So Much For Brotherly Love
The Cold War isn’t over after all.
Nyet, nyet, nyet. At least not here in America’s cradle of liberty, the so-called city of brotherly love, where hatred is being celebrated in these Stanley Cup finals.
We should not be surprised. This is Philadelphia, after all, where such thinking is commemorated on the front page of the local newspaper.
This is a city that reveres a Flyers team that felt compelled to defend this continent’s honor by so physically abusing a visiting Soviet team, it nearly refused to finish a game.
This is a city that honors perhaps its greatest sports hero for using his stick to break the ankle of a Soviet star, otherwise preventing what surely would have been a national embarrassment for Canada in the 1972 series between hockey’s two superpowers.
This is a city that began this Stanley Cup finals series with a public rally in which Detroit’s stars were referred to as “dirty, stinking rotten Russians,” a city that could set detente back more than 40 years, a city nearly as preoccupied with red-baiting as Sen. Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s.
This is a city that should be ashamed of itself. Somebody should tell these people that the Iron Curtain has crumbled, that the Berlin Wall has fallen, that communism, for all practical purposes, is dead, that there really was no need to build a bomb shelter beneath the sparkling new CoreStates Center, that the opponent is not the Red Army but the Red Wings.
Oh, and by the way, this is a city whose hockey team is trailing, 1-0, in the best-of-7 championship series because of a winning goal by Detroit’s Sergei Fedorov, who probably should watch his ankles.
Game 2 is tonight, and anybody whose name ends in “ov” is a target. But that’s nothing new in this town.
“I don’t know why people hate us,” said Igor Larionov, whose hammer and sickle on his jersey has been replaced by a winged wheel. “When we go on the road, people hate us, maybe because they don’t want to see some Russians kick some butt of the Americans.
“But what can we do? We can’t really change that.
It’s a lack of intelligence, that’s all.”
And it is rampant among Flyers fans, who get a steady diet of how these Russians should be handled, how they did it in the seamier days of the game when hooliganism nearly ruined it.
So it was written in Sunday’s edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer, in a story that accompanied a large color picture of the cherub-faced Fedorov.
The story told of a game in January 1976, when the two-time defending Stanley Cup-champion Flyers played hateful host to the famed Soviet Red Army club that was touring NHL cities and crushing every team it played, making a mockery of Canada’s game and the best league in the world.
“It was like we were playing for all of North America,” the Flyers’ Bob Kelly recalled.
The late Valery Kharlamov was his team’s best player and arguably the greatest player Russia ever produced. Four years earlier, when the Soviets were embarrassing Canada in the 1972 Superseries, Team Canada’s Bob Clarke, the Flyers captain, told his teammates he would take care of Kharlamov. And he did, using his stick to break Kharlamov’s ankle.
Against the Flyers in ‘76, Kharlamov again was a target for abuse when Ed Van Impe left the penalty box and skated across the ice, leveling the Russian star with a thunderous hit. Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov pulled his team off the ice in protest.
After a 16-minute delay in which NHL officials told the Soviets they wouldn’t be paid if they didn’t play, the game resumed. The Flyers won, 4-1.
At a luncheon before that game, Flyers owner Ed Snider addressed both teams and had planned to end his speech with a Russian phrase, “vsyevo khoroshevo,” which means best of luck. After much rehearsing, Snider never used it.
“I didn’t forget it,” he said afterward. “It’s just that I looked at those cold SOBs and I couldn’t.”
Sadly, this anachronistic attitude prevails today throughout a franchise that has gone out of its way to avoid employing Russian-born players.
The Flyers signed their first Russian player, Andrei Lomakin, in 1991, though team alumni like Van Impe would say publicly they were “not totally comfortable with it.” Nor was Lomakin, who lasted barely two seasons. Philadelphia’s only Eastern Bloc player today, rookie Dainius Zubrus, was born in Lithuania and played in Ukraine, two former satellite countries where hatred of the Russians is nearly as strong as among Flyers fans.
Detroit’s Russian players, meantime, try to dismiss all the fuss, since they don’t entirely understand it. They laughed it off when fans in St. Louis and Anaheim chanted “USA! USA!” when they were employed as a five-man unit in those series.
Here, they feel the kind of hatred their comrades before them experienced a quarter-century ago, when the political climate was so much different.
“It’s not our fault,” Larionov said. “We’re just trying to be professional and play the best we can.”
And Fedorov, the Nike poster boy, who has embraced capitalism every bit as much as Eric Lindros, said anti-Russian sentiment is misguided when it is directed at NHL imports.
“I just try not to concentrate on those comments because to me it doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I’ve got a Red Wings jersey on and I play for this club for seven years. … It is like, sometimes, too much.”
It is, in fact, shameful.
Canadians invented a wonderful game and, arguably, the Russians perfected it. Men like Larionov and Slava Fetisov were soldiers on the front lines fighting the communist dictatorship and knocking down the barriers to opportunity in the West for guys like Fedorov and Zubrus.
The Russians came to North America and helped an ever-expanding league improve the quality of its product. The NHL’s past is colliding with its future in this series.
While Philadelphia, in a tribute to its past, builds with big and belligerent players, Detroit retooled with swift and skilled players and a defensive system imported from Europe.
The league can only hope the Wings win this series, because the Flyers could set it back 20 years - right where their brotherly hating fans seem most comfortable.