NOT A SINGER MACHINE

SPORTS

Heroes of old covers Hockey goalie Victor Singer was the idol of my childhood, the hero of my yard fantasies. If I imagined myself standing at the gates during hours of battles, it was them. Our yard hockey is not very ...

Heroes of the old

Hockey goalie Viktor Singer was the idol of my childhood, the hero of my backyard fantasies. If I imagined myself standing at the gates during hours of battles, it was them. Our yard hockey didn't really look like a real one, we played on the snow and without skates, and besides, not with a puck, but with a tennis ball. Most of the players had sticks from Canadian hockey, but one or two originals came out with Russian sticks and brandished them intimidatingly, trying to hit a flying ball. Sometimes it came out not on the ball, but on the face of the opponent, and then the hockey player in a sweaty fur hat and terry trousers clutched his bloody lip and yelled in a wild voice: “Goat, are you crazy, or what?”. "I've gone nuts myself!" the goat answered.

Instead of a gate, wooden boxes were placed, which were stolen from the back of a nearby store. They were knocked together from planks, and some attackers in our yard reached such degrees of skill that they knocked the planks out of the box with a fist throw. Defenders, as in real hockey, rolled up under these mighty shots, closing the gate with their chest, but the goalkeeper still had enough work to do. The goalkeeper either moved his boots like shields, fending off throws at close range, then, like a trap, he caught the ball with an earflap tied to his hand, or he rushed into the storm and rolled there, trying to cover the bouncing ball with his body.

Victor Singer was an idol, first of all, of course, because he played for Spartak. Spartak in those years was generally something else, not what it is now. Now rooting for Spartak is a matter of taste or tradition, but not a cultural or political choice. At the same time, in our yard, all normal people aged from six to sixteen knew perfectly well that CSKA was an army that impudently rowed its best players (Firsov was dragged away from us like that!); Dynamo are cops who beat decent people in the precincts, and Spartak is the people, that is, people of a cheerful free breed who habitually add vodka to beer and are desperately ill in the stands. Once, a man of about ten years old, sitting on the podium at Luzhniki, I saw how a hefty Spartak fan, a man in an unbuttoned cowboy shirt, with a joyfully smiling mouth, swung and shot an apple right into the head of a young policeman passing by. The apple splashed in all directions with white juicy pulp, the policeman shuddered in surprise, caught his cap and, pressing his head into his shoulders, quickly ran away. True, it was on football, and not on hockey, but this does not change the essence.

Singer was precisely the Spartak goalkeeper, that is, a certain amount of frivolity and gouging was characteristic of him. He could miss a few easy goals in the game against Traktor, but he always stood heroically against CSKA. He knew how to do what turns a goalkeeper into a hero - to save. A great army attack was playing against him - Loktev, Almetov and Aleksandrov, by the cunning of moves, by the intricacy of the game, could give a hundred points ahead to the current Enkhael blockheads. Short, agile, in a white plastic mask that fitted his face, