http://thechronicleherald.ca/thenova...-summit-series
By IAN THOMPSON
Published September 30, 2012 - 9:33am
Last Updated September 30, 2012 - 9:35am
Our fans were half-crazed, boastful, funny
Canada’s NHL stars stand in line before a Summit Series game against the U.S.S.R. in Moscow in 1972. (ITAR-TASS)
Canada’s NHL stars stand in line before a Summit Series game against the U.S.S.R. in Moscow in 1972. (ITAR-TASS)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Associate publisher Ian Thompson was a staff reporter for The Chronicle-Herald in 1972. With his wife, he travelled as a tourist to Moscow for the final four games of the Canada-Russia hockey series and he filed game reports for this newspaper. Forty years later, he offers some observations on that experience.
OUR NEWEST FRIEND from Burnaby was clearly drunk. He had joined the tour hours earlier in Vancouver and we were now leaving Montreal for Moscow and the most talked about hockey series of all time.
We were 3,000 Canadians with tour packages to visit Moscow and, in our case, Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Feel*ing extravagant, my wife and I paid $1,400 for the two weeks of travel, meals, the Bolshoi, the circus, the Her*mitage, Red Square, Lenin’s tomb, the Summer Palace and, of course, the hockey tickets.
We were in good Nova Scotian com*pany. Edwin “Oogie" Jones, “Big" John Dunlop, Winston Bradley, Eddie Ray*mond, Clyde Fraser, Gerry Munroe, Creel MacArthur, Peter and Alexa McDonough, Stuart MacLeod.