1972

Scott Morrison, To Be Confirmed S&S Canada

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781982154141
• eBook ISBN: 9781982154318

#1 BESTSELLER The legacy of the greatest hockey series ever played, fifty years later, with stories from the players that shed new light on those incredible games and times. "Cournoyer has it on that wing. Here's a shot. Henderson made a wild stab for it and fell. Here's another shot. Right in front...they score! Henderson has scored for Canada!"These immortal words, spoken to hockey fans around the world by the legendary broadcaster Foster Hewitt, capture the historic final-seconds goal scored by Paul Henderson that won the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union. Hockey fans know the moment well, but the story of those amazing eight games has never been fully told—until now.The series was the first of its kind, and one of the most dramatic sporting showdowns in history. With the Soviets dominating international hockey, this series was meant to settle the debate, once and for all, of who owned the game. It was Canada's best against the Soviets for the first time. And in the shadow of the Cold War, this was about more than eight games of hockey.Expectations were high as the series began. This was supposed to be easy for Team Canada, but after the disappointing first four games on home ice with only one win, victory seemed out of reach. With the final four games in Moscow, Canada got a rare glimpse behind the iron curtain as the team, as well as three thousand raucous fans, arrived in the USSR. Amid the culture shock and strained relations, what followed was a tug-of-war battle that lasted to the dying seconds of game 8.Now, five decades after this historic event, it's time to reflect on the greatest hockey series ever played. Veteran journalist and hockey analyst Scott Morrison uses a storyteller's voice to reveal what it meant to hockey then, and what it means now. Filled with the memories of the players and others involved with the series, he shows how it changed the game, and challenged a nation's sense of identity and place in the world.

CHAPTER 1 A Super Series Is Born

In July 1966, hockey power broker Alan Eagleson was entertaining at his cottage north of Toronto. The guest list included Canadian national team founder Father David Bauer; Carl Brewer, who had played seven seasons with the Maple Leafs but had regained his amateur status and was about to become one of Bauer’s leaders and trusted defencemen; and the great Bobby Orr, no introduction necessary.

Hockey, as you would expect, dominated the conversation. But Canada’s national game wasn’t the only topic on the minds of the four sporting fanatics. At the time, the World Cup of soccer was being played in England, with the host country ultimately capturing worldwide headlines and national adoration when it defeated West Germany to win its first championship.

“I’ve read a dozen stories about all sorts of guys taking credit for the series,” Eagleson said, recalling the beginnings of the 1972 Canada–Soviet Union series. “We were listening to the World Cup of soccer on the radio. I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a World Cup of hockey?’ It wasn’t just Russia and Canada then. I wanted to go far beyond that.”

In due time it would happen, of course. But first things first.

What Eagleson had in mind in 1966 did not in the short term extend beyond a hockey showdown between Canada and the Soviet Union. Many more informal and formal gatherings took place after Bobby Charlton and his England teammates became national heroes at Wembley Stadium one afternoon that late July. And many more hockey executives, administrators, bureaucrats, and politicians became involved before Phil Esposito and Paul Henderson and others would become heroes in Canada in 1972.

The prospect of a hockey super series picked up steam on the political campaign trail leading up to the June 1968 federal election. New Liberal leader Pierre Elliott Trudeau promised to investigate why Canada struggled on the international sports stage and to find ways to solve the situation.

“Here’s where you have to start: 1968, in Rossland, BC,” former Hockey Canada secretary-treasurer Chris Lang told the Globe and Mail. “Pierre Trudeau is on the campaign trail and says, ‘If I’m elected, I’m going to take a look at sport because I can’t figure out why we’re not doing well in international hockey.’ ”

Trudeau was far from being a sports nut, even though he captained his high-school hockey team at Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal. But he did understand the importance of hockey to the country’s overall psyche, morale, and pride.

Canada was in a major slump on the international scene. Senior clubs had represented the country at the World Championship and the Olympic Games until Father Bauer instituted the national team program in the mid-1960s. But Canada had not won an Olympic gold medal in hockey since the Edmonton Mercurys in 1952 in Oslo, Norway. The country’s last World Championship victory was in 1961 in Switzerland with the Trail (BC) Smoke Eaters.

“Hockey is considered our national game, and yet, in the World Hockey Championships, we have not been able as amateurs to perform as well as we know we can,” Trudeau said.

