The 1972 Summit Series
A 4 Part Series by Bruce Kish
Brought to you buy Decisive-Action Sports

SUMMIT PART 1: THE GAUNTLET IS DROPPED

MIDNIGHT IN MOSCOW

Fresh snow swirled through the chilly night air and buried Moscow's silent streets. Street lamps, dimmed by the storm, cast a pale light on the sidewalks below.  Pedestrians had trudged home from work several hours earlier, but their footsteps were hidden under the white mantle. The mood of the Canadian diplomatic corps, stationed at the embassy row on Starokonyushenny Street on this evening in late December 1971, was as sullen as the weather.

Working late at the embassy under the dull glow of a fluorescent lamp, second secretary Gary Smith leaned back from the clutter of Soviet newspapers on his desk and rubbed his tired eyes. The junior staffer, who would later rise through the diplomatic ranks to prominence, was assigned the task of gleaning intelligence about Soviet life and culture as described in the state newspaper "Izvestia."

His brain numbed by repetitious anti-Western propaganda, Smith decided to take a break and browse through the sports section. His eyes spotted the hockey column he regularly read, written by sports editor Boris Fedosov who went under the pen name "Snowman." Midway through the article, Fedosov mentioned in a somewhat bored tone that the Soviet national team was tired of trouncing its European neighbors in the Winter Olympics and the minor international tournaments and was seeking a new challenge.

Smith knew the editorial was a cryptic challenge to the West, whose players were highly reputed in the Soviet Union. He decided to pick up the gauntlet and ask Fedosov if he were really serious.

"Come over for a drink and we'll talk about it," came the reply.

Thus, over several glasses of vodka, a basic plan was hammered out to have the Soviet nationals play the best of Canada's NHL players. It was agreed in theory that a series of games would be split between Canadian and Soviet cities. The details would be worked out later.

In the wee hours of the evening, Smith shook hands with his host and stepped outside into the cold. Later that morning, both men would report the meeting to their bosses and the issue was passed from the diplomats to their respective governments. Neither Smith nor Fedosov realized at the time they had laid the foundation for an event that would become hockey's most famous.

IN THE BEGINNING

Canada's mystique as an international hockey power was born in the 1920

Summer Games at Antwerp, Belgium, when the Canadians vanquished the United States and Czechoslovakia. Ice hockey became part of the Winter Games in 1924, but Canada continued its dominance, taking the Gold in five of the next six Olympiads. The only blemish was a shocking loss to Great Britain in the finals of the 1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Games in Germany.

By 1952, Canadians were so bored with their supremacy, they didn't bother fielding a national team to complete in Oslo, Norway. Instead, they sent over the Edmonton Mercuries, an intermediate-level team that was still strong enough to thrash the Europeans en route to another Gold.

Canadian hockey power had reached its zenith. The Europeans learned from their past humiliations and began improving. In 1954, the Soviets shattered the myth of North American supremacy by upsetting the East York Lyndhursts at the 1954 World's Championships in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a loss that sent Canada in a near state of national mourning.

In 1955, the Canadians began a quest to regain the World's Championship amid a frenzy of patriotism that hadn't been seen since the Second World War. The Pentiton Vees won the Canadian national title and the honor of attempting to traveling to Krefeld, Germany, to avenge last year's defeat. The Vees, led by Don Moog (father of NHL goalie Andy Moog), overran their opponents in the preliminary rounds, then crushed the Soviets 5-0 in the finals.

Despite that triumph, Canada would not win another international title until 1961 when the British Columbia-based Trail Smoke Eaters again defeated the Soviets 5-1. The victory was also sweet revenge for losing in the Gold Medal round to the USSR in 1956.

Throughout the 1960s, Canadians grudgingly began to search for better training methods. Father David Bauer, coach of St. Michael's College in Toronto, assembled a group of top college players whom he drilled year round under simulated international conditions. Between 1964 and 1969, his team held its own in the World Championships and the Olympics, but failed to capture a title. To Bauer's countrymen, however, anything less was considered failure and the project ground to a halt.

The Canadian government, however, saw merit in Bauer's efforts and revived his methods on a national scale in 1970 through an organization called Hockey Canada. This new group was a partnership between various Canadian amateur associations, the NHL, and the NHLPA. With the coming World Championships to Winnipeg later that year, Hockey Canada negotiated a deal with international federations to permit a limited number of professional players to compete.

