Home-Town Hockey

Canadians used to own the modern game of ice hockey. They developed it in the late 19th century after they got tired of a British sport called bandy.* They could usually be counted on to turn out the best amateur team in the world. Then last year, Toronto's Lyndhursts went to Stockholm and embarrassed all of Canada: they lost the international championship to the Moscow Dynamos, a bunch of hard-skating sportsmen from the MVD, Russia's security police.

"See Who Scored." Last fall the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association reached into the Far West and picked British Columbia's Penticton Vs to take a crack at regaining the championship. Canadians decided that the title was all but home. In the four years since they were organized, the Vs had developed into one of the slickest teams on ice.

Residents of Penticton (pop. 14,000) grow fruit to earn their living, but they live for hockey. On road trips the team is ferried by volunteer drivers in private cars; a women's auxiliary washes the players' jerseys and darns their socks. During the playoffs for the Canadian championship last May, when an elderly lady collapsed of a heart attack, she surprised no one with her last words: "Go see who scored that goal!" The entire team attended her funeral.

With spirit such as that, Penticton quickly earned a reputation as a fine place to play. Skaters drifted in from all over Canada. Veterans came out of retirement. Bernie ("Boom Boom") Bathgate brought 15 years of experience to the team; Mike Shebaga, 32 years old and scrawny as hockey players go, pulled on his pads and turned out to be a stickhandling Houdini.

Bawling Burgher. This month, hometown boosters followed the team to West Germany at their own expense to watch them fight to get the championship back. Wherever the Vs tuned up in practice games, Penticton rooters made a loud and loyal crew. To their surprise, they got a lot of outside support. While the Vs were trouncing a pickup team of Berliners, German spectators screamed: "Beat the Russians! Beat the Russians!"

In Prague, where President Antonin Zapotocky himself attended the games, the arena was packed with Heroes of Labor, Deserving Teachers of the People, Communist Activists. Cheers for the Canadians were diffident, and the game was rough. Czechs, who object to the Canadians' enthusiastic body checking, climbed up the backs of Penticton players and slashed with their skates, an unforgivable sin in the West. The Czech referees' whistles were remarkably silent. After the Vs had tied one game, 3-3, and won the next, 6-0, Penticton's player-coach, Grant Warwick, had to skate around the ice blowing kisses to calm the crowd.

But later, in hotel corridors and on dark street corners, citizens sidled up to the Canadians and whispered: "Beat the Russians! Canada good, America good." One of the Vs stopped to ask directions from a Prague burgher. He got a bawling out in reply. "Why didn't you beat us twice?" complained the Czech. Then he wagged a stubby finger. "You beat the Russians," he ordered.

Last week, as the tournament got under way in Duesseldorf, Dortmund, Krefeld and Cologne, the Vs had more than the Russians between them and the championship. Finland, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and the U.S. had also entered teams. Each of them had 36 games to go, but the Canadians began by making it look easy. In Dortmund's Westphalenhalle Arena they trounced the U.S., 12-1. Outside, in the cold German winter, a red-bereted corporal of the Canadian occupation army blasted on a bugle while his buddies jeered: "Yankees go home, and learn to play hockey."

* A haphazard form of hockey that was played on the English fens after late fall rains had frozen into thin sheets of ice.

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