Road to Gold: The Untold Story of Canada at the World Juniors - Softcover

Spector, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1982111526 ISBN 13: 9781982111526

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Celebrate another historic gold medal with the behind-the-scenes story of the Canadian World Junior program, from bestselling author Mark Spector.

On the World Juniors hockey stage today, Canada is known as the team to beat. They hold the record for the most gold medals won (eighteen since the tournament’s inception), their games draw millions of fans each year, and the tournament serves as a showcase for each year’s best talent.

But things weren’t always so rosy. For years, Canada languished in obscurity at the World Juniors. Wearing the red-and-white wasn’t a mark of honour but merely a sideshow to the players, owners resented the interruption to their league operations, and Canada was an afterthought at the tournament. Canada was supposed to be better at hockey than any nation on earth, but no one took them seriously.

So, the team set out on a reclamation mission. The Program of Excellence was born, and with it, a new hope for hockey’s future in Canada. No more would Canada be content with merely showing up. Instead, each year, the country would send its best talent—from Gretzky to Lemieux to Crosby to McDavid—to reclaim its spot at the top of the hockey world.

Tracing the owner disputes, off-ice antics, and riveting on-ice action of nearly forty years at the World Juniors, Road to Gold is full of inside stories from hockey greats. And, this edition features a new chapter reliving the amazing final game against Russia in January 2020 that brought the gold medal back to Canada. Funny, smart, and clear-eyed, Mark Spector traces the remarkable rise of the Canadian World Junior program and shows how Canada created not just a new team, but a new dream for the sport.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Spector is a sports journalist for Sportsnet and has been reporting for the Canadian media for over thirty years. His career spans multiple mediums, from having hosted the Mark Spector Show on TEAM 1260, to being an Oilers beat reporter for the Edmonton Journal, to writing a national sports column for the National Post. He has interviewed some of the biggest sporting names of our generation, from Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier to Alex Rodriguez and Ichiro Suzuki, and he is the bestselling author of The Battle of Alberta. Mark lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Connect with him on Twitter @SportsnetSpec.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: The Meeting CHAPTER 1 The Meeting
“If you do this right, we’ll have success. And with your good players, we will have success.”

—MURRAY COSTELLO

Murray Costello sat in a chair off the lobby of Ottawa’s old Skyline Hotel, watching the junior hockey owners and executives file past. They walked by on their way to the meeting room, and he smiled. They emerged for a bathroom break, and he nodded. He was clearly available for a chat. But they wouldn’t break stride.

Nine o’clock became ten o’clock with no change. Costello had a copy of The Globe and Mail open in front of him, but he barely registered the articles, instead staring over the top of the paper as he staked out the lobby, like a secret agent in an old Get Smart episode. His focus was on the double doors of the meeting room across the hall, waiting for his moment.

The problem was, that moment wasn’t preordained. Inside the meeting room, the owners and operators of Canada’s Major Junior Hockey teams were gathered for their annual general meeting. Most of them had arrived in Ottawa completely oblivious to Costello and the pitch that he and his lieutenant, Dennis McDonald, had formulated over at the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. The owners had their own issues, generally of the micro variety, and they weren’t exactly falling over themselves to include Costello in their day.

“I sat there for a long time,” Costello said. “I wondered at times, ‘What the hell am I doing?’?”

What the hell was Costello doing there? To some degree, even he wasn’t sure.

It was May 1981. The New York Islanders and Edmonton Eskimos ruled their respective leagues. The PC, or personal computer, would be introduced to the world later that year. The movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was about to dominate the box office. The virus that causes AIDS was identified. Frequent flyer miles were invented.

And the World Junior Hockey Championships, as Canadians know them today, were born.

The tournament had been around since 1973, though it was no more popular among Canadian hockey fans than were the Izvestia Cup and the Swedish Games. In those early days, there was no guarantee the CBC would even televise the games. If Canada was in the gold medal game, it might be on TV. If not, then CBC Radio would broadcast the game. Maybe.

