Hey History fans, Its your friendly neighbourhood DSC back in the game with our famous #TBT posts!! Our blog team knows that some of you history buffs out there are also hockey fans, and with the NHL season having commenced last night, we figured we’d kick off with some hockey content of our own.
Very few would argue against the fact that Canada and hockey go together like maple syrup and, well, anything. So, this week we are commemorating 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. On September 28th, 1972 Canada won a stunning victory against the Soviet Union on the last game of that series.[1] These games were much more than athletic in nature, they were geopolitical. Millions of Canadians and Russians gathered around their television sets to not only watch two teams pair off, but two ideologies. One expert as put It as such, “In the Canadian mind, the teams also represented their societies’ conflicting political systems. Our guys were rugged, free-enterprising individualists. Their guys were robots, cogs in the communist machine.”.[2] Political machinations of global scale were being played out on ice by two distinct societies who saw each other as immediate and existential threats. Bobby Clarke was notorious for captaining the Flyers teams of the “Broad Street Bullies” era, and he would bring a dash of that notoriety when he levelled a two-handed slash against Soviet superstar Valeri Kharlamov that broke his ankle. Now the senior VP of the Flyers, Clarke remains generally ambivalent about it. “If I hadn’t learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, I’d never have left Flin Flon.”
That’s not to say that the Soviets were a testament to clean hockey themselves, with defencemen Gary Bergman recalling being shocked when he found himself being kicked by the skates of Boris Mikhailov in clear view of television cameras during game seven in Moscow. This event Is fondly remembered by a generation of Canadians as a testament to Canadian athleticism, and a triumph of Canadian “firewagon” hockey over a Soviet system that up until then had seemed invulnerable.
But perhaps a sign of a bygone era, once bitter enemies are now enshrined side by side in the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, the speed and skill pioneered by the Soviets is increasingly commonplace in today’s NHL, and Russians comprise a substantial subset of elite NHL players of the last three decades. The world has changed immeasurably since ‘73, and while at the time it served as a reminder of Canadian hockey supremacy, in a world today where Canada’s dominance is increasingly challenged by Scandinavia and the US, perhaps the series was a sign of times to come.
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Work Cited
1. Macskimming, Roy. "Hockey put Canada’s Cold War perceptions on ice." The Globe and Mail, August 31, 2012. Accessed September 21, 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/hockey-put-canadas-cold-war-perceptions-on-ice/article4510769/?arc404=true.
2. Marsh, James H. "1972 Canada-Soviet Hockey Series (Summit Series)." The Canadian Encyclopedia. February 7th, 2006. Accessed September 22, 2017. http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/1972-canada-soviet-hockey-series/.