The As It Happens Files (17 page)
Read The As It Happens Files Online
Authors: Mary Lou Finlay
This story, like the one about Barbara’s Canada Council grant, raised the dander of a few listeners. Around the office, some people were shocked about how plausible Mr. Beatty made it all sound. They even worried for a time about whether we had accidentally stumbled on a plan that might turn out to be true. It
was
true that the RCMP had given Disney control over who’d be allowed to use the Mountie image around the world.
In the end, there was no deal between the CBC and Disney—but maybe there should have been. Constant budget cuts and failing ratings and ad revenues (CBC Television does carry commercials) and the neglect, benign or otherwise, of successive governments have left the corporation cash-strapped and stressed. I hope it survives these trying times as it has survived challenges in the past, because it’s hard to imagine Canada without the CBC and impossible to imagine it without
As It Happens.
The Wrath of Grapes
Radio that gets into the corners
T
his is the transcript of a conversation between me and Don Cherry, CBC TV hockey commentator and hockey coach, on the day in December 2001 that the
Toronto Star
ran a big story about the ailing fortunes of his AAA hockey team. The Mississauga Ice Dogs were dead last in the Ontario Hockey League, and their centre had just quit. The interview started off all right.
ML: Mr. Cherry? Hello?
DC: There used to be a nice song called “Mary Lou.”
ML: Would you like to sing it?
DC: [singing] “Mary Lou, I love you.” I remember my mother had a record. “Mary Lou …” Anyhow …
ML: Hmm. But listen, you’re ducking the issue here.
DC: All right.
ML: What’s with the IceDogs?
DC: IceDogs are doing all right. We’re in the top third of the draft and we draw over
2,300
and, uh, we’ve lost ten games by one goal, and we’re doin’ all right. We got twice as many wins as we had last year. Some people are upset that some kid—three-goal scorer—goes home and we get headline sports.
ML: You said you’re top third of the draft. That’s because you’re last again this year. Right?
DC: Right. Well, not this year; last year.
ML: Last year, right. But twice as many wins this year?
DC: Right.
ML: And how many is that?
DC: Five.
ML: And how many losses?
DC: Twenty.
ML: It’s not great, is it?
DC: No, it’s not great.
ML: And you finished last, last year?
DC: We finished last.
ML: And what about the year before that?
DC: Last.
ML: Before that?
DC: Yeah.
ML: [laughing] Well, what is wrong with your team?
DC: Well, we’re a franchise. We’re goin’ along, we’re doing the best we can and we’re fightin’ our way out of it, and everybody likes to see that. When a celebrity’s having a tough time, they like to jump on him. It’s like picking wings off flies, and they have a great time bringing up the record and that.
ML: Yeah.
DC: That’s the kind of people we are in Canada. Anytime there’s a celebrity having a tough time, it’s great
news for people. Why, you get on the front page of the
Toronto Star
and you get on CBC Radio—
ML: Yeah.
DC: If we had’ve been in first place, would you have called me?
ML: Sure, I would’ve.
DC: Oh sure, you would’ve.
ML: But listen, Don—
DC: Sure, you would’ve. You would’ve called me for sure. You’re like one of those investigative journalists: [whispering now] “Let’s phone Don Cherry, let’s phone Don Cherry. He’s having a tough time; he was on the front page. Let’s do it.”
ML: [laughing] Listen, you go on TV—and you know everything, right?
DC: Absolutely.
ML: You know everything there is to know about hockey.
DC: Absolutely.
ML: But you can’t win a game!
DC: I have to go on CBC to pay your salary, because nobody listens to you on the radio.
ML: Oh, are you sure?
DC: Nobody watches the sex life of a bumblebee or the rest of the programmes, so I have to go on the most-watched thing in Canada. Now, what do you have to say about that?
ML: You might hear from the people who don’t listen to us.
DC: I’ll hear from all three of them, right?
ML: But listen: do you know anything about hockey or not?
DC: I know a lot about hockey. I was Coach of the Year in the American League and I was Coach of the Year in the National League, and I know a little bit about hockey and I’m doing the best I can.
ML: But why can’t you win a game?
DC: Well, it’s the same thing as you. Now, you’re a good reporter and you’re a good announcer and look at you: you’re on in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, who is really listening at ten to two? Sometimes circumstances are that way. You get stuck in a role like you’re in, that I’m in, and you have to fight your way out of it. I’m sure you’re trying to get into prime time, like about drive time—about four or five—but here you are, stuck at two o’clock.
ML: Do you know as much about hockey as you do about radio?
DC: Well, I know I’m at two o’clock and there’s nobody listening, I’ll tell you that.
ML: Could be because we’re actually on the air at six-thirty.
DC: Oh, you’re on the air at six-thirty! So this is taped!
ML: Yeah, it is.
