Soviet and Canadian players face off in Game 1 of the Summit Series on Sept. 2, 1972.Dennis Robinson/The Globe and Mail
Roy MacGregor is the author of nearly 40 books, and a former columnist and feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
It hasn’t worked out quite as planned.
Or at least as hoped for less than a year ago …
With the 50th anniversary of hockey’s iconic Summit Series looming ever closer, the thinking then was all about mutual celebration and gratitude for the long-ago September that changed forever the face of hockey.
The wishful thinking back then would have included exchange visits by the now-elderly Canadian and Russian players, as had marked previous anniversaries of the 1972 series. There might be celebratory galas and banquets featuring political leaders and famous athletes. Perhaps Paul Henderson, who scored with 34 seconds left in Game 8 to give Team Canada the series victory, might finally take his due place in the Hockey Hall of Fame. Perhaps the current Canadian Prime Minister, 50-year-old Justin Trudeau, could travel to Moscow as his parents, Pierre and Margaret, had done when the series was first being considered. Perhaps Russia’s shinny-loving President, Vladimir Putin, could even come to Canada, lace them up and score a few goals against the weakest beer-league team available.
Russian President Vladimir Putin greets hockey players in Sochi in 2019.MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images
But then came Feb. 24, the day Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine. Suddenly Russia was being sanctioned and shunned by the West. On Friday, the continuing war in Ukraine reached the 50th anniversary of the first match in the Summit Series, a stunning 7-3 Russian victory at the old Montreal Forum that sent shock waves across the country that calls hockey its “national game.”
The return of the Cold War put a quick end to any dream plans for September, 2022, but that was not the only unexpected and sad turn. Next came Hockey Canada’s aestas horribilis, a summer of allegations concerning sexual assaults by some members of the country’s world junior players at a Hockey Canada gala in London, Ont., in 2018, and during a junior world championship held in Halifax in 2003.
This, remember, is a country that once held the news until the final buzzer of playoff games, a proud nation that once put young hockey players on its currency. Lester Pearson, who would one day become prime minister, told a London audience in 1939 that hockey “has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”
“The ground has certainly shifted on the national game,” says Richard Gruneau, emeritus professor of communications at Simon Fraser University in B.C. Prof. Gruneau has spent his career studying sports and culture, and is co-author (with David Whitson) of 1993′s Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics, as well as 2016′s Artificial Ice: Hockey, Culture, and Commerce.
“If celebrating the ‘72 series means celebrating as ‘iconic’ a time when many in the game saw women’s hockey as an aberration, when fighting or using the lumber was seen as fully okay, when homophobia in the game was rampant, when many people still thought that yelling racist chants at Indigenous players was okay … then I’d say we shouldn’t be celebrating without mentioning how hockey of the ‘72 era was far from perfect.”
The Summit Series may not have changed the world, but it changed what it meant to be Canadian
Prof. Gruneau would prefer to see the anniversary note welcome changes in the national game, from the growth of women’s hockey to the inclusion of minorities. He praises the influx of European players to the NHL that followed the series. He salutes the rise of female analysts and announcers and is a fan of Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi. He sees a slow reckoning with the game’s often sexist and racist history, though much remains to be done.
“In my view,” he says, “those are the kinds of change to celebrate.”
There may be none of the imagined exchanges and banquets, but that does not mean there is not a great deal being done in Canada to recall fondly the Summit Series. There will be commemorative coins and a stamp. Several excellent books are already climbing the bestseller lists, including a memoir of the series by Team Canada goaltender Ken Dryden – The Series: What I Remember, What It Felt Like, What It Feels Like Now. As Mr. Dryden has said, “History has decided that the Summit Series is the most important moment in hockey history.”
Canadian diplomat Gary J. Smith gives a presentation to Soviet officials in July, 1972, during final negotiations before the series.Courtesy of Victor Akhlomov
Another entry is Gary J. Smith’s Ice War Diplomat: Hockey Meets Cold War Politics at the 1972 Summit Series. Mr. Smith was then a 28-year-old diplomat in the Canadian embassy in Moscow. He spoke fluent Russian and was critical to both the organization of the series and the salvaging of it when dissension over officiating threatened an early end.
