Vander Kooy found herself subsisting on black bread and butter, so unappealing did she find the shrivelled fruits and boiled meats served as meals. The Soviets tried to impress the tourist, but Ms. (A few years after the series, she was inducted into both the B.C.
She roomed with Claire Lovett, a two-time Canadian singles badminton champion who was also a prominent tennis player in the postwar years. Vander Kooy arrived in Moscow knowing no one, but found the locals and the visiting Canadians alike to be welcoming. Butlin could hear was the scratching of players' skate blades on the ice. One of his strongest memories is that the fans at the arena would hush whenever Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev rose from his seat. Butlin, who is now best known for organizing the annual Victoria Day and Santa Claus parades in Victoria, found the Muscovites to be friendly, though the security was oppressive.
"All we could see were soldiers with rifles. "We were looking for normal customs people," he said. Ron Butlin, president of the Western Hockey League, remembers most of all the oppressive nature of the regime, which was on display at the airport. Vander Kooy, also included such notables as liquor magnate Edward Bronfman, department store mogul John Craig Eaton, hockey coach Punch Imlach, Toronto Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard, recently retired Montreal Canadiens captain Jean Béliveau, and retired wresting star Whipper Billy Watson. The Canadians who made it to Moscow, most of them ordinary fans such as Ms. Among those stuck without tickets was hockey great Maurice (Rocket) Richard. Many got tickets to only two of the four Moscow matches. The promised first-class hotel rooms turned out to contain only a bed, a chair and a sink, with the bathroom down the hall to be shared by the entire floor. Some hockey tourists arrived to disappointing news. She booked a 12-day tour, which included the flight, meals, hotel room, bus transfers, seats at the circus and the opera, and, of course, those four important tickets to the hockey arena. "It's just that it sounded like it would be a real adventure." "I wasn't so much a rabid hockey fan," Jeanette Vander Kooy, who now lives in Victoria, said recently. When she could not get time off, she quit her job. Among them was a 26-year-old nurse from Kelowna. It became a battlefront in the Cold War.įor a lucky few, it was a chance to slip behind the Iron Curtain for a glimpse of a land both forbidden and foreboding.
#THE GOAL OF THE CENTURY SERIES#
The Summit Series pitted the Soviet Union's sham amateurs against Canada's best professionals in an eight-game exhibition of hockey. Unlike the French forces, they returned home triumphant. Two hundred years ago this month, Napoleon and his Grand Armée launched an invasion of Moscow, resulting in an ignominious retreat.įorty years ago this month, a ragtag collection of Canadian hockey fans invaded the same Russian capital armed with nothing more than cheap blue jeans and American greenbacks.
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