#green unit

Quick overview

Titania in some ways got screwed by the newest update. We were expecting something amazing but then tragedy struck when all she got was a legendary emerald axe with res tactic? Mind you res tactic is the important thing here for a lot of reasons. For a start, Titania is currently the only unit in the game able to run 3 tactic skills at once meaning she can be a deadly buff bot to the rest of the team. Still in order to do so she leaves her self wide open to reds to be careful.

Base kit

Draconic Poleaxe's name is very misleading just being a glorified emerald axe, however having res tactic as a refine is really nice for the most part so it's not all bad. Guard helps her tanking role as it stops units like Reinhardt charging their specials. Reciprocal aid is nice for healing allies though nothing ground breaking. Finally armoured blow is nice I guess? Honestly Titania is a defensive unit by nature and probably won't be needing it all that much. To round her out iceberg or glacies is suggested due to her res stat. Any C skill works but the most notable shoutout is tactic skills due to being able to apply 3 tactic skills at once.

Pros + Cons

+ A legendary emerald axe with res tactic is nice I suppose

+Killer Blue mage counter

+Being a cavalry unit means 3 move and horse buffs which is nice.

-If you use her trio tactics then you leave her wide open to red units

-Very poor attack at base

-Lacks diversity a lot of the time making her easy to plan for.

Partners

So there is one unit in the game who heavily benefits and synergises so well with Titania. And that unit is Eirika. Because of Titanias triple tactic skills she guarantees Eirika at least +6 in 3 stats on her self and then +6 from her weapons effect, effectively putting her at +12 in all stats, not to mention Eirika able to give Titania buffs as well. Whats more Titania thanks to her legendary weapon's main passive can demolish blue units who oppose Eirika. Overall She's the best team mate Eirika could hope for. Outside of that any mixed team or horse emblem team is glad to have her, units like Camilla who can give buffs to horse units while not themselves a horse unit are also enjoyed.

Suggested set(s)

Tactina

Suggested ivs: +atk/spd -hp

Draconic poleaxe, reposition, iceberg

Slot A = Distant counter, fury, fierce stance, close defence

Slot B = Guard

Slot C = tactic skill, ploys or any c skill

Sacred seals: def tactic, drive skills.

Weapon refinery: In this set we're abusing her tactic refine, however if you don't plan to run tactics then go with something like +spd or +res

Titania is the only unit able to use triple tactics as of now and thats part of the main reason to use her, with def tactic as a seal she can pick either the spd or atk tactic in the C slot, with atk tactic being the more prefered choice, while someone units may enjoy the spd to prevent doubles.Guard allows her to stop units breaking through her and thus stop her providing buffs, while you could use QR she's generally speedy as is. As for her A lot, DC is a no brainer and she's still up there pick wise however fury is a nice budget option or stance skills.

Dual phase, green bean machine

Suggested ivs: +atk/spd -hp/def

Slaying axe+, reposition, iceberg

Slot A = Fury, distant counter

Slot B = desperation, green tome breaker

Slot C = ploys or any c slot

Sacred seals: spd +3, atk+3, ploys

Weapon refinery: Go +spd or +res, +res more so if using DC or ploys.

“It was a joyful, undeniable fact: The Greens were made for each other.”

Part 1>>

Part 2>>

Part 3>>

Part 4>>

Part 5>>

Part 6>>

Part 7>>

Part 8>>

Part 9>>

Content warning: this is a story largely about institutional abuse, in some cases of teenage boys, including physical, emotional, and political abuse or imprisonment. Also, discussions of disordered eating. 

Please only do, like, 50% of what Igor Larionov would do. The ‘being a bro’ and ‘committing acts of political dissidence’ half. Take your meds, eat and drink what you gotta, rest sometime, and I’ll see you in the morning. 

“When he was in a bad mood, he would lock himself in a shell. He had his own understanding of life and of hockey, which he held to firmly, and revealed rarely….”

[Sergei Makarov in his Red Army sweater, coming over the boards for a shift with a determined expression.]

Sergei Makarov was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia’s Detroit. His parents didn’t bother to send him to daycare, because they always knew where he would be, toddling around the apartment block, pushing a puck.