The plan fell though when the Soviets, fearing the reputation of the NHL talent, refused to accept it. In protest, the Canadians disbanded the national team and withdrew from international competition.

Two years later, however, the Soviets had a change of heart since donning the mantle of international supremacy and offered a challenge. Hockey Canada, which somehow survived the breakup of its team, quickly accepted.

History's shortest ice age had ended.

OF PUCKS AND POLITICS

Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden was relaxing in a cafe in Vienna when he received a message from the newly appointed Team Canada coach Harry Sinden, inviting him to attend a training camp in Toronto. As he was driving from the Montreal airport to Toronto, Dryden noticed a billboard along the route: TO RUSSIA WITH HULL. Something was afoot.

At about the same time farther west in Ottawa, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau hung up the phone at his desk and brooded. All was not well from the seat of power. The prime minister, feeling the heat of Canadian public opinion from the Maritimes to the Great Plains to put the best team possible on the ice, had lost the first round of the battle with Hockey Canada. Trudeau had backed the series to support his re-election bid, but was beginning to panic when he realized the plan was starting to backfire.

The problem was over the status of superstar Bobby Hull, who had become an outcast after jumping from the NHL to the rival WHA's Winnipeg Jets for the unheard of salary of $2.75 million. At the time, he held the NHL's all-time record for points by a left wing and was considered to be professional hockey's marquee player along with Boston's Bobby Orr.

Hull, backed by virtually all of Canada, wanted to join the national team, but the factions that controlled Hockey Canada could not agree whether to admit the "Golden Jet." The NHL owners were bitter with the WHA raids on their talent pool and the rising salaries that resulted; the last thing they wanted to do was to share the international spotlight with the enemy.

The Russians couldn't believe their opponents were quibbling over letting Hull play. Said former USSR national coach Anatoly Tarasov: "Hull against us would be worth one or two goals a game."

Sinden and his assistant coach John Ferguson, despite their NHL ties, privately wanted Hull and felt they could somehow work out an arrangement with their league. When contacted, Hull said he would play only on condition that his share of the series purse goes into the WHA players' pension fund.

Despite Sinden's request that he keep quiet about the matter, Hull lost his patience two days later and went public. The result was like a spark to a powder keg. NHL owners went into an uproar. League President Clarence Campbell decreed that if Team Canada accepted any WHA player, the NHL would prohibit its players from participating.

Prime Minister Trudeau made last-ditch appeal to Hockey Canada: "You are aware of the intense concern which I share with millions of Canadians in all parts of our country, that Canada should be represented by its best hockey players, including Bobby Hull and all those named by Team Canada, in the forthcoming series with the Soviet Union. ... I would ask you to keep the best interests of Canada in mind and to make sure they are fully respected and served."

Toronto owner Harold Ballard sympathized with Trudeau and broke ranks with his peers. "I don't give a damn if he signed with a team in China," he declared. "He's a Canadian and should be on the Canadian team."

With the battle lines drawn, attention turned to Alan Eagleson, the NHL Players Association attorney. He realized that the Canadian government didn't have the teeth to back up its demands and that the NHL owners had two major points in their favor; they essentially ran Hockey Canada and they controlled the best players. Faced with the prospect of having the tournament cancelled, Eagleson sided with the league.

Bobby Hull, to the regret of many, was out. Also scratched were three other selections Sinden had made: Boston goalie Gerry Cheevers and center Derek Sanderson, and Montreal defenseman J.C. Tremblay. All three had recently jumped to WHA teams. The most severe blow, however, was the announcement from Bobby Orr that his injured knee would keep him out of the series.

Nevertheless, Sinden drew upon the NHL's vast talent pool and assembled an impressive lineup which included established veterans and proven younger talent. The leadership provided by Boston's Phil Esposito and Chicago's Stan Mikita would join forces with Philadelphia's Bobby Clarke, Buffalo's Gilbert Perreault, and Detroit's Marcel Dionne. Extra firepower was acquired from New York's "GAG (Goal-a-Game) Line” of Jean Ratelle, Vic Hadfield, and Rod Gilbert which had combined for 312 points during the 1971 campaign and finished third, fourth, and fifth respectively in the scoring race.

Even without Hull and Orr, Canadians believed, Team Canada would still easily crush the Soviets.

