Bengie Molina, Check Out this Phil Esposito Video Clip

Bengie Molina's latest blog post flat-out beseeches Tiger fans not to lose faith in the team, despite their five game losing streak.

Molina's request reminds one (over 50) of  Phil Esposito's famous interview during the "War on Ice"/"Summit Series" between Canada and the Soviet Union in 1972:

It was the height of the Cold War, and the USSR had dominated the ice at the Winter Olympics for 16 years, winning gold in 1956, '64, '68 and '72. And few of the Soviets games were competitive because NHL players weren't allowed to play in the Olympics back then. The Olympics were only open to "amateur" athletes — and the Soviets had thousands of those.

In the 1950's, realizing that international sporting events could be a world-wide propaganda platform, the Soviet's had devised a system for identifying their most talented athletes during their early childhood, then shipping them off to sports academies to toil till they were in their late teens. After life at the academies, most of the best athletes — and all the best hockey players — were shipped off to the military, where they continued to train for their sport year round as uniformed members of the Soviet Red Army — even though the only thing they ever shot was a puck.

But the Soviets had never played against the best of the NHL, and so all of Canada eagerly awaited the Summit Series, seeing it as a chance to reassert Canada's provenance and spiritual ownership of hockey.  

Ironically, it turned out that Canadians didn't own the sport.  The sport owned them. Canadian national identity was so wrapt up in the game that a loss by the NHL All-Star team was unthinkable.  The NHL had put together a team of stars, specifically selected to represent their country against the Soviets — this was the first time any of the four Major Leagues had ever put together a "dream team" to defend their sport — and there was no way they were going to lose.  It was unthinkable to most Canadians. And to any American who followed sports.  

Here's what it was like:  Remember the NBA's "Redeem Team" and their sense of mission to return basketball gold to America in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing?  Well, you could take that sense of mission and multiply it a hundred times and you still wouldn't have what it felt like before the Summit Series. The stakes were enormous.  

What was at stake was nothing less than the identity of an independent country of 20 million people. 

It was a big deal.  

Imagine that today the Taliban had an Olympic basketball team and had won four out of the last five Olympic gold medals, including the last three in a row, and that they'd won in no small part by beating up American college kids.  Now imagine a special series was set up between the Taliban and the NBA: four games here, and four games in their caves.  That's what the '72 Summit Series was like. 

The first game of the eight game series was held in Mecca, at the Montreal Forum.  And the Soviets crushed Canada, 7-3.  They then won another of the four games played on Canadian ice. Then the last of the four games played in Canada was a 5-3 ass-kicking in Vancouver, in front of 15,570 disgusted fans who booed Team Canada off the ice.  

It was scary.  

And it was depressing.

Real depressing.

Then, suddenly, as the fans began to leave, Phil Esposito appeared on the ice and gave one of the all-time emotional interviews in the history of sports. Looking directly into the camera at times, he said:

"To the people across Canada . . . we gave it our best, and to the people that boo us, geez . . . all of us guys are really disheartened and we're disillusioned, and we're disappointed at some of the people. We cannot believe the bad press we've got, the booing we've gotten in our own buildings.  If the Russians boo their players, the fans... Russians boo their players... then I'll come back and I'll apologize to each one of the Canadians, but I don't think they will.

I'm really, really... I'm really disappointed. I am completely disappointed.  I cannot believe it.  Some of our guys are really, really down in the dumps, we know, we're trying, like, hell, I mean, we're doing the best we can, and they got a good team, and let's face facts. But it doesn't mean that we're not giving it our 150%, because we certainly are."

(Alas, there's only a brief clip of the speech on YouTube . . . with the snippet of Espo's speech at 1-minute, 15-seconds into the video.  If anyone out there has more of the interview, please send us a link!)

Despite Espo's speech, the Canadians lost the next game in the USSR, to go down in the series 1-3-1.  But then, out of sheer desperation, they rallied to win the final three games, each by a single goal, each in dramatic fashion.  It was and remains one of the great and extended comebacks in sports history. Team Canada won the series 4-3-1.  And saved Canadian pride.

BTW:   It was that hockey series, along with the U.S. basketball team getting robbed by the Soviets in the '72 Olympic basketball finals, that paved the way for professional athletes to begin participating in the Olympics.

Think about that, Tiger fans.  (And Bengie Esposito.)

 (Wikipedia has a terrific, detailed synopsis of the series.)