His favorite game was playing the “Makarov Championship” with his older brothers. Kneeling on the floor of their apartment to bat a puck around, they each pretended to be one of the three famous teams in Moscow. Nikolai, already a teenager, picked Dynamo, Yuri would be Spartak, and baby Sergei imagined himself as CSKA.

Outside the Makarov home, those teams had secret identities of their own. CSKA was naturally favored by the military brass. Dynamo’s biggest fans were intelligence officers—the KGB. (I don’t know if anyone liked Spartak.) 

Nikolai would soon be chosen by CSKA’s farm team. Tween Sergei visited whenever he could—not so much to see his brother, but his brother’s new teammate, a winger like Sergei wanted to be, named Valeri Kharlamov.

When Nikolai could come home, Sergei would beg him to teach him all of Kharlamov’s new moves. When he couldn’t copy them all to Sergei’s satisfaction, Nikolai pled ‘being a defenseman’, and invited Kharlamov home for dinner to meet his biggest fan. Nikolai was traded back to Chelyabinsk’s senior team, where he would have his own successful career, but the impression Kharlamov left on Sergei lingered.

[Two black and white pictures of Sergei and Nikolai Makarov on the ice. In the first, it’s extremely hard to tell which one is ten years older than the other. In the second, Nikolai is hanging off his brother while Sergei looks amused.]

With movie-star cool looks, he grew up confident and fiercely independent. By the time he was 17, Sergei’s two passions were ‘Kharlamov’ and ‘quitting hockey.’ When the team scraped together a win, Sergei was most of the reason. So when the team lost, his coaches would point to him for failing. Sergei would snap back about why they even needed him if he sucked so much, and so on.

It was only when it got up to the head coach of the senior team, who called him up to stop him walking, that Chelyabinsk started winning. When he made the junior national team, they won gold. 

Coach Tikhonov invited him to practice with the big boys. Then he added the rookie to the men’s national team roster for the ’78 Worlds. Then they won gold. It was the start of a long, strange pattern: for every major international tournament, Coach Tikhonov liked to bring a new rookie. 

CSKA decided they were interested in another Makarov brother after all. Sergei and another prospect from the junior national team, a left winger named Vladimir Krutov, joined a roster already stacked with famous players like Boris Mikhailov, young star Slava Fetisov, and, of course, Kharlamov. 

Vova, 1960

[A headshot of Vladimir Krutov in the famous green sweater that the National team's top line wore in practice. He has a round face, very blue round eyes, and a gentle expression.]

“Volodya was such a dependable and steadfast man that I would have gone anywhere with him — to war, to espionage, into peril.”

Playing in Moscow’s backstreets, the boys had a nickname for Vladimir Krutov—Пупсик (“Pupsik”) means “sweetie” or “babydoll”. As a young man he picked up another name that doesn’t need translation: “Tank.” 

With a cherubic, pink-cheeked face and easy smile, he inspired affection in very nearly everyone who met him, and kept it with a death-defying loyalty. He couldn’t stand, or understand, unfairness: if someone went after his friends, on or off the ice, he’d dive in to sort it out. 

But when authority figures treated him badly, his fairness and faithfulness butted heads. His best friend described a moment when, as a teenager, he took a puck to the face and fell down, then skated unsteadily to the team doctor. The coach screamed at him for coming off before a change. “Vladimir was crushed. Never before—or since—had anyone questioned his guts.” But he simply stood there and took it without talking back, as if he couldn’t imagine a coach could do wrong.

He wasn’t the enforcer you’d expect, though. In three World Juniors he always came out the top scorer, his speed and strength catching the attention of Canadian juniors who’d one day be his teammates.

In ’79 Vova was called up from CSKA’s junior team to join the men for a few games, and scored 4 goals in a game against arch-nemesis Dynamo. The next year Vova and Sergei both scrambled into the CSKA lineup full-time, and Coach Tikhonov decided Vova would be his rookie of the year. He was headed to the 1980 Olympics, without having even played a World Championship at the men’s level. 

“For American people, selective memory, it’s a national thing,” Slava says about 1980. “I admit, I own one of the most famous silver medals in sports history. Correct? Done?”