It didn’t help that Canada was rarely in the gold medal game, so most coverage of the tournament was purely academic. No one wanted to see the Soviets play Czechoslovakia back in 1981. Even the ratings for Canadian games were sketchy.

That indifference was killing Costello, a bespectacled, greying lifetime hockey man who was not quite fifty back in 1981. Costello was sick and tired of watching the antiquated Canadian national program produce ill-prepared teams that couldn’t compete with Russia, the reigning hockey superpower, at the World Juniors. He knew that Canada could—should—be the best hockey nation in the world.

Costello was the president of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, the forerunner to what is today called Hockey Canada. The CAHA was responsible for growing hockey in Canada, through both its programs that certified coaches from coast to coast and its organized age-group hockey from which the best kids would graduate to the junior ranks.

Each year, the CAHA and its thousands of volunteers tilled the fields, planted the seeds, and tended the crops of the hockey world’s most fecund soil—Canada—and then, when the best of the harvest reached Major Junior Hockey, the junior operators would pat the CAHA on the head and say, “We’ll take it from here.”

Costello and McDonald, his right-hand man at the CAHA, had watched this happen year after year. And for every bit as long, they watched as the Canadian junior team was doomed to failure.

Since the World Juniors tournament’s inception in 1974, when the International Ice Hockey Federation invited five nations to join Russia’s Under-20 team in what was then known as Leningrad (today it is Saint Petersburg), Canada had obliged by sending over its reigning Memorial Cup champions, plus a few last-minute pick-ups, to the tournament. There, Canada’s best junior team from the previous season would promptly get toasted.

The problems were many, and they were systemic.

The team that won the Memorial Cup in May tended to lose its best nineteen-year-old players the following season, when they turned pro. Sometimes, even the best eighteen-year-olds from the team would head to the National Hockey League, leaving that year’s champion without its best players at the World Juniors tournament in December.

There was also the culture shock. In the early days of the tournament, none of the kids had played on the larger European ice surface, and few of their coaches had any experience with game-planning for the different style of hockey played by the Europeans.

Even more foreign than the host country’s culture, though, was the on-ice officiating.

“Teams going over had no idea what they were going to face,” Costello said. “If you hit a guy hard, even if it was clean, it would be a penalty simply because it was a hard hit. And the European teams used the basketball pick play, where a guy would come in and block someone out. Over here, that would be an interference penalty, but they wouldn’t call it over there. Our players got frustrated, and of course the sticks would get going, and we’d then pay the price on the special teams.”

By the time the Canadian boys figured out what constituted a penalty, the team was often out of contention for the gold. And even in years like 1977 and ’78, when Canada medaled, there was still one final, intractable problem: We couldn’t beat the Russians.

As the head of the CAHA, Costello was the liaison between the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and the Canadian junior leagues. From his vantage point, he could clearly see the inherent negatives that accompanied sending over what was effectively just an enhanced club team, as opposed to a true national team. The rotating coaching staffs were fresh each year, which meant they encountered every problem for the first time, learned the hard lesson, and then were replaced by another bunch of first-timers the next year. Then those coaches would relearn the same lessons. There was no one to collect the intel and pass it down. No mechanism for amassing accrued knowledge.

Costello likened the process to soccer, where players earned a “cap” for every international game they played. “We were playing every year with zero caps,” he said. “We had to break this cycle, to prepare our players and coaches to be able to play the international game.”

For Costello, the final straw had come a few months before the Skyline Hotel meeting, as he watched the 1981 tournament unfold in what was then West Germany. The reigning Memorial Cup winners, the Cornwall Royals—a team that included Dale Hawerchuk, Doug Gilmour, and a nineteen-year-old Marc Crawford—added a few players from the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL) and boarded a flight for Fussen, Germany. There, they played the best Under-20 national teams from seven other countries. When the dust settled, Canada finished in seventh place—ahead of only Austria.

“When Germany beat Canada [7–6 in the Consolation...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982111526
• ISBN 13: 9781982111526
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar