weren’t going to win with our puck-handling skills, or our one-man rushes.
Still, if Jim were playing there, we believed we wouldn’t be in this predicament.
“Hello, hockey fans...” the announcer started.
“Quiet!” someone yelled, “the game is starting.”
Russia was leading the series. We had to win today or we would accomplish the unthinkable—lose the series.
The television set was an outdated set, even for 1972, with alternating black and white, then coloured pictures. The sound was erratic at best, with undertones of static when the sound was at its best and indistinguishable noise when it was at its worst. But it didn’t matter. The game was on. We needed to win this game to be anything at all--to be Canadian. We needed to win, so our country would not sink into a depression, like the one in 1929, but not an economic depression, rather a social depression. You couldn’t cut this tension with a knife, as has been often said. There was no way of cutting it. Well, actually, there was one way, only one way—win the game.
I remember the shame we felt on the first night when Canada lost. We had bragged to our American friends at a wedding party that night. We had bragged at just how good our Canadian professional hockey players were. We had stated that the Americans would have no chance at all in a series like this one. “Our guys are unbelievably good,” we would say. We were in attendance at a beautiful wedding at Beach Grove Golf Club. The family of the bride had toasted the family of the groom. It was the groom’s turn next to toast someone. The bride was radiant and she looked even better. The groom was polished and happy.
I’m not sure what happened next because the Russians had scored.
“Are you kidding me?” someone said, “That had to be a fluke!” And we all gathered around the television set in the outer lobby.
“Wait until Frank Mahovlich shows them a slap shot,” someone said and we all laughed at the thought of it.
When the Russians scored again and again and Canada had clearly lost, we rejoined the wedding party, looking like we had just walked out of the morgue. I saw several people cry.
“What happened to the Big M?” someone said.
His shot just kept bouncing off goal pads as if it was our expectation that he would shoot the puck right through those Russian pads.
Back at the wedding party, we put on our best faces and tried to look happy. Many of us were asked by attendees of the wedding if something was wrong.
“Did you just get run over by a truck or something?” someone asked. “Yeah,” I said, “we got run over all right. We got run over by a big, red, truck!”
That game hurt. It really hurt. It hurt all of us. It kicked us in the pride. We too, were hockey players. We were Canadian hockey players. But it wasn’t only that we were Canadian hockey players and all the pride that went with that. We were also told over and over in news reports everywhere that we were against Russia in life too.
In my case, I got my first pair of skates at Christmas time, the year I turned six years old. My aunt had bought them. My aunt lived in Detroit. She was an immigrant from Lithuania, here because of the Russians. The Russians had tramped through her country. Lithuania was a strong, proud, free country that became a casualty of the Second World War. It lost its freedom to the Russians, or so we all thought. Lithuania was now, in fact, a part of what was often referred to as a silly concept, something called the Soviet Union, the union of unwilling partners, we were told over and over.
Canada and Russia, great allies of each other during the Second World War, were now at odds with each other, at war, Cold War, and the war was coldest on the ice. At one time, the two countries romanced each other. They stood together in war. But, just as separating couples sometimes do, people who, at one time loved and liked each other, but who now despised each other, Canada and Russia fought. Canada and Russia, the great allies, brought together by a third party evil, which they defeated together, now turned at each other. It was a cold war, with cold, icy feelings. It was us versus them. From our perspective, we were the good guys--they were the bad. The horrors of Stalinist Russia drove the point home. Who would deliberately starve their own people? To us, living on the farm, it was unthinkable. We had to beat Russia at hockey. We had to beat them at everything. They represented the evil we feared. We just had to. We didn’t know exactly why, but we knew we had to.
Equally, my aunt had come to America, brought here on false hope, hope provided by a US military man. She was locked here, kept here during the Cold War, away from the family she loved over there, unable to return. We had to win at hockey for her too. We had to win.
My mother, too, had fled during that awful war. She fled here. She taught us as little children.
“I was lucky,” she would say, “because I could run away. I could run here. You can’t run from here. There is nowhere better to go.”
Hockey was the summary of our feelings: personal, social, real, or imagined. To lose to the Russians now at hockey, would be the same as losing to them at war. To see them prevail over my aunt, my mother and my country, would hurt immensely. We had to win. Our players knew we had to win--didn’t they? We weren’t always sure. Some of them had left the team. Some of them seemed to sleep-walk. Phil Esposito had corrected us, after the loss in Vancouver.
“We are trying,” he would say, but this made us wonder just how good these Russians were.
My aunt didn’t know much about hockey. To her, hockey was just a rumour. She was active in more important things, like poetry and, of course, writing. My aunt wrote for the Lithuanian government in exile. There were rumours then, that it was they who controlled the country’s immense gold supply. The parties at my aunt’s house were so grand, they seemed to prove it.
We met great figures from history at those parties. We met presidents. We met the former Lithuanian field marshal there. He was a true military man, straight and disciplined. He had a full black beard and an ever-present glass of straight whiskey, Canadian whiskey.
“I can drink this whiskey all day long,” he would tell us as kids, “and it doesn’t bother me.” And then he would prove it. “At war, we often didn’t have food,” he would tell us as though teaching a great truth. “But we always had whiskey. Whiskey protected us,” he would teach, “and it protected our stomachs too.”
He would give us blackjack gum too. We had never heard of blackjack gum, as kids, or black licorice, but it was really good. The General didn’t know anything about hockey either and he didn’t care about it, but we had to win for him too, didn’t we?
The pastry at those parties was the finest of the time. Mrs. Balanda, a baking genius, would bring in what she called Napoleon cakes, the fanciest we had ever seen. At ages like four and six, we, a bunch of unruly farm kids, would run at those cakes, fine, thin French pastry, layered with fine thin raspberry, or plum filling, alternating with fine, thin whipped cream and layered again with fine, thin French pastry, with this repeated thousands of times over. These were first built for Napoleon, in Lithuania, to welcome him. Pastry and thin crepe-style pancakes were made to feed his armies and to welcome them, too. There wasn’t any choice but to welcome, when a mighty army tramples in. We, as kids, would run at those cakes repeatedly with both hands outstretched and grab as much as we could before running back to an outer room to eat it, then we would run at them again.
“Hey, you kids, stop that,” we often heard from somewhere, but my aunt wouldn’t hear of it.
We
