Word: fetisov
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Patriotism does not flow easily in Russia anymore. And if anyone has a right to shut his heart to Moscow, it is Slava Fetisov. The country's greatest hockey hero throughout the 1980s, Fetisov, 43, won two gold Olympic medals and one silver, seven world championships and the Order of Lenin. Yet Fetisov spent the late '80s being systematically harassed by his government. After being denied, year after year, the right to play in the National Hockey League as he had been promised, Fetisov decided to sue the U.S.S.R. for his freedom...
Eventually, in 1989, Fetisov was allowed by President Mikhail Gorbachev to emigrate and led the Detroit Red Wings to two Stanley Cups. He now lives in suburban New Jersey, where he works for the New Jersey Devils. Yet he has agreed to coach this year's Russian Olympic team. For free. "It would be the easiest thing for me to turn my back. I have my family here. I have a nice house," he says. "But I can't say no to the people of Russia. People who raised me, who gave me education--how can you deny them...
...Fetisov, who says he was privately recruited by President Vladimir Putin, took the job, and he now has to struggle with both the past and the present problems of Russian hockey. He must negotiate with the same hockey authorities who tried to derail him--and who still hate him for opening the floodgates out of Russia to the riches of the NHL for many players after him. Those players are now millionaire hockey stars, and although they owe their careers to Fetisov's bravery, he has nothing with which to recruit them for the Russian Olympic team...
Four years ago, when NHL players entered the Olympics for the first time, many Russian players refused to play for the motherland. This year Florida Panthers player Pavel Bure, with the support of other Russian NHL players, lobbied for Fetisov to coach in a closed meeting with Putin. Soon after, Russian hockey execs buckled. So there's nothing they would like to see more than Fetisov coming home without a medal. "I don't want to get into details, but everything I try to do, they try to sabotage," he says. "I was fighting for freedom and democracy...
DETROIT: Sergei Federov. Vladimir Konstantinov. Fetisov, Kozlov, Larionov. The stars of the Detroit Red Wings' 1997 Stanley Cup team were more than an example of the NHL's decidedly foreign flavor. They were the Red Army. So it is fitting that this summer, Lord Stanley's Cup will make its first trip to the former Soviet Union. The cup will be in Russia from Aug. 16-19. Fetisov, Kozlov and Larionov plan to parade the Cup through the streets of Moscow and then put it on display in Red Square. The announcement comes on the same day that Konstantinov...