DC: So this is taped, so you can edit out—you can edit what you want. You don’t really have the—what do we say?—to go on live, eh?
ML: We’re not going to edit at all!
DC: I don’t want to say what you don’t have to go on live. I got it. So you’re going to edit all this out. I got it.
ML: It must be your good manners and charm that brought your team along to the place where it is now.
DC: Well, I don’t know what it is. I’m the most watched thing in Canada, and when somebody asks me questions like this, they open themselves up for what you’re gonna get. Now you can edit this down any way you want.
A couple of things to note here. One: we did not edit so much as a snicker from that exchange with Don Cherry. Why would we? Two: Don Cherry—also known as “Grapes”—was perfectly correct about his celebrity. As the coach on “Coach’s Corner,” he was, and is, the most-watched figure on CBC and probably all of Canadian television, both delighting and repelling people with his opinions, his political incorrectness and his sports jackets (the word
wild
doesn’t do them justice). I could always tell when Don was about to make new headlines—conducting his contract negotiations in public, say, or referring to French-Canadian hockey players as sissies—from the harried expression on the face of my friend Ruth-Ellen Soles, because it was her job as Corporate Spokesperson to assure Cherry’s legions of fans that the CBC was certainly not going to fire him and to explain to his critics why not. For sure, though, the money he brought into the CBC coffers helped pay my salary and hers.
Three: we did have a great story, as one or two of our listeners hastened to tell us. Some prefaced their remarks by saying things like, “I’m driving along the 401 with my husband listening to your interview with Don Cherry, so I guess we’re two of your three listeners.” One man said how tickled he
was to have his two favourite broadcasters on air together and getting on so well, more or less.
What is it about hockey, though, that makes people just want to throw down their gloves and fight? One of Barbara Frum’s more memorable interviews—along with the Big Cabbage—featured a tussle with Harold Ballard, former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Maple Leaf Gardens, who told her that women had no business on the radio. And then there are the hockey parents! Not as crazy as soccer fans perhaps, but the parents of kids’ league players are notorious for hurling abuse at referees, coaches and opposing teams, suing over their kids’ failure to win coveted positions and, on occasion, even exchanging blows with the parents of other players.
We can’t even agree about where the game originated. Was it in Windsor, Nova Scotia, around 1800; in Dartmouth in 1827; or in Halifax in 1870? Many sources say that the
first recorded
game was played in Montreal in 1875, but in February 2004, the Director of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia told us that he had a lithograph in front of him showing a hockey game that was played in Dartmouth in 1867, which puts it eight years ahead of the Montreal game. Jeffrey Spalding admitted that the print belonged to a series entitled
Curling on Lakes in Nova Scotia,
but there’s no doubt, he said, that what they’re doing in his picture is playing hockey: the players are on ice, they’re wearing skates and they have curved sticks in their hands. To clinch it, he cites a Halifax newspaper story from the same time that describes a “hockey match between the Garrison and the Fleet” on Oathill Lake in Dartmouth. This doesn’t necessarily make Dartmouth the birthplace of hockey, says Spalding, but it is proof that Montreal’s game was not the first to be recorded.
The Montreal game, incidentally, was played by the McGill
Football
Club, which may help explain why the game in North America is so physical. It ended—as did the Army-Navy game in Dartmouth—in a fight.
Hockey players can’t even set up a backyard rink without getting into a brawl with someone. At least that’s what happened in Kanata, a suburb of Ottawa, a few years ago. Neighbourhood parents had laid out a rink, watered it and strung up lights so the kids could play after dark, which in Ottawa in January comes at around 4:30 in the afternoon. The bureaucrats thought the electrical cords in the trees posed a major safety hazard
(and playing hockey doesn’t?)
and ordered the lights taken down, which earned them a very public flogging in the media. I don’t need to tell you what happened when they tried to ban
street
hockey in Ottawa.
The most abuse I’ve ever heard directed at the CBC—from outside the halls of Mother Corp herself—was during a technicians’ strike in the 1970s that caused the Saturday night hockey broadcast to be cancelled. I was working in Ottawa at the time, and I saw the pages and pages of virulence contained in the records of phone calls from enraged fans, all dutifully reproduced by the poor receptionist at CBOT—and that was just one station. You can imagine how frustrated the fans were when the National Hockey League bosses themselves locked out their players for the 2004/05 season and the fans couldn’t blame the CBC.
In fact, some of us at the CBC did our best to get a Stanley Cup series going
without
the NHL. It was a couple of guys in Edmonton who got things started, when they set up a website to “Free Stanley.” They argued that the Stanley Cup didn’t actually belong to the NHL; Lord Stanley of Preston, a
former Governor General, had indicated, when he gave the Cup to Canada, that he intended it to be awarded annually to the best
amateur
hockey team in the Dominion. In 1926 it became the
de facto
trophy of the NHL, but if the NHL wasn’t going to play a championship series that year, the Cup’s trustees should allow non-NHL teams to compete for it.
