Ed- The following is an excerpt from John U. Bacon’s latest book, The Greatest Comeback, How Team Canada Fought Back, Took the Summit Series, and Reinvented Hockey. If you’re familiar with the 1972 Summit Series, according to its principles and participants this is the best and most comprehensive accounting of that incredible sports moment of many written.

If this is new to you, this book is the best introduction to one of the consequential moments in sports history, when East met West, when the hubris of liberal capitalism crashed into the cheap hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. It was the battle that inspired Rocky vs Drago, and introduced North America to the beautiful game played by the Soviets.

And all these guys talked. The executives, coaches, players, and superstars of the next generation who were inspired by what they saw all agreed to let Bacon craft the definitive version of one of the great sports stories of all time. Well, most of it—Mark Messier wrote the foreword. And in case the last sentence wasn’t a clue, this book is also, for my (U.S.) money, the most Canadian thing ever written.

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In September of 1972 Team Canada opened the newly created Summit Series as one of the most heavily favored teams not merely in the history of hockey, but in the history of sports.

Just about every Canadian fan, journalist, player, and coach expected the greatest hockey team ever assembled to crush its untested opponents eight games to zero. Team Canada’s leaders were so certain of victory that they traded away every advantage the Soviets could conjure, including the referees. They’ve also invited 35 players, two full teams’ worth—including Red Berenson—to their training camp in Toronto, and promised all of them that they would get into at least one game. Anticipating little competition from the Soviets, they figured they could use the older players for the first four games in Canada, then let the younger players mop up the last four games in Moscow.

But that is not, of course, how it worked out.

As we join the story Team Canada is now down 1-2-1 in the eight-game series, needing to win three of four in Soviet Russia to avoid a nation-shattering collapse. Three of their teammates are flying home, angry. The 300 Canadian steaks and pallets of Labatt's they had sent over have disappeared, now circulating through Moscow’s black market. Their wives are suffering every indignity the communist officials can come up with. The press is calling them thugs. The commissioner of the NHL is calling them entitled. And 85 percent of their countrymen—more than saw the moon landing—are watching.

[After the jump: Coach Red is born]

Early Friday evening, September 22, Team Canada’s bus pulled up to the Luzhniki Ice Palace for Game Five, which millions of Canadians would watch in the early afternoon by skipping school, work, or whatever had to be done that day. The viewers included Mark Messier, an 11-year-old student in St. Albert, Alberta, who ran home each afternoon to see the Moscow games, which played at 2:30 Alberta time.

It was trickier for 11-year-old Wayne Gretzky, who lived in Brantford, Ontario. “The last four games in Moscow started at 12:30 in the afternoon,” he recalls. “Well, that’s school time, of course—but this is Canada, so at our school they gathered all the kids in the gymnasium and rolled in a TV to watch it. But it was a regular-sized black-and-white TV on a high stand. I remember telling my dad, ‘It’s horrible. I can’t see what’s happening!’ “So the next day, my dad told me, ‘You get out of school at noon for lunch, and you get an hour to go home. So you can come home and watch the next three games.’ Then he even let me go next door to the Rizzettos’, because they had a colour TV! Better than Christmas.

“Mrs. Rizzetto and I would watch the games together, which was awfully nice of her because she wasn’t really a hockey fan.

She was doing it more for me. My mom would pop in once in a while to make sure I wasn’t bothering Mrs. Rizzetto, but I was just intent on watching every shift like it was life or death—because it was to me! “I really don’t know what they were saying about me missing school, but I bet they figured out where I was. And it wasn’t like I was really missing school, because they weren’t in math class, either. They were all in the gymnasium, watching the game. I was just watching on a better TV. No snacks. No interruptions. Just the greatest hockey I’ve ever seen. I loved every minute of it.”

Whenever the Canadians got off the bus at Luzhniki, the Russian kids would run up to swap souvenir pins for something as simple as a stick of Wrigley’s gum, an exotic treat for those kids.