After Trudeau won the election to become Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, he followed through on his campaign promise. His government commissioned a task force to study Canada’s hockey failures internationally, specifically at the Olympics and World Championships. Charles Rea, an oil company executive who happened to be Brewer’s father-in-law, and John Munro, the federal minister of health and welfare, headed up the endeavour.

Rea persuaded the prime minister to create Hockey Canada in February 1969 to develop solutions to Canada’s poor international record at the time. Rea hired another oil executive, Charlie Hay, as the new agency’s volunteer chairman. It was a separate organization from the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, although the two hockey bodies merged in 1998 and became known as Hockey Canada.

The first significant deduction in 1969 as to why Canada had stumbled against powerhouses such as the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia was that Canada was at a disadvantage having to play just their best amateur players. Canada’s strength was in the NHL, and without its best players, championship victories would continue to be hard to come by. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia had state-sponsored national teams that spent months together training. They were amateurs it seemed in name only.

“The task force decided between February and July of 1969 that Canada was fundamentally playing with a handicap,” Lang said. “The Russians were using their top twenty players. Our top five hundred players were all in the NHL, so we were essentially using players 501 through 520, and that’s why we kept losing.”

Hay swiftly forged a relationship with Eagleson, the newly minted head of the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA), who still maintained his position as the most powerful agent (Bobby Orr’s agent) and a massive influencer in the game.

Eagleson accompanied CAHA secretary-manager Gordon Jukes and Air Canada employee Aggie Kukulowicz, a former player who acted as their interpreter, to the 1969 World Championship in Stockholm. They met with all the top hockey nations to express Canada’s increased interest in the international scene, what the country’s best players wanted to achieve, especially if the International Ice Hockey Federation would allow professionals to compete in the World Championship and Olympic Winter Games.

The IIHF and Hockey Canada agreed to a year-long trial in which Canada would be allowed to employ up to nine non-NHL professionals for tournaments such as the World Championship, which Canada was slated to host in 1970 in Montreal and Winnipeg. The first step under the agreement occurred at the prestigious Izvestia Tournament in mid-December 1969 in Moscow (Izvestia was Russia’s daily newspaper of record until its demise in 1991. The hockey tournament has been known in recent years as the Channel One Cup.)

Canada put together a lineup fortified with five pros and finished second in the six-country, round-robin tournament to the host Soviets. The Canadians actually tied the mighty Soviets, 2–2, and their only defeat was a 4–0 loss to the Czechs.

The excellent showing from Canada, with its handful of professionals, didn’t sit well with the IIHF or the International Olympic Committee, however. On January 4, 1970, the IIHF convened an emergency meeting and decided to scrap the provisional use of professionals. Hockey Canada was upset, and so was Munro. His recommendation to Hockey Canada and to the CAHA to pull its participation from future IIHF events was enacted, which also meant Canada would not host the 1970 World Championship.

Canada wound up not playing in the World Championship from 1970 through 1976 and did not enter a team for the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games. But this development in 1970 didn’t deter Trudeau, Eagleson, and Hockey Canada officials from their pursuit of a series with the Soviets. And, after the October Crisis in the province of Quebec, later that year, the prime minister needed an event to bring the country together.

The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had perpetrated bombings and robberies between 1963 and 1970. In October 1970, the FLQ kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross, as well as a Quebec minister of labour and immigration Pierre Laporte, also the province’s deputy premier. Laporte’s body was later found strangled in the trunk of a car at the Montréal Saint-Hubert Longueuil Airport. The prime minister invoked the War Measures Act, deploying one thousand soldiers from the Canadian armed forces. Cross finally was released on December 3, 1970, after fifty-nine days of being held hostage. The Canadian troops withdrew a few weeks later.

Trudeau needed something big to unify the country. So he turned to hockey, which was and continues to be so much of the identity, fabric, and heritage of Canada. The hockey rink had always been a place to escape. Trudeau turned also to the Soviet Union. He wanted to build Canada’s political relationship with the Soviets anyway during the Cold War, and his government knew of their desire to promote their way of life through sports, particularly hockey, on the big stage, such as the Olympics.

More signs that the Soviet Union was open to a possible showdown with Canadian pros came in May 1971 when Trudeau took a twelve-day trip to Moscow and other parts of the country to strengthen political relations between the two nations. Trudeau met with Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, the country’s number two under general secretary Leonid Brezhnev. A few months later, in October, Kosygin spent a few days in Toronto and visited Trudeau in Ottawa, where he was actually attacked by a protester, and there was more hockey talk.

