The Sheila Variations

I'm pretty convinced the guy who took that had to have been hanging from the ceiling completely horizontal to the ice.

I know - where the hell was that guy?? There's no perspective of the boards on the edge of the ice - he's just hovering above the action. Great stuff.

Speaking of great stuff, I'm planning a huge post for Feb. 9, 1980 - the day the US Olympic hockey team faced off (disastrously, for us) against the Soviet Union team in Madison Square Garden, a week before the Olympics started. The Tretiak book you sent me has been HUGELY helpful in putting together my post. I'm excited about it!

I can't WAIT to read that! Especially your thoughts on the Tretiak book (didn't his take on the Olympics that year kind of break your heart?)!

Oh my God!!! So much!

I really LIKE him. Every interview I've seen with him, he really really impresses me ... his bitterness at being pulled by Tikhanov - but he has enough of a sense of dignity that he doesn't say "oh poor me" about it ... but it STILL rankles, you can tell. Of course! It was probably a huge mistake. Imagine what MIGHT have happened if he had not been yanked from the game ... the fire and rage he felt at that moment might have changed the history of that Olympics. You know??

Wonderful book - I was so glad to read it!

Victor Tikhonov still says that pulling Tretiak from that game was the biggest mistake of his hockey career.

And yeah, Tretiak is a really likeable guy. I just love his tone throughout that book. It's sort of as if he knows he is a legend, but feels a sense of obligation because of it, not entitlement. He's still pretty prosaic for being the most famous goalie that ever lived.

"I still remember the first time I played with my mother's field hockey stick. I liked to hit things around in the yard. One day, I broke it. I thought she would be mad, but she wasn't." That's like the tone he wrote with throughout the whole book. It's great. What an awesome guy.

I love that Herb Brooks quote to his Olympic team: "If you score a goal off Tretiak, keep the puck because it won't happen often."

Amazing!!

Myshkin had shut out an NHL All-Star team a few years previously so it's not like the Soviets were giving up on the game, but Myshkin was still not Vladislav Tretiak.

I forget who it was - probably the Montreal Canadiens - but Tretiak was drafted by an NHL team in the early 80s, even though everyone knew Moscow would never let him leave. He would have been the best keeper in the league. And I think it was in a small way an homage to his brilliance to do that. I believe that years later he said that he would have loved to sign, too.

Eddie Belfour has worn #20 for many years in tribute to Tretiak. One wonders how the league would have looked if he and other great Soviet-era players had been in the NHL. For one thing, if Montreal had him, would they have drafted Patrick Roy? Would Kharlamov spent his entire career beating on Bobby Clarke in revenge for breaking his ankle in the Canada Cup? Would Morrow and Fetisov been able to play the same defensive pairing, or would any of them have gotten along with the Stastnys?

We'll never know, just like we'll never know if the US could have scored two more times against Tretiak if Tikhonov didn't pull a hard-assed power move on him.

I have a hockey GM simulator called East Side Hockey Manager; one of the users modified the game to start with the 1979-1980 season and rosters, rather than 2006-2007. All of the Soviet players are in the game; to keep the NHL teams from signing them they all have nine-year contracts and maximum loyalty to their club teams. It was meant to preserve the "realism" of the situation, but of course none of them had that sort of security and they all HATED Tikhonov passionately. I'm trying to figure out how to re-mod the mod and let them all flee Russia for North America.