[An action shot of Vova sprawled in the crease beside the American goaltender]

The Miracle on Ice story looks up at the Soviet team from under the chin. But Kharlamov and goaltender Vladislav Tretiak were Coach Tarasov’s giants, not Coach Tikhonov’s. Slava and Sergei were only 21 years old. Lyosha, 20. Vova was 19. The player who would make him and Sergei world-famous was another teenager, not even on the team. I’m not saying the US’s win wasn’t wonderful, but it wasn’t a simple or satisfying end—just the beginning of an unraveling.

[Vova throwing his arms in the air as the American goaltender turns to see the puck bouncing out of the net behind him]

[Sergei carrying the puck through open ice. His stick is tangled with two American defenders’, but he’s still got the puck between his feet]

Vova scored the first goal in the game, and Sergei tied it back up before the end of the first. (In an underdog story, what does it say when we don’t name the 19 year old who’d never been here before, and stood up to the pressure at only 5 foot 9? Some college boys played a game against another boy called Baby. Any way we spin that is a choice.)

But Tretiak had let in two as well, so Tikhonov pulled the best goalie in the world after twenty minutes. He put in Vladimir Myshkin, who will be remembered to history as “Not Tretiak” (or just as Tretiak: many people think Tretiak played the Miracle game). He seemed to lean on other defensemen than Slava and Lyosha, despite how they’d helped set up those goals: the other d-men were older, and they were from the contingent of the national team that didn’t play for CSKA most of the year, but for Dynamo.

Remember, the KGB’s favorites. And Tikhonov had been trained there, years before. Maybe Tikhonov wanted to please somebody, wanted a different position, coaching Dynamo during the season instead of CSKA, which was still packed with players who Tarasov, not Tikhonov, had chosen. If he had played Tretiak and Tretiak won, in their hearts people would still have given the win to Tarasov, not Tikhonov. That was only rumor, but hey, that’s Russia. What mattered was respect. 

“Tikhonov was quiet like a fucking rabbit after this game,” Slava says. “But he had no choice but to stick with us, and we took over the world, just like that.”

Tikhonov’s loss in February 1980 was followed by another he might eventually have regretted more. 

Vova had scored as many goals as Boris Mikhailov, a legend on the team. Sergei, just behind him, tied for points and squeaked passed Kharlamov in goals. But all the pieces around the two young stars had been Coach Tarasov’s—30, 32, 32, 35. Old, old, old. Coach Tikhonov scrambled the plans, put the rookies together, and went hunting for a center for them.

Igor, 1960

[A candid headshot of Igor Larionov in practice. He has blue eyes and an expression I can either describe as ‘wistful’ or ‘pouty.’]

If you like horror movies, spoiler: Igor Larionov will be Coach Tikhonov’s ‘final girl’.

Just down the river from Moscow, Igor was born in Voskresensk, a one-stoplight town that eventually grew to two. Voskresensk’s team, Khimik, is a bit of a spoiler too: they might not be very good, but they’re good at kicking the shit out of Moscow. 

His grandfather had been kicked out of Moscow for mocking the regime. His parents had been raised as laborers, who moved from peasant farming to the town as factories grew. Igor loved his parents and his hometown, but already from a little distance. Unlike the Makarovs, he never felt quite the same as his brother, who played hockey too but who Igor thought wasted every opportunity with some knucklehead move. No one else ever seemed to see the opportunities Igor did, waiting spaces for a perfect plan to slither through. He was always small, and he had a lot of thoughts about everything, and even more feelings. Most of those feelings ended with “f— you.” He liked people a lot, but he would never feel sure enough if they liked him.

Apparently he loved ‘80s glam rock music.

No one noticed when he started to play for Khimik. His second season, he put up 45 points in 43 games, and that was enough to draw attention. In the fall of 1980 CSKA played Khimik, and before the game Coach Tikhonov sent a note inviting the 19 year-old to meet outside the rink. He made him the usual offer: sign with CSKA instead, and maybe you’ll make the national team.

Igor said something like, “Uh, I have a game to play? (F— you),” and picked up five more points against CSKA that night.

Igor knew signing with Coach Tikhonov’s CSKA was bad news. He knew other players from Voskresensk who had passed through CSKA’s grinding system, and who intimated that the coaching was nothing like Khimik’s. He knew that once you travelled to Moscow’s training facility, there wouldn’t be any going home on weekends. Worst, once you signed as an officer of the Army, he knew that breaking those contracts counted as treason. He was the teenage geek being invited to a party in the woods by the lake where teenagers always get murdered by the lake monster.

