Today was the fortieth anniversary of Paul Henderson's goal to win the Summit Series. If you're Canadian, you probably already knew this. Everyone - even people like myself who hadn't been born at the time - knows the story, and can probably recite Foster Hewitt's commentary. If you're not Canadian, I'm not sure how to describe it. There doesn't seem to be anything quite like Canada's love of this one moment. The U.S. has many famous sporting moments, but nothing quite as nationally transcendent. I don't know if England's World Cup victory in 1966 is quite the same; they don't seem to relive it quite as often. That's part of the uniqueness of this event. As Henderson himself noted in an anniversary interview, it seems to get bigger as time goes on.
As a kid, it seemed to me to be a really amazing time, something I wish I could have seen. Keep in mind that hockey lacked a little pizzazz back then: the regular season was mostly watching the Leafs lose again and again, followed by playoffs in which the Islanders or Oilers won again and again. A really close, meaningful series seemed like an amazing spectacle.
But as I've gotten older, I've come to learn more about the context of the series. And as I've learned more, I've started to wonder how the series took on such mythical proportions.
Since this is an emotional issue, I'll try to explain with an analogy to something we can be a little more objective about. Remember the U.S. basketball "Dream Team" in the 1992 Olympics? It was the first year professional players were allowed, and the Americans had what seemed to be the greatest team ever assembled, with Jordan and Bird and Magic Johnson and so on. It was assumed they'd just crush everyone in their path on the way to an easy gold medal.
Of course, they followed up their bragging by actually crushing everyone in their path on the way to an easy gold medal. But let's say hypothetically that they hadn't done so well. Let's say it turned out the Argentines and Italians and Spaniards were better than anyone had expected, and upset the Americans early in the tournament. But the team puts together a few close victories to avoid elimination and, set up a gold medal game against whatever the former Yugoslavia was called at the time. It's a close game, but they manage to win on a last-second three-pointer by Christian Laettner.
The Americans celebrate in the streets, and brag about being the best roundballers in the world. The rest of the world - especially Canadians - try to remind them that they were expecting to win easily, the big surprise had been how good their opposition had been, and all the Americans had done is avoid embarrassing themselves. But they don't listen. In their minds they had overcome incredible odds to prove that they were the world champs.
Well that's pretty much what happened in the Summit Series. We went in expecting to win easily, only to barely win. And rather than take it as a lesson in hubris, we re-imagined it into a story of great achievement. In a sense, that's suitably Canadian: our greatest sporting accomplishment is an instance of saving face. To be fair, you do occasionally hear people talk about the high expectations, and refer to the national soul-searching that took place while the series seemed in doubt. But more often, all that context gets lost in the simplistic reminiscences and interminable replays of the final goal.
Watching Game 8 forty years later, Canada looks like a bunch of thugs. Swinging sticks at the referee, giving the finger to the crowd, shoving after every whistle. And that doesn't even get into Bobby Clarke intentionally breaking Kharlamov's ankle in game 6.
ReplyDeleteOn September 28th, I was more interested in the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation than I was in the 40th anniversary of the Summit Series.