Face-off at the Summit

by Ken; Mulvoy Dryden

The Canadians and the NHL were full of themselves before the series started. The Russians were unknowns, victors ad nauseum over Olympians from Sweden, Finland, Czechoslovakia, et al., but untested against NHL competition. Cocksure predictions of an 8-game sweep were not only the norm in Canada, but a national right (and rite). When the Canadians scored the first two goals of the series almost before the first puck dropped, all seemed right in Saskatchewan. But after that came debacle: Canada lost the game, 7-3, and therein lies Ken Dryden’s tale. Dryden was one of the top NHL goalies of the 1970s. He led the Montreal Canadiens to six Stanley Cups, won Rookie of the Year in 1972, and earned five Vezina Trophies as the best goalie in an NHL season. That he started four of the eight games against the Russians came as no surprise. The shock was that a star of Dryden’s magnitude was forced to change his entire goaltending style after losing his first two starts. Nor was he alone. His teammates were just as unprepared for a style of hockey they had never seen before. (I still recall the baffled expressions of the Canadian TV hockey “experts” after one of the losses.).. Today's hockey fans know a lot of National Hockey League players whose names end in “ov”--Afinogenov, Kozlov, Federov, Antropov, Chistov, Samsonov, etc. Most are Russian. Forty years ago, such a statement would be unheard of. The Cold War was on, and while Canadians and Russians played the same game, they did so in two hostile worlds. Their only hockey contact occurred in the Olympic Games when the Soviets played Canadian amateurs, not professionals from the NHL..Until this landmark beginning!

Genres: Hockey, Nonfiction, Sports

209 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1973

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ken Dryden was a 25 year old hockey goalie heading into his third year of professional hockey when he was chosen to be part of Team Canada, a team of NHL all-stars who were going to take on the Soviet National team in 1972. This was the first time that Canada's best pro hockey players would compete against the Soviets in what would be an eight game series for the ages. Dryden kept a diary of his experiences and a year later, collaborated with Mark Mulvoy of Sports Illustrated to create this interesting and insightful book.

As someone who collects books about this series, I found that this book brought a different perspective to many of the events of that September that have entered into Canadian hockey lore. The insights Dryden provides here on hockey, on the pressures of competition and on the cultural differences between Canada and the USSR at the time show a maturity beyond his years. I often shook my head and had to remind myself that this was a 25 year old athlete. You could almost feel the tension as Dryden described how he felt preparing for and playing in some of the key games of the series. His recounting of various famous events of the series is more objective than most, avoiding hyper-patriotism and a good-guy-bad-guy approach, while still acknowledging a deep desire to win. His assessment of the Soviet players was incredibly positive in the midst of a tense series -- remember this is a transcribed diary. It took other Canadians some time before they admitted how good the Soviets were and that we could learn something from them. Dryden took a number of his days off during the Russian portion of the series to visit Soviet training facilities, showing an intense curiosity and willingness to learn from his hockey opponents.

Even though I've read extensively about the series, I still learned new things from the book. For instance, though much has been made about the Canadians difficulties with the refereeing during the Soviet part of the series, I never realized that the Russians also had complaints about some of the refereeing of the American refs during the first four games, resulting in Canada agreeing to a change of referees in game four. Dryden emphasized the hope that this show of goodwill would be reciprocated if Canada experienced the same difficulties in Russia. They did, and it wasn't.

I whizzed through this book in two days. It was that compelling and interesting. Anyone who remembers where they were when Paul Henderson scored with 34 seconds left in game eight will love this book. Anyone too young to remember but who would like some insight into the how the NHL became a league of players from all over the world would learn about the foundations of that shift from a player who in 1972 was thinking years ahead of his time.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

While "Face-off at the Summit" is one of those "as told to" sports books with much more emphasis on information rather than literary writing, it is fascinating and worthy, to me, of all five stars. Ken Dryden was my hero when I was a young goaltender in high school and he was playing for the mighty Big Red of Cornell and the Montreal Canadiens. He was the thinking man's athlete, a man who studied all aspects of hockey and sports, in general. His account of the legendary eight-game series between the Canadian National Team and the Russian National Team in 1972 goes into great detail about the x's and o's of the team's play, the pride that was involved and the psychological warfare that was happening at the same time involving players, coaches, organizers, journalists and fans. If you like hockey, give it a read. And it was a Walt Day gift from my friend and fellow former hockey player, Tim Wade.

[Alexa]

HOCKEY IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A diary kept by the author who was the starting goalie for Team Canada in the 1972 Summit Series.Insightful and fun to look at 38 years later.

[Donny Aiken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Daily recap of Dryden's days during the series.