Ed- The following is an excerpt from John U. Bacon’s latest book, The Greatest Comeback, How Team Canada Fought Back, Took the Summit Series, and Reinvented Hockey. If you’re familiar with the 1972 Summit Series, according to its principles and participants this is the best and most comprehensive accounting of that incredible sports moment of many written. If this is new to you, this book is the best introduction to one of the consequential moments in sports history, when East met West, when the hubris of liberal capitalism crashed into the cheap hypocrisy of totalitarian communism. It was the battle that inspired Rocky vs Drago, and introduced North America to the beautiful game played by the Soviets. And all these guys talked. The executives, coaches, players, and superstars of the next generation who were inspired by what they saw all agreed to let Bacon craft the definitive version of one of the great sports stories of all time. Well, most of it Mark Messier wrote the foreword.
Memories may fade as one gets older, but every Canadian hockey fan can probably still recite Foster Hewitt's words from Sept. 28, 1972. "Here's a shot.