Houston: No interest in Cherry's rant? Them's fightin' words

by WILLIAM HOUSTON
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

                                                                        
Don Cherry went on NBC Monday night and told its audience that hockey needs more fighting if it hopes to become a popular television sport in the United States.

The reaction from the National Hockey League? They've heard it already.

"He didn't say anything he [hasn't] said many times before," said John Shannon, the NHL's senior vice-president of broadcasting.

Shannon noted that NBC hockey analyst Brett Hull also is a supporter of fighting and feels the instigator rule should be rescinded. "Don didn't say anything that Brett hasn't been saying every Sunday," Shannon said.

Still, Cherry tossed red meat to the true believers, saying, "The fans love the fights. The players love the fights. The people go nuts on the fights. I hate to give NBC heck, and everything, but I'm told the reason they cut it down [the fighting] is because they wanted USA people to watch it — families.

"Can you believe it? That's the dumbest thing I've heard in my life — U.S., NASCAR, where they're crashing; football, kill the quarterback; Ultimate Fighting. Who's kidding who?"

Is Cherry right? Does the NHL need more fighting to sell the game?

"In my heart, I hope he isn't," said Shannon, who, as executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada in the 1990s, was Cherry's boss. "It's the simpler style and life of the game that Don talks about. The game is what it is, one way or the other. The fans in Anaheim are very happy right now and that's a tough team. And the fans in Ottawa are very happy, normally, and they're not really a tough team."

Shannon said the NHL and NBC did not conspire, as Cherry suggested, to reduce fighting.

"Everybody knows they haven't," Shannon said. "I just think the consequences now, with the number of skilled players that are needed to play the game, do you want to take a couple of roster spots for fighters?"

TSN's Dave Hodge, who was the Hockey Night host in the 1970s and '80s and Cherry's first partner on Coach's Corner, doesn't believe Cherry's remarks surprised the U.S. audience.

"They probably wondered what his crusade was," Hodge said. "It's sort of the image [of fighting being a part of the game] that already exists."

Hodge also felt Cherry picked a hackneyed issue.

"It's an old subject. You can go back 10 years, go back 20 years, go back 30 years. It's tiresome by now. No matter which side you're on."

Cup audiences

After four games in the Stanley Cup final (Ottawa Senators-Anaheim Ducks), the CBC is averaging 2.603 million viewers a game, just slightly down from 2.626 million for the first four games of the 2006 final (Edmonton Oilers-Carolina Hurricanes).

The CBC drew its largest audience of the postseason on Monday for the fourth game: 2.859 million, which peaked at 3.363 million between 9:30 p.m. EDT and 10 p.m. The CBC's 2007 average is down 16 per cent from the first four games of the 2004 series between the Calgary Flames and Tampa Bay Lightning: a 3.115 million average.

French-language RDS had 708,000 viewers for Monday's game. That brought the Cup final average to 616,500, 36.5 per cent above the average for the first four games in 2006.

In the United States, NBC earned an overnight rating of 2.3 (percentage of U.S. households tuned in), down 4 per cent from a 2.4 last year.