far—it was still the end of something. A part of Saturday night that had always been there suddenly wasn't."
Cherry himself never apologized. He maintained that his comments were directed at everyone who didn't wear a poppy, not specifically at immigrants. Many people believed him. Many others didn't. It hardly mattered. The damage was done, and the era was over.
If there was one cause Don Cherry championed above all others, it was the hockey enforcer. He was their loudest advocate, their most tireless defender, and in many cases, their friend.
Cherry's love of fighters went back to his playing days. He'd been a physical player himself, and he understood on a visceral level what it meant to put your body on the line every night. When the NHL began phasing out fighting, Cherry treated it as a personal betrayal.
"These guys are the heart and soul of the game," Cherry would say, pointing to men like Bob Probert, Tie Domi, and Dave Semenko. "You take fighting out of hockey, you take the soul out of the game."
He was particularly vocal in the debates that followed the deaths of enforcers like Derek Boogaard and the growing understanding of CTE. While others argued that fighting should be banned to protect players, Cherry insisted that fighting was protection—that without enforcers, star players would be targets.
"The irony is that Don genuinely cared about these guys," said a former enforcer who appeared on Coach's Corner multiple times. "He'd call them. Check on them after tough fights. When some of them were struggling after retirement, Don was one of the few people from the hockey world who reached out. He wasn't using them. He believed in them."
But the relationship was complicated. Cherry's championing of old-time hockey toughness contributed to a culture that celebrated violence, a culture that many now believe damaged countless lives. The men Cherry defended were often the ones who paid the highest price for the game's brutality.
As the stories of Cherry's era continued to emerge—the addiction, the depression, the early deaths—the question became harder to avoid: had Don Cherry's voice helped or hurt the people he claimed to love?
How do you measure the legacy of a man like Don Cherry? He changed Canadian broadcasting forever. He made hockey more exciting, more dramatic, more important to millions of people. He gave a voice to a blue-collar perspective that mainstream media often ignored. He raised awareness about the military and about remembrance in ways no other broadcaster could have.
He also divided people. He excluded people. He said things that were cruel and things that were wrong, and he did it with the confidence of a man who had never been told to sit down—or who simply refused to listen when he was.
"Don was Canada," said one observer. "Not the Canada we pretend to be—polite, inclusive, measured. The Canada we actually are, at least sometimes—loud, opinionated, stubborn, passionate, a little bit afraid of change."
In the years since his firing, Cherry has remained a public figure, though a diminished one. He does interviews. He appears at events. He has never, to anyone's knowledge, changed his mind about anything. This is either admirable or tragic, depending on who you ask.
What cannot be denied is the impact. An entire generation of Canadians grew up with Don Cherry as the voice of hockey. He shaped how they understood the game, who they cheered for, and what they valued. For better and for worse, he was ours—Canada's loudest, most outrageous, most impossible-to-ignore voice. And on Saturday nights, when the intermission comes and there's a panel of reasonable, careful analysts saying reasonable, careful things, something is missing.
Something loud. Something in a ridiculous suit. Something that made you lean forward and say, either in agreement or in fury: "Did he just say that?"
He did. He always did. And Canadian hockey will never be quite the same without him.
| Full Name | Donald Stewart Cherry |
| Born | February 5, 1934 - Kingston, Ontario, Canada |
| Playing Career | 1954-1972 (AHL), 1 NHL playoff game (Boston Bruins, 1955) |
| Coaching Career | Boston Bruins (1974-1979), Colorado Rockies (1979-1980) |
| NHL Coaching Record | 250-153-77 |
| Awards | Jack Adams Award (Coach of the Year), 1976 |
| HNIC Tenure | 1986-2019 (33 seasons of Coach's Corner) |
| Signature Look | Flamboyant custom-made suits, high collars |
| Famous Catchphrases | "Let's go!", "Good Canadian boy", "Keep your head up, kids" |
| Known For | Defending enforcers, supporting the military, polarizing opinions |
Don Cherry was fired from Hockey Night in Canada on November 11, 2019, after making comments on Coach's Corner directed at immigrants regarding wearing poppies for Remembrance Day. Sportsnet terminated his contract after widespread backlash, ending his 33-year run on the program. Cherry never apologized for the remarks and maintained his comments were directed at all Canadians who don't wear poppies.
Don Cherry played just one NHL game in his entire career—a 1955 playoff game with the Boston Bruins. He spent the vast majority of his 20-year playing career in the AHL, where he played over 800 games as a tough, physical defenseman for teams including the Hershey Bears and Springfield Indians.
Coach's Corner was a segment on Hockey Night in Canada that aired during the first intermission of Saturday night NHL broadcasts. Featuring Don Cherry and host Ron MacLean, the segment ran from 1986 to 2019 and became one of the most-watched regular segments in Canadian television history. Cherry used the platform to share his opinions on hockey, the military, and Canadian culture.
No. Don Cherry's closest brush with the Cup came in 1979, when his Boston Bruins lost to the Montreal Canadiens in the Stanley Cup semifinals after the infamous "too many men on the ice" penalty in Game 7. He reached the Finals twice (1977 and 1978) but lost both times to Montreal.
Don Cherry coached the Boston Bruins from 1974 to 1979 and the Colorado Rockies (now New Jersey Devils) for one season in 1979-80. His overall NHL coaching record was 250-153-77. He made the playoffs in four of his five seasons with Boston and won the Jack Adams Award as Coach of the Year in 1976.
Don Cherry coached Bobby Orr briefly during Orr's final season with the Boston Bruins in 1974-75, though Orr's devastating knee injuries limited their time together. Cherry has always called Orr the greatest player in hockey history and frequently championed him on Coach's Corner. Their mutual respect was a recurring theme throughout Cherry's broadcasting career. Read more in our piece on Cherry, Orr, and Wearing the Maple Leaf.
No. Despite his enormous impact on the sport, Don Cherry has never been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame in 2015 and has received numerous other honours, but the Hockey Hall of Fame has not recognized him, which remains a point of contention among his supporters.
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