I just read Don Cherry's book about his life... love'm or hate'm... it's a really good book... a collection of hockey stories Don has gathered through all his years in the business... told only the way he can...
... I've heard some of these stories already on Coaches Corner through the years of watching... like the fight he always comes back to where he had 'new gloves' and couldn't get them off fast enough... and got worked over pretty good... he explains the video intro to Coaches Corner where he is bowing to the Boston Crowd not because he wants applause but because it's the way coaches back then used to chide refs for taking over the game and calling too many penalties...
... my favorite part of the book is that instead of this book being about selling out everyone else around him (although he does sell out 3 people who, in my mind, deserve it)... it's about defining the culture and the identity of a hockey player... Maybe not where hockey is going, but definitely where it came from...
... Spent his whole career minus a game battling it out in the minor leagues... and serious props for doing it... I would never want to survive the break arm slashing, the across the teeth cross-checking, the grind it out for no paycheck league that he lived... but out of the dirtiness of road trips, bloody noses, and stitches for 20 is a man who fought his way from nothing and carved out a niche for himself... a man many times unemployed, kicked, dragged through the mud... who stayed strong through it all... like a single solitary weed on the side of a highway outlasting everything else growing around it... it's a story that hits home for too many Canadians, or people in general, for it not to have value...
... and I say if anyone ever wants credibility as a hockey fan in Canada they have to read this book...
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