EPIC CONFRONTATION: Canada vs. Russia On Ice: The Greatest Sports Drama of All-Time

By Greg Franke

There have been many thrilling and memorable sports rivalries. But none has ever combined such drama and excitement over such an extended period of time and against such a gripping background as the Cold War hockey rivalry between Canada and Russia (known at that time as the Soviet Union or USSR). For decades Canada had reigned unchallenged as the dominant country at the sport-and the pride that came with knowing that their beloved national game was one thing at which they were unquestionably the world's best was a major part of the self-image and esteem of nearly all Canadians. Until suddenly, an interloper appeared that was like no other competitor Canada had ever met. It was a far-off country that lacked advanced equipment and facilities, had only recently taken up the sport, and had even brazenly decided not (as other countries had done) to learn the game as mere pupils of the Canadian masters. Rather, largely through the genius of one remarkable leader, this newcomer would blaze its own trail, audaciously inventing an entirely new style of play, along with a unique approach to skills development and physical conditioning that led to a breathtakingly exciting and effective spectacle that even the game's creators had never conceived. Finally-and perhaps most significantly-this new competitor represented a political system that was openly hostile to the freedom and values taken for granted in the West, and openly proclaimed its superiority, predicting that it would one day spread throughout and dominate the world. Thus, to Canadians, overcoming this unexpected threat became not only a matter of national honor-but also a crusade for the Free World. This newcomer was Russia (the USSR)-and the seeming life-and-death struggle that ensued for four decades is an unbelievable tale that became the greatest sports drama ever known. Here is the never-before told full story of this historic confrontation told from both sides from the people who lived it, and from what was being reported as the events were happening.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643507927

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EPIC CONFRONTATION

Canada vs. Russian On Ice: The Greatest Sports Drama of All-Time

Greg Franke

Copyright © 2018 Greg Franke

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64350-791-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64350-792-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

This work is dedicated to the memory of Anatoli Tarasov, the brilliant coach and founder of the unparalleled Soviet style of hockey, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his birth (December 10, 2018.)

Foreword

The longstanding Canada-Soviet hockey rivalry, which began following World War II, was almost four decades of peaks and valleys as the push for bragging rights intensified, the training methods and skills of the game improved, and political tensions ebbed and flowed.

How tense was it?

Well, when the 1964 Canadian Olympic team was in a pre-Olympic series in Moscow and staying at the Mockba International Hotel, one time, I went to the room of coach and manager Father Dave Bauer and Dr. Bob Hindmarch. They were passing notes back and forth to each other. The room is bugged, they explained on a scrap of paper. Nonsense! suggested teammate Marshall Johnson (who went on to an NHL professional career as a player, scout, manager, and Team Canada coach.) He proceeded to get up on a chair to unscrew light bulbs and look behind pictures. Nothing was found—until in 1969 when a little electronic bug was found in the then-Canadian team manager A. J. Buck Houle’s jacket pocket!

While in competitions on the ice, the Canadian delegation was always leery of international referees of Eastern European countries to say nothing of International hockey’s ‘czar’ (as we used to call him) Bunny Ahearne. He once told me at a dinner, You Canadians have no right to complain, you have no history.

Well, the history we did experience since World War II with its well-worn terms of Cold War and Iron Curtain and high-level espionage certainly gave one reason to pause. The West’s efforts for influence in Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Germany, and Western Europe were matched equally by Russia in Egypt, Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and West Berlin (with ruthless struggles in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Korea and Vietnam.) Events in 1957, like the Russian Sputnik as a first in space, was matched a decade later in 1969 by America’s man on the moon. It was a relentless competition to present the superiority of one political system over the other.

Many of these events are referenced in this book alongside the development of the hockey rivalry, which was a small window into that wider competition.

Personally, I was a part of the Russia/Canada rivalry with the Canadian Olympic team in 1964 and ’68, and again in 1980 when, at Lake Placid, the USA pulled off its ‘Miracle on Ice’ to win an unexpected and glorious gold medal. This aspect of the rivalry pitted Canadian and American amateurs against Russian amateurs. (I suggest the term Russian amateurs loosely. It comes out in this book that while the Russian amateurs practiced on and off the ice 1,200 hours per year, while Sweden practiced about three hundred hours and Canada two hundred, star Russian forward Vyacheslav Starshinov still claimed that they were amateurs, had other pursuits, got paid little, but just worked harder than hockey players in North America.)

