National Post (National Edition)
What if Paul Henderson hadn't scored?
Paul Henderson never scored the ‘goal that everyone remembers?’ On Canada’s 150th birthday, Dustin Parkes reviews an imaginary adaptation of the way hockey and the Canadian identity are intertwined
What if?
The question is an important one; perhaps the most vital to fiction, and certainly integral to understanding our history – and by extension, our identity. Proper speculation over what could have been takes a total account of what has actually happened, and allows us to see it in a different light. It deepens our understanding of what has taken place and who we’ve become.
It’s in this fine tradition that Canadian author Gord Smith’s novel of alternate history, Our Game, examines what could have been if a single goal was scored during a long-forgotten ice hockey series in September of 1972. Smith asks what if Canada had won the Super Series, or as it’s rechristened in his fictitious world, The Summit Series.
It will seem impossible to comprehend for a generation of Canadians, but for those born prior to our country’s centenary celebration in 1967, ice hockey was the national sport in more than just name. It was central to the national sensibility of who we were.
Before Jim Balsillie’s failed attempt to found the Canadian Hockey Association in 2006; prior to the dissolution of the North American Hockey League in 2005; ahead of the shuttering of the National Hockey League in 1995, and even preceding the single season of the World Hockey Association that concluded in 1973, there occurred a shameful moment in, not just our sporting history, but our past as a whole.
Well-remembered in Russia, but mostly erased from memory here, the 1972 Super Series between Canada and the Soviet Union was supposed to pit the world’s greatest professional hockey players against the sport’s best amateurs. Smith’s novel builds to this real-life moment with a well-researched account of the history of ice hockey in Canada. He emphasizes its roots as a blue-collar sport, championed by authorities in British North America, and used as “a brutish outlet for repressed violent urges, while further strengthening stoicism as an attribute.”
The irony of such a description for a people who relish the opportunity to associate themselves with apologies and politeness is inescapable.
From there, Smith delves into hockey’s rise as a spectator sport and its inevitable path to becoming a professional game. If there’s one criticism to be made of the book, it’s the length the author devotes to the set-up. I understand the necessity of providing background for a readership that has ignored the game for decades and likely forgotten just how elemental it was to our national identity, but the beginning of the novel reads more like historic analysis than a work of fiction.
But Smith comes into his own describing the buildup to the Super Series, digging up real-life quotes from sports writers and pundits, all of whom assumed Team Canada would blow the Soviet Union’s team away. The Globe and Mail’s Dick Beddoes offered to literally eat his newspaper column, “shredded at high noon in a bowl of borscht on the steps of the Russian Embassy,” if the Soviets could manage to win a single game.
Such sentiment wasn’t just the predilect of the media at the time. Hockey Canada director Alan Eagleson, whose infamous foray into provincial politics would come after being fired from his position, said, “Anything less than an unblemished sweep of the Russians would bring shame down on the heads of the players and the national pride.” Even Harry Sinden, elected to coach the team, boasted that “Canada is first in the world in two things: hockey and wheat.”
This was, as Smith suggests, “the sport we invented, and in which we were set to face off against our Cold War enemy. And it was a contest in which we were assured victory.”
Our certainty dissipated quickly, however. The Soviets made a mockery of the Canadian defence in the first game of the series, winning 7–3 before 18,000 fans at The Forum in Montreal. The Canadians revised their lineup for game two to include more brute force than skill players. The defence-first mentality worked. They won 4–1 in front of a sold-out crowd at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. The third game, held in Winnipeg, ended in a tie.
Team Canada, which had been considered the vastly superior squad, had evened the series by stifling the Soviet skill with what amounted to on-ice bullying. They were bigger and used their size difference to slow down the Russian attack rather than outperforming their opponents through skating, stickhandling or passing.
The Soviet Union won 5–3, and the Canadians left the ice just as they entered: to a chorus of boos. The crowd’s reaction prompted Phil Esposito – forgotten now but a star comparable to baseball’s Mike Trout or basketball’s LeBron James at the time – to incoherently ramble on national television about his disappointment with fans: “To the people that boo us, geez, I’m really, all of us guys are really disheartened and we’re disillusioned, and we’re disappointed at some of the people. We cannot believe the bad press we’ve got, the booing we’ve gotten in our own buildings. If the Russians boo their players ... then I’ll come back and I’ll apologize to each one of the Canadians, but I don’t think they will ... I’m really disappointed. I am completely disappointed. I cannot believe it.”
