‘This was war.’ Remembering the 1972 Summit Series, 50 years later

To utter the words “hockey” and “Canada” in the same sentence today conjures a degree of shame. The country’s governing hockey body is in the early stages of unprecedented reckoning over its handling of abusive behaviors and insistence over protecting its old-guard decision makers. With the country enduring arguably its lowest hockey moment, many of us are still trying to reformulate our idea of what the sport means on this soil.

It makes what happened 50 years ago this month feel more like 100 years ago. In 1972, the nation celebrated its hockey players like heroes coming home from winning a war. The Summit Series, pitting Canada against the Soviet Union, produced the country’s proudest hockey moment.

At least, that’s what the romanticized perception of the Summit Series tells us. It represented the warm and fuzzy glory days, punctuated by the unforgettable postage stamp, the winning goal from Paul Henderson, called passionately by announcer Foster Hewitt in the final minute of the deciding game. But, really, happiness was just the end result. The road to get there was shocking, often painful and threatened to plunge Canadian hockey into a different kind of national shame, one tied to happenings on the ice rather than off it.

That’s why, speaking to members of the 1972 Canadian team today, what stands out aren’t so much the victories and specific plays they recall but instead the feelings. That’s what they share the most. The memories, while extremely vivid, don’t only come from a place of joy. They call to mind a true emotional rollercoaster occurring 50 Septembers ago.

As Hall of Famer Phil Esposito, 80, recalls it, when the Summit Series was finalized in April 1972, the NHL players participating initially perceived it as a joke. The Soviet Union had dominated international play for decades, winning four of the previous five Olympic gold medals heading into the eight-game exhibition against Canada in September 1972, but the triumphs had come against amateur players. Canada hadn’t put their best pros against the Soviets. The Canadians had an NHL-only roster for the Summit Series, missing WHA runaways like Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, but they weren’t remotely worried. They were chock full of Stanley Cup winners and future Hall of Famers. Head coach and GM Harry Sinden selected 35 players for the team who would mix in and out of the lineup for the exhibition.

“We stumbled on it, almost,” center Bobby Clarke, now 73, told Daily Faceoff this week. “Nobody was expecting a series like that. It was going to be a fun time, and we were going to kick the shit out of the Russians, and all of a sudden we’re in big trouble.”

In Game 1 at the Montreal Forum on Sept. 2, Esposito scored 30 seconds in, Paul Henderson made it 2-0 less than seven minutes in, and the rout appeared to be on. To the surprise of the Canadians, the Soviets answered with back to back goals before the first period ended, and the star-studded Canadian roster headed for the dressing room feeling stunned, nervous and, most of all, exhausted.

“It was 93 degrees outside, the Montreal Forum had no air conditioning and, quite frankly, we were not in shape,” Esposito told Daily Faceoff. “We didn’t train very hard. Shit, we drank way too much, we screwed around too much, come on. We were used to six weeks of training camp, come in with 10, 15 pounds, lose them in that six weeks, get your legs under you, play 10 exhibition games before you even got to the season. Because most of us had to work in the summer time to make ends meet.

“People forget that, because they think of all the money the players are getting nowadays. And it wasn’t like that for us. We had to work in the summertime. Crazy jobs. I worked in a steel plant, and I had a hockey school, my brother (Tony Esposito) and I gave the money back to go to that (tournament). And it took him a long time to forgive me for it.”

Canada dropped that first game 7-3. The players were devastated. They sponged up the crowd’s visible disappointment. Esposito urged Sinden after the game to eschew the 35-player team structure and set a real lineup. A national panic swelled, and the Canadians realized they had no idea who the Soviets really were as players, from Alexander Yakushev to Boris Mikhailov to Valeri Kharlamov to goaltender Vladislav Tretiak.

“I don’t think Harry or (assistant coach John Ferguson), who was coaching, knew how good they were either,” Esposito said. “We were told by the scouts, who were the scouts of the Maple Leafs at the time, that they were OK, the goaltender was shitty. But Vladislav Tretiak had just gotten married. He obviously wasn’t prepared to play when they saw him play. I remember saying to Paul Henderson and to (Leafs owner) Harold Ballard, who came on the trip with us, ‘Harold, are you kidding me? No wonder your team’s in last place with scouts like those two guys.’ ”

Canada’s Summit Series experience reached its nadir after the fourth game, a 5-3 loss in Vancouver that put Canada down 2-1-1 in the series with the four remaining games set to take place in Moscow. It was after that contest that Esposito, speaking to broadcaster Jonny Esaw, reacted to pro-Communist heckles by pleading to the viewers, “For the people across Canada, we tried, we gave it our best. And for the people that boo us, geez, all of us guys are really disheartened, we’re disillusioned, and we’re disappointed in some of the people. We cannot believe the bad press we’ve got, the booing we’ve gotten in our own buildings.”