Sports journalist Scott Morrison has 1972: The Series that Changed Hockey Forever. American writer John U. Bacon has The Greatest Comeback: How Team Canada Fought Back, Took the Summit Series, and Reinvented Hockey. Montreal’s Aislin (Terry Mosher) is publishing Montreal to Moscow: 1972 Summit Series – Cartoons & Anecdotes. Hockey historian Paul Patskou, Sean Mitton and Alex Braverman have written When Canada Shut Down: We’re Sorry, The Country You’re Trying to Reach is Watching Hockey.
That subtitle pretty well tells it as it was. Canadians were so cocky about the series that they expected a clean sweep, only to lose immediately that night in Montreal. Team Canada came back two days later in Toronto with a 4-1 victory, tied 4-4 in Winnipeg on Sept. 6, and lost 5-3 in Game 4, played in Vancouver on Sept. 8.
That Game 4 loss, loudly jeered and booed by some 15,000 fans, led to what may well stand as Canada’s most memorable speech. The Britons have Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches … ” and the Americans have JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you … ” but Canadians will never forget the sweating face of a crushed Phil Esposito leaning into Johnny Esaw’s microphone: “To the people who booed us, we tried, we did our best. Geez, I’m really … all of us guys are really disheartened, disillusioned.”
Team Canada's Don Awrey reaches for a puck behind goalie Ken Dryden in Game 4 of the Summit Series.The Canadian Press
That scene is certain to be replayed in various films and documentaries that will also mark the anniversary, including a four-part documentary series by Nicholas de Pencier that had access to the surviving Team Canada players.
As Mr. de Pencier said in a recent statement, “The ‘72 Summit Series is in our DNA as a nation. It was a life-altering experience for the players and their fans from both sides of the Iron Curtain, that changed the cultural, political and sports landscapes in ways that no one could have foreseen at the time.
“It is a story that endures and needs to be told through the prism of the present day to understand what it meant, how it changed hockey, and how it changed Canada.”
It most assuredly did change hockey. The Soviets used soccer formations, drop passes, east-west play and five-man units to show that there were different ways to play the game Canada claimed as its own.
The game now belonged to the world.
Mr. Smith's documents from 1972 identifies him as a member of the Soviet team.Supplied
Another documentary is Ice-Breaker – full disclosure, I served as a consultant – which is based in part on Mr. Smith’s Ice War Diplomat and explores how the series led to dramatic cultural changes in the game.
Director Robbie Hart conceived the project when he realized his own grown children knew nothing of the series. “I found it hard to believe,” he recently told The Humm, an Eastern Ontario arts publication, “that one of the most important events in Canadian political and cultural history of the 20th century, compared often to Confederation, the Maple Leaf flag and Expo 67, was not on the radar screen for most people under the age of 50.”
Mr. Smith adds that it is not just the games that should be remembered and discussed, but also the purpose of the series. The Summit Series, he says, was a case of “classic sports diplomacy,” where sport can help break down hateful stereotypes and lead to worthy negotiations on critical political matters.
“Sports,” he says, “has always been an instrument of domestic and foreign policy, for better or worse.” Worse, he contends, would include the current Saudi Arabian effort to win over golf professionals to the ultrarich LIV tour. Using sports to polish a sullied international reputation is known as “sportswashing.”
Mr. Smith, however, remains certain that the benefits both Canada and Russia gained from that 50-year-old hockey series were not only most worthwhile then, but also possible still.
As he writes in the final paragraph of Ice War Diplomat: “Engagement and dialogue remain the foundation of diplomacy. And though diplomacy may falter from time to time, it remains an essential element of foreign policy. Hockey has been, and can again be, part of that process with Russia.”
Editor’s note: The print version of this article, published in the Opinion section on Sept. 3, incorrectly states that Pierre and Margaret Trudeau travelled to Moscow after their son Justin Trudeau, the current Prime Minister, was born. In fact, the trip occurred before his birth, when the series was first being considered. The article above includes the correct information.