What I don't think I fully understood until I went up to Canada was how much of an integral figure Don Cherry actually is. The day after the Leafs game, Don Cherry was on the front page of both the big Toronto newspapers. One of them noted how their columnist had been attacked by Cherry in his "Coach's Corner" segment (which I will get into in a moment), and the other proclaimed, as its main headline, that "3 out of 4 Canadians support Don Cherry in his battle against the CBC". This, somehow, managed to be the most important story in Toronto -- Don Cherry not having a CBC contract for next season? It wasn't even the most important story of the day IN HOCKEY. This was absolutely bewildering for me, considering the absolute inanity of what I'd watched the day before.

As I mentioned in my piece yesterday, I watched game 5 of the Maple Leafs series in a packed bar in downtown Toronto. The previous day, I watched the second and third periods of the Calgary Flames-Detroit Red Wings series in a slightly different venue: the theatre at the Hockey Hall of Fame, several blocks away. Within five minutes of me sitting down to watch the game, its two biggest moments occurred.

First, Steve Yzerman (a first-ballot Hall of Famer and CAPTAIN~!~! of the Red Wings) got smacked in the face with the puck off of a deflection. The fifty or so people I was watching the game with (who were almost all, without fail, rooting for or fans of the Flames) gasped as Yzerman writhed on the ice like a fish out of water, shaking his legs uncontrollably. Yzerman suffered a fractured eye socket and a scratched cornea.

Several minutes later, the Flames scored the game's only goal: a pretty pass from Jerome Iginla and a perfect shot from Craig Conroy. I thought nothing of it afterwards. That, sadly, is what prevents me from being a Canadian commentating superstar. And I don't like Fu Manchus.

In his "Coach's Corner" segment during the first period of the Leafs game, Don Cherry's initial argument was that the usage of visors by NHL players should not be made mandatory. Instead, Cherry felt, players should be allowed to make their own individual decision, as they currently are allowed. Cherry's argument was coherent up to this point - unfortunately, he chose this point to morph into SUPER CHERRY or some sort of bizarre parody of himself. He refused to let the other commentator get a word in edgewise, repeatedly cutting him off, and even putting him down when he actually somehow let enough of the backtalk get through.

Cherry's rhetorical question was, "What makes [the media] cleverer (sic) than [Joe Nieuwendyk], [Gary Roberts], and the rest of them?" He went to on say, in several takes due to the utter excitement that prevented him from saying the statement in one utterance, that "...95% of people think that it should be mandatory...and the other 5% are the players." Essentially, Cherry deftly maneuvers himself into the fallacy that you have to be a cook to be able to tell whether food tastes good. Furthermore, he ignores the essential point: the media's argument is not inherently that they are "cleverer" than the players. The players, more so than anyone else, I might imagine, are aware of the risk and potential problems that not wearing a visor or cage can cause. Players choose to ignore this risk, because 99% or so of players don't end up suffering an eye or head-related injury as a result. The benefits from not wearing a visor or cage are performance-related; every visor limits your vision to some degree, particularly peripherally. As a result, players don't wear a visor, in order to gain that extra edge.

What extra edge? Well, for an example, Don Cherry points to none other than Craig Conroy of the Calgary Flames. IConroy wore a full cage with his helmet after being hit on April 11th by the stick of Vancouver Canucks goalie Johan Hedberg. In the playoffs, Conroy took the cage off, and came up big in the game against the Wings. Cherry solely attributed the goal to Conroy taking his face mask off -- in his mind, there was a direct correlation. The thing is, though - Conroy seemed to agree.

"I'm not going to make excuses but that thing on my face was bothering me -- it didn't feel comfortable,", Conroy said after the game to the Calgary Sun. The same article only provides a cursory mention of the "...horrible facial injury suffered by Steve Yzerman." Meanwhile, he told The Calgary Herald, "That thing was not fun to play with," he said. "To get it off, I just felt so much better. I could see the puck in my feet, I could see the puck to make plays." The thing is, though, there's a simple reason why that occurs - Conroy, I'd guess in a semi-educated fashion, has never worn a cage for any extended period of time; in particular, at the level of play that the NHL Playoffs entail. If Conroy had been wearing a cage for an extended period of time (i.e. if such a thing was, say, mandated), the problem of getting used to the cage wouldn't exist.

What's worth noting is that, in the eight games where Conroy wore the cage, he had a goal and five assists. In 63 regular season games, Conroy had eight goals and thirty-nine assists. Now - I'm not saying that wearing a visor isn't annoying - and Conroy was wearing a full cage, which is a real pain; but there was no serious drop in production here. Conroy was essentially the same player.

