By MARK MACKINNON
Monday, September 16, 2002 – Print Edition, Page S1
In a tiny two-room apartment in a rundown Moscow neighbourhood lives one of the stalwarts of the Soviet hockey team that stunned Canada with its skill 30 years ago.
Across town, another former Soviet star skips out on an interview for the second day in a row. His friends say he's a habitual drunk. Most of the rest of the team's veterans live on pensions of less than $90 a month.
While Canada's hockey heroes who prevailed in the epochal 1972 Summit Series live well, in general, on healthy National Hockey League pensions and advertising deals, their Russian counterparts struggle to get by. Though Paul Henderson, Yvon Cournoyer or even a more minor star such as Wayne Cashman could still draw a crowd of admirers -- and a sizable appearance fee -- at an autograph show, all but the brightest lights on the Soviet team live in obscurity, some well below the poverty line.
Most have never even seen the entire '72 series on tape -- just the first and last games on television replays.
Evgeny Mishakov was not one of the stars. The burly left winger, who wore No. 12 for the Soviets, spent most of the six games for which he dressed playing in a defensive role, frequently charged with shutting down Phil Esposito's line.
His one moment of fame came in the third period of the eighth game just as the Canadian rally was getting under way, when he did the unthinkable for a Soviet hockey player -- he dropped his gloves and fought normally gentlemanly Rod Gilbert, who'd been pestering Mishakov all series.
Mishakov, who, 30 years later, claims a thumping victory, shocked his teammates with his action, but was praised in the state newspaper, Pravda, for showing the Soviets could stand up for themselves physically after being pushed around for much of the series.
Today, the two-time Olympic gold medalist can barely walk and has to use a stick to hobble around his small apartment overlooking Moscow's main water-heating plant. His knees are swollen enough to pass as basketballs, and he hasn't money for the surgery he'd need to get back to his former regimen of jogging every morning.
Also see:
• Ex-foes may assist Russian (Sept. 23)
• David Shoalts - Soviets deserve Summit rewards, too (Sept. 23)
Until recently, he and his wife, Vera, lived on the monthly pension he received as a captain in the Red Army -- 1,100 rubles a month (about $55 Canadian). He's since been bumped up to 1,800 rubles a month, but Vera has still been forced to take a job behind the counter at a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store to help make ends meet. For his 60th birthday last year, he was given a car by some of his old teammates, which at least gave him the ability to get around town. But it was stolen a few months later.
So he spends most days sitting in his living room, staring at a wall of memories -- pictures of him in his prime, glaring fiercely back at the camera, and, more recently, joking with Pavel Bure -- and hoping some of his old hockey buddies will find the time to drop by.
Mishakov is painfully aware that this is not the kind of life he would have led had he played a dozen seasons for the Chicago Blackhawks, who admired his boisterous style and tried to persuade him to defect, instead of the Central Red Army team.
"If I'd played in the NHL, we'd be sitting by the swimming pool smoking big cigars," he said with a wistful smile. "We would be eating a table of meat, instead of just drinking tea."
It's a sentiment many of his old teammates share. All of them relish the memories of 1972 and the realization that they were as good as the professionals they'd heard so much about. And they all wonder at what might have been.
"Of course we want more and we want to live differently," said Boris Mikhailov, who dominated the fourth game of the series in Vancouver, scoring two goals and an assist, skating on the right side of a line with Vladimir Petrov and Valeri Kharlamov. He also gained a reputation as the main Soviet agitator, a player, like Mishakov, who responded in kind to the Canadians' physical battering. He drew a major penalty in the seventh game for kicking at defenceman Gary Bergman.
"We did so much for Soviet hockey in our time, and they provided us with nothing," Mikhailov said. "But we were products of this system. We expected nothing else."
Mikhailov, who captained the Soviet team in 1972, now works for the Russian Hockey Federation after a stint as the coach of the national team. By Russian standards, he's not a poor man, but he's not rich, either. Though he says he has no regrets, he's quick to mention that a number of NHL teams approached him about playing in North America.
Before the series, the idea of ever playing in the NHL was unfathomable. The Soviets approached the first game in Montreal with a mixture of fear and apprehension. Though they were the reigning Olympic champions, they had no idea whether they could compete with the likes of Esposito, Frank Mahovlich and Bobby Clarke.
"I remember when the two teams were standing, and the anthem played, and all of the Canadians stood and all of them were big, good guys," defenceman Alexander Gusev recalled of the first game. "I said to [defence partner] Valeri Vasiliev that 'I hope they don't kill us.' "
Only after winning the first game 7-3 -- a result that surprised the Soviets as much as anyone else -- did the Soviet players realize the series was to be a battle of equals, rather than a lopsided demonstration of how skilled Canada's professionals were. Each cites the hockey that followed as the best they've ever seen or been a part of.
Most of the Soviets believe that Henderson's winning goal with 34 seconds left in the eighth game was not a case of the hockey universe righting itself, but merely a combination of providence and luck that could easily have gone the other way.
"Since that moment, there has never been a day I don't think about what happened, about the whole chain of events," said centre Vladimir Shadrin, who was on the ice when Henderson slipped the puck under prone Vladislav Tretiak.
"Henderson says God helped him, but I believe it was more than this. We made mistakes. Vasiliev had the puck, then it went like a magnet to the Canadian player. A thousand coincidences led to this."
Shadrin, who was fourth in tournament scoring behind Esposito, Henderson and Alexander Yakushev, was for more than a decade one of the best-known Russian players, both on the international scene and with his home club, Moscow Spartak. But when his career was over, he said, life was "very hard" for him and his teammates.
While Spartak gave him an administrative job, Shadrin said many others had nothing, and many fell prey to alcoholism.
"From age 15 to 35, your whole life was organized for you, then suddenly you were left alone," he said. "Many were lost. Some national team players lost their lives."
He cited one 1972 teammate, right winger Vladimir Vikulov, as someone who is battling the bottle and losing -- before biting his lip and deciding not to name any more names. Mishakov will only say that 12 of his old teammates on the Central Red Army are now "drowning in alcohol." He is a recovering alcoholic, though he says he's been dry for more than 15 years.
Vets of the '72 series say the twin problems were the lack of work posthockey and the availability of alcohol. But what stung as much as anything for some players was how quickly they were forgotten.
"We have a big disadvantage in Russia, that we are always forgetting our history, and not just in hockey," said defenceman Alexander Ragulin, another player who lives primarily on a tiny military pension.
With some of his teammates, Ragulin has formed an association of Soviet hockey veterans to try to improve the lot of former players. He hopes one day to raise enough money to build a Russian hockey museum comparable with the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. Maybe then, he said, the younger generation will understand what the old stars gave for their country.
Maybe then, he said, the Russian government will do a little more to help players who gave everything they had for the motherland.
"Players from the Canadian team have cars, apartments and they don't starve," he said. "Nobody forgot about them."
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