Most Valuable by Gare Joyce

Author:Gare Joyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

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Of all the world’s sports, hockey has to be the one with the most curious political history. International hockey launched before the NHL was founded, but oddly excluded North America. The International Ice Hockey Federation was created in 1908 and staged its first championship tournament with a pool of four teams drawn entirely from Europe: Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain and Belgium. A world tournament drawing on both the eastern and western hemispheres, one that the IIHF lays claim to as its own, came along a couple of years after the birth of the NHL: improbably enough, the ice hockey competition at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, where the Winnipeg Falcons won the gold. The IIHF staged its first world championship in 1930, and again Canada won with an amateur club team, the Toronto CCMs. Canada would continue to send club teams and, through to the ’50s, win the gold most of the time—the score for championships being Canada 15, Rest of the World 4. The dynamic changed somewhat with the entry of the Soviets in 1954 and the rise of their amateur powerhouse in the ’60s, one that won eight straight world championships.

Canadian amateur ice hockey officials grew disenchanted with the IIHF and the International Olympic Committee and, for a time decided not to send teams to international tournaments, as if the country’s absence somehow devalued the events.

Through all these decades, the NHL was separated from the international game—a matter of amateurism. NHLers and those in the high minor leagues affiliated with the NHL were deemed professionals and thus ineligible, which is why Canada had sent either senior-league outfits or, in the ’60s, a national squad of those untainted by NHL contracts.

The first crossover event where the elite pros of the NHL met the best of the amateurs was, of course, the Summit Series in ’72. When it was organized, it seemed to be a one-off—no structure was put in place to make any similar event a fixture on the hockey schedule. Farther into the decade, the concept of the made-for-TV sports event came to the fore, and the great wall between the professional and amateur sports worlds began to ever so slightly erode. Into one small breach in that wall the hockey-gloved hands from Canada and the USSR reached, presumably clenched into fists rather than open for shaking. The Summit Series proved that bringing together the world’s best could be done, but it wasn’t easy. Consequently, it wasn’t tried frequently and the results were all over the place. The 1974 series between the Soviets and the WHA’s Canadian all-stars was better than you might expect. The Soviets didn’t send a good number of their first stringers to the ’76 World Cup, likely for fear they might defect. The ’81 Canada Cup was the Soviets’ most dominant performance; the ’84, ’87 and ’91 instalments were opportunities for Canadian pride to recover. All of these, however, were autumn tournaments, preseason events. However intense and drama-filled they might have been, the players were out of season.

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