Yes, Don Cherry did coach a championship team

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Author of the article:

Patrick Kennedy

Publishing date:

Mar 26, 2021  •  1 day ago  •  5 minute read Don Cherry coached the Pittsford Knights to the Monroe County High School Hockey League championship in the 1972-73 season while also coaching the Rochester Americans of the American Hockey League. Supplied Photo Article content

The cranky customer at the upscale Cadillac dealership in Rochester, N.Y., took exception to the pea-green salesman’s hard-sell tactics. “You guys,” the customer grumbled. “You’re all alike.”

Don Cherry, the rookie salesman who at the time was one year into retirement following a long playing career in pro hockey’s minor leagues, was not charmed by the comment. Indeed, he took it as a verbal elbow to the chops and responded accordingly. Cherry confronted the unsuspecting customer, backed him against a wall and demanded in a non-angelic voice: “Whattaya mean by that?”

The brief scrum on that autumn afternoon in 1970 pretty much ended Cherry’s equally brief but ill-fated attempt to earn his daily bread by pushing luxury automobiles in northern New York state. “I sold cars only long enough to establish myself as the worst salesman of all time,” Cherry recounts with a laugh.

He can laugh now, and why not? Today Donald S. Cherry is a healthy, hardy 87 years young. He has a successful podcast, a few other pokers in the fire, a recent COVID-19 vaccination, and unwavering continued support from tens of thousands of puck-game patrons across North America.

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Yet Cherry wasn’t laughing back in 1970. “Grapes” was at a crossroads in his life. After hanging up the blades, the Kingston native had worked construction and painted houses in and around Rochester, two jobs at which he was only marginally better suited than selling high-end automobiles. Inevitably, he got laid off, and when the weeks of unemployment turned into months, the then-36-year-old married father of two young children found himself in a precarious predicament — an out-of-work breadwinner.

At a friend’s urging, Cherry opted to return to high school, a place he had not been since leaving Kingston Collegiate in his mid-teens to play junior hockey in Barrie. With ample time on his hands and undiminished enthusiasm for the sport, he returned not as a student but as coach of the Pittsford Knights hockey team, then set about making his coaching bones in the Monroe County High School Hockey League.

The move marked Cherry’s first foray into coaching and dramatically changed his life and his family’s fortunes in unimaginable ways.

“I tell you, if I hadn’t gone to Pittsford, it just wouldn’t have happened for me,” the bombastic former star of Hockey Night in Canada’s Coach’s Corner says over the phone from his Mississauga lair. “That was the biggest break I ever had, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”

His three seasons at the Pittsford helm (1971 to 1973) culminated in an undefeated campaign and a county championship, curiously the lone championship Cherry would earn as a coach despite garnering coach-of-the-year kudos in both the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League.

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Those seasons in Pittsford, a tony suburb of Rochester, also furnished Knights players with enough memories, moments and stories to last 10 lifetimes.

“Tell people that you once played for Don Cherry and you get instant credibility,” former Knights forward Jay Hill says on the phone from Rochester. “Drop that on anyone, especially in a hockey room, and it changes everything.”

Cherry was no stranger to Rochester hockey fans, including his Pittsford troops. In the mid-1960s, he was a bruising blueliner on Rochester Americans squads that played in four consecutive Calder Cup finals and prevailed in three of them. Of his 16 minor-league pro seasons, seven were spent in the “Flower City.”

“We had 5 p.m. practice every day and Don would show up at four o’clock,” Knights defenceman Al Vyverberg recalls. “We started getting there early just to listen to his stories.

“It was a great place for Don to start out as a coach, because we’d go through a wall for the guy.”

The Knights missed the playoffs in Cherry’s first season behind the pine. But the team reached the league final the next year, only to lose an overtime heartbreaker to nemesis St. Thomas Aquinas. “I think I was more upset over that loss to Aquinas than any other playoff loss, including my (five) years in Boston,” Cherry insists. “I could hardly wait for the next season to start, because I knew that Pittsford team would be loaded.”

Locked and loaded and then some. The Knights capped an unbeaten 1972-73 season with a 7-4 victory in the title tilt. By that point in time, Cherry had already been rehired by the “Amerks,” first as a player/coach, then as coach/general manager. He also continued to guide the Knights.

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Jeff Knisely played only one season at Pittsford but still enjoyed a “unique relationship” with his coach. Knisely had been the Amerks’ stick boy and later the team’s assistant trainer. He and Cherry would sometimes finish a high school game and immediately join the Amerks on a road trip. “Don was like my parent on the road,” he says.

“Every time I hear someone on the radio point out that Cherry never coached a championship team, I feel like phoning the station and saying, ‘You guys are dead wrong,’” Knisely says.

When Cherry was coaching the Bruins, Hill and some teammates visited him before a game at the old Boston Garden. Ol’ Highcollar brought them straight into the dressing room and began singing their praises and raving about Pittsford’s formidable power play.

“There wasn’t one person in that room who cared about our power play,” Hill recalls, “but that didn’t stop Don. He kept pumping us up.”

Added Vyverberg: “The neat thing about Don is that he never forgets the little people who were with him along his path.”

Reminded of that power play, Cherry gushes. “Best power play on any team I’ve coached. Best by far, too.” More than a half-century later, the names of the Pittsford Five roll easily off his tongue: “Jay Hill, Eddie Scott, Al Vyverberg, John Hoff, Jeff Knisely.”

He remembers being plenty nervous about joining the coaching lodge. “I knew nothing about changing lines, doing drills, drawing up plays … nothing. I didn’t even know how to run a practice; I just ran it the way they ran practices when I was playing, except for a wrinkle here and there.”

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Cherry wasn’t around at the end to celebrate the Knights’ 7-4 championship victory in ‘73. He left the game in the waning moments to catch a flight to the Amerks’ contest that night in Springfield.

“I can still see him standing at the top of the stands, inching his way to the exit,” Hill recalls. “Once we scored the seventh goal, he knew it was in the bag.”

Hill recounts Cherry’s short but stimulating between-periods pep talk after the Knights had fallen behind 2-0. “He calmly told us that we were better than what we showed. Then he said, ‘Now go out there and scare ‘em.’ It was classic.”

Cherry still cherishes that hockey title and his time with the Knights. In his den next to the goldfish aquarium is the Pittsford team photo from that championship season. “What I learned from that whole experience was the importance of having character guys on your team. And every kid on that Pittsford team had character.”

Patrick Kennedy is a retired Whig-Standard reporter. He can be reached at pjckennedy35@gmail.com.

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