Hockey Confidential (13 page)

“I hope we have a good referee for you. I don't know this guy.
If the ref calls lots of penalties at the beginning, the game will be chaos.
If the ref is good, he lets the boys play.”—Don Cherry

It's a blistering-cold Tuesday night in mid-December, and
there's pretty much just family and friends inside icy Victoria Village Arena. The utilitarian rink is tucked into an industrial section of the Don Mills area of Toronto, and the small group of fans sparsely dotting the stands are there for the 9 p.m. Greater Toronto Hockey League minor midget game between the middle-of-the-pack Don Mills Flyers and the lower-end Toronto Young Nationals. It's not exactly a marquee matchup. While some of the 15-year-old boys on both teams will get drafted into the Ontario Hockey League the following spring, and a couple may even play there as soon as the next season, there are no superstars on either team, no can't-miss kids.

A veteran scout of more than 13 years, who works for the OHL Central Scouting Bureau, is in the house tonight. It's his job. This is one of anywhere between two and four games he normally sees each week, and, as is their custom, his soon-to-be-80-year-old father has joined him on the drive from their Mississauga homes.

“I go with him all the time,” the father says. “If he goes, I go. He'll phone me in the morning, and on the days I know we're going to a game, that's what I'll look forward to all day. It's joy—pure joy. I'd rather do this than anything. I'd rather be here than anywhere.”

The father and son walk to the far end of the rink, away from the arena entrance and past the few people who are there. They stand in the far corner, noses pressed right up to the glass, inches away from the action. There's no thought given to sitting in the stands, even for the man whose 80th birthday (February 5) is less than two months away.

“Best place to watch a game,” the scout says. “You get a real feel for the speed and the size of the players. You can really see and hear everything here, too. It's a little colder here, but it could be worse. In some rinks, when you stand in the corner, you're actually standing on ice. Sometimes we'll sit—maybe if it's a doubleheader—but we like standing in the corner. That's our spot.”

The father is wearing a black toque emblazoned with a red maple leaf, pulled down over his ears, tight to his eyes, to ward off the cold and dampness. The toque matches his all-black melton and leather jacket, which is also adorned with large red maple leaves, black sweat pants and black boots.

“I'd rather watch these games than the NHL,” Don Cherry tells his guest for the evening. “This is the best hockey in the world when you get a good referee that lets them play. It never stops; it's hockey like it used to be played. No bullshit—you know what I mean?”

Tim Cherry, his son, nods his approval.

Game on.

“This is a good referee . . . he's letting them play.”

Welcome to Don Cherry, unplugged.

Grapes is Grapes, of course. What you see on “Coach's Corner” during the first intermission of
Hockey Night in Canada
is what you get. It's no act. He believes what he says, say what he believes. But anyone who actually knows Don Cherry understands that when the lights go down, when the colourful suits and ties are exchanged for black sweat pants and a winter coat and hat, and he's standing alongside his son, Tim, in a cold suburban rink instead of sitting next to Ron MacLean in the
HNIC
studio, there is a difference. Noticeably so.

“He's basically the same guy; he's just a lot more amped up when you see him on TV and a lot less amped up when he's not on TV,” Tim says.

It's such an apt description.

On TV, Cherry's voice fairly booms, and in a segment that lasts six or seven minutes, he seldom stops talking. It's not so much a dialogue with MacLean as it is a performance, though no one would suggest for a moment Cherry isn't true to his core values every Saturday night. That's him. But get him in a rink watching 15-year-olds play hockey, or see him hanging with Bobby Orr at his hero's summer golf tourney in Parry Sound, Ontario, and it's striking how many decibels his voice comes down, how he's perfectly comfortable saying little or nothing for stretches at a time, happy as a clam to listen to others and how, when he does speak, there's a subdued, understated, almost soft-spoken quality to it. It's so . . . how can one put it . . . conversational? Endearing, too.

