Bobby Orr: 12 things I learned from Bobby Orr's autobiography, 'Orr: My Story"

11. Big fan of Don Cherry

CARLOS OSORIO/AP
Don Cherry, announcer on CBC's "Hockey Night in Canada," is greeted by fans as he arrives for an NHL Stanley Cup game between Pittsburgh and Detroit in 2009.

Despite playing only one game in the National Hockey League, Don Cherry should be in the Hall of Fame, Orr believes. That Cherry isn’t, Orr writes, is “one of the greatest oversights in the history of the game.” Orr devotes a whole chapter in his book to the man who has achieved his greatest fame as the flamboyant,  garishly attired hockey analyst of the CBC’s “Hockey Night in Canada” game telecasts. Hockey has never had a better ambassador in Orr’s estimation. Cherry did coach six years in the NHL, including five with the Bruins in the late 1970s. He wound up with a career 250-153-77 mark (the NHL counts regular-season ties), but with no Stanley Cups to his resume, Cherry isn’t a serious candidate. But when you consider all he has done for hockey causes, including raising money, generating interest in the sport, and making visits to hospitals and military bases, Orr concludes that Cherry’s “importance is as great of that of any player, past or present.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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