Hey Charles! Thanks for your
post -- it was the first time I had heard about
Percival (more about him later) After reading through what Charles had to say, I thought I should share a few more thoughts on this issue.
When I sat down to write my original post, the idea I was trying to get across was that both Canadian hockey, as well as American basketball, had a tendency of ignoring the talent and athletic potential in other countries -- something which led directly to the sort of shocks we saw in ice hockey in 1972, and in basketball this past Summer. I've excerpted a few paragraphs from Charles' post below, and added some comments of my own.
Certainly the Soviets implemented a new exciting hockey paradigm, vital and compelling. Utilizing a methodology whose origins were Canadian (Lloyd Percival) the big Red Soviets gave sweet vindication for those few who lobbied for change at the NHL sausage factory.
While I won't dispute the assertion that Russian strategy and tactics resembled those developed by
Percival(the father of Russian ice hockey Anatoli Tarasov wrote to Percival to praise his
Hockey Handbook as "wonderful"), I don't think Charles gives the pioneers of Soviet ice hockey enough credit. As Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor wrote in
Home Game: Hockey And Life In Canada:
These hockey pioneers knew much about the game through similar sports, such as bandy and soccer, but they had no reason to know this at the time. And so they looked for teachers. The Czechoslovaks had a long history in hockey and played it well, and so did the Scandanavians, but in 1946 there was really only one hockey country, and that was Canada. Canadians had been the world's teachers and were easily the best players.
"I wanted to go abroad," recalls Anatoli Tarasov, one of the early Soviet players. "I was thirty years old at the time and had seen nothing but the war." A relentless bear of a man, Tarasov later would be coach of the Central Army and Soviet national teams for many years, and was the first Soviet inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. But at this moment, like most of his hockey friends, he wanted to travel to Canada to learn how hockey should be played. He tells of a fateful conversation he had with a friend and mentor, Mikhail Tovarovsky. "There's nothing for you in Canada," Tovarovsky chided him. "Go your own way. Devise your own style of hockey." Years later, Tarasov could say with the wisdom of experience and success, "To copy is always to be second best,"
And again, though Tarasov praised Percival, it was really the special circumstances of Russian life that led them to adopt what to an outsider might have looked like an odd set of drills and techniques to train ice hockey players:
The early Soviet players worked more hours of the day and more months of the year than Canadians had ever deemed necessary -- or possible. The country had but one artificial ice rink -- a slab of ice really, in a Moscow children's park. The players, built it themselves. Without walls or roof or even boards it was just 12 meters by 10 meters, roughly one-quarter the size of the defensive zone of a normal rink. In summer, they covered the rink with a canvas tent to keep out the ice melting sun and , in soccer shorts and shin pads, continued to play. As for the country's other rinks, with natural ice they were at the unforgiving whim of the seasons.
So the Soviets took hockey off the ice and did on playing fields and gymnasiums what they could not do in arenas. They ran, rowed, lifted weights, tumbled. They made themselves better athletes. They learned hockey techniques and strategies by playing other games, doing other drills. Skating and conditioning were the twin foundations of their game. Skating they got from bandy; conditioning was just hard work. Together they would allow the Soviets to compete until their hockey skills and feel for the game had time to catch up and enable them to win.
So, the forerunners for today's 365-day-a-year hockey players were not Canadian, but rather the Russians who we despised so much during the Cold War. Percival, who was right, needed some Communists to prove how right he was.
Funny how things work out.
Next, let's turn to Charles comments concerning American ice hockey:
Laying the success of Herb Brook’s Team USA in 1980 at the feet of a Russian hockey revolution overlooks the existence of a solid USA hockey program that saw silver medals won in Oslo and in the rain in Cortina in the 1952 and 1956 Olympic games. It neglects to account for the well-deserved Gold won by the USA in 1960 at Squaw Valley when the Americans went undefeated, dominating seasoned Russian and Czech teams. It fails to account for the hard-earned Silver Medal won in Sapporo in 1972 by an underrated team that included 16 year-old Mark Howe.
Certainly, USA Hockey compiled an honorable record prior to 1980. But despite this honorable record, the Canadians that dominated the GM jobs and scouting staffs inside the league paid little respect for the talents of American players until those scrappy amateurs kncoked off the Big Red Machine in Lake Placid.
U.S. Players few and far between in the NHL in 1980. Sure, there was
Mark Howe, WHA refugees
Mike Milbury,
Robbie Ftorek and a few others, but for the most part Canadian general managers had scant respect for the quality of play in NCAA hockey.
After Lake Placid, the Canadians who dominated NHL front offices never looked at American college hockey the same way again. A system that had once only supplied a trickle of gritty players suddenly turned into a flood -- with the alumni of Lake Placid leading the way.
From here on in, American college hockey began to be seen as a legitimate alternative to Canadian Major Junior hockey -- even for Canadian players (Curtis Joseph and Paul Kariya being just two examples). And again, just as with the addition of European players beginning in the 1970s, ice hockey was all the better for it.
So what conclusion can we draw? When Canada fielded its best players playing the Canadian “system” (1972, 1976, 1984, 1987 and 1991) more often than not it won. Did 1972 really signal the demise of the Canadian game, as so many pundits suggested? It appears not. Did the 1972 Summit Series invoke wholesale changes in Canadian hockey? No.
That Canadian NHL All-Star teams won five tournaments on their home ice (Canada Cup) using the NHL-sized ice surface with NHL rules is not such a big surprise. And, as I recall, Soviet teams that
barnstormed across North America beginning in 1975 acquitted themselves very well, regularly embarassing their NHL hosts. And when the Soviet National team played a team of NHL All-Stars in the
Rendez-Vous '87 tournament, they earned a well-deserved split.
As to the second assertion, that the 1972 Summit Series didn't presage massive changes in Canadian hockey, I can see how Charles might see it this way. But to say it didn't change the way the game was played in the NHL seems absurd on its face. Again, I point to the example of the great Edmonton Oilers teams of the 1980s. Who did that team have more in common with: the 1972 Canadian All-Stars, or the Soviet National Team? Or did they play a style that was a hybridized version of the two?
Back to you Charles. . .
