In the summer of 1972 almost nobody in Canada expected a contest. The country had invented the professional game, supplied most of its best players, and agreed to an eight-game series against the Soviet Union with the quiet assumption that it would be an exhibition. What followed was four weeks that changed how Canadians understood their own sport.
The Soviet Union had been winning world championships and Olympic tournaments for years, but always against amateurs, because professionals were barred from those competitions. Canada had withdrawn from international play in protest at exactly that arrangement. The Summit Series was designed to settle the question: the best Soviet players against Canadian professionals, four games in Canada and four in Moscow.
Canadian confidence was close to total. Newspaper previews debated whether the home side would win all eight or merely seven. Players later admitted that preparation had been casual, with several arriving at camp short of fitness after a summer off. The Soviets had been training more or less continuously.
Game one in Montreal
Canada scored twice in the opening minutes and the expected pattern seemed to be confirmed. Then the Soviets began to play, and the building went quiet. They passed in triangles, changed direction at speed, and attacked in waves that did not depend on any single star. By the end they had won comprehensively, in the Montreal Forum, against a team assembled from the best of the NHL.
The result was received at home as something closer to a national humiliation than a defeat. It also produced the first of many arguments about the Soviet goaltender, Vladislav Tretiak, who had been dismissed in Canadian scouting reports as the weak point of the team and who proceeded to play as well as anyone on the ice.
Vancouver, and the speech
The Canadian half of the series went badly. By the fourth game, in Vancouver, the home crowd was booing its own team off the ice. What happened next became as famous as any goal in the series. Phil Esposito, interviewed on the ice immediately afterwards, delivered an unscripted address straight down the camera, defending his teammates and telling the country that the players were trying their best and were disheartened by the reception.
It is remembered now as a turning point in mood. The team flew to Moscow trailing in the series, and the tone of coverage at home shifted from derision to something more sympathetic. Several thousand Canadian supporters travelled to the Soviet Union, which in 1972 was an undertaking of some complexity.
Moscow
Conditions in Moscow were unfamiliar and the organisation was difficult: disputes over officials, complaints about food and accommodation, and a general atmosphere of suspicion on both sides. Canada lost the fifth game after leading, which left them needing to win the last three matches in a row against a team that had beaten them repeatedly.
They won the sixth. They won the seventh. Paul Henderson, a forward who had not been among the most celebrated names on the roster, scored the decisive goal in each. The series came down to a single final game in which a draw would have left the Soviets ahead on goals scored.
An entire country stopped working to watch a hockey game played in another hemisphere, and the schools that did not stop simply wheeled televisions into the classrooms.
Thirty-four seconds
Canada trailed in the final game and drew level in the third period. With the clock running down, Henderson went to the front of the Soviet net, had a shot blocked, recovered the puck and scored with thirty-four seconds remaining. The call by broadcaster Foster Hewitt, and the photograph of Henderson leaping into the arms of a teammate, are among the most reproduced images in Canadian cultural memory.
Canada took the series by four wins to three with one drawn. The margin, after eight games, was a single goal in the final minute. Nothing about the result resembled the formality that had been advertised in August.
The series is remembered in Russia as well, though differently. Soviet accounts emphasise that their team, assembled from a system the Canadians had dismissed, pushed the best professionals in the world to the last minute of the last game - and that Tretiak went on to be regarded as one of the finest goaltenders the sport has produced.
The uglier parts
The series was not a festival of goodwill. It was played with considerable hostility, and the moment Canadians discuss most uncomfortably is a deliberate slash by Bobby Clarke that injured the ankle of Valeri Kharlamov, the most dangerous Soviet forward. Kharlamov missed a game and was reduced afterwards. Clarke has never fully disowned it, and the incident remains a genuine stain on the Canadian victory.
There were also walkouts over officiating, a near-abandonment of one game, and open contempt between the benches. The romance attached to the series since has tended to smooth all of that away, but the games themselves were tense, bad-tempered and occasionally vicious.
What it changed
The most lasting consequence was that Canadian hockey stopped assuming it had nothing to learn. Soviet methods, particularly their emphasis on skating, puck movement and off-ice conditioning, were studied and gradually absorbed. Coaches who had treated European hockey as a soft curiosity began to borrow from it.
It also opened the door, slowly, to the internationalisation of the NHL. Within two decades Soviet and other European players were a normal part of the league, and the idea that Canada held a monopoly on the sport's talent had quietly disappeared. The series is remembered in Canada as a triumph, which it was, but its more important legacy was the shock that preceded the triumph.
