TPS315: Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story, Episode 2, Part 1

This week on The Produce Stand, we continue our offseason deep dive into Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story, tackling the first half of Part 2.

We pick up with Don Cherry beginning his coaching career in Rochester, where his hard-nosed philosophy quickly takes shape. After clashing with management and finding himself unemployed, Don gets another shot at Rochester, this time building an independent team from scratch around skill, toughness and players other teams overlooked. Sound familiar?

The parallels to Shoresy become impossible to ignore. From surrounding skilled players with the toughest guys available to locker-room speeches and an obsession with hating to lose, we find plenty of DNA that appears to have carried into Jared Keeso’s later work. There’s even a surprising connection when future Shoresy director Sean Skeen turns up as Battleship Kelly.

Don’s success eventually earns him the Boston Bruins job, where he inherits Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito and a talented team that isn’t quite playing his kind of hockey.

We also discuss Jared Keeso’s performance, Rose Cherry’s influence and the beginnings of the larger-than-life Don Cherry Canadians would eventually know from Coach’s Corner.

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Introduction00:01:10 – How Was Your Week?00:21:55 – Don’t Bore Us Get To The Chorus (Episode Recap)01:12:19 – First Impressions01:23:43 – Listener Comments01:31:27 – YEWniversal News01:32:20 – Patreon Spotlight01:35:42 – Final Comments01:39:25 – Outro

Links:

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