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Donnellon: Watson sees warming trend in Flyers' Cold War

FORTY-ONE YEARS ago, amid incendiary rhetoric between the two countries not unlike the rhetoric of today, an NHL referee reportedly walked into the Flyers' locker room at the Spectrum before an extremely important game of hockey against the Soviet Red Army team and crossed the line of any definition of sportsmanship.

FORTY-ONE YEARS ago, amid incendiary rhetoric between the two countries not unlike the rhetoric of today, an NHL referee reportedly walked into the Flyers' locker room at the Spectrum before an extremely important game of hockey against the Soviet Red Army team and crossed the line of any definition of sportsmanship.

"Play your game, fellas," Joe Watson remembers referee Lloyd Gilmour telling him and his teammates, and a wink or nod was not needed. In the visitors' locker room was a Soviet Red Army team that had already embarrassed several of the NHL's revered franchises, leaving the Flyers as the league's last hope to save face from a series that was arranged to display North American superiority.

The 4-1 Flyers victory that followed, filled with cheap shots and Cold War implications, remains a historical thermostat of a time when international competition was used as a tool of war, or at least propaganda. Four years later, the United States led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; four years after that, the Russians returned fire by skipping the Los Angeles Games.

The U.S. hockey team's "Miracle on Ice" at the 1980 Winter Olympics, just before those boycotts, certainly fits inside of that narrative. But it was played in the early-morning hours back in the Soviet Union, and was more of a wake-up shock than a lived-through one.

The game between the Soviet Red Army team and the Flyers? That, everyone from Siberia to Sochi saw, felt, remembered. The president of Kazan, greeting Watson and the small band of Flyers alums who last week traipsed across the Atlantic for a series of "friendly" games, remembers being outraged as a boy. Other diplomats who played in or watched the four games played in Kazan, St. Petersburg and Moscow, all of similar age, had similar memories, making Watson's personal experience less about hockey and much more about, well, time travel.

"They couldn't believe I was still playing," said Watson, who at 73 was by far the oldest of the nine players who made the trip. The trip's organizer, former NHL player Scott MacGregor, found a few more team members once they arrived, including former Flyer Andrei "The Tank" Kovalenko.

"They told me there were 150 million people watching that game in Russia," Watson said.

"Everywhere we went, I got interviewed about the big, bad Flyers. They all wanted to know what we did, why they left the ice. I told them they were so much more skilled than we were. But we had to uphold the prestige of our league."

Although plans for the trip began last spring, Watson said he reached out to more than 150 former Flyers and got nine. Whether that was trepidation due to the headlines of the day, the time of year in Russia, or something completely unrelated, he wasn't sure. He just knows they missed out on some big-time international hijinks, like riding horses down the streets of St. Petersburg at 2 a.m. (a bar was involved), getting hustled for 1,800 rubles by a Joseph Stalin look-alike ("About 30 bucks," he said) or simply downing some homegrown vodka with his Russian hosts and opponents – this time the hockey served as a backdrop.

Good thing too, for the lads – who included Brad Marsh, Shjon Podein, Al Secord, Terry Carkner and the early-morning horseman, Lindsay Carson – did not fare well. They lost one game in a shootout after blowing a two-goal lead with three minutes left, and lost their next two before finally salvaging some respect with a final-game win – mirroring, in a small way, the way it played out back in 1976.

"Hey, we got three points on a tough road trip," Watson quipped.

This time, too, nobody was jumping from the penalty box to run over the other team's best player. Current diplomatic relations found no seepage here. Watson spotted Flyers jerseys with names like Giroux and Voracek in the stands, met Russian-speaking Flyers fans who, he said, pre-existed the arrival of rookie sensation Ivan Provorov.

"Mr. Snider used to always say, 'If you see Flyers jerseys in other countries, tell me,' " said Watson, who over the years has taken alumni teams all over Europe.

"Every time I saw one of those fans, I thought of Ed right away. And it brought a tear to my eye. He would have loved it."

Yeah, well, maybe that latter-day version would have. But Ed Snider's role in that 1976 game was legendary, too. The Soviet team left the ice after Ed Van Impe leveled Red Army star Valeri Kharlamov with an unpenalized check and came back on the ice, Watson tells his Russian audience, only after the Flyers' owner threatened he would not pay the Soviets. Forty-one years later, these stories proved as rich and funny to his hosts as they are to his audiences back home, fueling hours of camaraderie way beyond what the former Flyers defenseman hoped for.

He had only one regret, Watson said. He would have liked at least one more time traveler on the trip.

"I wish I could have played against just one of those guys from '76," Watson said. "That would have been fun. But none of them play anymore."

donnels@phillynews.com

@samdonnellon

Columns: ph.ly/Donnellon