Silly Little Country

Selective Memory - Revisionism - Is it so Easy to Lie?

I should start by admitting I am not much of a hockey fan, and particularly have never been much of a fan of the NHL, or Canadian National Teams. I did think the Olympic Final in Salt Lake City was exciting to watch, and there have been the odd few games late in a Stanley Cup Final where I can be motivated to watch the matches. But generally it just looks like random body-bashing to me.
I did not see the Swiss beat Canada at the Olympics yesterday, but I will admit I giggled when I heard the result. And am enjoying watching the Finns leading Canada today, as I watch bits of the match in breaks from golf.
But hockey really has never struck me as much of a sport - sure there are pockets of interest in the world but in the grand scale it's a sport with interest concentrated in a small fraction of the earth. And it can't decide between its roller derby aspects and its moments of elegance, which come and go over its history (and this tension regarding the elegance is very much a problem in the Canadian game). Suffice it to say I was amused when my wife reported that a CBC reporter had gone amongst the crowds in Turin to see who knew who Wayne Gretzky was and nobody knew. The importance of Gretzky's peripheral involvement in the gambling scandal in the Canadian press is a mark of a silly little country.
Even more so is another mark. This morning I heard a reporter on the CBC say something to the effect that the Swiss win yesterday was analagous to Canada's triumph in 1972, which surely must have been a reference to the 8-game series against the Soviet team. Nobody burst out laughing or tried to correct this reporter. Has silly little mythmaking gone this far? How old was this reporter? Was he alive then? Does he have any notion what happened? Other than Paul Henderson scoring some goal, almost by accident?
Let us recall what was happening in 1972. For many years Canada's international teams were being regularly defeated in major competitions by the Soviets in particular, but also by other national teams. Canadian national (hockey) pride absorbed this by observing correctly that Canada was not sending its best players, who were all in the NHL, and assuming very dubiously that our best players would destroy those other teams. This was far less clear, at least to skeptics like me.
The 1972 series was set up exactly to confirm this silly little theory; let the Soviets bring their best to play an NHL-all-Canadian team, and we would prove it. (No doubt there were broader business goals behind the idea of this series, and we now see their consequences, but I want to focus on what is essential that makes the reporter's comment ridiculous, well, silly.)
The Canadian hockey community was almost unanimous in the certainty that this series would be completely dominated by Canada. I recall casual predictions that the NHL Canadian team would outscore the Soviets 40-1 over the eight games. I recall essentially nobody in the sporting press giving the Soviets a chance (I say essentially, as I think there was a lone dissident, but this is over 30 years ago, and I was not really into it all.)
And as I recall it, early in the first game, this looked true, as the Soviets nervously allowed two cheap Canadian goals. And then the Series transformed itself! Suddenly the combination plays from those underrated Soviet players began to work; I recall the initial game was won by the Soviets 7-3. I definitely recall watching them scoring with delight (theirs and mine), repeatedly.
The Soviets won a later game in Canada 4-1, I believe, and one got tied. I don't recall all the details but in the end Canada prevailed over the whole series, I believe 4-3-1, squeaking the last game in Moscow out with a late goal by Paul Henderson, that Canadians are now taught to think of as a national version of the first shot at Bunker Hill. Along the way there was much national sturm and drang, all ridiculous.
So NO! NO! 1972 was not when downtrodden Canada proved their superiority to the Soviets. 1972 was when European hockey proved that Canada, long thinking it knew all there was to know in the world about hockey, could usefully take some lessons from the smooth passing and shotmaking, and great goalkeeping, that the elegant Soviets produced. (The series produced along the way the usual dirty play by Canadians against this style of hockey.)
The Swiss win yesterday as an analogy to 1972? Not in the smallest way. Unless you put the 1972 Soviets in the role of the Swiss, which is not remotely what our silly little reporter meant.
Have our sports historians really managed to make the truth about this series reverse itself, and turn what was truly an embarrassment into a pseudo-triumph?
In 1978 I was a visiting scholar at Oxford and one day in the photocopy room I ran into a Russian scholar; after some struggle across our language gaps, we began talking about that 1972 series. It was very clear he felt the series was an enormous triumph for the Soviet team. And I certainly would not disagree with him.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:06 PM