Hockey Night in Canada

I like hockey, but it's hard to blog about it without dredging up bitter memories of Cleveland's catastrophic NHL hockey experience, so I usually don't. On the other hand, it's a slow news day in Cleveland sports, and it might be fun to talk about something a little bit off the beaten path.

Over the last month, a lot of media attention has been devoted to the "end" of Monday Night Football, but that program is a mere infant compared to North America's longest running sports broadcast. I'm referring to the legendary Hockey Night in Canada, which, if you live close enough to the lake and haven't thrown out your old antenna, you can pick up on Saturday nights during the NHL season.

People got all dewy-eyed when Monday Night Football changed networks after 35 years. Hockey Night in Canada has been on the air for an incredible 75 years, first on CBC Radio and, since 1952, on television (usually, but not always, CBC TV). Hockey Night in Canada is the nation's highest rated domestic program, but ratings don't fully reflect how iconic this program is to Canadians. For example, HNIC's theme song has been referred to as "Canada's second national anthem." Not only that, but Don Cherry, who hosts the highly entertaining Coach's Corner segment that airs after the first period, actually finished seventh in voting for the title "The Greatest Canadian," beating out, among others, Alexander Graham Bell. By the way, Cherry's Coach's Corner segment is reportedly the single highest rated show on Canadian television, regardless of whether U.S. programming is factored into the mix.

Why would people tune in to watch Cherry if they weren't already watching the game? Nobody who's watched him would ever ask such a question. Click on the Coach's Corner link and you'll get a taste of the Don Cherry experience. Cherry played for and subsequently coached the Rochester Amerks for a few years when I was growing up, so I've always had a soft spot for him. Plus, there's just a lot to like about the guy.

Don Cherry is a one man war on political correctness ("Anybody who says they don't like fighting in the NHL has to be out of their mind"). He's a bellicose Canadian patriot, which makes him a rare commodity, and aggressively pro-American, which makes him practically an endangered species north of the border. He gets in trouble with the media or his network quite a bit, usually either for sticking up for Americans or for offending the French (or the French speaking).

Okay, that's it for hockey for a while. If I say more, I'll lapse into a rant about the injustice of Columbus having an NHL franchise while we're stuck with a rotating series of underfunded AHL teams.