Don Cherry, voice of Hockey in Canada for several decades, was fired, finally, for saying a version of something he has been saying for years:
Several organizations spent Sunday trying to argue Cherry’s sentiments did not reflect their views, as outrage simmered. The 85-year-old had used his national platform Saturday night to complain about the lack of poppies he had seen in his home of Mississauga, and in Toronto, leading up to Remembrance Day.
“You people love — you, that come here, whatever it is — you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey,” Cherry said, pointing his index finger at the camera. “At least you could pay a couple of bucks for poppies or something like that. These guys paid for your way of life, that you enjoy in Canada.”
Sean McIndoe, perhaps the best hockey writer today, wrote about why Cherry was so often treated like an embarrassing uncle or passing shower on an otherwise sunny day:
It was the one thing Don Cherry was never supposed to be: un-Canadian. … I was always taught that it doesn’t matter where you’re from or when you get here. It’s not about how you look or talk or pray or whether you can skate.
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It even felt different than the xenophobia aimed at the Russians or Swedes or whoever else had just beat Team Canada. It probably shouldn’t have felt different from the times he took aim at women or French-Canadians or people with different politics, but it did.
For many of us – at least those like me who didn’t have to worry about being his target – Don Cherry was a Canadian icon. Not just an icon, or a famous guy on TV, because we had plenty of those, but a Canadian one. There’s a reason he was voted the seventh greatest Canadian of all time in a 2004 poll. He was Canadian in a way that you just didn’t see anywhere else, at least when you were a kid in the ’80s who didn’t know where to look. We’re not a country that’s very good at sticking out our chests. You can be proud and you can be patriotic, but you do it politely. Cherry didn’t. He was Canadian and he thought Canada was the best and if you didn’t like it then too bad for you. Thumbs up. Let’s go.
I know when Cherry hooked me in. It was in 1987, in the aftermath of the ugly world junior brawl between Canada and the Soviets. The media reaction was exactly what you knew it would be: This was a scandal and a black eye for the nation that we’d have to reflect on and learn from and make amends for. And then Cherry showed up, and he wasn’t having any of it. Lay off our boys, he told us. The other guys started it, we finished it, and we didn’t owe an apology for anything. Pretty much everyone else who got to be on television was aghast. A lot of us watching at home cheered out loud.
Watching Cherry debate Michael Farber in the aftermath of that night feels like watching the yin and yang of the Canadian hockey fan’s mind. Go back and rewatch it. Farber’s right, about pretty much everything. But he’s right in a way that we’d already heard from a half-dozen other talking heads. Cherry’s let-them-fight stance was the only one that sounded like what we were saying with our friends.
McIndoe says that this time, Cherry said something that felt un-Canadian. But he doesn’t realize that Cherry has been un-Canadian by Sean’s own definition for pretty much his entire run. McIndoe says that being Canadian isn’t supposed to be about where you are from or what you look like. But to Cherry that was always what it was about. Cherry defended the Canadian junior team when they were wrong simply because they were Canadian, and it made McIndoe fell proud. But by his own definition, that was un-Canadian. He just didn’t realize it.
Cherry was always about defining Canadian not as something to aspire to, not as a collection of things that people could strive towards, but as an accident of birth, a thing to use as a cudgel. He defined Canadian-ness not as something positive, but by the absence of negative traits he saw in other nationalities and people not exactly like him. Europeans were soft and weak, not like good Canadian boys. Women and liberals and French-Canadians where defective in some form or fashion, not like real Canadians.
It is a nationalism of dirt, built on the desperate hope that the accident of your birth can make up for the deficiencies of your character. It is and always has been the only thing Cherry every had to say on the matter. It is unfortunately seductive, as the fact that a decent man like McIndoe didn’t notice it for all those years. Or, more precisely, found it easy to turn away from because nationalism speaks to the need to belong in all of us. But the nationalism of dirt is a worthless thing, good only for those who would base their lives on hate.
Where you were born means nothing. The dirt you stand on give you no special powers, provides you no meaningful characteristics. And I promise you, sometime in the past, someone who didn’t belong to the group you thin of as yours owned that dirt. And sometime in the future, someone else you would revile today will own it. It is nothing special. People who pretend that it is are usually up to no good. That is the nationalism of small men who define themselves by the pain they impose on others, the deficiencies they imagine others have so they can claim imaginary virtues by comparison rather than actually work at developing real virtues.
There is another kind of nationalism, the one that McIndoe alludes to when he says that “that it doesn’t matter where you’re from or when you get here. It’s not about how you look or talk or pray or whether you can skate. “ The nationalism of ideas. That is a nationalism worth having. It is the nationalism that welcomes people to participate in sharing those ideals and works towards building real virtues rather than tearing down imaginary vices in others. Where you were born doesn’t mean anything to this nationalism. What you do, how you act, does.
To keep this in hockey terms, Canadians can be proud that their teams play heavy. They go into the corners to dig out pucks, they take hits to make plays, they stand in the crease and take the punishment to deflect in shots into the net. They can be proud of players who play that game, no matter what country they come from. And they can be proud of the heavy game without insisting that the skilled game is a moral abomination just because it didn’t originate in Canadian dirt.
We live in dangerous times. The forces of corruption and illiberalism are on the rise everywhere. Don Cherry is hardly the most dangerous of men, but his cheap appeals to the nationalism of dirt, his insistence that mud mattered more than ideals, is a part and parcel of the mindset that leads to Brexit, Trump and illiberal democracy. Don Cherry was always the worst of Canada because he never understood that the dirt of your birth is still just dirt. What makes a person is their actions after they are born, not the dirt upon which they are born.
EDIT: I should add that I am not Canadian, just a life long hockey fan. Sorry if I gave the impression I was Canadian.