In the 1960s, Canadian Senior A club teams in international hockey gave way to a year-round national team made up of mainly university students. When it was proven over the years that Canadian amateurs were still no match for the Russian amateurs, the approach marched toward a best against best competition, which allowed for Canadian professionals to compete.

Nearly half a century later, Canada won three of the last four Olympic gold medals in which professional all-stars competed, as well as the World Cup in 2016. But this journey has been a steep climb for Canada with more than a few stumbles since 1952 when the Senior A Edmonton Mercurys won the gold for Canada. As this rivalry expanded, Canada and its hockey gurus went from dismissiveness, to shock, to admiration, to resetting its own game with the establishment of Hockey Canada and a scientific approach to development. At the same time, Russia was on a bull market trajectory winning both World and Olympic championships regularly—that is, until its 1991 perestroika and glasnost revolution when many of its best players decided to play in North America and its national team lost a viselike grip on its best players. As a result, Russia is on a reset that is continuing even today.

Author Greg Franke brings his very particular experience to the intertwining of these stories.

Franke’s approach is as a journalist, and his research reaches into sportswriters’ perspectives, interviews with the major figures on both sides, and expert commentary current at the time. The author is also a linguist who is fluent in the Russian language and used that skill with the US military as well as for writing for Russian-language media for international tournaments. This allowed for interviews and insights with Russian hockey superstars and its leaders throughout this period, for example, into the memorabilia of legendary Russian coach Anatoli Tarasov, through his daughter Galina.

Mr. Franke is also a sports broadcaster as well as an amateur hockey coach. This gave him an appreciation for the nuances within the long-running debate on the comparison of the Canadian and Russian styles of hockey—the former with its dependence on individual flashes of greatness associated with rugged checking and not a little intimidation, the latter with its stress on team play, passing, and puck possession.

Toronto Maple Leafs coach Punch Imlach and Anatoli Tarasov described the contrasting styles best. Imlach: When we have 75 hits a game, we win vs. Tarasov: When we have 245 passes a game, we win.

Author Franke brings alive the titanic contests of this long-standing rivalry with its clashes of style and preparation, which, at times, were both nasty and inspiring. Most agree that today the balance of skills including conditioning, tactics, and strategy has evened out in the last twenty years, and Canada has caught up to Russian training techniques. In addition, that elusive thing called ‘spirit’, that unrelenting will to win in Canadian hockey teams, an area in which Tarasov once suggested Canada had the edge, may still be advantage Canada.

But the story never really ends.

Today the NHL is trying to encourage hockey in China, and has begun scheduling exhibition games there. Having a television audience of a billion and a half citizens is just too much potential to ignore.

Perhaps the new area of rivalry over the next sixty years for both Russia and Canada will come from the Middle Kingdom. We all see that modern China is on a reset of its influence in the world—a world rife with change.

Technological advances in training, performance, and enhancement are charting new territory with DNA experimentation, artificial intelligence, and chip implants. We may not have seen anything yet.

So read ‘Epic Confrontation’—and then stay tuned. In the words of the legendary New York Yankee catcher Yoga Berra, it could be déjà vu all over again.

Terry O’Malley

Canadian Olympian 1964, 1968, 1980

Canadian National Team member, 1964–70, 1979–80

Introduction

Strange though it may seem, even more than four decades after the epochal 1972 Summit Series between Canada’s top NHL stars and the Soviet Union’s powerful national team (and despite countless volumes being written about the event over that time period), there is a great deal that still needs to be documented about that historic confrontation.

Indeed, this is true even though nearly everyone who watched the series closely undoubtedly feels they can recite it all by heart.

(This would certainly include nearly all Canadians, as well as untold millions of Russians and countless other interested observers in Europe and North America, and an entire generation to come for whom the story has been compellingly and repeatedly recounted.)

