Is there Hope For Hockey?

It is before dawn and snowing steadily on Moscow's deserted streets. But the boys on the rink at the CSKA Youth Hockey School off of Leningradsky Prospekt have already had a full workout. Every weekday, the 20-odd boys shoot pucks and play scrimmages. "My dream is to play in the NHL someday," says Maxim Fadeyev, 10, who is already a four-year veteran of the game. His blond, curly hair wet from perspiration and his cheeks ruddy, Maxim recites his dreams: "When I play, I want to be like the best Russian players, like Bure, Fedorov and Mogilny."


As Russian hockey proudly celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the sport also faces its biggest crisis. Once a showcase of socialist achievement, Soviet hockey was generously funded by the state. The top players, like other elite athletes, enjoyed good apartments, cars, trips abroad and the respect and envy of their countrymen. Today, just keeping a team together is a challenge amid dwindling finances and poor facilities. And like Maxim, the greatest achievement for Russian players has become to play in the National Hockey League.


"No other country in the world, in any sport, can match our achievements in hockey during these 50 years," said Valentin Sych, president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation, at a commemoration ball at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses in December. Flanked by gray-haired champions from the past, Sych then implored: "The game in Russia is in dire need of help at the moment. If we want our hockey to remain at the top, not just in the memories of our glorious veterans, we must triple our efforts and find a way to support youth hockey, grassroots programs, and to find incentives for our youth coaches to remain in the sport. These are our first priority."


Since 1989, dozens of Russia's top players have been leaving their home teams to play for big money in the West. Their newfound wealth has even made them targets of the Russian mafia, which has allegedly attempted to extort money from several top-ranked Russian players in the NHL. At present, 174 Russians play in North America alone. Back home, teams are on the verge of bankruptcy and cannot begin to offer competitive salaries. Even the transfer fees they receive by sacrificing one of their stars amount to only temporary relief.


When Moscow's Krylia Sovetov sold its most promising defenseman, Oleg Tverdovsky, to the Anaheim Mighty Ducks in the fall of 1994, the Moscow club received $150,000 up front, plus $25,000 a year for the following four years. It was well short of the $600,000 the Russian team had asked for.


"We used part of the money to buy a team bus and an ice cleaning machine," said Krylia's head coach and president Igor Dmitriev. "But our financial situation is far too severe and it felt like a drop in the bucket." For most teams, any new money goes toward travel expenses, leaving their facilities neglected. Moscow's Luzhniki Ice Palace, once the glorious arena that hosted the Soviet-NHL superseries, has not been renovated since 1972, and has wooden seats, an outdated scoreboard and unkempt toilets.


The financial crunch is especially felt at the youth schools -- once the proud instructional programs attached to each team, and a breeding ground for future stars. "If the top teams have financial problems, then what could you say about us?" asks Alexei Morozov, Krylia's youth school coach. "We don't have enough ice time at the rink because our arena has been rented out to various private organizations. Most of the hockey equipment is outdated but we don't have the money to buy new ones." Unable to keep coaches with their salaries of around $100 per month, and with children more interested in video games than hockey, many teams have abandoned their youth programs.


It is no wonder, then, that Russian hockey is at its lowest level in history.


The Russians have not won a major international tournament since 1993. This season they suffered one of their biggest setbacks in years. For the first time since Soviet days, Russia assembled its own Dream Team for hockey's first World Cup. Billed as one of the favorites, the team was comprised completely of Russian players who had become NHL superstars. But a clash of egos dragged the team down.


"You can't have players running the team," said former manager Boris Mayorov, who wanted to replace some of the team veterans. But Detroit Red Wings' Igor Larionov asserted "We have a right to say how the team should be run. We are professionals. We know how to train and how to prepare ourselves for tournaments like this. We don't need someone looking over our shoulder every time we go to bed."


The end result was two 5-2 losses at the hands of the U.S. squad, and an avalanche of criticism: "A lack of preparation led to numerous injuries by key players while the team leaders could care less about the honor and prestige of Russian hockey," wrote the weekly Hockey magazine.





