The CBC has just announced that Don Cherry's rants on Coach's Corner, a longtime intermission staple of Hockey Night in Canada, will now broadcast on a 7-second delay. This crackdown comes as a result of a routine segment where bq. Cherry spoke out about players wearing visors on their helmets. In full flight he said, "most of the guys that wear them are Europeans or French guys and you cannot have half the league have them." Frankly, this is nothing compared to his wartime tirade or, even worse, his onerous ranting about foreigners ruining the game when Ulf Samuelsson shortened Cam Neely's career with a cheap knee to the thigh (that was way back in the 1991 conference finals). The real problem with the measure that the CBC has taken is that this censure is--unsurprisingly--a half-assed solution. Cherry's meandering crudeness shouldn't even render him the center of this much attention. If the CBC is the kind of broadcaster that prides itself on its professionalism and ability to enrich hockey for its viewers, then why is Don Cherry still gracing our airwaves? Just dismiss him. Cherry's attention-grabbing stunts aren't even the best reason to can him. He lost touch with the game played on the ice long ago: compare Coach's Corner to Behind the Mask and you'll find that Kelly Hrudey spends atleast the majority of his time analyzing the hockey game itself, not politics. In fact, until TSN and Sportsnet recently started broadcasting intermission analysis that provided respectable insight and thoughtful commentary on hockey, I don't think HNIC viewers could even recall the last time they witnessed intelligent analysis coming from their televisions. Don Cherry may "tell it like he sees it," but why even care to listen? The themesong to HNIC is a cultural icon, Dick Irvin's occasional rambling is tolerable and Ron MacLean is clever when he's not crotch-watching. But the CBC should make a real decision and simply put Don Cherry out of our misery. We may have grown up watching Don Cherry, but aren't we old enough that we can now be allowed to watch hockey again, please?