On top of that, many occurrences that led up to that first memorable meeting which unfolded for decades prior to 1972 are not only absolutely fascinating, but also have been largely overlooked in spite of some laudable attempts to record them.

There are two main reasons for this: First, the multitude of events that contributed to the dramatic coming together of all the elements that made for such a gripping and unforgettable tale have never been systematically organized into one volume, and second (and perhaps most significantly), the respective sides of the story—Canadian and Russian—have never been presented side by side with equal emphasis throughout the entire narrative.

There are of course excellent reasons for this—the language and distance barriers being the primary ones. But also the fact that those telling the story generally have been so close to it that their sense of national pride has quite understandably left them to a very real degree unable to separate themselves from some of the treasured mythology that has arisen regarding the story to really tell it like it was.

This volume is meant to fill that void.

This leads to the question of why this writer, an American who was only peripherally aware of the drama as it was happening in 1972, should be the one to render this tale that is so celebrated and cherished in the annals of Russian sports history—and in all of Canadian history, sports or otherwise.

Let me attempt to provide some context to this question.

In 1972, I was growing up in Fairfax, Virginia near Washington, D.C.—hardly a hotbed of hockey, although numerous professional teams had played out of Washington’s storied Uline Arena (later known as the Washington Coliseum) over the years.

My one particular recollection of the Summit Series was at nine years of age watching the fifth game (the first in Moscow) on whatever outlet was carrying at least a portion of the series in the United States. With this game coming very shortly after the controversial Summer Olympic basketball game in Munich in which the United States team had the gold medals (that like Canada’s hockey dominance had always seemed the country’s birthright) essentially stolen from them and delivered to the Soviet Union, I was quite pleased to see that Team Canada had rolled out to a 4–1 lead over the USSR’s hockey representatives.

But when the Soviets scored to cut the lead to 4–2 early in the third period, and followed that up with another goal a mere eight seconds later, the same sense of dread came over me that no doubt came over all Canadians—that this group of seemingly expressionless foreign supermen was going to forge back and once again refuse to be denied. And this is exactly what happened. The Soviets came back to win 5–4 to take a seemingly prohibitive 3–1–1 lead in the eight-game series (with the final three games all to be played right in Moscow).

Team Canada coach Harry Sinden undoubtedly spoke for many millions when he wrote in his memoirs that Canada was just not destined to win this thing—no matter what we do, these people beat us.¹

After that, the series dropped off my radar screen (although I do remember hearing that Canada eventually came back to win it, the absolutely incredible storybook nature of the comeback was lost on me at the time).

As the years progressed, I became more and more interested in the great Canadian pastime. I took up playing the sport (in the interest of doing something my older and then more athletically advanced sibling did not do), and the opportunity to watch live NHL hockey in what was at the time the most futuristic arena in the league (the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, of which I still maintain the fondest of memories) cultivated a love for the game that within a few years turned into nothing less than a lifelong obsession.

Still, my exposure to international hockey was as yet in the dormant stages.

Though I recall while watching a Washington Capitals game on TV against the Detroit Red Wings on New Year’s Eve 1975 being disappointed to hear that the touring Soviet Central Army team had come from two goals down to tie the mighty Montreal Canadiens, I had no idea that that game was to be extolled as possibly the greatest hockey game ever played up to that time.

Shortly thereafter, in February 1976, I recall being again let down when the Soviets once more narrowly escaped defeat when they rallied for two late goals to win the 1976 Winter Olympic gold medals over Czechoslovakia.

Then in September of that year, I recall watching (on the PBS network in the United States) as Bobby Orr rushed through the Czechoslovak defense to score a beautiful backhand goal in the first-ever Canada Cup playoff game. Though enthralled by Orr’s effort, and glad of Canada’s success, I had little knowledge of the background behind that tournament that made it among the most eagerly awaited hockey events of all time—the very first meeting of the best players from the top six hockey countries in the world.

By February 1979, I was fifteen years old living in Dayton, Ohio (really little more hockeycentric than Washington DC), but still playing the game, and by that time was keenly aware of the importance of the best-of-three Challenge Cup Series in New York—of which we south of the border were able only to watch pitifully abbreviated coverage of the second game of the series (complete with camera angles adjusted to avoid showing the ubiquitous rinkboard advertising—which was pompously declared to be an ‘undue commercial intrusion into the sporting event’). That meant one could barely follow the play when the puck was along the boards.

