Tonight is the 40th Anniversary of the 8th game between Team Canada and The Soviet Union in The Summit Series. The game is being replayed on TSN, a channel that didn't exist at that time. It is great fun to watch the game with my 27 year old son and my 14 year old son...they have lots of questions about the history of the game and the series at the time. I think that this series was a turning point for not just Canadian hockey but Canada as a country. I remember being a grade 7 student at Arthur Ford Public School getting to watch the game on 2 televisions that were set up in the gym. The whole school was there, screaming and cheering, for Canadian players who appeared to have serious hate for their Communist opponent. I remember thinking at the time how wonderful the technology was that the television signal from the games could be sent from Moscow to Helsinki to London England to Toronto. Never once did we think the reception was bad!!! Watching it tonight in its original format...wow...it sucked!!! We forget too, about the political incorrectness of the time as well.
Russia was still a hard-line communist country and the Canadian team members had complete disdain for them. At one point I watched as J.P. Parise skater towards an official and attempted to swing his stick at him. The General Manager of Team Canada, Alan Eagleson, got in a fight in the stands, was escorted across the ice and gave the entire arena the "middle-finger salute" as did the team members and assistant coaches who had to escort him. This display of classlessness would never be acceptable today. While there were many forgetable moments that occurred during the series...the series and the game of hockey signalled the beginning of change within Canadians. We took pride in our achievements. We celebrated our freedoms. We unified around a game that we long thought we were the best at. We decided at that moment, that we needed to do better...we woke up. Hockey schools began to appear everywhere, sports in general became more popular...yound people took to politics like never before. Not all of this was directly as a result of 8 hockey games in 27 days of September 40 years ago but it did provide the spark...the impitus...and sometimes that is all a great nation needs to light the collective fire.