That was the line from the “Free Stanley” boys, and we at
As It Happens
thought it made sense, so we jumped on their bandwagon—or, rather, I did. In retrospect, I wonder if all our producers quite had their hearts in it, but it was nice while it lasted. We faced off with Brian O’Neill, one of the Stanley Cup trustees, who insisted that the Stanley Cup was now, officially and contractually, the property of the National Hockey League. He had no desire to muddy the waters by trying to pry it loose. Rod Payne, lawyer for the “Free Stanley” movement, countered with an argument for why, legally, the trustees had had no business in 1947 trying to delegate control of the Cup to the NHL. Mr. Payne thought that, if any hockey team were to issue a formal challenge for the Stanley Cup that year, the trustees were bound in law to consider it.
Then we got some really big firepower:
ML: Your Excellency, you think the Stanley Cup should go to a women’s team this year, do you?
Governor General Adrienne Clarkson (GG): Well, it’s not exactly the way I would put it; the way I would put it is that the Stanley Cup should not have a year where it is not awarded. The reason I think that is that I feel some responsibility towards the Stanley Cup, as it was first given for excellence in hockey by my British predecessor, Lord Stanley, in
1908/09,
and since it came out under that aegis, as I watched what was happening to our regular
hockey season, I began to think, really, Canadians don’t want to be without the Stanley Cup for a year. It means more than just a trophy. The Stanley Cup is a symbol of our national identity through hockey.…
Its basic premise is excellence in hockey, so we have to say, “Okay, who’s excellent?” Everybody else who’s excellent has a Cup. There’s the Allen Cup, there’s the Memorial Cup, but Women’s League hockey does not have a Cup, and I think this year would be the time to say, “Women could do this.”
ML: This is a fabulous idea. I mean, those lads in Edmonton who started the campaign “Free Stanley” will be thrilled to have you onside!
GG: Well, I am onside because I feel that we have to make sure that this Cup is given, so that the standard of excellence in hockey is not dropped. And who could save the day? The women could save the day!
ML: As always.
GG: [laughing]
You
said that!
ML: I know. But let me ask you something: Clearly, you’ve been having people doing the research about the Cups and everything—
GG: Yes.
ML:—and we’re clear about what Lord Stanley’s wishes were—that it go to the best team of the year?
GG: Excellence of amateur hockey.
ML: It was amateur in the beginning.
GG: Yes, amateur, and the reason why the Cup was installed—and there’s documentation about this between the trustees and Lord Stanley’s secretary, about the fact
that they really wanted to recognize the best in
amateur
hockey, because professionalism was beginning to take hold and they wanted to say this is the best in amateur hockey.
ML: Now, we spoke to one of the trustees yesterday, and I must say, he seemed a little reluctant to consider awarding the Stanley Cup to anybody else or making it available and, I mean, that’s to put it mildly. I don’t know how—I mean, if
you
asked for it, surely he couldn’t refuse
you!
GG: Well, I would like him to listen to what the Canadian people are thinking. I’m only representing them, you know. I represent all Canadians and I think I represent them in this particular case, because I’m saying, “I don’t want to see No Stanley Cup!” …
It’s not about legal technicalities; it’s about the psyche.…
You know, hockey is one of those things that everybody grows up with in Canada—everybody! And even in the days when girls didn’t play, sometimes they snuck out with their brothers.… I think even the Americans understand that it’s a part of our psyche, that it isn’t a part of their psyche. They play it and everything, but it’s
us;
it’s our real being.
ML: So you’re saying it should go to a Canadian team?
GG: No. No, I think you have to—it’s just like the NHL—
ML: Canada and the U.S.
GG: The Canadian Women’s League would play to the East and West finals, and then they would play each other and then play the States.
ML: Would you go to the finals?
GG: I certainly would. I’d go to more than the finals.
ML: Really.
GG: I certainly would. I like watching hockey—in real life. I’m not that keen on watching it on television.… [On TV] sometimes I can’t follow the puck, you know. I suggested once to somebody, “Why don’t we light the puck?”
ML: Oh! You know they did that for a while in the States.
GG: Did they?
ML: I think so. They had a little—it was sort of a purple dot on the screen, and I dunno, they were laughed out of town, I think, for doing that. You know, most of the Canadians said, “What’s the matter? You can’t
see
a hockey puck!”
GG: Well, I just—I want to see where this goes, because you know, public opinion should decide what they want. I’m just putting my Governor General’s worth into it.
ML: Should be worth something. Thank you, Your Excellency.
…
Barbara Budd [extro]: Well, get a load of that! Adrienne Clarkson is Governor General of Canada. She’s not only the Voice of the People—she’s the Voice of the Queen, for crying out loud.