And to my great consternation, the reception on the only channel carrying the game in our area—this was still pre-cable TV for most people—was so bad it was almost unwatchable.

I joined with millions of Canadians in exulting when Team NHL (which also included three Swedish players: Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson—playing then for the New York Rangers after legendary careers teaming up with Bobby Hull for the Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association—and Borje Salming of the Toronto Maple Leafs) dominated the Soviet interlopers and won the first game handily. But the Soviets rebounded to win game 2 convincingly before shocking the hockey world with a 6–0 drubbing of the outclassed NHL team in the deciding game.

At that time, I must have felt as dejected as most Canadians. Since becoming really involved with the sport, I had adopted the pride that came with the idea that Canada—our friends and northern neighbors— was clearly the best country in the world at it. To see that designation lost to the same country to which not only had we been deprived of those basketball gold medals in the 1972 Olympics, but also (even more significantly) sponsored an odious, totalitarian society devoid of the freedoms we cherished and took for granted was just too much.

Many things changed for international hockey, and for me personally in 1980.

This, of course, was the year of the ‘Miracle on Ice’, in which a heretofore unknown group of American college players won the Olympic Gold Medals at Lake Placid, New York, after defeating the same Soviet juggernaut that had just a year before humbled the top stars of the NHL.

(Of course it was precisely the exceptionally high caliber of the Soviet team that made this victory come to be known as a ‘miracle.’)

This was my first real opportunity to watch the international game as a mature hockey observer, and I absolutely thrilled to the great skill level, the fast pace, and the nationalistic excitement of the games.

And in addition to this, my forming a friendship with an exchange student from Finland who was as much of a hockey enthusiast as I was, and who also was very knowledgeable about all the European players and teams, provided me with a wonderful education in the international game.

When the US defeated the Soviets (seeing the clock tick down and hearing Al Michaels on the game broadcast famously exclaim Do you believe in miracles? Yes! is as ingrained as a wondrously joyous moment for me and millions of Americans as Paul Henderson’s winning goal in game 8 of the Summit Series is for Canadians), it had to rank as one of the happiest memories of my life—and still does to this day.

As Team USA defenseman Mike Ramsey said of the postgame euphoria in which he was memorably shown joyfully embracing teammate Jack O’Callahan on the ice: I’ll take that picture to my grave with me.²

Sounds very similar to Canada in 1972, does it not?

(In fact, regarding the almost reality-defying events leading to the 1980 US triumph, Michaels eloquently—and largely correctly—stated that the confluence of events was so extraordinary, it could never happen again.)³

Indeed, maybe never again. But anyone who witnessed the proceedings of 1972 will likely insist that such extraordinary circumstances—in fact, probably even greater—had already occurred eight years before (and had been building to such an amazing crescendo many years before that).

Even in matters as remarkable as these, the statement in Ecclesiastes rings true: There is nothing new under the sun.

Two days after the American upset of the Soviet Union, I watched the US defeat Finland to clinch the gold with my friend from abroad—our house was undoubtedly one of the few in the country which contained someone who cheered heartily when the Finns went ahead twice and nearly spoiled the greatest American sports story of all time. But then the inspired US team stormed back with three third-period goals to turn a 2–1 deficit into a 4–2 win, and the triumph was complete.

How ironic—and revealing—that in both Canada and the United States it was an international hockey victory that stands unchallenged as the respective countries’ greatest sports moments—and both involved ‘miracle’ wins over the Soviet Union’s vaunted National Team.

From that time forward, my perspective on hockey was transformed. Though I continued to be very avidly interested in the NHL—it was a great era with the European influence, together with the emergence of Wayne Gretzky and a myriad of other future Hall of Famers drastically improving the quality of play—my true interest lay with international hockey.

To this day, I consider the next year’s Canada Cup tournament to be perhaps the most engrossing since 1972.

