Hockey as Canadian popular culture: Team Canada 1972, television and the Canadian identity

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 1995 by Earle, Neil

The "intimate" medium was about to transform the 30-odd players of Team Canada into "our guys," an embattled little family up against life's bewildering complexities and letdowns. This was what television had been transmitting and celebrating for decades: the surrogate families of Star Trek and The Beachcombers, of A Gift to Last and Upstairs, Downstairs. Audiences identified with the tight little worlds of the Plouffes and the Bunkers, the Kings of Kensington and the Waltons.

If there was intimacy there was also continuity, the second of Newcomb's televisual aesthetics. Prime time's dynamics helped make Team Canada as familiar as extended family: Clarke and Cournoyer, Henderson and Ratelle, Esposito and the Mahovlich brothers. Heroes are often found in defeat, as the reputations of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and John Diefenbaker can attest. The shrill voice of Foster Hewitt crackling across the ether from the grim and dour Soviet capital for the last four games thus deepended the element of participatory drama. In Ken Dryden's words, those scratchy transmissions over the pole came embedded with their own dramatic intensity, "momentous with distance ... never certain of getting through."(f.42)

Canadians watching the telecast of 22 September 1972 from Moscow by now were involved in something deeper than sport. There was an element of heroic daring in the fact of a middle power contending with the largest national land mass in the world, a nuclear-armed super-power at the time, for hockey supremacy. The denouement would be played in a capital that had refused to yield before Napoleon and Hitler. Who were the Canadians to think they could redeem themselves in such a place?(f.43) The very audacity of the attempt seemed heroic. The fight had to be played out to the final seconds, according to the prescribed codes of sport. If this was not Newcomb's "mythic model," then what was?

Team Canada lost their first game in Moscow 5-4. Yet the Canadians "were adjusting, adapting, experimenting ... now able to break up the Soviets' intricate passing plays." Thus Game Six was do-or-die for Team Canada, a spiritual ne plus ultra. They chose to "do." Game Six produced the first Canadian victory since that seemingly long-ago night in Toronto. It was noted for something else as well; a particular piece of infamy that starkly reflects hockey's darker side. Canada's Bobby Clarke purposely set out to "tap" and thus sabotage the speedy Russian Kharlamov's ankle. Years later Clarke was only mildly repentant: "It's not something I would've done in an NHL game, at least I hope I wouldn't. But that situation ... at that stage in the series, with everything that was happening, it was necessary."(f.44)

"With everything that was happening" -- if there was little grace in Clarke's confession there was admittedly some in his candour. For by now these were obviously more than just hockey games; the whole experience had been lifted beyond sport.(f.45) The series was pointing to something beyond itself, something primal, something of hockey's own elemental origins. The juvenility and sexism, the Odysseus-like cunning and calculated cruelty -- hockey's eternal dark side was always present though somehow counterbalanced by a sense of transcendence. The 3,000 plus fans who flew to Moscow to shout "Da, Da Canada; Nyet, Nyet, Soviet" testified to that. So did Bobby Orr's desire to sit behind the bench as a supporter, his bad knees making it impossible for Sinden to play him. Another quiet piece of heroism could be seen when players of the calibre of Stan Mikita and Rod Seiling waited patiently for ice time that hardly ever came.