Uma uhhuhsuhu suhaushuhaushuh ushauhsuhausu u hau hsh aoho sihhiuhasha
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Uma uhhuhsuhu suhaushuhaushuh ushauhsuhausu u hau hsh aoho sihhiuhasha |
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Thirty years have passed already and still the memory of Phil Esposito's impassioned speech and Paul Henderson's incredible goal resonate through the collective Canadian hockey consciousness. Now, there are websites to provide background to the 1972 Summit Series and DVD collections to provide enhanced viewing. There is a television station - ESPN Classic - showing all eight games, all the time, on the anniversary date in which they were originally played. The players, the ones who have survived the past three decades and aren't boycotting the 30th anniversary celebrations out of loyalty to tournament organizer Alan Eagleson, are providing unprecedented anecdotal history lessons - and by the time Sept. 28 passes, just about everything people want to know about that historic eight-game series between Canada and the Soviet Union will be available, somewhere, somehow. They will be reminded that a popular Globe And Mail columnist, Dick Beddoes, said he would eat his hat in front of Toronto's city hall if Canada lost Game 1. Or that Dr. Randy Gregg, a Canadian Olympian in 1988 and a member of five Edmonton Oilers' Stanley Cup championships, was just a 16-year-old fan, watching the series unfold from the seats at Luzhniki Arena as part of a small, but vocal group of Canadians who made the trip to Moscow to suppor their team. Or how Phil Esposito collected a new pair of pantyhose from all the players' wives and traded the loot for Eagleson's room key. From there, Esposito hijacked the Canadian beer that Eagleson had stashed in his room so he could throw a party for his teammates in his own suite. Esposito merited a suite, while the rest of the players were stuck in narrow, cell-like hotel rooms because - well, because he was Phil Esposito, their inspirational leader, the man who practically willed the Canadian team to victory after its slow start, fuelled in equal parts by overconfidence and poor conditioning. How times change. Esposito professed a natural, instinctive and almost xenophobic dislike of the Russian players in 1972. Twenty-four years later, he walked his daughter Connie down the aisle as she married a Russian hockey player - one Alexander Selinanov - who was then a member of the same Tampa Bay Lightning team that Esposito operated as general manager. Just as the memory of where they were on Sept. 11, 2001 will be forever etched in the memories of a generation of Americans, Canadians of a particular age will always remember where they were on that day in 1972 when Henderson's shot from the edge of the goalcrease trickled past goaltender Vladislav Tretiak and gave Canada an improbable come-from-behind 4-3-1 edge in the series. "I was teaching high school in Saskatoon," said Dave King, right on cue, speaking from Columbus, Ohio, where he is running his Blue Jackets team through the first days of its National Hockey League training camp, although if the truth be told, not many of us were teaching that day. "I remember when Henderson scored, the doors of the classrooms burst open and there was a flood of kids into the hallways. Up until that point, hockey had been our game, our identity. Imagine if the Soviets had won six or seven of those eight games. Then, what would have happened to our game?" A good question. One could convincingly argue that the Soviet team's ability to push Canada to the limit in '72 opened the door for hockey's new order, which manifests itself today with a 30-team NHL that includes star players from a dozen different countries around the world, including Russia and its surrounding republics, all of which were politically defined as the Soviet Union back in 1972. Now, there are European scoring champions (the Czech Republic's Jaromir Jagr, in four consecutive years before Canada's Jarome Iginla won last season) and European MVPs, European Vezina Trophy winners and European rookies of the year. The last myth surrounding European-trained players evaporated in June when a Swede playing for the Detroit Red Wings, Nicklas Lidstrom, won the Conn Smythe trophy as the playoffs' most valuable player. Nowadays, it is unimaginable to ponder an NHL without Russians and Czechs, Swedes and Finns, Slovaks and Germans. And yet, as recently as 30 years ago, the notion that there was a high level of hockey played somewhere beyond the Canadian borders was considered preposterous to even the most open-minded members of Canada's hockey establishment. Father David Bauer, who led the national team program, made a blunt and unequivocal pre-tournament prediction: I expect total victory." Instead, what Canada got was a narrow victory and a much-needed wake-up call - that perhaps the rest of the world was slowly, gradually, beginning to catch up. This, then, was perhaps the lasting legacy of that seminal series: That slowly in the beginning and then with a greater urgency over time, the NHL began to turn its attention towards Europe as a means of recruiting player talent. Of all the people cast in the role of pioneer, it fell to Toronto Maple