There were just so many intriguing plots and subplots: The Soviets were bringing in a new generation of stars and seeking to recover lost prestige from the previous year’s loss to the Americans—and then tragically, seeking a victory to celebrate the memory of the great Valeri Kharlamov, who died in a car crash just as the Soviet team had arrived in Canada.

The Canadians, fresh with exciting new stars led by the amazing young Gretzky (just a total breath of fresh air for Canadian hockey after a decade seemingly known more for fighting and violence than anything else), were seeking to make amends for the Challenge Cup debacle, while the strongest-ever US team was playing for the first time with many of the stars from the ’80 Olympic team as pros.

In addition, the Czechoslovaks were also looking for redemption for a dismal ’80 Olympics (though they would have to accomplish that without the services of three of their greatest stars—brothers Peter and Anton Stastny, who had defected to play for the NHL’s Quebec Nordiques, and their older brother Marian who was suspended as punishment in Communist Czechoslovakia and a year later would manage to join his brothers in Quebec). The Swedish team with all their NHL stars was tremendously talented, and the underdog Finns had clearly their most talented team ever.

The series was just as great as advertised, with the Canadians playing a fresh new style based on speed and puck control—featuring a dynamic line of Gretzky, Guy Lafleur, and Gilbert Perreault that was just dazzling until Perreault was unfortunately knocked out of the series with an injury resulting from a freak collision in the game against the Swedes. Still, the Canadians continued to roll, demolishing the Soviets 7–3 in a round-robin game (that perhaps gave a false sense of security), and downing the strong US team—buttressed by very impressive showings by the miracle boys—in the semifinals.

But then it happened again.

With the Canadians playing so well throughout the tournament, it seemed almost unfathomable that they could not only lose to the Soviets again, but also be shellacked by an even greater margin than in the Challenge Cup—but indeed it happened. The great Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak—who had not played in the round-robin game—stifled numerous Canadian drives throughout the first two periods before the Soviets broke away to an 8–1 win.

After listening to the game on the radio (there was still no TV coverage to be found in Dayton at the time), I—no doubt along with millions of Canadians—even teared up a bit at the thought that the Canadians’ game was theirs no longer, and the point could not realistically even be argued any more (as the 14–1 combined score in the two pivotal games unmistakably attested).

The next year I got my first chance to see the Soviet powerhouse in person, as my Finnish friend and I were able to attend the 1982 World Championships in Helsinki. Though seeing the Soviet and other European stars firsthand was thrill enough in itself, numerous upsets in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs meant an opportunity to see Wayne Gretzky play in the flesh for the first time as well (in addition to other greats such as Bobby Clarke, Darryl Sittler, Bob Gainey, Bill Barber, Mike Gartner, NHL Rookie of the Year Dale Hawerchuk, and many more) in what was to that point—and probably still is—the most talented aggregation ever sent by Canada to a World Championship tournament.

And of course, for Canadians, the hope existed that if this great collection of stars could somehow defeat the Soviets, the painful double memories of 1979 and 1981 could yet be erased.

To an extent they were, as the Canadians certainly proved that the lopsided scores in those earlier matchups were anomalies—but in the end, the Soviets still prevailed in tremendous contests by 4–3 and 6–4 scores.

And so it went for the next two years.

The next winter, the Soviet National Team toured six NHL cities and faced many of the league’s top teams. Though the NHL clubs did manage two victories (one by the soon-to-become-dynasty Edmonton Oilers), the Soviets were outstanding and won all four games in which the great goaltender Tretiak played, two by shutout, and allowing only a goal a game average in those wins.

Then, in the 1983 World Championship in Germany, another outstanding Canadian lineup—possibly even equaling the one from the previous year—this time featuring the likes of Marcel Dionne and his high-scoring Triple Crown linemates Dave Taylor and Charlie Simmer, along with Sittler, Gainey, Gartner, Michel Goulet, Denis Maruk (who had scored sixty goals the year before), and a tremendous defense corp consisting of Craig Hartsburg and Paul Reinhart (back from the previous year’s team), Brian Engblom, Scott Stevens (NHL Rookie of the Year runner-up), and a young James Patrick—was simply taken apart by the superb Soviet team led by the peerless ‘Green Unit’ of forwards Sergei Makarov, Igor Larionov, and Vladimir Krutov, together with defensemen Vyacheslav Fetisov and Alexei Kasatonov, and backed by the seemingly impenetrable goaltending of Tretiak.

