page_title: Don Cherry
section_title: Playing career
hierarchical_section_title: Don Cherry / Playing career
caption_attribution_description: Photo By: Kelly Shea
context_page_description: Donald Stewart Cherry is a Canadian ice hockey commentator. He is also a sports writer, as well as a retired professional hockey player and National Hockey League coach.
  Cherry played one game with the Boston Bruins, and later coached the team for five seasons after concluding a successful playing career in the American Hockey League. From 1986 to 2019, Cherry co-hosted Coach's Corner—a segment aired during CBC's Saturday-night NHL broadcast Hockey Night in Canada, with Ron MacLean. Nicknamed Grapes, he is known for his outspoken manner and opinions, and his flamboyant dress. By the 2018–19 NHL season, Cherry and MacLean had hosted Coach's Corner for 33 seasons. From 1984 to 2019, Cherry also hosted Grapeline, a short-form radio segment with fellow sportscaster Brian Williams, and also created the video series Rock'em Sock'em Hockey.
  In 2004, Cherry was voted by viewers as the seventh-greatest Canadian of all-time in the CBC miniseries The Greatest Canadian. In March 2010, his life was dramatized in a two-part CBC movie, Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story, based on a script written by his son, Timothy Cherry.
context_section_description: Cherry played junior hockey with the Barrie Flyers and the Windsor Spitfires in the Ontario Hockey Association. Cherry won the Memorial Cup as a defenceman with Barrie in 1953. He dropped out of high school, and in 1954 he signed with the American Hockey League's (AHL) Hershey Bears.
  Cherry had a long playing career in professional minor hockey, and in 1955 played his only NHL game when the Boston Bruins called him up during the playoffs. According to Cherry, a baseball injury suffered in the off season kept him from making the NHL, despite his almost 20 years playing in the minor leagues. He retired as a player in 1970, but came out of retirement two years later to play 19 final games with the Rochester Americans. Cherry won the Calder Cup championship (AHL) four times—1960 with the Springfield Indians, and 1965, 1966, 1968 with Rochester. He also won the Lester Patrick Cup, the Western Hockey League Championship, with the Vancouver Canucks in 1969.
caption: Cherry was inducted into the American Hockey League Hall of Fame in 2019.
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