Valery’s Ankle, the Break and its Consequences:
The 1972 Summit Series and the Shaping of Canada’s Cultural Identity
Brett Kashmere
At the beginning of The Death of Hockey, a book that perceives the late-60s U.S. corporate takeover of professional hockey as an affront to Canadian nationalism, Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane assert,
Hockey is the Canadian metaphor, the rink a symbol of this country’s vast stretches of water and wilderness, its extremes of climate, the player a symbol of our struggle to civilize such a land. Some people call it our national religion.1
Others have called it our national game, our popular theatre, our common passion, the game of our lives, the Canadian universal and the Canadian specific. Apocryphal or not, hockey remains a socializing force, playing an irreducible role in the formation, production and representation of Canadian identity. Its mythic function, however, has been in steady decline since the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series, considered the most dramatic hockey ever played. Still, one doesn’t have to back check thirty years to find evidence of the game’s continuing significance: Todd Bertuzzi’s blindside revenge assault on Colorado Avalanche rookie Steve Moore and Don Cherry’s bigoted comments regarding European and French Canadian players have recently inspired international media coverage and community debate. More importantly these incidents have thrust issues of violence and racism into the dominant hockey discourse.2
Ironically, The Death of Hockey was published shortly after the Summit Series’ conclusion. As Michael Robidoux writes, “the most celebrated hockey and, in turn, Canadian story occurred on 28 September 1972, when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in the final of an eight-game series against the Soviet Union.”3 In similar fashion Samir Gandesha claims, “The single most important historical event in this country after the British North America Act of 1867 was not the two World Wars nor the October Crisis, but rather the Canada Cup series of 1972.”3 Team Canada’s goaltender for the series, Ken Dryden contends that Henderson’s goal in Moscow is the “one wholly Canadian event that has left a similar trail of memory” as John F. Kennedy’s assassination.5 It is estimated that 95% of 21.8 million Canadians followed the Summit Series on radio or television with over one-third of the country tuning in for the live telecast of the deciding game.6 This statistic is remarkable considering the game was televised on a Thursday afternoon, when a large segment of the population was in school or at work.
Footage of Henderson’s winning goal, transmitted in living colour via the Soviet Union’s unsteady video signal, has subsequently been re-mastered, rebroadcast and replayed ad infinitum on the collective Canadian mind/screen. In Canada it remains the epoch’s enduring moment, an audiovisual loop made even more memorable by its stark, unavoidable colour. Foster Hewitt’s coterminous commentary likewise invokes instant recall, engendering a shared sense of nostalgia. But as Gary Genosko observes,
The unanalysed replay is visual fast food. It becomes a domain of analysis when it is played in slow and stop motion and presents the opportunity for expert and colour commentary… It is… a kind of moving blackboard open to the analysis of otherwise indecipherable patterns and flows.7
When dealing with familiar cultural material we must recognize the power dynamics of mass media. The selection and repetitive transmission of images by socio-technological apparatuses function to construct and reproduce political ideology. The countless replays and rehashing of Henderson’s goal have produced an extended ideological effect – stirrings of patriotism.8However, by isolating less memorable evidence from the series in stop motion, shuttling it forwards and backwards through time, we can begin to understand why the desperate, paranoid aggression carried out by Team Canada during the Summit Series has been narratively recast as heroic, noble and necessary.
The Summit Series occurred when video was becoming an international broadcast medium; the poor quality of the cameras and television facilities used in Moscow, provided by the Soviet Union, caused several moments of temporary picture loss during the final four games. Besides representing obvious economic and technological disparities between the countries I like to think these technical glitches signify the forgotten juvenile misbehavior that occurred throughout the series.9 Of all Team Canada’s on-ice transgressions, Bobby Clarke’s premeditated slash of rival Russian hockey star Valery Kharlamov’s ankle during game six carries the greatest symbolic significance.10 Using the breaking of Kharlamov’s ankle as a departure point, I consider this attack through the filter of Canada’s political and cultural histories, the particular circumstances of the Summit Series and its semiotic function in the imagination and the collective memory of Canadians.
By aggressively challenging the way we characterize ourselves as a country it is my assertion that Team Canada’s performance throughout the tournament, and Clarke’s two-handed slash in particular, signify a discernable “glitch” in the production of Canadian nationalism, identity and masculinity. This fissure disrupts Canadian self-identification as polite, peaceful and sportsmanlike and enacts a shadow identity as frustrated, aggressive and vengeful. I trace this enactment of frustration through a genre-focused reading of two Canadian hockey films produced before and after 1972: the overlooked NFB (National Film Board of Canada) essay film, Of Sport and Men (Hubert Aquin, 1961) and Yves Simoneau’s 1990 narrative feature, Perfectly Normal.11 This analysis addresses recurrent themes of mediation and representation, the crisis of masculinity, and the struggle to envisage a coherent national identity through hockey.
In “Minimal Selves” Stuart Hall demonstrates how double consciousness – determined by where we are (the present) and where we’re from (the past) – constructs and structures identity. As a young boy growing up on the Saskatchewan prairies, birthplace of “Mr. Hockey,” Gordie Howe, hockey played a formative role in my personal development. Now in Montreal, as a graduate student these former stomping (and now eternal resting) grounds of Maurice “Rocket” Richard has reignited my curiosity about the game’s binding relationship to Canadian identity generally, and our myopic identification with the Summit Series specifically. Hall writes, “Identity is formed at the unstable point where the ‘unspeakable’ stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture.”12Although identity is necessarily fluid, fragmented, displaced and therefore impossible to fix at any moment, “‘the self’ does relate to a real set of histories.”13Writing from the viewpoint of a hockey enthusiast and former player, I insist on Raymond Williams’ belief that “what always needs to be understood is the specificity of the response.”14I herebyoffer a personally subjective response tied to the specificity of my experience and limited to a particular perspective in space and time.
But as Bruce Ferguson demonstrates, when personal subjectivity figures too prominently it shifts the critical process out-of-focus. Waxing about his relationship to the painter Eric Fischl, Ferguson articulates the parameters of “correct” critical distance, a space that allows for both intimate (close-up) and contextual (wide angle) engagement.15 Trinh T. Minh-ha gives shape to Ferguson’s correct distance through her notion of “an interval that neither separates nor assimilates,”16 allowing for creative interpretations, new readings, intentional mis-readings, transformation, impermanence, disruptions and exceptions.
Ferguson favors un-mirroring the relationship between matter and language, “to make viewers suspicious of the positive account of art as a simple reflection (which is the myth of truth).”17 Un-mirroring can be achieved by giving minor instants – the gaps of history – major attention, evoking Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism. He writes:
The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again… To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize the ‘way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of
memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”18
Clarke’s slashing of Kharlamov’s ankle is a minor instant brought to light in the image of Bertuzzi’s recent attack on Steve Moore.19Fusing past and present, the Bertuzzi incident has released a historical constellation of Canadian aggression into the televisual sphere. The resultant montage of blindside slashes and crosschecks, crashes, concussions and fractured skulls reveals that nearly all of the previous half-century’s most vicious hockey incidents were instigated by Canadian professionals. The conclusion I draw from this evidence, conveniently organized by an omniscient television media, is that organizational and national pressures to win-at-all-costs not only shape but also encourage hockey violence.
Beginning in the mid-50s, Canada’s reputation as the world’s premiere hockey power encountered its first serious challenge.After the Russians’ upset victory over the East York Lyndhursts (Canada’s amateur representative) at the 1954 world hockey championships, the nation was scandalized.20 This loss eventually led to the 1972 Summit Series, marking the first time a team composed of NHL pros faced-off against the amateur Soviet Nationals. Spread over the month of September, with the first four games played across Canada and the final four in Moscow, the eight-game challenge tournament presented an opportunity for Canada to emphatically regain its world number one status. Set amidst the rhetoric of an ideological war, the international media seized on the contrast of democratic and socialist values and styles, pitting Team Canada’s flair, individuality and long hair against the Soviet Union’s disciplined, systematic team play and uniform military grooming. Many North American experts predicted a Canadian sweep, but the Soviets dominated the first five games, winning three and tying one. Their decisive 7-3 victory in the first game, held at the legendary Montreal Forum, recalls Trinh’s claim that the assumptions of specialized knowledge need to be constantly scrutinized and counteracted. “The waning of the hegemonic professional ethos is a necessary condition for the emergence of new relationships and complex forms of repressive subjectivities,” she writes.21
The Soviets entered game six needing a win to clinch the series;for Canada it was now sudden death. Midway through the second period, with Canada ahead 3-1, Bobby Clarke received an assignment from Team Canada assistant coach John Ferguson. Perhaps fearing a replay of game five in which the Russians stormed back from a three-goal deficit in the final period to win the contest, Ferguson prompted Clarke to injure the Russian phenom Valery Kharlamov. Ferguson admits, “Kharlamov was hurting us all the time. So I called Bobby Clarke over… and asked him to try to tap that ankle of his and break it.”22“I chased him down and gave him a whack across the side of the ankle,” Clarke recalls, adding Kharlamov “wasn’t an effective player after that.”23
Occurring in the heart of the Communist Empire under the spectre of the Cold War, Clarke’s transgression resonates with distinct political overtones. As our most celebrated hockey commentator Don Cherry argues, the Summit Series wasn’t about hockey at all, “This was WAR!”24 Critics and participants on both sides have made similar observations. Kidd and Macfarlane conclude that “In the end the stars of the NHL had not played better than the Russians, but they had shown more desire – which may have little to do with hockey but everything to do with winning.”25 “To me, it was war,” Phil Esposito said years later. “[T]here’s no doubt in my mind that I think I would have killed to win…”26“I am convinced that Bobby Clarke was given the job of taking me out of the game,” Kharlamov maintained after the series. “Sometimes I thought it was his only goal. I looked into his angry eyes, saw his stick which he yielded like a sword, and didn’t understand what he was doing. It had nothing to do with hockey.”27Thirty years later Paul Henderson called Clarke’s slash “the low point of the series,” and compared it to the despicable act of “shooting a guy in the hallway.”28At the time Clarke justified the penalty, claiming “If I hadn’t learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, I’d never have left Flin Flon.”29
These comments bring to mind Roland Barthes observation, vis-à-vis Canadian hockey, that “The great players are heroes and not stars.”30 Barthes wrote this line as accompanying commentary for the NFB’s phenomenological essay film, Of Sport and Men (1961). Directed by the Québécoise writer, filmmaker and broadcaster Hubert Aquin, Of Sport and Men covers five “sports-spectacles,” including Spanish bullfighting, the Tour de France, an American sports car race, British soccer and Canadian hockey. The film was one of four hockey-related projects produced at the NFB between 1953 and 1967,31 a period marked by nuclear escalation, Cold War anxiety, the homosexualization of left wing political activity, widespread censorship and the emergence of television. At the same time Canada’s dominance in the hockey arena was being challenged by the Soviets. Like the United States, Canada previously defined itself against the communism and state power of the Soviet Union, but with hockey substituting for the space race as a primary instrument of anti-communist propaganda.32For English Canada cultural anxiety was triply produced by the machine-like Soviet system, materialized in their hockey successes; the myth of American “exceptionalism” and the ideological dominance of their entertainment industry – namely Hollywood; and the insulated autonomy of Québécoise culture.
Like other hockey films of the postwar era, Of Sport and Men re-constructs and re-affirms the mythic image of the rugged, vigorous Canadian hockey player, signified here by Maurice “Rocket” Richard.33Over shots of Richard scoring, we are reminded by a “voice-of-god” narrator that “A goal scored proves the virility of the attackers” and that, “Hockey is an offensive game where the joy of the attack justifies every risk.” Cutting to a skirmish after the whistle, the film implicitly conflates hockey with combat. As an incredulous Richard is thrown from the game for slashing an opponent, a riot erupts inside the arena. Meanwhile, outside the riot is in full bloom. As fans tussle with police amid the chaos of flames, protests and sirens, the narrator reminds us that, “Sport is what separates combat from riot.” Ironically, in this case, sport doesn’t separate combat from riot: it perpetuates the worst riot in Canadian sports history, the infamous Richard riot of 1955.
The mythic construction of Canadian hockey reached an apotheosis during the Summit Series. One outcome is an increasingly complex representation of Canadian identity, gender and masculinity in commercial narrative films. In her analysis of museal tropes in mainstream cinema Jennifer Fisher demonstrates how American pop culture perpetuates public stereotypes of the artist.34I believe Canadian culture creates similar hockey typecasts,whichrecent films have attempted to deconstruct. In Perfectly Normal (1990), the hero Renzo Parachii (Michael Riley) works in a brewery, plays goal for their hockey team and drives a taxicab at night. In one climactic scene, the coach’s Irish nurse, Mrs. Hathaway (Patricia Gage) urges the team to victory by challenging their manhood, while Renzo’s American friend, the gregarious chef Alonzo (Robbie Coltrane), oversees the opening night of their opera-themed Italian restaurant, at which Renzo will later perform in full drag.
Like many of the Canadian films produced after 1972 that foreground hockey, including Paperback Hero (Peter Pearson, 1973), Strange Brew (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, 1983) and Les Boys (Louis Saia, 1997),35Perfectly Normal features working class amateurs rather than NHL pros. Janice Kaye points out, “Perfectly Normal constructs the Canadian male character as more feminine than masculine, with Renzo assigned traditionally female characteristics… slim, reserved, polite… sexually reticent, shy [and] passive,”36he’s also fond of opera and averse to the local sports bar. In several ways he’s Maurice Richard and Bobby Clarke’s opposite number. Perfectly Normal also signifies ironically on Of Sport and Men’s statement that “the goalie is ultimately responsible for the good name of the team.” Renzo appears indifferent towards winning; in fact he slips away from the team’s victory celebrations to publicly perform his transvestism (inadvertently in their presence). Questioning the terms of heroic masculinity as its determined in Canadian hockey prior to Clarke’s breaking of Valery Kharlamov’s ankle, Perfectly Normal negotiates a much more complex representation of nationalism, identity and gender than its pre-Summit predecessors.
NOTES:
Thanks to Astria Suparak, Jennifer Fisher, J.W. (Bill) Fitsell and the Henry P. and Thomas R. Schreiner-National Film Board of Canada Research/ Production Grant in Documentary for their assistance in preparing this essay.