It's almost like there's a degree of serenity or wonderment emanating from him that you rarely see for the confidence and swagger on Saturday night, when he's liable to be calling someone a “a rat” or getting himself in hot water with someone, oftentimes his bosses. Maybe that's because he truly does love this level of hockey and feels so at home standing at the glass. Or perhaps it's the natural warmth—the love. really—that comes with one of these regular father-son outings that he looks forward to more than anything on this earth. Told he's lucky he gets to share so much quality time with his son doing what they both enjoy, that others would be envious of this relationship with Tim and vice versa, Don Cherry considers that momentarily and says softly: “You're right . . . I am lucky, I am, eh?”

“What I don't understand is icing the puck for a change.
It's been drilled into these kids to stay out for only 30 seconds, so they ice
it to get off. We would stay on the ice and hope the whistle never went.
Now they get yelled at if they don't ice it. Icing used to be a bad thing.”

Tim Cherry was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 1963. The
story of his family, and especially his father's rise through the professional hockey ranks to Canadian icon status, has been well documented. In fact, it was Tim who told it as a producer-writer for two made-for-television movies:
Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story
(2010) and
Wrath of Grapes: The Don Cherry Story II
(2012). Tim also produced and oversaw Don Cherry's
Rock'em Sock'em Hockey
videos, including getting all 25 years of them compiled for a silver-anniversary boxed DVD set that was released just two weeks prior to the game at Victoria Village Arena.

“You're a pretty talented guy,” the guest says to Tim.

“I don't know about that,” Tim replies, “but it's been really busy with the release of the DVDs.”

“Well, Tim, you must have something going for you,” Don adds, chuckling, “because good looks and charm will only carry you so far.”

The first impression upon meeting Tim Cherry is that he seems a kind and gentle soul, the same as what anyone would say about his mother, Rose, who passed away in 1997 after battling cancer. Rose was a lovely woman, the love of Don's life, and while there are most certainly similarities in look and manner between Don and Tim, it seems obvious there's a lot more of Rose in Tim.

“There's no doubt,” Tim says, “I've got my mom's temperament.”

It's a close-knit family, certainly close in the literal sense. Tim's older sister, Cindy, and her family live in a house on the same street as Don—right across the road, in fact. Tim's house is a literal stone's throw away from both, just around the corner. Don and his wife, Luba—they were married in 1999—live in the same suburban Mississauga home that's always been the Cherry family home. It's Don's sanctuary. He's a homebody at heart, and loves nothing more than puttering around the house, reading books or watching television. On the nights when isn't out at games with Tim, he'll be at home, having a few “cold ones” and watching NHL games on TV until the western games are over at 1 a.m.

“I'm glad I'm down in my basement,” Cherry says. “I can yell at the screen. ‘You [expletive deleted].' I hate when refs make phantom calls. Drives me crazy.”

Imagine for a moment what it's like to have Don Cherry as your father.

Tim Cherry ponders that one for a moment.

“You know, it's good,” Tim says. “He's a good dad. He was obviously busy, and there were times he wasn't around, but I played hockey in Boston and Dad would get out to games and practices when he could. I'd get to go to Bruin practices and Dad would have me on the ice before practice, giving me tips. We'd go fishing together.”

Don recalls how, as coach of the Bruins, he used to wear a long, blue leather coat that had a fur collar, not unlike the one Reggie Dunlop (played by Paul Newman) wore in
Slap Shot,
which led to his players calling Grapes “Reggie.”

Tim laughs at the memory of it: “Dad took me to
Slap Shot.
I was 10 years old. He walks up, ‘Two for
Slap Shot.
' The lady looked at us and she didn't say anything, but you could tell what she was thinking, ‘You're taking your 10-year-old kid to
Slap Shot
?'”

The time Don and Tim spend together now is precious because they're both well aware of how fleeting it can be. There was a time when they both wondered what quality of life Tim would be able to lead.

When Tim was 12, he had a tonsillectomy and ran into infection complications (strep) that resulted in severe kidney damage. Tim was hospitalized in September of the year he turned 13. Doctors told Don and Rose that his kidneys would never function properly and that he would have to live with dialysis, but would eventually require a kidney transplant.