But he was also a teenage geek getting invited to a party. 

He had gotten to go to World Juniors U-20 twice, both times with Vova. Like most people, Igor liked Vova rather helplessly, and he had loved traveling. He was proud of his English, proud of his reading and writing, and proud of his ability to understand people. Hotels full of visiting teams had been like feasts: he loved meeting other players and snatched up every opportunity to talk with them. He liked to sit in the stands to watch every game he didn’t have to play in, and cheered for his opponents. He refused to call them ‘rivals’, or 'enemies.' He thought that was how you talked about soldiers and war, not players of a game.

That year in U-20 Vova had been the top junior scorer as usual, but Igor had been voted the MVP. He’d been sure it meant something, that the two of them would be going places, together. Then almost as soon as they’d returned from World Juniors, Tikhonov had appeared in a whirlwind and whisked Vova away on an American adventure, off to the Olympics--alone. Igor watched the Miracle game on TV with his Khimik teammates, and realized he was running out of time. 

With 20 looming, the only way he’d ever travel again would be if he could make the men’s national team too. Igor was proud of his play, and he knew that he was good enough to make the national team while playing on any team he wanted—as long as it was Moscow’s. No one who cared would keep watching Khimik.

And at 20, like everyone else in Russia, he was already in debt—those two years of mandatory military service. Spartak was courting him that year too: their coach acted friendly, and bought Igor food, and offered to help his family. But Igor knew Spartak’s coach was out of favor with the Army officials, and Tikhonov was in. So even if he signed with Spartak and tried to fulfill his service through work assignments and trainings on their side of Moscow, he could be mysteriously called up to “active duty” on CSKA’s side at any moment.

At least, he thought, Tikhonov was honest. He knew something was wrong, or he maybe he just thinks he should have, looking back. But he was lonely. 

While Igor was overthinking everything, Coach Tikhonov played Sergei and Vova with a center named Viktor Zhluktov for the rest of the ’80-81 season. Viktor Zhluktov probably has a rich interior life like anyone else: for our purposes he is a transparent cut-out with “Mean Girl” stamped on his forehead. He even has an evil mustache. 

[An old Soviet graphic with a headshot of Viktor Zhluktov. He has a really bad mustache.]

Vova probably thought he was nice. 

Igor, who was still with Khimik and totally didn’t care, thought Viktor “did not shine as a player, but thanks to his faultless obedience to Tikhonov, he got onto the national team with no problem.”

By August 1981, Coach Tikhonov was ready to make the team a little more obediently his. He told Kharlamov not to bother joining the national team for that fall’s Canada Cup: he was getting too old. 

Kharlamov had been privately planning to retire before the winter, but he’d wanted to travel with the team and play one last time, a goodbye tour. While driving back to Moscow with his wife Irina, he was killed in a car crash on August 27. 

Overnight, it was official: Vova became the best left winger outside the NHL by default. He inherited CSKA’s top line spot, the top line on the national team too. Sergei, who had just lost his childhood friend, rose silently on the right. 

That summer Igor signed as a private in the Army. He was not going to be a good soldier, and he knew it. But he reported to Moscow’s training camp.

Main

He hated being called a robot as much as he hated being called a soldier. He didn’t know what the world wanted the Green Unit to do on the ice or off it, how they had to behave, before someone would believe they had feelings. On the worst days they were too tired and numb to feel anything else.  

When he’d met Bobby Clarke, who he thought looked like a hockey angel with a blond halo and no teeth, Bobby commented about the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Igor didn’t know how to say that he’d definitely never been allowed to go to Afghanistan, and under the uniform he didn’t deserve to be a soldier, for good or bad. The national team was a tool of the Soviet government: at the same time it was a comfort for ordinary people in cold little apartments in mining towns where the players grew up and also a prop in the illusions that kept everything how it was. 

The illusion went skin deep: every time they left Russia, Igor was issued a snappy winter coat and brand-name Western clothes, so no one would think the Soviets looked poor.