Leafs' unpredictable and bombastic owner Harold Ballard to set the wheels in motion. During the Summit Series, Ballard made a headline-grabbing $1 million cash offer to the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation for the rights to Valeri Kharlamov, a player who was giving the Canadian defencemen all kinds of trouble. Ballard's overture was widely dismissed as a publicity stunt, a gesture by a headline-grabbing dinosaur in which he would never be obliged to follow through on with cash on the barrrel. Only a year later, the Leafs went overseas to sign a pair of Swedish players, Borje Salming and Inge Hammarstrom, to contracts. Hammarstrom had limited NHL success, but Salming went on to have a ground-breaking 17-year career that eventually ended with a place in the Hall Of Fame. From that tentative first step, described by King as more of a trickle than an invasion" came the cosmopolitan league that will open its 2002-03 season next week with hundreds of European-born players peppering the line-up of every team. "Up until 1972, we'd never before had best-on-best competition," said King, who coached Canada's national team for nine years, through three Winter Olympic Games. "We won the series on heart and mental toughness, maybe more than on skill. We always thought we were better. In that series, we realized that maybe, tactically and skill-wise, they were doing some things that were pretty good. Even after we won, the result caused some people to say: 'Maybe these guys are for real.' They'd beaten our amateur players and now, they'd come very close to beating our professional players. It signified a real change in our game. "Afterwards, we didn't put our feet up and just say, 'We won it.' We rolled up our sleeves and said, 'Let's get to work here.' And brought some of their things - tactical play and conditioning - to our game." Had the result been different, had Canada won the series in eight consecutive games, as so many people smugly predicted, it could have gone the other way. King was asked: Would the NHL have turned a blind eye to Europe for another decade or more had Canada cruised to victory? It might have," answered King. Remember, it started as a trickle, not an invasion and the first players came from Sweden and Finland, the lesser of the top four countries. The only Russians and Czechs we saw before the end of the 1980s came because they defected. So it started out small. Had we won, maybe no one would have come over for a long time. So it was a very important point in the evolution of the NHL, but also in Canadian hockey. I'm talking about our game now. A lot of good things came out of that series - coaching programs, much more attention paid to conditioning. I mean, it was a whole new respect for the way the game could be played." As the 30th anniversary of Canada's victory in the eighth game approaches, many poignant stories are being told and retold about that moment, that time, that series. Perhaps no described the impact of the series better than Tretiak himself did back in February, 1997 - or the last time all the principal players dredged up their recollections of '72. The brief background: Heading into the deciding game, there were fears within the Canadian management team that if the final game ended in a tie - squaring the series at 3-3-2 - the Soviets would claim victory, on the grounds of goal differential. It was a plausible-enough scenario because goal differential was used to decide placings in international hockey, including Olympics and world championships, to break ties. So when Henderson won the final game in the dying seconds, it ended the possibility of an ambiguous result. Or did it? Tretiak, then as now a goaltending consultant with the Chicago Blackhawks, believes: "In 1972, nobody lost. Everybody won. Now we could see that the best players in Russian could play with the NHL. It opened the door for the European players in the NHL today. Now, it's the best league in the world. Who won? "Hockey won."
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Que que foi? Que que foi? Que que há?
Led the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) in scoring with 140 points (46-94=140) in 69 games with Chicoutimi in 2001-02...Named QMJHL’s Top Offensive Player and to the league’s First All-Star Team and chosen Canadian Hockey League Player of the Year...Scored 38 goals and 95 points (38-57=95) in 67 games with Chicoutimi in 2000-01...Finished second among rookie scorers in QMJHL and led team in both goals and points en route to the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year honors...Notched 84 goals and 151 assists in 136 QMJHL games during two seasons with Chicoutimi...Led Team Canada in scoring with four goals and eight assists in eight games at the 2002 Under-18 World Junior Championships...Selected by Minnesota in the first round (8th overall) of the 2002 NHL Entry Draft.
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Especial Valery Kharlamov Anything less than perfection was unacceptable
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Qualquer correção ou sugestão envie um e-mail para esgooto@yahoo.com CESC © 2001-2002 |
Trinta
anos da Summit Series entre URSS e Canadá!!!
Latauhuauhauhuaa
Latriauhauuahuahuhau huhuahua
