Daily Inspiration Quote by Donald Stewart Cherry

Don Cherry’s line isn’t trying to persuade you so much as dare you to disagree. The phrasing - “Anybody who says...” - turns a preference into a litmus test, and the punchy closer - “out of their minds” - pathologizes dissent. It’s classic Cherry: the hockey-guy scold as folk philosopher, using bluntness as credibility. You’re not invited to weigh pros and cons; you’re asked to declare allegiance.

The specific intent is defensive and evangelizing at once: to protect fighting’s place in the NHL by framing it as not merely entertaining but essential to the sport’s identity. Cherry’s genius, culturally, is that he speaks in the register of the barstool and the broadcast booth simultaneously. The subtext is a nostalgic insistence that hockey’s moral order is enforced by players, not rulebooks: fighting as deterrent, as catharsis, as proof of manhood and team loyalty. If you don’t enjoy it, the implication goes, you don’t understand the game - or worse, you’re trying to sanitize it.

Context matters because Cherry’s career rode the era when fighting was mainstreamed as spectacle and rationalized as “policing,” long before concussion science and PR-conscious leagues made that story harder to sell. His comment also functions as culture-war shorthand: old-school authenticity versus modern safety politics, blue-collar tradition versus “soft” reform. The line works because it collapses complexity into identity, turning a controversial practice into common sense, then calling anyone who resists it irrational. That’s not analysis; it’s a power move.