The stature of hockey, now lost, lay its foundation on Dec. 22, 1946, when Soviet authorities decided to officially recognize the still novel but increasingly popular sport. That day kicked off the first national hockey championship in five cities across the former Soviet Union: Moscow, Leningrad, Riga, Kaunas and Arkhangelsk. The game was initially called "Canadian hockey" to differentiate it from the Russian version which used a small ball instead of a puck and was played on a much bigger ice surface.


"We liked the new game from the start," recalls former Dinamo player Oleg Tolmachev, who at 26 was one of the youngest on the team and helped Dinamo win the championship. Tolmachev entered the game after a series of coincidences. In 1944, when he was a soldier stationed in the Northern Caucasus, a German bomb blew off the front of a Studebaker which he was driving. Tolmachev suffered a concussion and was given time off during which he went to Moscow. He visited his cousin Vsevolod Blinkov, a soccer player, and happened to meet Dinamo coach Mikhail Yakushin who was recruiting hockey players. "We were given a tryout because Yakushin thought that we Siberians are good skaters," says the Novosibirsk native. "To this day I'm thankful to the coach because he probably saved my life: Instead of going back to the German front I played for Dinamo."


It wasn't just the players who embraced the new game as an escape from the war. Thousands of fans, tired and demoralized from the four-year-long battle, were also looking to get back to a normal life. Russians took to the violent aspect of the game; it seemed an extension of pre-revolutionary tradition where male villagers fought with bare fists on frozen lakes while women went to church on Sundays. In the same way, the Soviet people braved the cold temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius and cheered their favorite players in the simple game of hockey.


Among the top players, one stood head and shoulders above the rest. If Canada had Gordie Howe, than Russia had Vsevolod Bobrov. Bobrov had a God-given talent for scoring goals and excelled in both soccer and hockey, although his greatest feats were in the latter. He is still the only athlete who was captain of the national team in both sports.


Hockey has also had its legendary coaches, such as the CSKA tsar Anatoly Tarasov, and Dinamo's long-time coach Arkady Chernyshov. Tarasov, the first European to be inducted into the National Hockey League's Hall of Fame, was the prototype of a coach-dictator who got the maximum out of each player.


Tarasov terrorized players with his exhausting workouts, and was quick to eject any player who objected to his methods. "Once during a late-evening practice at our suburban training base in Arkhangelskoye, Tarasov ordered us to skate laps around the frozen lake," recalls Anatoly Firsov, who played for nearly two decades under Tarasov's regime at CSKA. "One young player, who was recently brought to our team and thought he could outsmart the coach, hid in the dark behind the trees. He was gone the next morning. Tarasov never took 'No' for an answer."


In February 1948, hockey's newcomers got their first international test when the Soviets hosted the Czech team in a three-game series. The Moscow team, as the Soviets called themselves, led by Borbov, played before 35,000 fans at Dinamo stadium. The Soviets and the Czechs split the series, winning and losing once, with the final game ending in a tie.


In 1952, the Soviets joined the International Ice Hockey Federation and began playing in the Olympics. The following year, they were eligible to compete in the World Championships, but Stalin kept the squad at home, afraid of losing to its political enemies of the capitalist world. "Only after our victory in the 1953 University Games, where we crushed Czechoslovakia and Poland 8-1 and 15-0 respectively, did our country's leaders decide it was time to compete against the best," wrote Tarasov in his memoirs.


The following year, the Russians made their long-awaited appearance at the World Championships in Stockholm, with a debut that exceeded all expectations. The newcomers beat Finland 7-1 in the opener, and pummeled the game's founding fathers, the Canadians, 7-2, winning the title on their first try.


Two years later the Soviets captured the gold at their first winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy. Russian hockey had come of age.


Soon after, other hockey nations began taking the bold upstarts seriously, and Russia had to wait until 1963 for its next world crown, which also took place in Stockholm. In fact, the Swedish capital became the lucky city for the Russians, who won a total of six world championships there. The 1963 World Championship began a string of 10 world and Olympic titles for the mighty Soviet squad.


Amid the backdrop of the Cold War, political tensions often underlined the game. Just months before Soviet tanks would crush the Czech resistance in Prague, the two countries met in a decisive final match for the World Championship title in Vienna. A bench-clearing brawl with two dozen players from each side erupted during the game, lasting nearly 20 minutes. The crowd deemed the fight a draw, but the Soviets won the battle on the ice 4-2.


