Dear Coach's Corner (Canadian content warning)
Welcome to Reasonable Things, an occasional newsletter about music, language, and meaning from Joel Heng Hartse.
For several years, I've been really into the song "Dear Coach's Corner" by the Canadian punk band Propaghandi.
It's a dark, hardcore punk song about militarism and sports, and it unexpectedly made me super emotional when I first heard it. Unlike the other things that stir my Canadian immigrant patriotism (e.g., Tim Hortons and Canadian Tire commercials, Canadian Olympians excited about finishing a respectable fourth), this song isn't sentimental about Canada, but bitterly angry at the way something many people find uplifting and beautiful in my adopted country (the game of hockey) is co-opted by military ritual: the song was inspired by the singer's attending a game with his young niece, the pre-game ceremonies of which featured soldiers rappelling down the sides of a stadium, and ends with the haunting line "How do I protect her from this cult of death?"
It's a stirring, passionate song, but to really get it, you've go to understand what is going on in the brief snippet of TV dialogue that opens the song.
If you're not Canadian this may not mean much to you, so let me try to explain. Here's the clip that starts the song:
Don Cherry: That was sickening last week, by the way... that's a joke...
Ron MacLean: What? What is going on with you here?
Don Cherry: Oh, it's not -- what is that stuff in here? It's Hockey Night in Canada, and we're talking about saving the world, and all that stuff... Let's talk Hockey!
Ron MacLean (clearly exasperated): but that's the whole idea behind December the 25th!
Don Cherry: Let's talk about some good guys! Let's talk about the troops!
Hockey Night in Canada is an iconic sports broadcast here, and for many years the segment "Coach's Corner" was hosted by the irascible, cantankerous former hockey coach Don Cherry and the mild-mannered broadcaster Ron McLean. Not knowing much about the guy before moving to Canada, I enjoyed Cherry at first -- he's obnoxiously obtuse about anything but old-school, violent, aggressive, body-checkingly satisfying hockey, refuses to pronounce any player's name correctly, yells about hockey in an entertaining way while MacLean tries to rein him in, and wears absurd, loud suits with ridiculous cravats.
What I didn't realize is that he also has a history of making blatantly bigoted anti-immigrant comments, claiming, for example, that "new Canadians" don't support "the troops" and are essentially freeloaders who don't appreciate the "milk and honey" they get here. He was finally fired for one such comment he made in 2019, in fact, which resulted in the end of "Coach's Corner" after nearly 40 years.
This song was released in 2009, but it wasn't until the apocalyptic (in the original Greek sense) political events of more recent times in both the US and Canada that I began to understand what was going on in the excerpt from the Hockey Night Broadcast that begins it. That Cherry could so swiftly and matter-of-factly swat away McLean's exasperated plea to remember what exactly Christmas is, in favor of talking about "some real good guys," that is, "the troops," seems a perfect distillation of the peculiar sickness of large swathes of North American society which would prefer to pay homage to a militarized nationalism (which allegedly has something to do with Christianity, I guess?) while utterly dismissing, uh, you know, Jesus Christ.
"Dear Coach's Corner" is written as an open letter not to Cherry or to the CBC itself, but to Ron MacLean. Despite everything, the hope is that MacLean might be able to listen to the critique the song offers, might be able to be a bridge, somehow.
MacLean, on the final Coach's Corner Broadcast, seemed sad, confused, and conflicted, praising Cherry and rebuking him, celebrating hockey and condemning small-mindedness, ambivalently saying: "we have, like the country, to reimagine ourselves. And there will be a possibility out of this really bad, unexpected thing, to do some good things, I hope.”
There are worse prayers, I think.
JHH
from Cooperstown, NY