The Game I'll Never Forget - hockey player's favorite competition

Hockey Digest, Summer, 2001 by Chuck O'Donnell

Steve Shutt

The Montreal Hall-of-Famer recalls a historic 1975 match against the mighty Soviet Red Army squad

LAST YEAR, A BUNCH OF FORMER players, including myself, flew to Russia to play against the team that represented the Soviet Union in the legendary 1972 Summit Series.

I regularly play with the Legends of Hockey team that tours Canada. A bunch of the guys from the 1972 Summit Series Canadian team--Frank Mahovlich, Gilbert Perreault, Marcel Dionne, Don Awrey, Brad Park--and some other guys, including me, made the trip. We had a lot of fun. It was a great experience, a great trip, and it brought back a lot of great memories.

It was also great to see some of the Russian players I played against in a an exhibition match on New Year's Eve in 1975--"the game I'll never forget."

That winter, the Soviet Union had sent its best teams, the Central Red Army and the Soviet Wings, over to play a short series of games against various NHL teams in what was being billed as "the Super Series."

The Montreal Canadiens were scheduled to play the Red Army. We didn't have a scouting report on them, per se, but a lot of our players had played against a lot of their players during the Summit Series. And since they had played a few games against NHL teams in the Super Series, we had seen a little bit of them.

This Red Army team was good--we knew that just from how they beat the New York Rangers 7-3 a few nights earlier.

At that time, the style of play in North America and the Soviet Union was totally different. In today's NHL, with the overseas influx of the past decade, there's a lot of European influence on the game.

But back in 1975, Montreal was more of a classic Canadian Up-and-down, physical team. Overall, we had a great team. On defense, we had Larry Robinson, Serge Savard, and Guy Lapoint We had skilled forwards, like Guy Lafleur, Jacques Lemaire, and Yvan Cournoyer, and we had some strong, two-way, gritty forwards like Bob Gainey, Doug Jarvis, and Mario Tremblay. In net we had one of the greatest goalies in the game, Ken Dryden.

The Red Army team was a more free-flowing, puck-passing team, which maybe got one shot per rush. With the North American style, we would just slap the puck. But some of their players were incredibly talented. Their skating and stick-handling was terrific.

The one guy we all focused on from their team was Vladislav Tretiak. He was just a great goalie. He played deep in his net, which I guess was their style. The other guy everyone knew was Valeri Kharlamov, a left wing like me, who had just a incredible array of skills on the ice. This guy could do it all--and do it at a very high speed.

Although the Red Army was coming to the Forum for this "exhibition," we weren't looking at it as an exhibition. We took the game very seriously. We knew this was Russia's best team, the best team outside of North America. We thought we were the best in North America at the time. So, in our eyes, this was a game to determine who was the best team in the world. This was the World Series of hockey, and the winner could say they were the best team in the world.

When you take that into consideration, and mix in the fact that there was this natural West vs. East thing, this global rivalry, this democracy vs. communism, you can imagine there was quite a bit of build up going into the game.

Although everybody knew this was a big game, I didn't realize how big it was until we came out of the dressing room. I'll always remember walking on to the ice at the old Forum and feeling the tension in the air. It almost hit you like a wall. Everybody was into that game. We stepped out to one of the biggest cheers I've ever heard. It was bigger than a playoff game or an All-Star Game or anything else I had ever heard.

We came out and got on them quickly. As luck would have it, I got a goal very early in the game. It might have been on my first shift. I went down the right side and took a slapshot--typical North American style--and I put it right over Tretiak's glove hand.

I'll see Tretiak now every few years at some function or a dinner or at the Hall of Fame and he always looks at me, smiles, and raises his glove hand as if he was swiping at the puck that night at the Forum. He will never forget that goal I scored on him.

We ended up going into the locker room to a rousing cheer, holding a 2-0 lead. We started the second period on the power play and really got some quality shots on net. But Tretiak was playing great that night, and he was holding the Red Army in the game.

And as Tretiak was standing on his head, the Red Army began to get back into the game. Kharlamov scored on a rush to get the Russians back in it.

From then on, this was probably one of the best games ever played. Two great teams were playing at their highest levels, competing for every inch of ice. The fans were loving it, and I think the players later on realized what a classic game it was.

In the waning moments, we had a 3-2 lead, but the Red Army scored in the third period to tie the game. And that's how it ended, 3-3. We had outshot them by a three-to-one margin, but all that counts are the ones that go in. I thought we outplayed them, and so did a lot of other people I've talked to.