Before the Soviets could sit back victorious, however, there remained another hurdle. The Russians had only made their mark in the amateur level. The North American pros were in a league of their own.


The ground-breaking superseries between the Soviets and the NHL in the fall of 1972 started a new chapter in the history of the game. The series pitted against each other not only two superb teams, but the bitter political enemies of the Brezhnev-Nixon era.


The series materialized only after numerous back room maneuverings between sports officials and the leaders of the Soviet Union, Canada and America. Alexander Yakovlev, a long-time Soviet ambassador to Canada, recalls: "The Communist Party's Central Committee was split about the idea, but Soviet leader [Leonid] Brezhnev was very afraid of losing to the Canadians. It took constant lobbying from sports officials, hockey coaches like Tarasov, to finally convince our government."


According to Yakovlev, the final break in favor of the series came during Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin's first trip to Canada in 1971, where he met with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.


"Our relations with Canada suddenly became much warmer, and the idea was given a green light," says Yakovlev. "But it took a long time. Six months alone was spent on the initial negotiations."


The Russians met the NHL's All-Stars, led by hockey's household names like Phil Esposito, Guy LeFleur and Pete Mahovlich, in an eight-game series. Four games were played in Canada and the rest after a two-week break, in Moscow.


"No one from the other side of the Atlantic ocean gave us a chance," wrote the great Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretyak in his book "When the Ice Heats Up." "Every newspaper in Canada stated that the Russian amateurs would be humiliated by the NHL pros." Tretyak recalls in particular that one paper wrote: "The Russian goalie is the weakest link on their team."


The opening match took place at the famous Montreal Forum on Sept. 2, 1972. Thirty seconds into the game, Esposito scored and it looked as if the tide was against the visitors. "After he scored, Espo patted me on the back and said 'It's okay' as if he wanted to cheer me up," wrote Tretyak. "The sirens were blowing at full blast and the organist was playing 'Moscow nights.' When they made it 2-0 a few minutes later, the organist changed his tune to a funeral hymn."


But the Russians rebounded from that humiliating start, helped by two goals from Yevgeny Zimin and Valery Kharlamov. In front of a stunned sell-out crowd, the Soviets crushed the NHL team, 7-3. In the following games, thousands of fans across Canada and the U.S. would master the pronunciations of hockey's new superstars: Tretyak, Kharlamov and Alexander Yakushev.


In the end, the NHL took the 1972 superseries with four wins, one draw and three losses. But everyone agreed that the two opponents were evenly matched.


In the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, the Soviet team suffered the humiliating "miracle on ice" defeat by the American team comprised of college and minor league players. But the Soviets proved their global supremacy by winning the 1984 and 1988 Olympics.


Perestroika brought new troubles to the now hallowed sport. Star players, led by Larionov and Vyacheslav Fetisov, began an open public dissent against dictatorial CSKA coach Viktor Tikhonov. The players accused Tikhonov of subjecting them to unnecessarily harsh conditions such as only rarely being able to see their families. They revealed that Tikhonov had hit young star Alexander Mogilny during the 1988 Olympics. In May of 1989, at the World Championships in Stockholm, the then 19-year-old Mogilny stunned Soviet authorities by becoming the first hockey player to defect to the United States, where he joined the Buffalo Sabres.


Soviet authorities eased travel restrictions, hoping that would dampen the desires to take the extreme step of defection, but the move backfired and triggered a mass exodus which continues today. In September, Russia lost one of its brightest stars, when 17-year-old sensation Sergei Samsonov left CSKA to play for the Detroit Wipers of the International Hockey League. Samsonov, who was paid 700,000 rubles ($152) a month by the CSKA, signed a $100,000 one-year contract with the Wipers.


Sadly for Russia, but happily for the West, many others are waiting to follow Samsonov's footsteps as Russian hockey increasingly becomes just a breeding ground for the NHL. Hockey remains Russia's most popular winter sport, but these days the arenas are only half full at best. Groups of youths dressed in their favorite team's colors cheer wildly, but older spectators are mostly quiet, perhaps contemplating what has been lost.


In his famous pre-game talks, Tarasov liked to say: "The harder it gets, the stronger it makes us, and gives us the willpower to fight the odds." Russia's hockey fans hope those words apply beyond the arena as well.