Ron MacLean says he's back in touch with Don Cherry
Former Hockey Night in Canada colleagues Don Cherry and Ron MacLean aren’t exactly the closest of friends these days, but they still keep in touch.
The 89-year-old Cherry has been off the air from CBC and Sportsnet since November 2019 following his comments about a perceived lack of immigrants wearing poppies around Remembrance Day, comments he has since doubled down to on multiple occasions.
And Cherry wasn’t shy in sharing his feelings that he felt betrayed by MacLean — who remains on Hockey Night in Canada nearly four years after the incident and is set to return again this season.
In the aftermath of the incident, MacLean offered up a series of apologies on Cherry’s behalf over the coming weeks, calling the remarks “hurtful, discriminatory… [and] flat-out wrong” the day after a broadcast of the now-defunct Hometown Hockey show.
In the first Hockey Night in Canada show five days after Cherry’s firing, MacLean gave a five-minute monologue that seemed to try to toe the line to both reclaim his own career and his connection with Cherry.
“I don’t think we’ll ever be friends again,” Cherry said in a video posted to social media in May 2022 by Joe Warmington of the Toronto Sun, saying he felt betrayed by MacLean in the weeks following his dismissal.
But in a recent interview with former Sportsnet host and producer John Shannon on the Bob McCown Podcast, MacLean revealed that he and Cherry still play a bit of telephone tag from time to time.
“The way we speak is I phone and then he usually phones back but you know, Don is not big on technology,” MacLean said.
MacLean added that he and Cherry’s former producer Kathy Broderick and Sportsnet coworker Kevin Bieksa phoned him from the NHL All-Star Game in Sunrise, Florida, this past February.
“We all sent greetings. And then I phoned him when Mayor Hazel McCallion, longtime mayor of Mississauga, passed, I offered to take Don to the funeral, but it would have been, you know, a bit of an event if he was there. So he asked not to. I phoned him again on June 1 on the anniversary of [Don’s late wife] Rose’s passing,” MacLean added.
Interestingly, MacLean added that he and Cherry still share a set of Toronto Maple Leafs season seats together, one of the hottest tickets in pro sports.
But despite chatting here and there, MacLean admitted they’ve always had their differences.
“We were always polar opposites in terms of our politics. And it’s funny as the world has become more and more that way, you can almost feel us drifting apart further,” MacLean added. “We function beautifully as work colleagues, but we were never the kind of friends [to be close away from work] just because we were so different.”
MacLean added that he and Cherry used to argue about another Don — former US President Donald Trump while on the job.
“I mean, we would sit after a Stanley Cup playoff games in the final years watching Fox News and Trump’s speeches. Don loved those, he took great inspiration from the way Trump marketed. I was the other guy. I was what he would describe as the ‘left-wing, pinko communist kook.’
“But we still got along, as opposites do attract.”
The full clip is available below:
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