[A black and white photo of the Green Unit posing, smiling except for Igor, in matching windbreakers with saddle shoulders and bold stripes. This was a hot look, about 10 years before the Soviet Union Costuming Department thought it was a hot look]

Underneath the coat or the beautiful red sweater, everything was a mess. At one point, at a tournament in Canada, a Canadian player would hit Igor from behind. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the Soviet management hadn’t provided enough hockey pads. Igor was wearing a partial set he’d borrowed from a high school team that played in the host arena earlier that day. (Across Europe and Canada I bet there are grown men, still hockey fans now, who have no idea they once owned game-worn gear from the world’s top scorers. To Igor’s fans those pieces might be worth as much as he ever earned in his CSKA career.) He would play the rest of that tournament with broken ribs.

The only outsider he’d met who seemed to understand, however briefly, was their friend Vanya. Asked what it was like playing against those Russian robots, Wayne said, 

“Robots don’t hurt when they lose.”

By June 1985, Slava was recovering from that knee injury that had sidelined him for half the last season. He and his little brother Tolya, now a CSKA rookie, drove back for the start of training. Their car was hit, and Tolya was killed. Slava thought about leaving that season, but their parents told him to keep going, and just try to live for two people.

In November, the players at Arkhangel heard a rumor: someone had written an article, in a Soviet paper, that criticized the hockey program. Anything that wasn’t awe was criticism. Someone got their hands on a copy, and Igor, Vova, Sergei, and Slava huddled around their usual table that evening, hiding each other as they read it in turns. Igor reread it twice. He’d read Canadian and American papers that dragged the Soviet system, but never something like this, that got it--almost--right. It didn’t have all the details to understand the illusion--how they trained, how Tikhonov acted behind Arkhangel’s walls--but it guessed some.

Glasnost was beginning, a long rustling cracking thaw opening new streams of information and communication like Igor had dreamed. The Canucks drafted him that year, and then Vova. The Devils had dibsed Slava and Lyosha a few years before, and the Flames wanted Sergei. There was a place for them, waiting, if they could ever get to the NHL. But there wouldn’t be any thaw in Arkhangel as long as Tikhonov ruled it.

The ’85 World Championships were held in Prague, and ’86 in Moscow. Igor played both, and nothing else. For two years, no one saw him outside the Soviet Union. 

In December of ‘85, CSKA was supposed to tour North America. Igor was dressed and ready. Then he heard his passport, which he had used a hundred times before, had run into problems. Coach told him not to worry, but to stay behind in Russia and--how convenient--keep training for the championships in Moscow. Igor woke up at three in the morning to watch the games he was supposed to be playing. He learned that Canadian journalists were asking about him: apparently, he had tonsillitis. Igor wasn’t entirely sure where his tonsils were. 

Two months later CSKA played in Sweden. Strange, how his tonsils still weren’t better, and his passport was still missing. Two nights before they were set to leave Tikhonov called him into the office, in front of the team, and told him so. But the next evening Tretiak, now a more senior officer, came out to visit the barracks. He hugged Igor and promised him he would do what he could to get the passport by the time they were supposed to leave the next morning. Igor went to bed hoping. At 4:30 AM the coaches woke him just to tell him the passport wasn’t there yet, so the team really would be leaving without him. 

The third time it happened, he was told to go back to the passport office to file everything all over again--maybe he had fucked up his passport. He didn’t bother. Taking away travel had been one thing. But doing it in front of the team, in front of the Green Unit, so that he knew that they knew that he had let them down somehow, broke his heart. 

He was still allowed to play inside the Soviet Union. As long as he was with CSKA, the other Greens treated him the same as always. If they had known how bad things were going to get, Igor thought they would have done more sooner, but he knew that they didn’t understand what was happening. In between games, he spent his days in office buildings, being grilled about suspicious activities like listening to rock music, calling his mom too often, or kissing Canadians. 

“I was at fault all around. That I gladly gave interviews to journalists. That I liked the NHL...that I like rock music. That the living standard there impressed me. All this was raked up into a pile. I was the enemy. Because, you see, if I liked the American way of life, then in general I was an American by heart. All of this they said about me.

By nature, I am clearly a Russian. I do not like everything in America. It cannot be that somewhere is as in a fairytale, and somewhere else is total darkness.

Particularly, it seemed, my [friendliness] offended the preservers of government secrets….I also knew a little English. Therefore I had the possibility to rub elbows with whomever I might come in contact: hockey players, journalists and even immigrants. And, they assumed, to each of them I could give important information--everyone getting an equal share, no doubt, in order to be fair.”

He couldn’t talk to his friends from other countries, or his Russian friends either when they traveled without him. On the street outside between the rink and the party offices, none of his former fans would speak to him, except to ask or tell him their opinion if he really was a traitor.

He was wanted everywhere but home. Obviously, no other country believed that a 25 year-old athlete who had been the best in the world six months before had been brought down by tonsillitis multiple times in a row. There’s only so many tonsils a person can have. Obviously, every other country thought Igor must want to defect, the one thing he did not want and couldn’t convince anyone of. So each host on the international hockey circuit was bouncing on their toes, first Canada, then Sweden and so on, thinking maybe the Soviet Union would slip up and let him come to their tournament, he'd defect, and then they’d get to keep him. Obviously, the Soviets noticed that, and squeezed tighter.

Each time the team left on tour, he was told to spend his time alone training harder and hope. If he was good enough, maybe he’d make the next tournament. His body, always a battle-ground with Coach Tikhonov, became a hostage situation. The more Tikhonov told him to train, the less he ate. Eventually he was eating mostly fruit, and restricting his water intake. 

He stopped pretending to defer to anyone.  He used to be the sober one between his hot-head wingers, and now he egged every fight on. Sometimes he faked an American accent, calling Coach “Tikhonoff” the way American broadcasters had at the '81 Olympics.

One day at the rink he bumped into figure skater Lena Batanova, who “knew nothing about hockey and could not have cared less.” She had been through worse training than he had growing up, only to win two World Championships, and then be slighted from a third. They understood each other without having to say anything.

[Igor washing dishes in their Moscow apartment, turning to glance at Lena pressing up him.]

That summer he stayed up late talking with his friends, and realized he wanted to marry Lena. He asked her the next morning, and she said yes. Behind Igor’s back, Slava, Vova, Sergei, and Lyosha went to Coach Tikhonov’s office, and told him that they would play every other day of the year if they had to, but they would be going to Igor’s wedding. Coach wouldn’t allow the three days for a traditional Russian wedding, but he had to give Igor one.

Waking up the morning after the wedding, Igor checked the mail and found a summons to appear before the Central Committee of the Communist Party. His friends, who I imagine lying hungover on his and Lena’s new couch and floor, rushed for their unused books to help him study up on Communist doctrine, in case he got quizzed. This is presumably when Lena woke up, realized she’d married a whole line of hockey players for their one communal brain cell, and rolled back over. Igor reported the next morning, probably with flashcards Vova had made for him in his pocket.

The Party officials congratulated him on getting married and gave him the wedding gift they were sure no one else would have gotten: his passport. We have to guess the logic here, if there was one. It’s possible the Party thought he wouldn’t risk his wife, or that two years had just been enough to realize the team wasn’t working without him. 

But he was allowed to go to Canada for the Calgary Cup before the end of ‘86, and everyone had questions about his two years of tonsillitis. Igor, for the first time in his life, didn’t talk. But that just left the hockey world to gossip. Two months later it was announced he’d be in Quebec City for another tournament, and right before they arrived a Quebec newspaper printed a version of the night out with Gretzky--with quotes, they claimed, from Wayne. This time the tournament organizers called someone from every team up for a pregame presser. I imagine Igor shrugging at his KGB handlers and sliding away to the stage: nothing could stop him talking now.

Except the Canadian journalists. They wanted to interview Team Canada first. Igor stewed, and then looked up to see an oncoming Wayne. Someone had asked him about the alleged quotes in the article, which Igor had snagged a copy of to read the second they let him loose in Canada. Apparently Wayne hadn’t. 

“‘Believe me, Igor,’” Igor remembers Wayne blurting out. “‘I didn’t say what was printed in the paper. I’ll tell them it didn’t happen! But what is your position now?’”

“‘Do not worry,” Igor promised him. “‘Now, everything is okay.’”

“Oh, awesome,” (I’m assuming again) Wayne said. “So do you want to come over later and hang out in my mom’s basement?!”

“If the KGB pulls a gun, then call me.” --Wayne Gretzky

Weirdly, I’ve never seen this inspirational quote cross-stitched on someone’s wall. 

