All Canadians know about the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series in which the NHL proved its supremacy via Paul Henderson’s last minute goal. In 1974, the upstart WHA took on the Russians with a different outcome. The World Hockey Association was attempting to prove it was as good as the National Hockey League and better than the Russians. It had some of the great players but it didn’t have the preparation time that the NHL had enjoyed two years earlier.
Still, if you were around back then you know the ’74 series was a huge deal for Canadian hockey and for international relations. The first four games in Canada sold out and were huge draws on television. It was a different era. Russian hockey players didn’t normally come to Canada and travel to Russia wasn’t commonplace.
Gordie Howe hadn’t played in ’72 because he was in the WHA so this was his chance, at age 46, to take part in a Russia-Canada series. Paul Henderson, Bobby Hull, Frank Mahovlich and Gary Cheevers all played in ’74. And yet you don’t hear much about it anymore because A) the WHA folded in 1979 and B) the NHL is in the business of promoting the NHL, not the defunct WHA, which was its most successful rival to date. It also wasn’t the story of triumph that the 1972 series wrote. In ’72, the NHL came home having won three out of four games. In ’74, the WHA lost 3 and tied one.
My Mom and Dad were there for the ’74 series, cheering in the stands of Luzhniki Arena outside Moscow. “Nyet nyet Soviet!: Da Da Canada!” They traveled with a group of fellow Canadians, all rabid hockey fans, mostly following the strict rules about where and when they could and couldn’t explore. Armed guards let them know when they strayed. (They have a few stories about late-night vodka-fueled antics but those tales aren’t mine to tell!) They stayed in the same hotel as the hockey players and often encountered them in the elevator. Sadly, it’s one of our family’s great tragedies that the negatives were stolen from a Fotomat in a Grimsby shopping plaza.
I have all of the memorabilia from the ’74 series and no idea what to do with it. There are gold pins and booklets, advisories and agendas. Perhaps it will end up in a shadow box to commemorate the event, and the fact that my parents were present for a important piece of Canadian history that’s been hidden in the shadow of Henderson’s great goal.