 The
Big M's lumbering style placed him at a disadvantage
against the speedy Soviets. But Frank Mahovlich was a winner from his many days
in Toronto and helped teach this team how to win as well.
Mahovlich's only goal was an
extremely important insurance goal in game 2, coming just 2 minutes after his
brother scored in spectacular fashion to give Canada the lead.
Mahovlich was portrayed in the media
as being one of the most paranoid Canadians in Moscow during the series. There
were stories about how he was spooked to see military men with machine guns as
he initially got off of the airplane. When he got to his hotel room he
supposedly ripped the room apart searching for bugs. There was even one story -
which seems to get bigger and crazier with every year that passes - about how
some of the players found some screws in the floor and began unscrewing them as
they were certain they had found a KGB bug. It turned out, as the story goes, to
be a chandelier in a large room on the floor below.
Despite being tagged as the paranoid
guy on the team, Frank Mahovlich insists he was no more uneasy than anyone else
on the team and that these media reports back home were absurd and over
exaggerated.
The only reports that he conceded
was true was the mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night that would
wake up the players, and oddities concerning the food the Canadians had brought
from home.
"Our steaks were supposed to be
one-inch thick, but when they got there, they had been cut so they were only
half an inch thick," Frank Mahovlich said. "We all complained, so the
next time they were all an inch thick but they'd been sliced in half the other
way."
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