ENTER THE RUSSIANS

Vladislav Tretiak shook his head in disgust and turned to sweep a puck out of the net. He had played too far back in his crease and was surprised by a soft wrist shot. Up in the stands, Team Canada's scouts, Toronto Maple Leafs head coach John McLellan and Leafs' chief scout Bob Davidson, smirked as they reviewed their notes on the Russian goalie: "Has weak glove hand."

Back on the ice, Tretiak checked the angles and leaned on his stick, but his mind was elsewhere.

"I was supposed to get married," he later recalled, "but due to the series I had to postpone the wedding three times and that wasn't easy. There were lots of other guys who wanted to marry my wife too."

After hurried preparations, the 20-year-old goalie took a leave of absence to get married on August 23. Three days later, he was boarding a plane headed for Montreal.

"I tell people I spent my honeymoon with Canadian players," Tretiak later joked.

At 8:30 p.m. on August 30, Aeroflot Flight 301 touched down at Dorval Airport, Montreal. There was no fanfare or welcoming committee to greet the Russians, only the stillness of Quebecois night.

On the following morning, Soviets left their hotel for the rink. When a surprised Canadian official asked about jet lag from the seven-hour time difference, an interpreter replied that the team had been practicing on Montreal time just prior to leaving.

Team Canada's scouts continued to take notes on the opposition, unimpressed with the slow, deliberate pace of the practice session and the disinterested reactions of the Russians. If this was best the Soviet Union could field, Team Canada members reasoned, an easy series was certainly in the offing.

Only one player was not viewing the series as a cakewalk. Goalie Ken Dryden watched the lumbering Soviets and knew they were not revealing their strengths. Back in 1969, he had played on Father Bauer's national amateur team and was in nets when the Russians had crushed Canada. He knew only too well what they were capable of.

TALKIN’ TRASH

Team Canada's confidence was picked up by the rest of North America. Those who weren't caught up in the hysteria were called unpatriotic or accused of being Communist sympathizers.

On September 1, the day before Game 1, the "Montreal Gazette" published predictions from hockey people:

All-Star goalie Jacques Plante: "Eight Straight for Canada."

Gerald Eskenazi, "New York Times" hockey writer: "The NHL team will slaughter them in eight straight."

Mark Mulvoy, "Toronto Star" hockey writer: "Canada will win handily. Say, 7-1."

Only one journalist was slightly more daring. Predicted Johnny Esaw, CTV network: "The Russians will win one here, one in Russia. Six-two."

Two other prominent hockey minds were publicly shouted down.

Billy Harris, the much-respected three-time Cup-winning goalie with Toronto in the 1960s, predicted that the Russians would win the series on the basis of Tretiak's goaltending. Poisoned pens in the media labelled him as a "crank."

John Robertson, a writer for the "Montreal Star," enraged the entire nation by predicting the Russians would take two games in Canada and all four in the Soviet Union. He argued that North American training and physical conditioning habits were inferior to the Russians'. The Russians had been training year round. The NHL players, by contrast, hadn't even begun conditioning and didn't expect to be in peak form until Christmas.

When publicly told by fellow writers he should go write for the Soviet paper "Pravda," Robertson angrily shot back: "We have taken one hundred years of hockey heritage and shoved it into the center of the table and staked it on the outcome of an eight-game series in which we sit back and allow the deck to be stacked against us."

In the midst of the squabbling, Cold War politics very nearly ended the series before it began. A young Czech refugee, who had fled to Canada while Soviet ground troops quelled the 1968 "Prague Spring" uprising, had filed suit in a Quebecois court in 1969, charging that a Warsaw Pact tank had crushed his car.

The sympathetic court ruled in his favor, but had no way of compensating him. The arrival of the Soviet team afforded an opportunity. The court ordered the seizure of all Russian hockey equipment, valued at $1,889, on the eve of Game 1. An international incident was provoked after sheriff's deputies carried out the court order.

The Soviets, feeling harassed, threatened to pull out unless the equipment was returned. Both the Canadian government and Hockey Canada, hosts for what was supposed to be a friendly event, were embarrassed. But Alan Eagleson, who also served as a Hockey Canada attorney, diffused tensions by writing out a personal check to the plaintiff and retrieving the equipment.

The series was back on. The exuberant Trudeau decided to cash in his political chips and formally announced his bid for re-election. But few Canadians were paying attention on this day. They were too busy anticipating Team Canada's big win the following night.

Ensuing events, however, would shatter their confidence.

1972 Summit Series
A 4 Part Series by Bruce Kish