What Putin doesn’t understand
Vladimir Putin likes hockey. Every year, he builds an ice rink in the middle of Moscow’s Red Square. For any occasion he can devise, he puts on hockey equipment and plays.
It’s not a surprise that Putin feels as he does. Russians love hockey for the same reason Canadians do. It comes straight from their landscape, from winter, from cold. It punishes us, but at the same time absorbs us, so we almost don’t feel its pain. To play hockey, you have to be tough, in lots of ways. And Russians are tough. Tough enough to survive their history. To survive Leningrad.
But there are a few things Putin doesn’t understand about hockey. One is that when he dresses in hockey gear and skates with real players, and those players let him skate by untouched, and goalies flounder to one side, letting him score five, six, seven times—real hockey players, real goalies, don’t do that. Except maybe once in awhile, and not for anyone over the age of 5. A real hockey player would never ask it, expect it or allow it.
There’s something else that Putin doesn’t understand about hockey, and about sports generally. I’ve been thinking about this because September will mark the 50th anniversary of the eight-game series in which Canada’s best hockey players faced Russia’s best for the first time.
Russia began to play hockey in 1946; Canada had originated the game more than 70 years earlier, and its players were regarded as undeniably the best in the world. Yet, because professionals couldn’t compete against amateurs, the Russians (technically, the Soviets) had been winning the hockey “World Championships” year after year and were called world champions.
Finally, in 1972, Canada had its chance. The result would be an overwhelming victory and celebration for the nation that invented the sport.
Except in Game 1 in Montreal, the Russians won 7-3. The series wasn’t decided until Game 8, when Canada’s Paul Henderson scored with 34 seconds left. I was one of Canada’s goalies. Putin, then a 19-year-old law student in Leningrad, surely watched.
Surprising to players on both sides, feelings of hatred softened gradually, until a deeper feeling set in. It’s the same feeling experienced by those in other bitter sports rivalries: Celtics and Lakers, Yankees and Red Sox, and many others. It’s born of the realization that each pushes the other beyond what they think possible, forcing them to be better than they’ve ever been.
Until a few weeks ago, Canadians and Russians were planning to celebrate the 1972 series with Canadian players traveling to Russia and Russian players coming to Canada. Such a shared celebration, we players have come to understand, would only be right.
Now, the reunion likely won’t happen. It’s too bad for the players, too bad for Canadians and Russians who lived through that historic competition. And too bad for Putin, who surely would have been there, part of those celebrations, and could have observed firsthand how nationalism can give way to something more enduring.
He will miss seeing his great players, proud Russians, and Canadian players, proud Canadians, feel proud about something that doesn’t entirely have to do with being Russian or Canadian. Taking all this in, Putin might have finally gained a sense of what it’s like to be a real player. He might have come to understand that no matter how geopolitics divides us, humanity lies beneath.