The two weeks between Games Four and Five had worked their magic. The players who wanted in had bonded with remarkable speed, and the three players who wanted out were all well beyond Soviet airspace before warm-ups. For all the ups and downs, the Canadians felt ready. They had whipped themselves into something close to game shape and started figuring out the Soviets’ style and the Olympic-sized sheet. They were no longer taking anything for granted.

This naturally started with the team’s unofficial captain, Phil Esposito, who was famously fastidious about his pregame routine.

“He goes at it like a bride preparing for her wedding,” Harry Sinden wrote. “He puts his gloves and stick in front of him, and they’re not to be moved. He also makes sure that his sticks are crossed, for some reason. And when he puts on his equipment everything has to go on in sequence, always following the same pattern.

“When Phil’s bitchy, he’s ready.” Phil Esposito was ready for Game Five.

Sinden felt his players were as jacked up for that night’s game as they had been for Game One, even confident enough to joke around a bit before the game. Ken Dryden overheard J.P. Parisé, who would be playing on an odd line with Esposito and Rod Gilbert, make a crack at his own expense. “If you want to see a guy panic, just give me the puck in front of the net.”

They got another shot of adrenalin when they took the ice for warm-ups and saw some 3,000 Canadians cheering them on with horns, whistles, Canadian flags, and signs saying “Mission Possible” and “Sarnia’s Here, Whitey.”

A champion water skier from Montreal named Pierre Plouffe, who had just competed in the Munich Olympics—where water skiing was a demonstration sport, and he finished 10th in jumping, 14th in the slalom, and 11th in tricks—travelled to Moscow with his bugle, which he brought to Luzhniki to pump up the Canadians. When the Soviet authorities tried to confiscate it, for no good reason except that it was fun, Plouffe handed the horn to the fans, who passed it down the line so the guards couldn’t get it.

“On the Canadian side of the arena,” Joy Berenson recalls, “it was all drunken Canadians in bright colours getting loud and having fun. On the other side it was Russians wearing black and brown and not having any fun at all.” While the fans got loud, Serge Savard went out for warm-ups to see what his ankle could do.

“That’s when I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life,” he says. “Before warm-ups, Harry asked me, ‘How do you feel?’ I tell him the truth. I said, ‘I’m not 100 percent, but I’m ready.’” That was enough for Sinden to keep Savard out and put Rod Seiling in.

“After the warm-up, I knew I was okay, but now I’m out of the lineup. I should have said, ‘I’m 100 percent!’” When the players returned to their locker rooms after warm-ups, Sinden summoned them to the coaches’ office. As Henderson remembers it, the coach tried to keep their mission simple: “We’re not playing four games tonight, just one. So let’s just focus on winning Game Five tonight, and the rest will take care of themselves.”

Before the player introductions, in front of Leonid Brezhnev and other top Soviet officials, a Soviet figure skater dressed in traditional garb presented Jean Ratelle with a big loaf of bread, Russia’s customary show of hospitality. When he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, the home crowd loved it.

Then 44 Soviet kids, ages six though 15, skated onto the ice, carrying bouquets for each player—but one of them dropped a leaf, unseen by the crowd, right before the announcer started introducing each Canadian player in numerical order. When he got to number seven, Phil Esposito skated out, slipped on the leaf, and fell right on his backside, skates pointing up to the sky.

Everyone roared with laughter, the only time most of the Canadians had seen the Soviet players so much as smile, and gave Esposito a warm ovation. Most players would have scrambled to their feet, mortified, but Esposito milked it for all it was worth. He got up on one knee, cradling his stick like a sceptre, then swept his right hand across his body as if bowing to the king.

“It is simply impossible to prepare for that moment,” Henderson says, in admiration. “Anyone else would have just turned red, but Espo knew just what to do. I was laughing like crazy. A born leader—just a born leader.”

Esposito’s reaction made a big impression on young Mark Messier. “I remember him absorbing that moment with such grace. Shit happens to everyone. It’s what you do with it that counts. He instantly brought levity and poise. You have to have confidence, real confidence, to play that off the way he did.”

When Game One started, the Canadians were surprised by the Soviet players. When Game Five started, they were surprised by the Soviet fans, who appeared bored. If an opponent got too rough, they would snap out of their slumber and start whistling in disapproval the way the Swedish fans had. But otherwise, they made little noise—the opposite of the raucous Canadian fans, who, though outnumbered four to one, outcheered their Soviet counterparts from start to finish.

The first few minutes featured a vigorous back-and-forth from two teams eager to get at it. With 4:30 left in the first Period, Gilbert Perreault, making his second appearance of the series, started behind the Canadian net and went through the Soviet lineup, becoming the first Canadian to beat the great Vladimir Lutchenko. Despite Parisé’s pregame joke, when Perreault gave Parisé the puck right in front of the net, he didn’t panic, but banged it home.

The Canadians returned to their locker rooms with a 1–0 lead and a 12–9 shot advantage, suggesting they really were ready to win on Soviet soil.

At 2:36 of the second period, Bobby Clarke skated out from behind the net to stuff one between Tretiak’s pads for a 2–0 lead.

Six minutes later, Henderson used his quick trigger to put Canada ahead by three. With Tony Esposito knocking back all 22 Soviet shots in the first two periods, when the Canadians returned to their locker rooms for the second intermission, their 3-0 lead seemed insurmountable.

“I did think we were okay,” Ratelle recalls. “They weren’t fluky goals. We were playing well.”

Just before the period ended, however, a Soviet player had tripped Henderson, sending him headfirst into the boards. His wife, Eleanor, pleaded with him from the stands, “Get up, Paul— get up! If you go to the hospital, I can’t be all by myself in that hotel room!” He got up, but between periods he complained of a pounding headache, which Dr. Jim Murray quickly diagnosed as a concussion.

Today, Henderson would be out, perhaps for more than one game. But in 1972 he could turn to Sinden and say, “Please, please don’t do this. Don’t make me take my stuff off. I’ve gotta play.” Sinden paused, then said, “Paul, we sure as hell need you, and if you want to play, I would never stop you.”

If Team Canada could simply hold a three-goal lead for 20 minutes, the series would be tied, reducing eight games to a bestof- three series. Sinden told his players they had played their best period since Game Two in Toronto, then admonished them not to try to protect their lead, but to go on the attack.

“And then,” Ratelle says, shaking his head, “it came . . .”

Three minutes into the third period the Soviets broke the shutout, but just 1:22 later Clarke passed to Henderson, who scored his third goal of the series for a 4–1 lead. Henderson would finish with a team-high plus-6 in even-strength scoring chances, with Frank Mahovlich next at plus-4, justifying Sinden’s decision to play him ahead of Hadfield.

Surely this three-goal lead would hold up, especially after the Canadians had learned their lesson in Games Three and Four. As the clock ticked toward the 12-minute mark, it certainly looked that way. But then, as Pat Stapleton recalled, “I don’t know how the hell it fell apart—but it did, and in dramatic fashion.”

Vyacheslav Anisin, the centre of their Kid Line, scored with 11:55 remaining to cut Canada’s lead to 4–2. Just eight seconds later, Anisin set up Vladimir Shadrin to cut the lead to 4–3 and tighten Canada’s collars.

“I don’t think I ever saw a good team like ours so completely outplayed as we were in the next five minutes,” Sinden said into his tape recorder that night. It was as if all 17 Canadian skaters were running a marathon, and they’d all hit the proverbial wall at the exact same time and suddenly had nothing left to give.

The Soviets struck again with 8:19 left to tie the game at four.

Just three minutes later, Valeri Kharlamov set up Vladimir Vikulov on a two-on-one to put the Soviets ahead, 5–4. The normally staid Soviet crowd erupted like Canadians, and they yelled even louder when the horn sealed the Soviets’ third, and least likely, victory.

Despite outshooting the Soviets in the third period, 13–11, the Canadians couldn’t get anything to go in, while the Soviets scored five goals on 11 shots. But Tony Esposito’s play was more a symptom of the Canadians’ demise than the cause.

“Look, this one wasn’t that complicated,” Clarke says. “All- Star teams aren’t made up of backchecking specialists. They’re filled with goal-scoring attack players like Espo, Yvan, and most of our forwards. Great players, but defence is not their strength.

So you’re backed up in your own end the entire third period, and you can’t get it out. A game like that is when you don’t have enough Ron Ellises.

“And that’s how you lose a game like that.”

Sinden felt so angry, confused, and frustrated that he didn’t trust himself even to be in the same room as his players, fearful that he would say something he couldn’t take back. Instead, he and Ferguson stayed in the coaches’ room, “stalking up and down,” Sinden said, “cursing out loud until we were sure all the players had left. I didn’t want to see any players. I would have said the wrong thing. There wasn’t any right thing to say after this. I’ve said all I could for six weeks. They’ve listened to me enough. Now they’ve got to come up with their own answers.”

Outside the locker room, Sinden told Sports Illustrated’s Mark Mulvoy—who described the loss as “especially humiliating”—“We can’t put two good periods together, but [the Soviets] could play the same way 24 hours a day until midnight of the third Thursday next February.”

Then Sinden concluded, “Maybe I should have stuck to building houses.” In Sinden’s journal that night, he was equally unsparing.

“We’re just not destined to win this thing. No matter what we do, these people beat us. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life as I did tonight in the third period when the Russians scored five goals on us. Five goals against the ‘greatest’ players in the world! “Why the hell do 17 of 18 guys all of a sudden stop skating? I could see it happening to one guy, or even a line. But a whole team? Explain it logically to me so that the next time it happens I’ll know how to handle it.”

Sinden probably made a wise decision not to address his players, partly for reasons he couldn’t have known. The gloom in the players’ rooms should have been as heavy as the cloud over Sinden’s. After all, there are only two ways to win a hockey game—hold a lead or catch up—and Games One and Four had shown the Canadians couldn’t catch up against the Soviets, while Games Three and Five showed they couldn’t hold a lead, either.

Game Two was starting to look like a fluke.

“When [Boston] played the Rangers, they couldn’t beat us,” Phil Esposito recalls. “When we played Montreal, we couldn’t beat them. And the Rangers could beat Montreal. How do you figure all that? Well, that’s hockey. Sometimes a team just has your number, and you can’t figure out why.”

That’s what it looked like in Moscow. Team Canada now had to win three straight games there, after winning only one game out of four at home. Only a delusional optimist would expect the Canadians to pull off that miracle—and there weren’t any of those in the press box. Mere minutes after Game Five ended, the Canadian reporters finished their eulogies.

“No way now,” the Winnipeg Free Press’s Maurice Smith wrote, “that Canada’s National Hockey League stars are going to win their series with the puckchasers from the Soviet Union.” And yet.

While Sinden paced back and forth, muttering to himself, the reaction from the fans and players was virtually the opposite.

Anything Sinden might have said could have squashed the optimism just beginning to bubble up around him.

After suffering another heartbreaking loss—each one worse than the last—and blowing their biggest lead of the series, the players never imagined they’d hear anything but boos. But the Canadian fans stood up in the stands and serenaded them with a heartfelt rendition of “O Canada,” one of the world’s most beautiful anthems. Every player still remembers it.

“Horrible loss,” recalls Savard. “And then everyone is singing ‘O Canada’! You do not forget this.”

“I’m not that emotional when it comes to things like that,” Phil Esposito says, almost a half-century later. “But I’m getting chills just thinking about it. The serenade was emotional for me, because I walked right through there.”

“If you’ve got any emotion at all,” Clarke says, “if you’ve got any caring inside you, it has to get to you. Has to. That really helped. Without even knowing how it helps, exactly, it helps. It was like the telegrams, the same kind of feeling. Players have to know that you care about them. You see the telegrams, you hear the song, and you know: we are cared about back home.”

“Americans are proud to be Americans,” Pete Mahovlich says.

“They fly their flags wherever you go in the States. You see it everywhere. But Canadians are a lot quieter about it—and maybe because we don’t always see ourselves as Canadians. We see ourselves as English or French or Maritimers or Westerners. But the emotion of wearing that Team Canada sweater—it got to me. I think all the guys felt that way. And after Sweden, we weren’t Red Wings or Rangers or Bruins anymore. We were Canadians. And we felt that way—and I think we played that way.

“Then we lost Game Five, and it was very, very tough. But then all of a sudden you’ve got 3,000 people, representing a microcosm of the 22 million people back home, waiting for us. Boy, after Vancouver, we were not expecting that! To come off the ice and see that—what a proud moment that was.”

Five decades after the fact, Mahovlich pauses to collect himself, as if experiencing it for the first time. “And they start singing ‘O Canada’ . . .” At this, the six-foot-five Mahovlich, a big, tough player, started squeezing out some tears and grabbed a napkin to mop them up— all through a stubborn smile.

“My eyes are starting to water. That’s how much it meant to me. Just tells you how emotional it was. A proud moment.”

The players could only guess the reaction back in Canada, but they assumed the worst. But the Canadians who made the trip to Moscow were completely behind this team, win or lose—and that’s what mattered now.

In the locker room, Eagleson recalls, “I was sitting next to Tony Esposito, who was apologizing for the third period. And in comes Red Berenson, his eyes lit up.”

Berenson would never be described as a naive utopian, but watching from the stands that night, he saw something he hadn’t seen before, and he rushed down to tell his teammates.

“In the third period, we backed off—big mistake,” he says.

“But I felt good about this game. We were a better team when we got to Moscow, and we showed it in the first two periods.

We’re getting going now, we’re a different team, in better shape, getting closer. I felt more like a coach than a player that night. I don’t remember yelling or shouting, just talking to the guys individually and in small groups. I told them, ‘That’s the best we’ve played. We’re playing better than they are. We proved it for two periods. We had the lead! We were outplaying them. We can beat these guys!’ “Losing, and losing like that especially, should have crushed the greatest comeback 257 us. But we weren’t down. We saw for the first time that we could outplay them after all, and on their ice.”

“Normally, [when] a guy who hadn’t played comes in and gives a pep talk, they say, ‘Fuck off, dimwit!’” Alan Eagleson says. “But Red, they all respected him and took him seriously. They knew he wasn’t talking to hear himself talk. When he comes in and says, ‘I’m telling you, we can beat these guys!’ everybody listened. He was so in sync with everybody.”

“I only played in two games,” Berenson says, “so I guess that was my claim to fame. There had to be some belief in there.”

“We all felt that way,” Gilbert said. “There were phases of the game we totally dominated, like we finally knew exactly what we were doing. We felt a lot of encouragement, even from the guys who were not playing. And that meant a lot to us, too.”

“After Game Five, I wasn’t upset,” Park says. “It was the first time we were dominating for three, four, five minutes at a time, then for one or two minutes we weren’t, then we were again. I was not thinking about the task ahead—no. I was just thinking, ‘We lost, but we’re on an even footing now.’”

When they returned to the hotel their fans were waiting for them, some standing on tables, Savard recalls, “and they were still singing, and the guy with the trumpet started playing!” “There were at least a thousand of them,” Henderson says. “And I know most of them were hammered, but I would suggest to you that the Canadian national anthem has never been sung with more fervour. If it didn’t get to you, you were made of stone.”

At least one player found even more motivation.

“They’d stolen our beer and our steaks,” Gilbert recalled, “and then to make it worse, when we go back to the hotel after the game, they give us this Russian beer—the warm, skunky shit, and not the good, cold Labatts our sponsor sent. I remember thinking, ‘These pricks will never beat us again! They are not going to win another fucking game.’ I swear in my heart I felt that way.

“I remember going to my room, trying to unwind—and then thinking, ‘All this other stuff, we can deal with. But they stole our fucking beer!’”

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The Greatest Comeback is available from the publisher’s website, on Amazon, or check local bookstores (Literati and Nicola’s have it).