Several weeks after Kosygin’s visit, and after the Soviets celebrated another championship at the 1971 Izvestia Trophy tournament in December, Canadian Embassy diplomat Gary Smith came across an eye-opening newspaper column.

“One of my jobs was I had to read the government newspaper Izvestia every day,” Smith told the Globe and Mail. “One night, this was December 1971, there was a very interesting column by someone calling himself the Snowman. The Soviets had won the Izvestia tournament again, and he wrote that it was now time to play the Canadian professionals. When I saw that, I knew that you didn’t just write something like that in a Soviet paper. This guy must have some official authorization.”

Smith found out the author of the column was a reporter named Boris Fedosov. Smith invited Fedosov to the Canadian Embassy in Moscow for a consultation that also included embassy employee Peter Hancock. As a result of this get-together, next on the guest list to the embassy was Soviet Union Ice Hockey Federation general secretary Andrei Starovoitov. Smith’s feelings about the Russians’ keenness for a super series between the two countries were bolstered from these meetings. He sent word back to Ottawa through Robert Ford, the Canadian ambassador to Moscow at the time.

Soviet hockey was on a roll. The Big Red Machine had reeled off nine consecutive World Championship titles between 1963 and 1971. The Russians also celebrated gold-medal victories at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria (Canada was fourth), and Grenoble, France, in 1968 (Canada won bronze). They would win again in the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, less than two months after the Snowman’s dispatch.

The Soviet victory in Japan was significant. As the Snowman pointed out in his December 1971 column, the Big Red Machine craved a new challenge, and a third straight Olympic gold only hastened the necessity.

The closing ceremony of the 1972 Winter Games was on February 13. The 1972 World Championship in Prague was less than two months away. Officials from Canada and the Soviet Union would assemble to negotiate an arrangement for a super series during the tournament.

They met at the Hotel International in Prague. Sitting on the Canadian side of the table were Hay, Gordon Jukes, and CAHA president Joe Kryczka, a lawyer. Sport Canada director Lou Lefaive also was in Prague, advising the Canadian contingent. Starovoitov represented the Soviets, while IIHF president Bunny Ahearne and vice-president Fred Page, a Canadian and former CAHA president, were also in the room.

On April 18, 1972, an agreement was signed to play eight games, four in Canada and four in Moscow, in September, contested under IIHF rules and with amateur on-ice officials. In a strange turn of events, the Russians failed to close the deal on a tenth consecutive World Championship victory. They lost to the host Czechs 3–2 and tied Sweden 3–3 in their final two games of the double round-robin, six-country tournament, finishing 7-1-2, three points behind Czechoslovakia (9-0-1). The two games were played after the announcement of the super series.

Still, the news of the eight-game super series was met with enthusiasm in both countries. The NHL, however, was not amused.

“So they announce this series, and the minute they do, [NHL president] Clarence Campbell holds a press conference in Montreal to say there will be no such series because ‘we will not permit our players to play,’ ” Eagleson told the Globe and Mail on the fortieth anniversary of the series. “The owners said they were worried about giving up their players, their assets, without anything in return. I got Clarence and the owners onside by guaranteeing that every player would have a signed NHL contract and by guaranteeing that part of the profit would go toward the players’ pension fund.”

Toronto Maple Leafs co-owner Stafford Smythe also helped calm his fellow owners’ bluster. As a patriotic Canadian, he wanted this series to happen. He first managed to get the ownership groups in Montreal and Vancouver onside. Smythe then convinced Chicago Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz and his Detroit Red Wings counterpart Bruce Norris about the importance of the series, conveying it was the first step towards putting together a version for hockey of the World Cup that soccer enjoyed. The hockey version would include an American side. Of course, this was Eagleson’s original concept and came to fruition in 1976 with the inaugural Canada Cup.

There still was, however, plenty to figure out for the 1972 series. Where would the games be played in Canada? Who would coach? Which players would be selected? Ticket sales and television rights also had to be ironed out. Heck, what would the Canadian team be called, and who would design the team sweaters?

“This is when Eagleson shot to the fore, fast becoming the leader and public face for all plans,” Hockey Canada board member and journalist Douglas Fisher wrote in the Toronto Sun.

Eagleson had a business connection to the ad agency Vickers and Benson. He asked creative director Terry O’Malley to come up with a sweater design. O’Malley enlisted the services of a transplanted Englishman, John Lloyd, an art director who knew little about hockey. The country quickly fell in love with Lloyd’s design of a large Maple Leaf on the sweater’s front and the word “CANADA” above the numbers on the back. In those days, the players’ names on the backs of sweaters did not exist. This was a stride in that direction.