Cherry, in his commentary, essentially ignored the Yzerman injury, finding that it was more convenient for him and his argument. Maybe it was the cleverer thing to do. I'm not sure.
But dwelling is effortless. I'm going to move on.

The poor other CBC presenter, who I didn't recognize, brought up the point that several players had been hit in the face with the followthrough of a stick. Cherry, as if he'd known it was coming, immediately jumped all over the point. Drawing upon his hockey experience, he noted that players often attempt to hit other annoying (I am tempted to try and use Tikkanen as an adjective) players in the face with the followthrough of their stick. Now - granted - Don Cherry has more professional hockey experience than I. That being said, he never played a game in the NHL. Furthermore, he last played hockey thirty-four years ago (that will be my final use of italics in this article). Is it possible that these things may have happened amongst AHL players in the 1960's, but not in the NHL nowadays? It seems incredibly unlikely that Matthew Barnaby would still have a career Tikkanening (there we go! verb!) people if it was. Cherry used this to go on another soapbox, where "the people who make the rules" don't know what they're talking about, while "people like him" (who understand the game of hockey on a superior level) are forced to rant in the intermission of hockey games in the hope that someone with power might be listening. Essentially, Cherry argued that anytime a player gets hit in the face with a stick, it's intentional, and his team should be penalized as a result. At no point did Cherry actually explain HOW he might change the rule to determine whether an incident was intentional or not, or what the penalty might be. The other presenter, meanwhile, brought up an unintentional case: that of defenseman Bryan Berard, who nearly lost his eyesight several years ago, and has only recently returned to hockey. When he asked Cherry about this, Cherry stammered for a second, and then muttered "Well, that was unintentional of course." It's not often that people dissolve their own arguments while they're attempting to make them, but I was treated to such a show.

Cherry's grand finale occurred as the segment ended. He compared the potential enforcement of visors to that of helmets several years ago, saying that he expected to find that mandatory visor usage would be grandfathered in, similar to how helmet usage was. Very relevant and very likely true. How did he follow this? He asked his co-presenter (I think it's Scott Oake - thank you Google - but I'm not positive) two more rhetorical questions. "Since helmets have been made mandatory, have there been more head injuries in hockey? Has there been less respect between players?" Oake answered both questions in the affirmative. I'm not sure if the first is true and I'd like to find out how Cherry qualifies the latter; I suspect he does so by counting head injuries and maybe asking Doug Gilmour. I don't know.

Let me re-state what Cherry said. He believes that helmets have actually caused more (I lied) head injuries to occur in hockey. Theoretically, this would ensue out of a lack of respect from player-to-player, who have somehow figured that because other players wear helmets, they can hit them in positions that they wouldn'tve when they weren't wearing helmets. I am sadly disappointed that Cherry didn't equate this to European players not understanding the unwritten rules of hockey, because I think I may have gotten far too giddy for the bar to contain. The aspect of injury that Cherry ignores, again because it makes his argument looks silly, is that players have gotten dramatically bigger over the last fifteen years. THAT is why more head injuries are occurring - if you want to throw in the point about certain types of glass having less give, I am fine with that too. It is, I suppose, possible that players are making split-second decisions to hit players because they have helmets. But is it likely? William of Occam, somewhere, is raising his hand quietly, and Don Cherry is hitting him in a safe, non-head-injury causing fashion, because neither are wearing a helmet.

So, 75% then? I suspect that no sports presenter - in particular one that has already alienated entire sections of the country they're associated with - would receive such support. Ron Atkinson, a British soccer pundit and former manager, "resigned" from his job at ITV after broadcasting the first leg of the Chelsea-Monaco Champions League semifinal (so brilliantly covered by yours truly) two weeks ago. After the match ended, most feeds were turned to the post-game show; the Middle East, though, still received the feed of the broadcasters talking. Atkinson referred to French defender Marcel Desailly as a "...f------ thick lazy n-----". Don Cherry's bashing of European players is portrayed as colorful and controversial because he's not bashing his constituency. Instead, unfortunately, Don Cherry is doing it subtly, insulting his audience by furthering the halo that surrounds professional athletes. I believe that Canadian hockey television will be better off if Don Cherry is not retained by the CBC. Maybe that's because I! AM! AMERICAN!, though.

Oh - Steve Yzerman just gave his first comments since being hit in that Flames game. The ESPN article on it said, "He said he regrets not wearing a visor but will do so in the future." Maybe he's just not clever enough.