Keep your head up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story...

There is one thing that sucks a little when you are in France and you are a hockey fan. Many documentaries airing on CBC or any other Canadian channels are not very accessible and the worst is when they are eligible to be watched on the internet I cannot because I’m on the “wrong area”.
Generally it happens a lot with TSN especially when it comes to the Juniors or the CHL (but also for the MLB and the Blue Jays for instance); to be honest it happens a lot with Youtube as well, although there are some guys out there that decides to take some risks and  rip the programs with their computer and some software and then put them out there on Youtube. Fortunately for me it is the only way I can watch some of the best hockey documentary or hockey related TV shows. Therefore I encourage those guys to go on with this technique.

Now where I want to go with that is that Youtube just recommend me some documentaries lately and one of them was “Keep your Head up, kid: The Don Cherry story”. This one was a two-part mini-series aired on CBC. So I checked out its specificities and the series was written by Tim Cherry Don Cherry’s son and directed by Jeff Woolnough (He has directed in many successful TV shows such as “Dark Angel“, “NCIS“, “Bones“, etc… But he has also been really productive in the biographical field with Don Cherry and Jack Layton with “Jack“). Looking at the Wikipedia page of the show it seems that Tim Cherry took 6 years to have his father’s approval for this show. I assume it is true nevertheless Don Cherry gave his son a hard time on that one.

Since I am French, I was not aware of Don Cherry’s popularity in Canada until I started to be interested in the meaning of Hockey in Canada and started to read about it. My first acquaintance of Cherry came in the book called “A Canadian Saturday Night” written by Andrew Podnieks (I will try to make a review on this one) where A.P wrote a piece on some of Cherry’s misplaced words or extreme-sided point of views. Then I started to know a little bit more about the guy with many imitations of Steve Dangle on his videos and podcasts. Since then I watched a lot of highlight packages of him in order to understand what he stands for.  Now I do understand, the guy is highly entertainment that know how to speak the language of hockey, knows how to talk about it and knows to entertain it in his different appearances (on the ice in pre-talk show or on Coach’s Corner).

In short and to come back to the main topic I found this documentary really interesting, and managed to make me fully aware of Cherry’s roots. The story was written by Tim Cherry like I said before and must be pretty accurate or at least the coaching part; before Don’s coaching career Tim may have been helped by his father and not that I’m criticizing the story but Cherry might have turn the story at his advantage even though I feel like Don Cherry’s voice-off in the movie tells the truth.

What I really liked is the many references to his nowadays character for instance when he became a car-seller you can see a glimpse of his fascinating way to dress, obviously back then it seems to be the trend; or when he became the senior in Rochester and that his parenting role is set to become a coaching one for instance which makes the transitions really nice. Moreover the actors are playing well their respective characters (I’m an easy watcher and don’t need actress and actors to put Oscar performances every time so I’m not going to judge them). But what I loved the most are the hockey scenes. Many of the Boston-Montreal series and confrontations are reproduced and mixed with real TV footage of the games which put the mini-series in a real perspective and not just as a soapy biographical TV show. I’m not here to tell you the story however I will invite you to watch it if you did not so far. By the way if you liked it you may want to have a look on “Mr Hockey: The Gordie Howe story”.