Vancouver boo birds shamed city
Fans’ behaviour remains a stain 40 years after Summit Series
Forty years after Paul Henderson scored his historic goal to bring Canada victory over the Soviet Union, one thing that continues to stick out and to grate is the negative outburst of Vancouver fans against Team Canada.
The Vancouver game was the fourth in the 1972 Summit Series, a 5-3 Soviet win that saw them take the series lead.
In the contest, the Vancouver crowd started out cheering for Team Canada, but quickly a large group of boo birds started jeering. Some of the Team Canada targets were fair game perhaps, such as when the odd Team Canada player displayed poor sportsmanship with overly aggressive play. But there is no excuse for the Vancouver crowd’s heckling of Canadian goalie Ken Dryden.
Dryden was not having his best game. He certainly looked clumsy. But the slick passing of the Soviet team had a way of making Canadian players look bad in the first four games on Canadian soil. For instance, in the first game of the series in Montreal, Team Canada D-men like Don Awrey were going down to block outside shots, not knowing that the Soviet team didn’t take many outside shots. Instead, Russian attackers like Boris Mikhailov and Valery Kharlamov invariably tried to skate and pass the puck closer to the net.
The Soviet game, with its focus on fast passing and skating, looks far more like modern pro hockey than does the Canadian style from that same era. Team Canada’s attack was based on forechecking and virtuoso puck handling.
In Game 4, Dryden lurched about in net, trying to stop the cross-ice Soviet passand-shoot plays. That said, it’s hard to fault him much on any of the first four Soviet goals. Two came on odd-man rushes, which are always a challenge. Two more came on deflections where the crafty Soviet shooter Mikhailov got his stick on the puck at the last second.
Luck helped Mikhailov’s tip shots go in and only luck would have helped Dryden stop them. But the Vancouver crowd didn’t see it that way.
Starting in the second period, when Dryden touched the puck on routine plays, the Vancouver crowd started to give him the raspberry cheer. It was a disgraceful act. Little wonder that after the game Team Canada’s Phil Esposito let go with his famous rant against Canadian boo birds.
In the Vancouver papers the next day, a defence of the crowd was offered up by writer Eric Whitehead, as Jack Ludwig details in his book, The Great Hockey Thaw. The boos were actually for the “fat-andhappy NHL establishment that has been content to sit back and just rake in the money while the skills of the game have gone to pot,” Whitehead wrote. Ludwing himself defended the fans: “The Vancouver crowd was booing a deteriorated brand of hockey. It booed silly play.”
Ludwig is right to some extent. Some of the Canadian antics were silly, though in the heat of an NHL playoff game, no crowd would repeatedly turn on the hometown team for similar aggressive or stalling antics. They certainly would not give their own goalie the raspberry after he’s let in four tough goals. The boo birds were guilty of poor sportsmanship, peevishness and bad manners. Their conduct is an enduring stain on Vancouver hockey fans.