Moving to 1984, the Soviets almost sleepwalked to the Olympic gold medals, and had formed the unsettling (to opponents) habit of never so much as losing a game in these elite tournaments, and in most cases continuing to rarely even give up more than one goal in a game—and often not even that!

It was truly one of sports’ greatest records.

The next chance for Canadian redemption was the 1984 Canada Cup, but even with an absolute galaxy of superstar players, even Canadians themselves seemed resigned to the notion that the Soviets were unbeatable (even with captain Fetisov out with an injury and the great Tretiak having retired at the relatively youthful age of thirty-one). And indeed, the Soviets (led by underrated goaltender Vladimir Myshkin, who shut out the NHL All-Stars in the deciding game of that 1979 Challenge Cup, and who indeed emerged as the 1984 Canada Cup All-Star goaltender) again waltzed unblemished through the round-robin portion of the tournament, humbling the Gretzky-Mark Messier-Paul Coffey-led Team Canada 6–3 along the way, while the Canadians barely qualified for the playoff round by finishing fourth out of six teams.

However, in one memorable semifinals effort, the Canadians summoned up all their skill and all their will, outplaying the Soviets widely over the course of the game. Still they fell behind 2–1 on a magnificent effort by Makarov, who faked the great Larry Robinson into the stands with a superlative move and applied what appeared to be yet another death blow to Canadian hopes.

But somehow, Team Canada rallied and scored with six minutes left to tie the game, and got a Mike Bossy winner in overtime to produce the most delirious moment in Canadian hockey since 1972—they had finally gotten their game back.

I happened to be watching that memorable game with friends in Toronto, and together with them and all Canadians, rejoiced.

This victory proved to be just a prelude to 1987 and probably the most well-played series of hockey games ever staged: six games between the Soviet Nationals and Team NHL and then Team Canada. The first two involving Team NHL were in the Rendez-Vous ’87 event in February in Quebec City, and the next four involving Team Canada in September of 1987 in the next Canada Cup Series.

In an unbelievable display where the first game was great and each subsequent game seemed to top the previous one for action and excitement, the teams split two games at Rendez-Vous (with the Soviets having the advantage in total goals), and tied in a great Canada Cup preliminary game (in which Canada was saved by what was truly one of the most blatantly one-sided officiating performances in the history of the sport—certainly at least equaling any displays of ineptitude by European officials decried by Canadians over the years. In fact, on the CTV telecast, after one particularly egregious call by American referee Mike Noeth, legendary Canadian play-by-play announcer Dan Kelly acknowledged that I’m cheering for Canada, but that was ridiculous, and late in the game, in a mastery of understatement, color commentator Ron Reusch said (late in a game in which Canada would end up having 5 power play opportunities to the Soviets’ none) that the penalty disparities considering the robust way in which Canada has played this game, and I think that’s being polite, is rather strange.

But these three marvelous games proved to be only the prelude to the Canada Cup Final and perhaps the three best games ever—and possibly the most dramatic as well (with 1972 being probably the only exception). The Soviets took game 1 in overtime, before Team Canada (led by the incomparable duo of Gretzky and Mario Lemieux) escaped with a threadbare win in double overtime in game 2—which receives this observer’s nod for the single greatest hockey game ever played.

The third and deciding game was not quite on the level of game 2—or likely any of the preceding five games—for artistry, but the incredible spectacle of Team Canada erasing a seemingly insurmountable 3–0 deficit and winning on a Gretzky to Lemieux setup with a mere 1:26 to play (the uncalled infraction behind the play notwithstanding) served as a fitting climax to a series of games very reminiscent of 1972.

This onlooker will wager that such will never be seen again (for many reasons, not the least of which is the far greater contrast in playing styles at that time that created such a clash of philosophies, as well as the political implications that so fueled the drama of the international hockey confrontations of this era. These things likely will never be duplicated).