“Rose took charge of the whole thing,” Don recalls. “I was a coward. Training camp was on and I went off to the [pre-season] games. Rose said Tim was too young a boy to have dialysis his whole life, so we had to find a donor. It turned out that Cindy [who was then 21, eight years older than Tim] might as well have been Tim's twin [in terms of] a match. The hospital Tim was in was the first hospital to ever do a kidney transplant, so he was in good hands. I didn't know anything about dialysis or kidneys or transplants, but we all found out in a hurry. Everyone in Boston rallied around it. The Bruin players and their wives all gave blood.”

What Tim remembers most, though, about his two-and-a-half-week stint in the hospital is that his mom was urging him after to get out of his hospital room and go for a walk. On the day he finally left his room for the first time, some of the Boston Red Sox—Johnny Pesky, Dwight Evans and Carl Yastrzemski, to name a few—came to visit him. They left him an autographed bat.

“I came back and the nurses were all excited,” Tim says. “I couldn't believe I missed them. I still can't believe it. Now Cindy works for the Kidney Foundation, and that all started with her donating her kidney to me. Mom did a lot of volunteer work for them, too. That all started with me getting sick.”

Tim first started scouting junior hockey in the years after his dad purchased the OHL's Mississauga Ice Dogs in 1998, following the team's scouts to Junior A, Junior B, midget and minor midget games all over the province. He enjoyed seeing the games and evaluating the players, and eventually wound up working with the OHL Central Scouting Bureau.

“It's easier now,” he says. “All the kids are playing at one level, minor midget. But you still have to see each team a bunch of times to really get to know them. I'm amazed how much better the kids get from the start of the season to the end.”

On this particular night, Don was chauffeured to the game in Tim's Ford Fusion Hybrid, but it's not uncommon for Tim to drive one of Don's vehicles to the game. Don owns two 1993 Ford F-150 Flareside pickup trucks, both jet black, but they both were in the shop being reconditioned. Don also owns two 1983 Lincoln Continental Mark VI sedans. One of them was originally owned by Toronto Maple Leaf owner Harold Ballard, though the late Pal Hal wouldn't recognize the custom-made Maple Leaf blue vehicle with the distinctive white roof, since Cherry has had it totally reconditioned. It's now all black. His other Lincoln is white.

Black and white—seems an appropriate colour scheme for Cherry.

“As my father used to say of me,” Don says with a grin, “‘Don is very fond of what he likes.' And he was right about that!”

As much time as Tim spends with his dad scouting or being involved in the family
Rock'em Sock'em
franchise, there's more to his life than hockey. Tim has a 15-year-old daughter, Grace. Tim's divorced, but he and his wife adopted Grace from China in 2000, when she was just two years old. While Don was preparing for his trip to the 2014 Sochi Olympics—he celebrated his 80th birthday there—Tim was planning for a visit back to China with Grace in March 2014 to see her orphanage.

“She never really got into hockey,” Tim says of his daughter. “She skated for a bit when she was younger, but where she's from in China, it's far south, almost subtropical, and I think she's got warm-blooded genes. We always kind of played down who Dad is anyway, but when she was in grade school, she never fully grasped who Dad is. So one time, Dad went to one of her [grade school] recitals and he got mobbed there. She said to me, ‘How come everyone knows Poppa?'

“Now that she's in high school, she understands it. She's in a class with a lot of high school hockey players, and they were all talking hockey one day and she spoke up: ‘My grandfather knows a lot about hockey.' The boys said to her, ‘Who's your grandfather?' She said, ‘Don Cherry.' So needless to say, we had to get a bunch of autographed pictures for the kids at school.”

“I have three goldfish, they eat their food right out of my hand . . .
see, now that's a penalty, the ref has to call that one . . . the goldfish have
no names. I just call them goldfish. They're koi. They're hearty.”

After all these years of going to minor hockey games
together, Tim and Don have their routines down pat.

It's hit and miss as to whether Don actually gets to see the game on any given night. As one might imagine, Grapes showing up in a rink full of minor hockey players and parents is bound to create a stir. Cherry has actually given up on going to tournament games—the crowds around him tend to be overwhelming, “Which is too bad,” he says, “because I really enjoy the tournaments”—but at a lot of games he'll just tell kids and/or fans looking for autographs and/or pictures to wait for a whistle or the end of the period. Sometimes, though, there's no stemming the tide and he ends up not actually seeing much of the game.