Bure got casual fans hooked on hockey
The Russian Rocket turned Province writer into an ‘addict’ who planned his life around Canucks games
In the 1992-93 season, Pavel Bure shattered Canucks records. Not only did he become the first Canucks player to crack the 50-goal mark, he notched 60 goals and 110 points, setting new Canuck landmarks as the team topped triple digits in points for the first time. While the Canucks struggled in the playoffs, losing in the second round to Wayne Gretzky’s L.A. Kings, the emergence of Bure as an NHL superstar attracted new fans. Province news columnist Bob Stall was among them. Here’s a column he wrote as Bure soared to new heights:
I am damned.
I have become hooked on hockey and driven nuts by the Vancouver Canucks.
I build my weeks around game broadcasts and my mornings around sports pages. For the first time in 35 years, I’m in a major fan trance going into the playoffs.
There are many new addicts like me in B.C. and I know it’s the fault of Pavel Bure, the world’s most exciting hockey player on the world’s most maddening hockey team.
When Bure is on the ice, I don’t answer the calls of fridges, phones or bladders. I don’t blink. I’ve seen what he can do and I am wide-eyed.
Watch. When you see a tape of Bure accelerating, you have to adjust your brain to accept what’s happening because, in a slow-motion replay ... he is still going fast!
You see him streaking past slow-motion skaters and you realize that this is an athlete in another dimension. If the tape could be slowed to that notch where everyone else comes to a stop, you would see Bure moving stealthily through a still photograph, like a pickpocket in the twilight zone.
I ask one of those other skaters, Canucks winger Geoff Courtnall, to explain it.
“Pavel,” he says, “has the fastest first five or six strides in hockey. So everyone else seems to stand still.”
But speed alone doesn’t electrify. Bure, says Courtnall, can do more moves at a higher speed than anyone else in the game.
Moves? Watch him in heavy traffic.
He bounces the puck off each of his skates, back to his stick and through his own legs before flipping around the last dizzy defenceman and over a dead goaltender. The stupefied faces in the crowd are eerily similar to the ones around Michael Jordan when he’s making mid-air moves toward another kind of net.
Ice is Bure’s air.
His fellow pros confess to awe. They say the fans have never seen anything like the stuff he invents in practice.
Over there, on the practice rink, Bure’s the player with the face of a 10-year-old.
He flips a puck upward with the blade of his stick and keeps it in the air, bouncing it nonchalantly a half-dozen times. Yes, others can do this. It’s how they get good at deflections. But then, while the puck is still aloft, Bure grins, shrugs and kicks showtime to another level.
With the shrug, he bats the puck up with his elbow and when it comes down he kicks it back up with his skate, then his other skate, then the first one, then his stick and his elbow and his skate and his stick and then he keeps it in the air with alternating kicks off each foot, like a kid on dry land with a hacky sack.
But for an urchin or juggler to become a hero, Dickens and Disney have taught us that a lad’s wits must be as quick as his feet. So, watch one more scene, from a game in Toronto.
Bure has the puck behind the Maple Leaf net. Gretzky, when he’s in this spot, is so efficient that he’s said to be “in his office.” But Bure isn’t an office type. For him, this is a tough, grimy street where big men with sticks are hunting the kid who stole an apple.
Bure has the puck and he’s trapped. Two goons are closing in from opposite sides, confident that he and the puck won’t escape.
He moves toward one, then back, then toward the other, then back. Then he stops dead behind the net.
In a movie, this would be a freezeframe, from which the boy would spring to outwit his pursuers. He might jump in one door of a parked car and out the other. Or, on and off a car roof before he saunters away, chomping on his apple with a huge, cheeky grin.
For that’s the spirit of Bure. It’s what he does at this moment in Toronto.
Months later his teammates will still be talking about it.
Lazily, from behind the Leaf goal, he flips the puck high up and over the net. It lands in front like a bomb.
One player says that Pavel was centring the puck in a way that nobody had ever thought of before. Another says he was trying to bank it in off the back of the goalie.
The puck didn’t go in, but never mind. He’ll try it again some time. Or he’ll think of something else. I’ll be watching.
But Bure plays for the accursed Canucks, the team that can just as easily win or lose against anyone, anywhere, any time. I can’t figure them out but I love them.
I know this way lies madness but I’ll hang on their every whim in the playoffs.
Please pray for me, as well as them.
Following the record-breaking season, The Vancouver Sun’s Archie McDonald detailed Bure’s quest to get even better still. He wrote:
You can take the kid out of the Soviet Union but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of the kid. Or rather, you can’t take it out of his dad.
Pavel Bure and his father, Vladimir, spent the summer in Marina del Rey in the Los Angeles area, but it might as well have been on the shores of the Black Sea. It was all business and no beach bumming for the poster boy of the Vancouver Canucks.
“I work out all the time. All the time work,” said Bure at the training camp faceoff lunch when asked if he had enjoyed the sand and surf of California.
Nyet. Beaches are for jogging. There was ice time most days with players such as Chris Chelios, Russ Courtnall and Steve Duchesne, followed by dry land training and weightlifting later in the day.
All of this was done under the stern scrutiny of his father, a onetime Soviet Olympic swimmer who is Pavel’s personal fitness coach.
“He tells me what to do,” says Pavel. “I don’t even have to think about it.”
In Los Angeles, which has a substantial Russian community, Pavel had the comfort of old companions without the hassle of adoring fans.
‘’A lot of people who were my friends in Moscow are there.’’
Fifty goals in a season had been Bure’s dream. This year his dreams have no numbers.
“Just to play well,” he says. Maybe do better in the playoffs.
The Canucks finished with a team-record 101 points, but the loss to Los Angeles Kings in the second round of the second season is on this year’s agenda under unfinished business.