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NHL tough guy Sean Avery reopened his feud with Don Cherry this week by stating the CBC commentator knows next to nothing about hockey.
“He's a staple as far as Canadian hockey goes,” Avery said during interview on the CBC's The Hour. “And I grew up watching Coach's Corner, and he serves a purpose.
“But he really does not know shit about hockey.
“He knows, like, unnecessary facts about putting Sears catalogues on your shin pads.”
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Host George Stroumboulopoulos interjected with, “No, no, no.”
“He says a lot of things,” continued Avery. “He calls people by their wrong names. And it's just, like, enough of this guy.”
Last spring, Cherry called Avery a jerk on Hockey Night In Canada after a trash-talking episode at the Air Canada Centre involving the Toronto Maple Leafs' Darcy Tucker and Jason Blake.
Cherry said Avery needed to be “straightened out”.
In the interview with Stroumboulopoulos, which was taped, Avery said he used to defend Cherry to European teammates.
“The European guys hated him, but I always stuck up for him,” he said. “I said, ‘it's Grapes'. You've got to love him. But he would bash the European guys.
“And there are a lot of great European players. They may not be the toughest guys in the world, but they still bring an exciting part to the game.
“I'm just over with him.”
Avery, who signed with Dallas Stars in the off-season, discussed his interest in fashion and clothes.
During the summer, he worked as an intern at Vogue magazine in New York.
“People ask me if I'm gay because I work at Vogue,” he said. “All of a sudden, you turn into a gay man because you like clothes.”
His response, he said, is to say, “Open up a magazine and see my track record. I don't think I'm that gay.”
On another subject, Avery, who is from Pickering, Ont., and played in the Ontario Hockey League, said a junior hockey player's focus on the game to the exclusion of everything else is “terrible.”
“I didn't go to school,” he said. “I dropped out at Grade 9. I didn't learn to play the piano. I didn't read Moby Dick. I didn't read anything.”
Asked to name the “biggest ass in the NHL,” Avery said Tucker.
Asked to finish this sentence: Most hockey players are . . ., Avery said, “very, very simple.”