The series resumed two weeks later in Moscow, and it was more of the same. The Soviets won game five to take a three-games-to-one series lead. Then, the Canadians resorted once again to their dirty tactics, most notably with “the slash.” Bob Clarke, a 23-year-old player who would go on to have a middling NHL career with the Philadelphia Flyers and several other clubs, was instructed by assistant coach John Ferguson to take out Soviet star Valeri Kharlamov. Clarke responded with a twohanded slash across Kharlamov’s ankle. Without Kharlamov to rely on, the Soviets fell 3–2 to the Canadians.
Team Canada roughhoused its way to another victory in game seven to even the series at three wins and a tie – but the Soviets were ahead in goal differential, and game eight became the most-watched sporting event in Canadian history.
The Canadians stormed back from a two-goal deficit in the third period to tie the game, but despite several close chances they couldn’t find the go-ahead goal. The game ended in a draw, but for those counting at home the Soviets had won the series by scoring two more goals than Team Canada. The result – after anticipating the on-ice annihilation of a Cold War foe – was disappointing, but the true shame came from how the Canadians had lost – through what was roundly criticized as dirty play – and their reaction after the final buzzer. The team refused to shake hands with Soviet winners, and instead attempted to provoke altercations.
This is where Smith enters the fictional realm. The author takes a play-by-play call from commentator Foster Hewitt – “Henderson made a wild stab at it and fell!” – and imagines that veteran NHLer Paul Henderson, whose actual career ended one year later when the WHA disbanded, pots home the winning goal off his own rebound. Smith’s description of the immediate aftermath in this speculative world is immensely enjoyable: the Canadians return home as heroes, their devious tactics are forgotten, the players involved become legends and revisionist history paints the “Summit Series” as a narrative of good (Canada) versus evil (U.S.S.R.), with the heroes hurdling adversity to eventually triumph over the villains.
However, it’s in the butterfly effect of the goal where the book finds its strength. Smith extrapolates Canada’s victory to see hockey becoming further entwined in the national identity of Canadians. The mere act of playing or watching becomes an inherently patriotic act. While the actual loss prompted Canadians to come to terms with the thin veneer that guards against our baser instincts, Our Game posits that a victory over the Soviet Union would have only curbed that lesson, and led us to continue finding solace in our false sense of superior civility.
In his book, every major Canadian business “attempts to affiliate itself in some way with hockey for the sake of luring consumers.” But just when it seems as though Smith’s prognostication of a corporate-purchased national identity is verging on sermonizing, he shifts gears to recognize the good that comes from the Paul Henderson goal. Most notably, Canadian sport thrives. We host two Winter Olympics and a Summer Olympics, our amateur athletes are well-funded and we boast professional sports teams in every major North American league.
Our Game also devotes a chapter to hockey in the United States and its relationship to Canada, undoing most American colleges’ abandonment of their hockey programs after the Soviet Union’s victory in 1972 – with the consensus that hockey was a communist sport – that led directly to the failure of the WHA and eventual contraction of the American Original 6 franchises in the NHL.
However, in Smith’s reimagined world, hockey thrives in the United States. Testing the limits of credibility, he even suggests that an American team wins the 1980 Olympic tournament and imagines Canadian NHL franchises relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s. This, along with further expansion of the league contradicts rather mightily with the reality of its disbandment following the 1994/1995 season. In the early aughts, Canada’s biggest international rival is no longer Russia, but rather the U.S.A.
The final chapter of the book follows three hockey stars named Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby, whose attributes differ slightly on the ice but nonetheless embody a similar archetype: the reluctant superstar. In his portrayal of these generational talents, Smith encapsulates exactly what it is that Canadians define as noble and honourable: hard-working stoicism that contributes to the greater good of the team rather than personal gain. It’s a facet of our identity that suits a nation birthed through diplomacy rather than the struggles of rugged individuals.
The contradiction between our reality and Smith’s alternate world is quite similar to the difference between who Canadians really are and who we project ourselves to be. With or without Henderson’s goal in 1972, there are fictitious elements to what we claim as our identity. But that we recognize these fictions through works like Smith’s – and strive to be better – must count for something. Improvement, after all, is the goal that every Canadian should remember.