Cold War Puck: The Beauties of Russian Hockey
Basically, outside of these two national and notional allegiances, I favored the Russian style of play, an intricate, flowing approach that preferred puck possession and teamwork to (and Flyers haters will find this contradictory) brute force and individual achievement. Call me a Commie, if you want. I prefer to think that I was looking ahead to the post-Cold War sports landscape, when the nationality of teams or athletes mattered less than their comportment and playing style.
.. There was perhaps no sports culture as distinct as that of Russian hockey.
.. The Soviet approach to hockey evolved in a vacuum, under the tutelage of Anatoli Tarasov, a self-made hockey mastermind who was tasked by Stalin after the Second World War with creating an ice-hockey program where none had existed before. He integrated elements from ballet, chess, and bandy, and put players through rigorous and unorthodox training rituals. (Vintage footage dug up by Gabe Polsky, the film’s director, who played hockey at Yale, suggests that the key to graceful hockey is doing lots of somersaults in practice.) The players lived together most of the year and played together in units of five for years on end. The result of all this, in the rink, anyway, was a free-flowing weave of improvisational keep-away, with the flamboyance, if not the laughs, of the Globetrotters on ice. Their greatest successes, and most aesthetically pleasing performances, came when they were coached by a dictatorial apparatchik and former player named Viktor Tikhonov, whom most of them came to hate. The irony was always there and is central to Polsky’s film: a rigid, oppressive system, at both national and team levels, created the freest, most expressive hockey there ever was.