The next Canada Cup was held in August ‘87 in Hamilton, Ontario, which is like, basically next door to Wayne’s parents’ house. So the afternoon before the first game, Wayne sent his dad Walter to the hotel where the Soviet team was staying. Walter asked in Ukrainian if he could chat with Igor, who had to come down to the hotel lobby to meet him, since visitors were absolutely not allowed to wander up to players’ rooms. Walter invited his son’s friend over for dinner. Igor cut eyes at the KGB agent in the corner, and said he had to go upstairs and ask Coach. Tikhonov said no before Igor started talking.

Igor came back downstairs and apologized to Walter, who thought hard for a minute. He told Igor to ask what if the whole Green Unit went to Wayne’s house for team bonding? Coach Tikhonov considered, and said no, and Igor went back to Walter. 

Walter hitched up his suspenders, and announced to the KGB that he would talk go to Coach Tikhonov now.

He told Tikhonov he would be honored if Coach came to dinner at his house that evening, and if Coach felt like it, he might bring the boys over too. Tikhonov said he’d love to. 

Tikhonov, Igor, Vova, Sergei, Slava, Lyosha, and a KGB operative spent a delightful half hour packed in a car together driving to the Gretzkys' house, where Walter and Phyllis were throwing a cookout. Walter and some of his local buddies had barbecue and corn on the cob on the grill, and Phyllis had quizzed her son about his Moscow trip before throwing up her hands in despair and making a big batch of her mother’s Polish dumplings and sausage.

Nothing makes me happier than the image of Wayne Gretzky, beaming from ear to ear, handing famously fussy little Igor Larionov a piece of barbecued corn on the cob. Igor had to explain that yes, they had corn in Russia, but they ate it on a plate and not like squirrels. Walter offered him a beer, and Igor looked to Coach Tikhonov before saying no. Tikhonov allowed the players to have a soda.

Wayne started asking him how everything had been since the last time they hung out, and didn’t get why his friend wouldn’t talk to him at first. Igor might answer one question, and then act like he didn’t understand. Sergei and Vova really didn’t speak English, and kept elbowing Igor to explain what was going on and why Wayne was smiling at them like that, but Igor was still pretending he only spoke Russian and hesitated to translate for them. Finally Wayne realized Igor was clamming up every time Tikhonov got within earshot.

Wayne went to Walter to change the game plan. Walter would use his Ukrainian to ask Coach Tikhonov about his many amazing accomplishments, while Wayne told the whole party he wanted to show the other boys his medals, which were all down in the basement. Unfortunately the Gretzky family’s basement was very small, and housed Wayne’s many, many medals, so only two people could possibly fit down there at a time: one Gretzky, and one Russian. Tikhonov thought about it, decided he didn’t care about someone else’s medals, and gave the okay.

 Just in case, Wayne deputized his dad’s buddy Charlie, who did not speak Russian or anything like it but was somebody’s dad from suburban Ontario, to chat up the KGB agent.

So Wayne began to escort the Green Unit, one by one, down to his family’s basement. At the bottom of the stairs, he handed them a beer. The two of them chugged their beers together, trying not to take suspiciously long or laugh too loud, and then ran back up to change out for the next boy.

Nothing happened that night. It didn’t change anything, except that Tikhonov never found out. The Greens had been able to get one over on him, because they didn’t have to do it alone.

Main

We have to talk about Wayne.

[A black and white photor of Wayne Gretzy, with a sultry mullet, smiling at the camera.]

I did not want to talk about Wayne, here. But it’s like Wayne Gretzky has bodyslammed his way into my kitchen and been chatting all month.

If you google it, Wayne Gretzky’s family background comes up as Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Polish, all of those or just ‘something suspiciously Russianish.’ (If I spell his name wrong somewhere it’s because 1) I can’t spell 2) I’m still dealing with how it would more properly be pronounced “Hretzky”.)

The region his grandparents left just before 1918 had been several countries that don’t exist anymore, and mostly a war zone. At home, they spoke Ukrainian. Wayne’s father Walter Gretzky grew up in Ontario, in the Ukrainian language, and in hockey, but when he tried out for the NHL in ’54 he was told that he “just wasn’t big enough” for Canada’s game at 5’9”. That same year Coach Tarasov had brought his Soviet team to their very first World Championships. They won an unexpected gold, and they were…undersized.

