SUMMIT SERIES ‘ROCK SHOW’
Reunion promotes upcoming tour
At the beginning of a news conference Tuesday to promote the ’72 Summit Series Tour, there was a problem with the audio on a video looking back at the historic hockey event between Canada and the Soviet Union.
“It was so long ago, it was silent film,” said Peter Mahovlich, the former Canadiens class clown who hasn’t lost his sense of humour since playing for Team Canada 44 years ago.
Everyone in the conference room at the Château Champlain hotel cracked up.
There were a lot of smiles and laughs Tuesday as seven members of that 1972 Team Canada shared stories and memories about their victory that captured the attention of two nations as the eight-game series turned into a political war as much as a hockey battle.
Forty-four years later, the stories never get old — and apparently there are some that still haven’t been told.
The ’72 Summit Series Tour is be- ing produced by Pierre Marchand, who created the Musique Plus and Musi Max TV stations and is president of Atmosphère Inc. The tour will start in Montreal on Sept. 2 — the 44th anniversary of Game 1 of the Summit Series at the Montreal Forum, which the Soviets won 7-3 — and also have stops in Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver, the other Canadian cities that hosted games.
The players won’t be putting on their skates again, but Marchand said it will be like a two-hour “rock show” with a giant screen for a video montage and a moderator getting players to relive their most memorable moments. The second hour will be interactive, with members of the public able to ask players their own questions.
“Our team has decided that we have four demographics that we’re reaching,” said Team Canada defenceman Pat Stapleton, who was joined by former teammates Mahovlich, Serge Savard, Ken Dryden, Yvan Cournoyer, Guy Lapointe and Phil Esposito. “Fifty and above, we’re going to refresh the memories. Thirty-five to 50, we’re going to confirm the legend. Twenty to 35, we’re going to tell the story. And under 20, we’re going to advocate the team values.”
And what a team this was. The Summit Series squad was selected as Canada’s team of the century in a poll conducted by the Canadian Press and Broadcast News in 1999.
“You got to understand something,” Esposito said. “This became political and it became political very quickly. Not only the Russians, the Canadian government, too. It became society against society. Not that we wanted it, not that we realized it was going to be that way. But it did. So for me, anyway, it was almost like war.”
The story about Paul Henderson scoring the winning goal for Team Canada with 34 seconds remaining in Game 8 has been told a million times and any Canadian old enough to remember it knows exactly where they were when it happened. But Dryden said that 44 years later, the most interesting tales are about the “non-big-story stuff. It was the little stuff that I didn’t know was on anybody else’s mind that they were thinking about,” Dryden said.
For more information on the ’72 Summit Series Tour, visit the website at team canada 1972.ca