Spector - Road to gold: the untold story of Canada at the World Juniors

ALSO BY MARK SPECTOR

The Battle of Alberta: The Historic Rivalry Between the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames

Simon & Schuster Canada

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Copyright 2019 by Mark Spector

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Jacket Photograph: The Canadian Press

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Road to gold : the untold story of Canadas World Junior Program / by Mark Spector

Names: Spector, Mark, 1965 author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190116595 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190116609 | ISBN 9781982111519 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982111533 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: World Junior Championships (Hockey)History. | LCSH: HockeyTournamentsHistory. | LCSH: HockeyCanadaHistory.

Classification: LCC GV847.7 S64 2019 | DDC 796.962/62dc23

ISBN 978-1-9821-1151-9

ISBN 978-1-9821-1153-3 (ebook)

To my dear wife, Shelka, who supports me through these book-writing months with love, patience, and pierogies.

To our children, Haley, Jayce, Landon, and Rudy, who have grown into successful, unique adults. And a Goldie named Wrigley, who always wandered into my office just when I needed a break.

And to so many friends across the hockey world who provided a number, a memory, a column, or a quote. There may be just one name on the jacket, but there are hundreds in my heart.

Thank you all.

If you do this right, well have success. And with your good players, we will have success.

MURRAY COSTELLO

Murray Costello sat in a chair off the lobby of Ottawas old Skyline Hotel, watching the junior hockey owners and executives file past. They walked by on their way to the meeting room, and he smiled. They emerged for a bathroom break, and he nodded. He was clearly available for a chat. But they wouldnt break stride.

Nine oclock became ten oclock with no change. Costello had a copy of The Globe and Mail open in front of him, but he barely registered the articles, instead staring over the top of the paper as he staked out the lobby, like a secret agent in an old Get Smart episode. His focus was on the double doors of the meeting room across the hall, waiting for his moment.

The problem was, that moment wasnt preordained. Inside the meeting room, the owners and operators of Canadas Major Junior Hockey teams were gathered for their annual general meeting. Most of them had arrived in Ottawa completely oblivious to Costello and the pitch that he and his lieutenant, Dennis McDonald, had formulated over at the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. The owners had their own issues, generally of the micro variety, and they werent exactly falling over themselves to include Costello in their day.

I sat there for a long time, Costello said. I wondered at times, What the hell am I doing?

What the hell was Costello doing there? To some degree, even he wasnt sure.

It was May 1981. The New York Islanders and Edmonton Eskimos ruled their respective leagues. The PC, or personal computer, would be introduced to the world later that year. The movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was about to dominate the box office. The virus that causes AIDS was identified. Frequent flyer miles were invented.

And the World Junior Hockey Championships, as Canadians know them today, were born.

The tournament had been around since 1973, though it was no more popular among Canadian hockey fans than were the Izvestia Cup and the Swedish Games. In those early days, there was no guarantee the CBC would even televise the games. If Canada was in the gold medal game, it might be on TV. If not, then CBC Radio would broadcast the game. Maybe.

It didnt help that Canada was rarely in the gold medal game, so most coverage of the tournament was purely academic. No one wanted to see the Soviets play Czechoslovakia back in 1981. Even the ratings for Canadian games were sketchy.

That indifference was killing Costello, a bespectacled, greying lifetime hockey man who was not quite fifty back in 1981. Costello was sick and tired of watching the antiquated Canadian national program produce ill-prepared teams that couldnt compete with Russia, the reigning hockey superpower, at the World Juniors. He knew that Canada couldshouldbe the best hockey nation in the world.

Costello was the president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, the forerunner to what is today called Hockey Canada. The CAHA was responsible for growing hockey in Canada, through both its programs that certified coaches from coast to coast and its organized age-group hockey from which the best kids would graduate to the junior ranks.

Each year, the CAHA and its thousands of volunteers tilled the fields, planted the seeds, and tended the crops of the hockey worlds most fecund soilCanadaand then, when the best of the harvest reached Major Junior Hockey, the junior operators would pat the CAHA on the head and say, Well take it from here.

Costello and McDonald, his right-hand man at the CAHA, had watched this happen year after year. And for every bit as long, they watched as the Canadian junior team was doomed to failure.

Since the World Juniors tournaments inception in 1974, when the International Ice Hockey Federation invited five nations to join Russias Under-20 team in what was then known as Leningrad (today it is Saint Petersburg), Canada had obliged by sending over its reigning Memorial Cup champions, plus a few last-minute pick-ups, to the tournament. There, Canadas best junior team from the previous season would promptly get toasted.

The problems were many, and they were systemic.

The team that won the Memorial Cup in May tended to lose its best nineteen-year-old players the following season, when they turned pro. Sometimes, even the best eighteen-year-olds from the team would head to the National Hockey League, leaving that years champion without its best players at the World Juniors tournament in December.

There was also the culture shock. In the early days of the tournament, none of the kids had played on the larger European ice surface, and few of their coaches had any experience with game-planning for the different style of hockey played by the Europeans.

Even more foreign than the host countrys culture, though, was the on-ice officiating.

Teams going over had no idea what they were going to face, Costello said. If you hit a guy hard, even if it was clean, it would be a penalty simply because it was a hard hit. And the European teams used the basketball pick play, where a guy would come in and block someone out. Over here, that would be an interference penalty, but they wouldnt call it over there. Our players got frustrated, and of course the sticks would get going, and wed then pay the price on the special teams.