The Night the Russians Came to Erie

February 7, 1980  ·  Erie, Pennsylvania

The Night the Russians Came to Erie
The Erie Blades and the Soviet Nationals

Two weeks before the Miracle on Ice, the best hockey team in the world played a minor league club in a field house off Route 8, and a town that had been asked to boycott the game sold it out instead.

The Erie Blades got home at half past seven in the morning. They had lost 5-3 in Baltimore the night before against the Baltimore Clippers and spent the dark hours on a bus, north through Maryland and Pennsylvania, and by the time they reached Erie on Thursday, February 7, 1980, the sun was up. That night, they were scheduled to play what was the best hockey team in the world at the time. The Soviet national team was on its way to Lake Placid for the Olympics, but would make a stop in Erie, Pennsylvania before the Games.

In fifteen days a roster of American college players would beat the Soviets 4-3 in the most famous American hockey game ever played, but nobody in Erie knew that yet, and nobody would have believed it if you told them that's what was going to happen. What people in Erie knew in early February of 1980 was that the team arriving at the Erie County Field House, out where Route 8 meets Interstate 90, had beaten the best of the National Hockey League in a three-game series the previous winter, and were the four-time defending Olympic champions. The Soviets had won gold in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. The last country to take an Olympic gold medal away from them was the United States, with the Forgotten Miracle at Squaw Valley in 1960.

Will the show go on?

The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan six weeks earlier, and by late January the game had become a local argument. Ed Bordenaro, president of the United Labor Leaders, called on ticket holders to send their tickets back. Dr. John Caruso, who owned the Blades, said he had no authority to call anything off and pointed at the sponsor, the U.S. Amateur Hockey Association.

By the time the boycott was called for, it was mostly a moot point because the Erie County Field House was already sold out.

So Dr. Caruso and the Blades did something better than argue. The team declared the game Patriotism Day, printed on the program that night, and it handed out more than 4,000 small American flags, one to every person coming through the doors. The Blades would also wear a small American flag patch high on the right side of the chest, opposite the heart.

"The 1980 Hockey Spectacular will go on as scheduled," Nick Polano told the wire services. Polano was the Blades' coach and general manager, a defenseman from Sudbury, Ontario, who had never played an NHL shift and would one day be the head coach of the Detroit Red Wings. He pointed out that President Carter was, at that moment, permitting Americans to compete against Soviets in sport. The Blades were being consistent with that. The Soviets were guaranteed $10,000 to play the game, which Polano said would cover their expenses and leave little else, and he said whatever was left over would go to fund the United States Olympic team.

The Soviets arrived in Erie Wednesday night. The Blades arrived early Thursday morning, off the bus from Baltimore.

Twenty-three Russians and an organ player

The Soviets were introduced one at a time during the pre-game. Vladislav Tretiak, the most famous goaltender alive, was on the sheet at number twenty. Valeri Kharlamov at seventeen, Boris Mikhailov at thirteen, Sergei Makarov at twenty-four, Viacheslav Fetisov at two, Alexei Kasatonov at seven, Vladimir Krutov at nine. The program billed them as the Soviet Nationals. It was not a touring selects team or a development squad. It was, name for name, the team that would take the ice at Lake Placid in a few weeks' time.

Erie applauded them politely, and with cowbells. There were no boos, or if there were you couldn't hear them on the television broadcast.

Then the Blades came out and the building came apart, loudly enough to almost bury the voice of the public address announcer. Number fourteen was Val James, a left wing from Ocala, Florida, who would play sixty-nine of Erie's seventy games that season and who, twenty months later, would become the first Black American to play in the National Hockey League. Number thirty was Norm LaPointe, in goal.

Calling the game on radio was the Blades' broadcaster, a twenty-eight-year-old named JP Dellacamera. Nineteen years later he would be the American play-by-play voice when Brandi Chastain won the Women's World Cup.

Then the anthems were played, and here the night produced its strangest image. The Soviet anthem in a minor league arena in northwestern Pennsylvania was played on the house organ, and 4,250 people stood in complete silence and listened to it. Nobody sang. Nobody jeered. Then came the American anthem, and the flags went up, and the building sang.

"After we got by their national anthem, I knew everything was going to be alright," Polano said afterward.

Let's do that hockey

The game itself was over quickly. Makarov scored at 3:25 of the first period, and the Soviets led 4-0 before the period ended. The final was 9-0.

The shot totals tell it better than the score does. The Soviets put sixty pucks on the Erie net. Erie managed seventeen. LaPointe played the first two periods and stopped thirty-three of the thirty-eight shots he faced, and by the end of the second he was visibly spent. Mark Evans, wearing number one because the Blades' regular starter Carey Walker was on loan to the Fort Worth Texans, played the third and faced the rest.

Only eight minutes in penalties were called all night, six of them on the Soviets. There were no fights. There were no shoving matches. Nobody so much as glared.

The one sustained noise in the building that was not affectionate was aimed at the officials, who got the full treatment, booed before the game and jeered throughout it, and who declined to call what most of the arena believed was a trip on Erie center Steve Stockman in the third period.

Erie's own chances came and went. LaPointe made a save on Alexander Golikov that Dennis Michalski, covering for the Erie Morning News, described as the standout moment of a standout period. At the other end, Sylvain Cote and Stockman both got in alone on Vladimir Myshkin and both were turned away. Myshkin had shut out the NHL All-Stars the previous winter. Tretiak, the man people had paid to see, sat and watched the whole thing from the bench.

When it ended, most of the building stayed. They applauded, and they kept applauding while the two teams lined up and shook hands.

The full game survives in three parts: first period, second period, and third period.

Afterwards

Alex Szabo was sixty years old, a newspaper pressman, a Blades season ticket holder, and he spent the evening rooting through a white megaphone. He was born in Hungary. "I hate the Russians, and I am against Communism," he told the Associated Press, "but this is sport."

The Soviets skipped their own press conference. Coach Viktor Tikhonov and Makarov had both been expected, but the thirty-one-person party left the building for the hotel almost immediately. They were in New York two days later, at Madison Square Garden, where they beat the United States Olympic team 10-3 before heading north to Lake Placid.

The Blades had Friday off and hosted the Hampton Aces on Saturday. They were second in their division that week. They would win the Eastern Hockey League championship that spring, the middle title of three straight.

And on February 22, in the second period at Lake Placid, Viktor Tikhonov pulled Vladislav Tretiak and sent out his backup. The goaltender who finished the most famous American hockey game ever played, on the wrong end of it, was Vladimir Myshkin. Fifteen days earlier he had recorded a shutout in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Norm LaPointe, asked that Thursday night in Erie how it had felt, said he had always played well against Russian clubs, and that he had gone in wanting to win.

"But I wasn't expecting a miracle."

Sources

• Gary Mihoces, Associated Press, February 8, 1980, as printed in the Hazleton Standard-Speaker, the Pottsville Republican, and the Gettysburg Times.
• United Press International, February 8, 1980.
• Associated Press, January 31 and February 1 and 7, 1980.
• Dennis Michalski, Erie Morning News, February 8, 1980.
• Erie Blades official program, February 7, 1980.
• WQLN television broadcast of the game, February 7, 1980.
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 18, 1980.
• hockeyDB, Erie Blades 1979-80 roster and statistics.