By the ’60s, Valeri Kharlamov hit the world stage…at a glorious 5’8”. (He wasn’t even the top scorer that first year—that went to Anatoli Firsov, also 5’9”.) Walter’s son was weaving between tin cans and bleach bottles in the backyard, while Coach Tarasov taught his skaters to circle cones. 

Krutov, Larionov, and Makarov stood 5’9”, 5’9” and 5’8” all together. None of them would have been favorites to make the NHL if they had been born in Canada in the ’50s (or today). Wayne had to go and be a 6 foot freak, but he grew up playing his dad’s short hockey. Swooping ballet-and-chess hockey. You know, Soviet hockey. 

"The Soviets and Gretzky changed the NHL game,” says Ken Dryden. "Gretzky, the kid from Brantford with the Belarusian name, was the acceptable face of Soviet hockey. No Canadian kid wanted to play like Makarov or Larionov. They all wanted to play like Gretzky."

Before the ’81 final Coach Tikhonov hammered on Slava’s shoulder and told the Green Unit, “‘You’re going to play all the time against him. Every time he’s on ice, you have to go.’”

Sergei and Slava knew Wayne’s game already, from the ’78 World Juniors.

[Teenage Slava and Wayne holding each other in the handshake line. Wayne is making eye contact with the camera and I want to smack him with a rolled up newspaper.]

“I never give him space, I never give him time,” Slava said. “I knew he was going to kill us. If I would say I knew all the time what he would do, I would be a fool. That’s why he’s the Great One. He’s got lots of—what you call them?—in his sleeve, to pull out.”

The Canadians put on the pressure at first, generating lots of shots, but the Soviet game didn’t care about shot differential. By the second, the Green Unit got bored of shutting down shots and confiscated the Canadians’ puck. With Sergei and Vova sliding in and out of that tight formation around Igor, and Slava and Lyosha swinging around them like counterweights, they passed it back and forth instead of forward, often sliding it out sideways to a player they couldn’t possibly see coming in hot behind them.

[Vova, skating daintily down the ice into the attacking zone, about to catch the puck out of the air with his stick.]

Igor, who was starting to see himself as the benevolent Russian mother to his little family of five, ‘feeding’ them points when they whined about being hungry, claimed the first goal. The others took care of  scoring seven more.

[Igor celebrating in front of the goal with Vova stuffed under his arm, as Sergei gets ready to jump on them and the Canadians look on.]

Moments after the loss, Wayne was breathless. “Just can’t compete,” he said into the postgame crowd of cameras. “Just too . . . difficult.”

“To see them dismantle us 8–1 was mind-boggling, because we were such a good team,” he said after. “‘If they beat this team 8–1, how good are they?’” 

He knew Sergei and Slava, as much as they knew him. But it was his first tournament at the men’s level, just like Larionov’s. They were both 20 year-old top line centers, bizarre phenomena, both not quite fast enough to make up for not being strong enough, which forced them to become almost orchestral conductors of the players around them.

"Definitely,” Wayne thought, staring across the ice. “He saw the ice the same as me. Passing the puck, hockey sense, probably as similar to me as any player who has played the game."

Igor was in the middle of his own revelation. Two months ago he’d been in the two-stoplight town he’d lived all his life. “Now here I was, playing against men I’d heard and read about for years. It was a great feeling, and we won that last game so decisively, but so many feelings were pressing in on me….” He was basking in the abundance of newspapers, something new to read every day.

The Canada Cup wrapped up with a weird interlude where Alan Eagleson wouldn’t let the Soviet team take the actual Canada Cup out of Canada with them, because it had cost too much money. A trucker from Winnipeg thought that was shabby, so he put together a fundraiser and got his buddy who cast truck parts to make a copy of the Cup, which he presented to the Soviet ambassador Aleksandr Yakovlev, who thanked him and gave him a different hockey trophy that he literally had lying around and a Russian hockey training manual to, quote, “open up the secrets of our national game.” The exchange was greeted with rapturous boos from the crowd whenever anyone said “Alan Eagleson.” The hockey-fanatic Winnipeg trucker told the papers that, just to be clear, yes he was a red-blooded Canadian nationalist, but he hated NHL leadership so much he had to help the Ruskies win.

Wayne would do whatever it took to get his hands on some Soviet secrets too, by which I mean ‘Igor Larionov’s phone number.’

Main