Kukla's Korner Hockey
Flashback To Team Canada 1979
by Paul on 12/26/09 at 09:58 AM ET
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from Allen Abel at the Vancouver Sun,
It is 30 years - exactly half my lifetime - since my first visit to Moscow as an innocent, ignorant sportswriter covering one of Alan Eagleson’s Teams Canada for The Globe and Mail. The Canadian entry in the 1979 World Championships was not one of our most successful, though when I look at the roster now, there were some supremely talented men on the squad: Marcel Dionne, Garry Unger, Bobby Smith, Wayne Babych, Ryan Walter, Guy Charron, Jim Rutherford in goal.
Agglomerated a few hours before the tournament started from teams that missed the NHL playoffs, they finished fourth here and were slathered by the Soviets 9-2, in the heyday of the Mikhailov-Kharlamov-Petrov line with Tretiak in nets. These days, I could interview those guys one on one, as long as we talked about fish.
But, back then, the hockey was secondary to the Cold War suspense and surreality. Team Canada was entombed in a hotel a block from Red Square with doughy matrons blockading the corridors and glum prostitutes at every table in the dining hall.
I remember being shunned in shops, doors slammed shut in half-filled restaurants, empty shelves, barren faces, drunken heroes wearing their Great Patriotic War medals on the Metro, menus on which every dish save fleshless chicken Tabaka was crossed out.
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