So Brendan Shanahan was reminiscing about life as a 20-year-old, as a teammate of Slava Fetisov in The Great Man’s first season in North America with the Devils in 1989-90 after being allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
Midway through that season, Alexei Kasatonov, Fetisov’s partner on defense for both the Red Army and the Soviet national teams, and an integral member of the immortal five-man “Green Unit” featuring forwards Igor Larionov, Sergei Makarov and Vladimir Krutov, also would join the Devils.
The defense partners were once best friends, were once as close as brothers. But a deep schism had developed between them when Kasatonov not only did not support Fetisov’s original efforts to leave the Soviet Union, but sided with Fetisov’s enemies in the government’s hierarchy; a hierarchy that had sought to ruin Fetisov.
“Before Alex came over, Slava would say, ‘It’s not right. It’s not right that he was against me coming here and now he wants to follow,’ ” Shanahan said. “Slava didn’t do any TV interviews that first year, I don’t think, but he did one right before Alex got here.
“The guy asked him how he felt about Kasatonov joining the team,” said Shanahan, the Maple Leafs’ president. “And Slava’s answer became a catchphrase we all used — not [just] the next couple of years, but even now when guys from that team get together.
“Slava said: ‘I don’t happy.’ ”
Fetisov doesn’t say, “I don’t happy,” in “Red Army,” director Gabe Polsky’s evocative feature documentary about the Soviet Union’s national hockey team that opened to audiences on Friday, but those words aren’t necessary to paint the picture.
For No. 2 offers so much more about the relationship with Kasatonov, about his own singularly heroic effort to break out of the USSR, in this film that is painstakingly documented and so beautifully presented through the prism of The Great Fetisov’s heart and mind.
The film is a lesson in history that was lived in the USSR, Russia, the U.S. and Canada. And once Fetisov finally was granted his freedom to play in the NHL, it was history that played out more than anywhere else in a place called East Rutherford, N.J., home of the Devils, for whom I worked at time as VP of communications.
It was as bizarre a dynamic as you could ever find. This oddest of couples would not exchange a word off the ice. Yet Fetisov and Kasatonov formed a pair on the Devils’ blue line, on which they spoke the language of shared experience and of hockey.
“We had a lot of younger guys on that team, and we didn’t know the details of their rift — or whatever you’d want to call it — but we knew it had to do with Alex not supporting Slava when he wanted to leave by going through the front door,” Shanahan said. “We understood the origin of Slava’s resentment.
“The interesting thing was, they didn’t fight at all. They just didn’t speak. And they played great together,” the Hall of Fame winger said. “They were both great guys, neither of them were locker-room lawyers where they tried to get guys on their side or turn guys against the other one. There was nothing like that.
“They handled it like professionals,” Shanahan said. “It was never a distraction for them and it wasn’t for us, either. I never remember a time when a group of us said, ‘We can’t go out to dinner at a certain restaurant with Slava because Alex is going to be there.’
“Maybe they wouldn’t ride in the same cab, and maybe they sat at different ends of the table, but it wasn’t anything that became a team issue. And for me, I hit it off immediately with Slava, yet I used to ride to practice with Alex.”
Fetisov (eighth round, 145th overall) and Kasatonov (12th, 225th) were both selected by the Devils in the 1983 Entry Draft as the brain-children of owner John McMullen, renowned around the world for his naval architectural firm through which he had developed diplomatic contacts in the USSR.
By the summer of 1988, Lou Lamoriello, hired a year earlier as Devils’ president by McMullen after a lifetime at Providence College, was in Moscow for a series of secret meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It marked the beginning of tense negotiations between the Devils and the Soviet hierarchy, but even more so between Fetisov and his government’s high command.
The Devils, after all, were negotiating for a hockey player. Fetisov was “negotiating” for his freedom, if not his life, with men who had the power to exile him and his family to Siberia. In “Red Army,” Fetisov talks about his one-on-one meeting with Minister of Defense Dmitry Yazov that ends with the athlete simply walking out on his superior. It is a tale of bravery no less remarkable now than it was when he would first share it upon his arrival in New Jersey to those he trusted.
In the film, recounting the resentment he faced from North Americans following his move to the NHL, Fetisov cites the south-Boston born John Cunniff, his second coach with the Devils, as someone who wouldn’t even “look at Russians.”
“I don’t know specifically about Cunny, but there were a lot of old school coaches and players who were afraid of those guys coming over and ‘stealing’ jobs from North Americans,” Shanahan said. “But we also had a lot of younger guys like Kenny Daneyko and Kirk Muller who saw what he and Alex could do for us as a team.”
Jim Schoenfeld was Fetisov’s first NHL coach. He was also the coach who made Fetisov a healthy scratch for what would have been the defenseman’s 14th NHL game on Nov. 4, 1989, in Calgary. The game, a 7-3 New Jersey defeat, was televised in Russia.
The game also marked Schoenfeld’s last one behind the Devils’ bench, as he was fired two days later.
“No, I don’t think it was a coincidence that was my last game, but I also don’t believe that was the only reason,” Schoenfeld, in his eighth season as Rangers’ assistant general manager, told Slap Shots last week. “Of course I knew who he was, of course I knew the significance of what I was doing, and of course it was a hard call, but I thought he’d been beaten down and worn and needed a rest at that point.
“You could see he was a real elite player, but I don’t think Slava realized how good this league was and that he had to be in top shape in order to play at a highest level. Most importantly, the most physical players on the other teams were all targeting him and running roughshod over him.
“I had a long talk with Slava. He obviously wasn’t happy. But the times I’ve seen him since, he’s been friendly. If there’s animosity, he doesn’t show it.”
Fetisov played well for the Devils, but was never a difference maker. He re-ascended in Detroit with Scotty Bowman’s Russian Five that included Larionov, Sergei Fedorov, Slava Kozlov and Vladimir Konstantinov.
In New Jersey, Kasatonov was the better player.
“In Detroit, Slava was in a place where they all appreciated his style,” said Shanahan, a teammate for the 1997-98 consecutive Red Wing Cup championships. “It was a different environment.
“We were talking one time about his whole experience of leaving Russia and coming to New Jersey,” he said. “And Slava told me, ‘You know, it was so draining to try to get my freedom, it was such a grueling fight, I didn’t realize I was going to have another fight here.’ ”
The Great Fetisov.
The great “Red Army.”