Canada Versus the Orcs, 1972

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My niece, two decades ago, asked me, “Uncle, what’s a communist?” The girl was innocent about the Reds smothering free thought over a quarter of the globe: Just as certain adult well meaning liberals are today. 

As an American philosopher would say—Looking at you, Germany—those who forget the history of Russian Orcs are condemned to make Ukraine repeat it.

I suppose young people today must be wondering about all the recent TV-news fuss over the eight-game 1972 Canada-Soviet Russia hockey series. After all, no such series has been attempted since, and today would gather little interest. To understand the ’70’s means to understand war, cold war and the Olympics.

As for war, I was a boy, during the earlier still-innocent Vietnam years, when the US congress, one day, declared War on Poverty. That war was never undeclared—I keep imagining a silent dog padding around congress with its tail between its legs. 

During the culture of my youth the American nation, when going to war, was like a Jedi knight committed to ride a scary rodeo bronco: “There is no try, either do or do not.” At the tactical level, when the troops launched an assault across an open field, aiming for the tree line, they never had a plan B, they never looked back: The assault had to succeed. But then the War on Poverty, the War in Vietnam—which the army, rightly enough, called a “conflict”—and the various Wars on Drugs, on Terror and whatever else: These all showed us America was no longer a “can-do” nation. I miss my youth.

As for the Cold War, by 1972 both West and East, the First and Second world, had agreed not to use fiery weapons. For we who believed so strongly in democracy, it was embarrassing how Third World countries, all too often, would give their “hearts and minds” to communism, to Moscow and Beijing, (Peking) instead of us. While some African countries were officially Marxist, we kept telling the world that under freedom and capitalism folks could enjoy a better life.

Canadians were caught up in this Cold War competition, hence the hockey series was a not-too-subtle metaphor to prove who had a better “way of life.” The Canadians gathered individual players from various professional teams; the Soviets simply used their standing team, the same team of amateurs that would go to the Olympic Games, amateurs that very nearly beat Canada’s professionals.

At the Olympics, certain values were in play, during those good old days, and these values, just as for, say, education or freedom, have to be constantly restated and rethought: “If you snooze, you lose.” 

We snoozed, we lost: The Soviets managed to get us to play their own game. Their communist ideology meant, for example, that while communist East Germany did believe in their secret national doping of their athletes, they did not believe in Olympic ideals. You may recall that if you tried to defect from Russia or across the Berlin Wall you could be shot in the head. The reasoning, besides “being a traitor,” besides saying you were trying to escape with job training “the state had paid for,” was this: The state was not there to serve you, but vice versa. Big Brother was not a civil servant.

But an olympian, back then, did not exist to serve the state, nor solely to serve the crowd as a “means” to their pleasure. In fact, athletes could not compete if they had been paid in the recent past. Not a means, but an end in themselves. Partly because a well rounded citizen would be less likely to seek glory from, say, invading Ukraine. Just last month a Babushka, amongst bitter poverty for miles around said, “At least we have a mighty nation.” As in mighty imperialism of other nations, from being “more equal than others.” 

A good life could include sports. When a boxer in my home town could win a gold medal but then leave the field of sport to become a lawyer, well, that was perfectly in keeping with Olympic ideals of “getting a life.”

We snoozed because while we chauffeured our children to sports, all the games we ever saw on TV were professional. (Even college ball is secretly professional: There is a reason the “ivy league” schools, not-televised, allocate surplus funds to the library, instead of to new bleachers for the alumni) We forgot that, during the Games, the Olympic Committee never counts medals by country (the media does) and at one time there was no playing of any national anthem, not originally. 

Down the years, if our women’s team won a hockey world cup, then we might not say “we won,” …yet, somehow, we were likely to say “we won” if it were a male team. We could have thought about that, and walked along thought-paths to find the implications, instead of snoozing.

We could have reflected light from our democratic can-do glory by sending amateurs to the olympics to “not-win” every four years, with distain for being “mighty,” while the Soviets would “win” big, claiming their hockey players were amateurs with a real job. Supposedly they weren’t professionals, no, they were merely soldiers, part of the Red Army, soldiers who merely managed to get a little time off for practicing hockey—lots of time. Everybody knew the truth, but nobody dared criticize, because Russia was so big and fearsome: We were their cringing bitches, tail to leg. Russia set us an example in shameful cheating, and now, at every Olympics, Canada and the US will put clothes on a pig, dressing up their shame by saying they are sending a “dream team.” And now our beautiful amateurs no longer get to dream.

At least we now have the courage to know something of ourselves, maybe not sports-wise, but about how we haven’t any “can-do” spirit for fighting to defend Ukrainians, nor for gearing up our military-industrial complex to make extra munitions for them. Earlier, the courage we lacked to speak the truth could have been the first step to forestalling any imperial invasion of Ukraine.

You might ask: Where did I view the 1972 game? With such fuss? With such symbolism? On a television in the school gymnasium.

…

…

Sean Crawford

Under the glory of God’s firmament,

September

2022

For school teachers, here (link) is a lengthy army training film on pre-internet disinformation from the communists. It is bookended by a sergeant addressing a civilian television audience, who presumably also watched it. For students: Were attention spans longer back then? Would teenagers have cared about the issues? Does the Kremlin still seal off their people from western news about, say, Ukraine? In the film, calling the Reds “grave diggers” possibly came from the Soviet president saying, “We will bury you.” (As in Sting’s Russians)

Notes for amused historians:

~A prose exposure from my youth of the college football Texas Longhorns was called Meat on the Hoof. (link)

~A Hollywood exposure of college “it’s not for character training” basketball (the gladiator gets his own free tutor) was called One on One. (Roger Ebert’s review)

A physical education graduate told me back in the 1990’s how the olympians weren’t allowed to wear ski logos, laughing to add that then the ski companies started putting their brand on the skies right at the spot where it would show when an olympian propped up the skis for a photograph. (I dimly recall, from my childhood, Nancy Greene’s skis being hustled away before any Olympic photographs) 

~“Funding for the bleachers, but not the library” was an observation by a mid-west English professor, Samuel Steward. Disgusted, he quit to become a tattoo artist in a port city. There he made lots more money, plus he no longer had to suffer classrooms of students who didn’t know who Homer with-no-last-name was. He was friends with the sex researcher, Alfred Kinsey, (movie link) who asked him to take sexual notes, telling Steward he may be the only literate tattoo artist in the country. The notes became a book. (Link) Highly recommended. (Note: Although he wrote before the revelations of the late 1960’s, the old prof already knew about some police being pigs and some manly men, complete with tattoos, being homosexuals)

~Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos A Social History of the Tattoo with Gangs, Sailors, and Street-Corner Punks, 1950-1965

By Samuel M. Steward, PhD (link)