Indeed, we certainly wouldn’t want to duplicate them, because we’ve seen so much societal progress in East-West relations (even taking into account recent political developments, which pale by comparison to those of the Soviet era) that transcend sports. But nonetheless, the Cold War certainly served to bring out the best in athletic rivalry and competition.

Returning briefly to my personal narrative, during these years when the final climactic games in the unrelentingly thrilling Canada-Soviet Union hockey rivalry were playing out, some remarkable occurrences took place in my own evolution that ultimately resulted in the producing of the work which you have before you.

The first step in what would become a diametric transformation of my long-held attitudes was the opportunity my aforementioned Finnish friend and I had to actually go to the Soviet Union to attend the 1986 World Championship in Moscow.

In quite an amazing coincidence, Bowling Green State University in Ohio (at which I was a soon-to-be-graduating senior at the time) had chosen just that year to launch a Russian language and studies program. Though I had absolutely no desire to ever set foot in a foreign language classroom—and in fact had taken extensive pains to avoid that necessity—the circumstance of having the opportunity to fulfill my degree requirements by learning some Russian just months before I would actually be in Moscow was simply too great to ignore.

So I yielded to the fates and enrolled.

After a semester of great difficulty in learning the mechanics of the language—just as I had envisioned—I nonetheless found that I had indeed imbibed enough Russian to greatly enrich the experience of the trip.

Most significantly, I had the opportunity to engage in very basic-level conversations with native Russians, and found they were very welcoming and engaging.

The result of this experience was that I returned home (just after the horrible nuclear accident at Chernobyl—this was at the very beginning of the Gorbachev era: still pre-glasnost and perestroika) totally infused with the desire to learn more Russian and even to one day master it.

The next year brought yet another step to the opening of an American mind.

Somewhere during the second game of the 1987 Rendez-Vous Series, I had an epiphany: As the Soviets were displaying brilliant hockey on the way to defeating the outstanding NHL team (the difference between the teams in speed and skill level was much narrower than in the last Soviet-Team NHL meeting in 1979), it finally hit me that just because the Soviet team represented a reprehensible political system was no reason not to not only admire them (as I had done for years), but to also embrace them as an organization that represented the absolute best aspects of a sport that I so loved.

It was at that time that I stopped rooting rabidly against the Soviets and even began seeing them as good guys, not bad. (The wisdom of this later proved to be borne out when it became clear in upcoming years that the Soviet and Czechoslovak players themselves despised the vile Communist system perhaps more deeply than anyone.)

After attending yet another World Championship in 1989 in Stockholm, in which the Soviet team again swept through with an unblemished record en route to winning the gold medals—and after which their great young forward Alexander Mogilny defected to join the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres—another twist of fate occurred.

An unforeseen circumstance arose that temporarily interrupted my work as a local news and sports radio broadcaster, and I made the decision to use that interregnum to pursue my plans to attempt the mastery of the Russian language. I joined the military and enrolled as a student in the Defense Language Institute (that then operated out of Monterey, California) for a year of intensive Russian study.

Completing the program allowed me to acquire the ability to hold much higher-level conversations, and upon my return, I began working as a freelance sports reporter for the New York–based Russian newspaper Novoye Russkoye Slovo.

My first undertaking for NRS was to cover the 1991 Canada Cup Series, which began just as the Russian peoples’ historic defiance of Communist authority set the stage for the end of the horrendous period of Marxist rule and the Cold War. This, too, was to have major personal significance for me.

The Soviet team was only a shadow of itself in that last-ever major tournament for the top national team sporting the long-feared CCCP insignia. With many of the best players barred from playing because they wouldn’t sign contracts preventing them from leaving, and many others already having experienced the fame and glory of the NHL (or the freedom of life elsewhere in the West) declining to participate, the result was unsurprising.

(Nonetheless, a lot of skill remained, and the Soviets still gave victorious Team Canada its toughest test, achieving a 3–3 tie that Canada had to score late to secure.)

Afterward, I continued my independent work for NRS, writing features about Russian players in the NHL, and covering subsequent World Championships in 1992 in Prague (in which the former Soviet team now began playing under the banner of Russia), 1993 in Munich, and 1994 in Milan.

