With a little more free time thanks to the NHL lockout, staunch Canadian nationalist and colorfully dressed "Coach's Corner" co-host Don Cherry sat down for a Q&A with The Globe and Mail's James Mirtle. The best revelation from the interview, by far, related to his joining Twitter:
Well, nobody knows why I'm on Twitter. But what happened was, about five guys had my name out there, using my name as Twitter. So, CBC, they said we've got to protect ourselves. So we want you in the playoffs to start a Twitter. And I was ‘Come on, are you kidding?' I thought Twitter was for birds to tell you the truth.
They said, we've got to do it to protect you. Because these guys say something and people think you said it. So I started and I had a friend [help]. Kathy Broderick, she runs CBC as far as I'm concerned. She helps me on Coach's Corner.
So what I do is I phone in if I see something that bothers me. She takes care of it. She does the typing and all of that because I couldn't do all that. I did one with Dallas Eakins [in it] over Kadri and he said ‘he probably has somebody type it for him.' Pretty true! It was a shot. Yeah, it was a good one.
There's nothing particularly surprising here—nobody would ever accuse Don Cherry of using a computer, and his ghostwriter is pictured in his avatar. Still, the details wonderfully evoke Commissioner Gordon calling Adam West's Batman on the emergency Bat-phone. I choose to imagine there's a similarly special red phone at CBC headquarters, which only rings every time Don Cherry, sitting at home on his couch, thinks of another reason he hates the Maple Leafs Brian Burke.
Just think: before this technology existed, Don Cherry's angry calls to CBC headquarters were just shared with the poor intern getting abused on the other end of the line. This is the point of social media.