I Scored On Tretiak (Spoiler Alert)

One summer, in high school, I attended a hockey camp in Cole Harbour run by the Tretiak family. Tretiak, if you remember, was the goalie for the evil Soviet team in the 1970s. He's a pretty big deal. In fact, he was such a big deal that he only showed up to the camp for a single afternoon, leaving his brother Sasha to run the show for the rest of the week. But that's okay - no one really expected Tretiak to show anyway, and the fact that he did was pretty notable (I think he was/is a coach in Chicago).

Anyhoo, not only did he show his face, but he put on the pads and came out for an all-inclusive camp-wide shootout near the end of the week. All camp attendees - from the 5 year old novice to the 15 year old midgets (a hockey term, we were all relatively full-grown) - were given the opportunity to go one-on-one with the former face (mask?) of the iron curtain, at least as far as your typical stubby-sucking hoser was concerned (or so I imagine, not having been born at the time).

Everyone gathered on the ice in a huge oval and watched as each kid tried, and inevitably failed, to score on the Russian legend - who was taking this very seriously I might add; no 5 year old was getting a freebie. Little kids were poke-checked and slid helplessly into the end boards. Nervous teens tried to recall their best Mario moves, and usually missed the net or shot it directly into Tretiak's big red chest. No one thought to try and recreate 1972's series-clinching broken play and Paul Henderson's wild flailing, which admittedly would be hard to pull off on a one-on-one breakaway.

Eventually, it was my turn. At this point I think one or two other guys had managed to put one by the famous defender. I had no plan. I was terrified. What transpired is still kind of hazy... I'm pretty sure that my lack of planning led me to fake not once, not twice, but somewhere on the order of a dozen times - presenting Tretiak with a deke as complicated and convoluted as a Neil Peart drum solo. I broke and then re-wrote the rules of the shootout. Alexei Kovalev would have shit his pants. In the end, the puck managed to trickle under the baffled goalie's outstretched pad, and I'm pretty sure I did some obnoxious little dance. And my fellow campmates banged their sticks on the ice in a half-assed, dejected celebration. No confetti fell from the rafters, or maybe it did, I can't recall.

Tretiak signed the puck, and I still have it, in honour of what is probably the high point of my athletic "career". See: