Catching Up With The Past: 1972 Summit Series News And Notes

Summit Played Role In Thawing Cold War: Stephen Harper

From Matthew Fisher of Canada.com: “I am somebody who believes that that growth in cultural, economic and media contact that grew up in the seventies and certainly through the eighties had a lot to do with the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire,” Harper said at the end of a gathering Sunday of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders from 21 nations in the Russian Pacific port city of Vladivostok.

“It was harder and harder to make the Soviet Union look good to its citizens when they actually had exposure to anything else. I think their eyes were opened at the kind of free and expressive nature of Canadians. I think that that was a shock to them,” the prime minister added, referring not only to the eight games the two countries played in Canada and Russia this September but also the nearly 3,000 Canadian fans who descended upon Moscow for the last four games of the trans-Atlantic duel. Full Story

The Globe And Mail 1972 Interactive Web Site

In case you haven't already seen The Globe And Mail's 1972 Summit Series interactive website, here is the direct link. An amazing collection of photography and stories. An absolute must see. 

Forgotten Even In Russia

From Gary Mason of The Globe And Mail: 

The story in Russia is not so sweet and sunny.

Ten years ago this month, I visited Moscow to try to track down as many members of the ’72 Soviet team as I could. During my time there, I found most of them. What I discovered couldn’t have been more different than the post-series experience of the Canadian players.

Life for many of the Soviet team members had taken a dispiriting turn. “We are the forgotten ones,” Evgeny Mishakov told me at his rundown Moscow apartment one afternoon. “We are forgotten by our own people and by our own government.”

Full Story

Henderson's Goal United Canada

From Lance Hornby of the Toronto Sun: If Paul Henderson could make Sean Mitton’s mother break down and bawl about hockey, he must have done something truly extraordinary.

“She wasn’t even a hockey fan,” Mitton says 40 years later. “She was a housewife in Georgetown, Ont., who happened to be listening to Bob Cole’s CBC radio feed from Moscow during Game 8. But she got so nervous, she couldn’t help just wandering around, cleaning everything. When Henderson scored, she just started crying, then felt she had to go outside and talk to the lady next door, who probably thought she was crazy.” Full Story