O’Malley also convinced Eagleson to find a better team name than the NHL All-Stars. This team, after all, represented Canada, although in truth it eventually didn’t represent all the best Canadian players or all the NHL players. O’Malley and his employees brainstormed. On the shortlist were Dream Team and Team Canada, two names put forth by a copywriter from Detroit by the name of Terry Hill. Although the Dream Team was tempting, O’Malley chose Team Canada because the former seemed a little too cocky and not the Canadian way. Dream Team, of course, would become a prominent handle two decades later for the United States Olympic basketball team. On the practice sweaters, at least, it was Team Canada Équipe, fitting for a bilingual country. On the game sweaters, it was simply Canada across the shoulders on the back.

The television rights were sold to a group that included Bobby Orr Enterprises and Maple Leafs co-owner Harold Ballard for $750,000, outbidding McLaren Advertising, the rights holder to Hockey Night in Canada. The Orr-Ballard group cleared $1.2 million in profit, selling one-minute commercial time for between $12,000 and $15,000. Eagleson was the secretary of Orr Enterprises, and partnering with Ballard made for strange bedfellows. Al and Hal became hockey’s Odd Couple.

“We’re hustlers,” Eagleson told the Globe and Mail in 1972. “We’ll be able to sell the advertising. The $750,000 is the profit. The arrangement is that the first $100,000 comes to Hockey Canada [for developmental projects], and the balance is split between Hockey Canada and the National Hockey League Players’ Association. Each [Hockey Canada and the NHLPA] then contributes $25,000 for its use in international hockey.”

Eagleson hired Harry Sinden as the head coach for $15,000 and John Ferguson as the assistant coach for $10,000. The latter had only recently retired as a player, in 1971. Eagleson even struck a deal with Air Canada to fly more than three thousand Canadians to watch the games live in Moscow.

Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver were obvious locations for three of the games because those cities had the only NHL teams in Canada at the time—the Canadiens, Maple Leafs, and Canucks, respectively. Winnipeg became the fourth location because it had lost out on the chance of co-hosting the 1970 World Championship due to the snafu with the IIHF over the use of professional players.

When Winnipeg was chosen, Eagleson and Hockey Canada could not possibly have known what would play out that off-season with Bobby Hull bolting from the Blackhawks to sign with the upstart World Hockey Association’s Winnipeg Jets, becoming the game’s first multi-millionaire player.

Even though part of the agreement between Hockey Canada and the NHL prohibited using WHA-bound players, Sinden initially named Hull to his roster of thirty-five players on July 12. Immediately, Campbell and Wirtz voiced their outrage and threatened to withdraw all of the players from the series.

Fisher, now acting Hockey Canada chairman because Hay fell ill, issued a statement that Hull would not play for Team Canada. Fisher’s words whipped up the country into a fervour. Canadians demanded Hull suit up for Canada. Trudeau didn’t miss a beat in backing the uproar. He summoned Fisher to Ottawa for a briefing on the messy matter. Fisher arrived on Parliament Hill to find an aggressive mob of reporters.

“The session inside was strained,” Fisher recalled. “We were not mutual admirers. Trudeau gestured to stacks of messages. Most demanded, he insisted, that Hull play. If Hull could not, some people wanted him to block the Soviets from coming.

“The prime minister thought we should go ahead and play Hull. Surely the NHL, noting national outrage ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Super Series Is Born
• Chapter 2: A Dream Team and Nightmare
• Chapter 3: Willing, but Not Ready
• Chapter 4: Game 1—A Shocking Start
• Chapter 5: Shock and Awe
• Chapter 6: Game 2—A Must-Win Scenario
• Chapter 7: Game 3—To Hull with Russia
• Chapter 8: Game 4—“To the People Across Canada—We Tried”
• Chapter 9: A Stop in Sweden
• Chapter 10: To Russia with Beer
• Chapter 11: Deserters
• Chapter 12: Game 5—Ready, Willing, and Unable
• Chapter 13: Fans
• Chapter 14: Game 6—Win, or Else
• Chapter 15: Game 7—Nothing Short of a Win
• Chapter 16: Game 8—Fight Until the Last Second
• Chapter 17: Celebration and One More Game in Prague
• Chapter 18: Calling the Shots
• Chapter 19: O Canada
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Appendix A: In Memoriam
• Appendix B: Team Stats
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright