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They were there in '72

Victorians remember trip of a lifetime to see Team Canada play the Soviets in Moscow 40 years ago

Forty years ago today, Paul Henderson scored the most famous goal in Canadian hockey history, ending a Cold War-era contest that had the entire country holding its breath.

But for one Victoria hockey fan who was there, the quintessential Canadian moment came long before Henderson scored his lastminute goal to win the 1972 Canada-Soviet Summit Series. For Scott Richardson, an executive leadership coach now living in the Highlands, it was the sight of Team Canada's Peter Mahovlich, armed only with his hockey stick, facing down the assault rifles of Soviet guards on the ice in Moscow.

"It was absolutely something else," said Richardson, now 57 but then just a 17-year-old accompanied by his father. "[Mahovlich] was facing down all these Kalishnikovs with a Canadian hockey stick."

The lead-up to that moment came at 12: 56 in the third period. Team Canada winger Yvan Cournoyer captured a deflection of a shot from centre Phil Esposito to tie the game, but the goal judge didn't turn on the red light.

Fearing the goal would be discounted, Alan Eagleson - now disgraced as a fraudster and embezzler but then admired for his work on behalf of the NHL Players' Association - rushed at game officials. But Eagleson was intercepted by uniformed guards, who started to take him away.

It was then that Mahovlich skated across the ice, stepped over the boards and faced down the guards with his stick.

Shortly afterward, the whole Canadian team showed up and shuffled Eagleson to safety.

But when Henderson scored the winning goal with just 34 seconds left, Richardson and others believed the Soviets would come back - they were that good.

Jeanette Vander Kooy, 66, a retired nurse and health administrator, said she was sitting near the Canadian end and only realized a goal had been scored when goalie Ken Dryden dropped his stick and gloves and started hugging teammates. But even she thought the Soviets would respond. She still recalls, with no prompting, the exact number of seconds left. "We had seen what they could do," said Vander Kooy. "It was the longest 34 seconds of our lives."

Ron Butlin, a Victorian who was president of the Western Hockey League at the time, remembers the trappings of dictatorship: armed soldiers at the airport and the sight of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the games.

"And when he stood up, all the cheering would stop and all you could hear was the players' skates on the ice," Butlin said.

Richardson remembers the whole series as part of another time - the Cold War, with Canada facing down a team from a country known to few and distrusted by most.

Richardson's father, Jack, had been in hospital for many months prior to the series. Father and son had always been rabid hockey fans, living in Toronto but cheering for the Montreal Canadiens. They also admired international hockey, especially the masterful passing game of the Soviets. So Richardson's mother, Enid, took the initiative and arranged tickets for father and son to go to Moscow.

Even before catching his flight, Richardson found himself facing hostility - from fellow Canadians.

Richardson had taken a summer job training with the Canadian Forces reserves. When he let slip to fellow soldiers that he was headed for the Soviet Union to watch the series, disapproval was near instant.

"It was made very, very clear to me that it was tantamount to fraternizing with the enemy," he said.

When the Soviet team turned out to be astonishingly good, Richardson said, it was like all of Canada was suddenly defending its homeland. He heard Esposito afterwards saying he recalled being ready to kill to win, and understands the comment completely.

In Moscow, Richardson became convinced his room was bugged. One day on the way out, he grumbled to his dad that the hotel staff weren't cleaning up his room. When he returned only a few minutes later, the room was tidied.

At the final game, Russian fans seemed almost better suited to the Bolshoi ballet, they were so quiet. The biggest difference was the shrill whistling - thousands of fans all whistling in a way that was deafening when something happened they didn't like - their form of booing.

When the game was over and fans were ushered out of the arena, Canadians had to pass between two lines of armed Soviet guards to reach the buses, Richardson said.

"It was intimidating," he said. "But that was offset because so many of them were smiling and there was this nodding sense of, 'Hey, that was really quite something.'

"It was sort of a tip of the hat to the Canadians and the whole Canadian team, and maybe a way to say, 'That was quite the sporting experience.' "

The following day, a uniformed guard in the hotel approached Richardson with a red armband emblazoned with a Soviet hammer and sickle. The Toronto teenager had offered to trade a Canadian pin for the armband and been turned down. But on the last day, the guard came to say his wife had made one for him to take back to Canada.

"There was this outpouring of goodwill from the Red Army immediately after the game and the next day," Richardson said. "It was just a sense of collective warmth."

The red armband was later stolen. But the memory of the series remained strong for Richardson and his father. When Richardson married, it was his father who stood as his best man.

"There was a bond between us that lasted forever," he said.

For a Canadian teenager living in a time when the Soviet system was billed as the enemy, it had also been a revelation to meet Russian people: elderly women sweeping the streets in front of shops, soldiers laughing and nodding.

"It was very important when your only source of information about another culture is fed to you with a political intent," Richardson said.

"To see and reach out and say later, 'These people are real, they love sport, they know how to smile.' "

rwatts@timescolonist.com