The nation was turning on its players. The speech was a blackout moment for Esposito, who barely remembered what he said even immediately afterward and says he felt embarrassed when he finally saw the clip 10 years later.

“My dad, he got a rock thrown through his window after the Vancouver game,” Esposito said. “And there were guys who went by in a car yelling, ‘Your son sucked!’ My dad never complained about it. He just wished he could’ve gotten one of them (laughs).”

But something changed after that. As defenseman Brad Park remembers it, when the series started, he hated most of his own teammates more than the Soviets, as his fellow Canadians were his NHL rivals, but the Canadian group slowly galvanized. Leaving Canada meant getting away from reading national newspapers. It meant focusing only on each other – and on what they perceived as classless treatment when they arrived in Europe. When they played a pair of exhibition games against Sweden before resuming the Summit Series, the local press referred to the Canadians as gangsters because of their physical style, Park remembers, and when Canadian ambassador John Kur publicly agreed with the label, it banded the players together. They gelled even more when the Soviets tried to make their wives stay at separate hotels and gave them the opposite of a gracious welcome upon their arrival.

“We realized we were kind of being treated like shit from the first second we got off the plane,” Park told Daily Faceoff. “We were made to wait at the airport. They knew we were coming, they knew how long we were coming, and they still made it take three hours to process us. In layman’s terms, we considered that bullshit.”

With their legs starting to come back after half a dozen games and an “us against them” mentality, the Canadians started to feel like a team. Esposito was the superstar. He felt he refused to let the team lose and it almost possessed him. He also believes Henderson played the greatest hockey of his life in that series. The two of them were the stars on the scoresheet, and everyone began to understand his role on the team. The likes of Ron Ellis and J.P. Parise brought it as checkers, Clarke said. Park felt Rod Gilbert was a unsung glue guy on the team thanks to his lovably infectious personality. And Clarke was willing to do whatever it took. As he recalls it today, it wasn’t his team. He was told he was the final player selected. He wasn’t yet the two-time Hart Trophy winner and two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Philadelphia Flyers. He was 23, deferring to the veteran leaders and willing to do the dirty work.

Yes, that dirty work: the infamous slash that broke Kharlamov’s ankle in Game 5, which Canada entered trailing 3-1-1 in the series.

“I didn’t really care when I did it, nobody told me to go out there and do it, I did it in the heat of the game, and I don’t regret it,” Clarke said. “I don’t recommend doing something like that, but it happened. And there was no complaint about it. The Russians didn’t complain. Nobody complained about it until years later when Paul Henderson brought up that I shouldn’t have done it. But I didn’t see it as any big deal.”

“I told Clarke, I’m really pissed at you. He said ‘What?’ I said ‘You should’ve done it in the first game,” Esposito said. “This was war. It was Communism against capitalism. And that’s what we believed, because it became that, it became political. God I hate politics. Fuckin son of a bitches, all of them.”

Canada roared back to win the next three games, all by a single goal, all on winning tallies by Henderson, and produced a heritage moment in the process, regarded by most on a higher plane than Gretzky-to-Lemieux in 1987 or Sidney Crosby’s golden goal in 2010. Anyone alive and following the sport at the time likely has a story about where they were when Henderson scored on Sept. 28.

But the players didn’t just feel jubilation. They’d rescued themselves from oblivion.

“Besides the feeling of winning, for us who played, there was a feeling of relief,” Clarke said. “We didn’t let our country down, and our family backed us 100 percent, especially after we left Canada and we weren’t very good in Canada. They backed us so much and it’s just a relief that we didn’t let the country down. I think we all have our own opinions of how things were. And in the end, none of that is important. What was important was that we became a team, and a team beat the Russians.”

The general feeling among the 1972 Summit Series alumni is that the bad blood has dissipated between them and the Soviets, that they developed a mutual respect for each other after playing such a tightly contested series, won 4-3-1 by Canada. Some of them became friends. But just as the specter of the Cold War loomed over the Summit Series, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has created a strange “rewind” and restored international tension. The NHL has cut itself off from the KHL, while the IIHF has barred Russia from all international competition. Some of the 1972 Canadian players lament the fact that they won’t be able to ring in the 50^th anniversary with members of the Soviet team because the Canadian government won’t endorse bringing them to Canada given the international conflict.

“Fifty years later, it’s still a political nightmare,” Park said. “Fifty years ago the Soviet Union was very antagonistic to democracy, and it seems like it hasn’t changed.”

The sport’s relationship with Canada and Russia has never been as complicated as it is in 2022. But it wasn’t so simple 50 years ago, either. The Canadian players battled a seemingly faceless, anonymous opponent during a time when the world feared that nation’s intentions. And the Canadians wrestled with the idea that they might let their people down.

Luckily, the 1972 team didn’t. Who knows what would’ve happened if they did?

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‘This was war.’ Remembering the 1972 Summit Series, 50 years later

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