All this fascination with the brilliance of Soviet hockey and the ingeniousness of its philosophies (largely credited to the incomparable coach Anatoli Tarasov) then led to still another—and the most significant—highly unlikely occurrence that eventually opened the door to this project becoming reality.

In the summer of 1993, I attended the first-ever World Hockey Summit in Boston, Massachusetts, in which a number of top hockey people gathered together to discuss the evolution of the game and the issues facing it. The great Tarasov was in ill health and was not expected to make the trip overseas to attend the summit, but—surprisingly to most in attendance—he appeared together with his daughter Galina and a considerable entourage.

As someone who had learned the Russian language reasonably fluently, this represented a remarkable opportunity. Here I was as probably the only individual outside of his immediate coterie that had the capability of communicating directly with the legendary coach!

A combination of his poor health and natural gruffness, some still remaining vestiges of a language barrier, and (perhaps most significantly) sheer awe at having the chance to converse with a longtime personal hero prevented a close bond from forming immediately. But he did by the end take me into his confidence sufficiently to allow me to serve as something of an honorary member of the enclave over the course of the event.

His daughter, however, thought it was wonderful that a still relatively youthful American should take such an interest and show such esteem for her father, with the result that a warm friendship was initiated with her—to the extent that she rendered an invitation to stop by for a visit were I to be in Moscow again.

Naturally I was thrilled at the prospect.

As it happened, an acquaintance made with a Russian sportswriter a couple of months before at the 1993 World Championship in Munich had indeed resulted in an invitation to Moscow to help cover the famous Izvestia tournament that December, so I duly contacted Galina Tarasova and arranged for the get-together that had been conceived in Boston that summer.

(This is where the ending of the Cold War just when it did proved so providential—it was no longer quite as cumbersome to arrange a visit to Russia as it had been previously.)

I will remain forever thankful for this, as by far the most significant thing that came out of that trip is and will always remain meeting my future wife Irina (a former student of Galina’s while she was teaching school in Moscow). But for present purposes, it also resulted in the opportunity to contact and interview many of the top hockey personages in Russia. It was this circumstance that allowed for what is undoubtedly the truly unique and invaluable aspect of this work: The telling of the story of the Canada-Soviet hockey rivalry from both sides simultaneously, based on the firsthand recollections of many of the people directly involved.

(Thanks to the kind and invaluable help of people like Team Canada ’72 member Ron Ellis, whom I had contacted through the Hockey Hall of Fame, and highly respected hockey researcher Paul Patskou of Toronto, I was able to contact and speak with many major figures on the Canadian side, who also shared their insights for this project).

This, combined with exhaustive research of contemporary news articles (many provided by the courtesy of the Hall of Fame through its extensive collection of relevant items, and many the fruits of numerous hours spent examining microfilm archives), presents the already tremendously well-known story in a way that I genuinely believe will make people feel as though they are reading it for the very first time.

In honestly reporting on an event such as this, where there is so much treasured folklore that has been repeated so often over the years that it has come to be seen as almost sacred, there will be a necessity to challenge some long and centrally held ideas that in many cases are at the very least open to further examination, and in others simply don’t stand up to genuine scrutiny.

In each case where this is done, the assertions will be supported from primary source material written at the time the events took place (that have been all but forgotten in favor of the now-accepted narrative), or based on a careful review of the games themselves, which in this modern age are now easily accessible for interested individuals to check for themselves the veracity of any statements made.

All of this—the result of years of painstaking research and numerous sojourns to both Canada and Russia—sheds a new and extraordinarily interesting light on things we thought we already knew.

Finally, in referencing these things in as objective and uncompromising a way as possible, I wish to emphasize my absolute and enormous respect for all the protagonists in this story, together with the full acknowledgment that everything stated within these pages is meant to be a constructive illumination of the many lessons in this unforgettable saga that are there to be learned by all of us. None of it is meant in any kind of negative vein. I trust that this positive perspective will remain apparent throughout regardless of any iconoclasm and unvarnished honesty that must of necessity take place in order to tell this story properly.

The truth is, I’m rather certain that given the intensely emotional circumstances that predominated at the time,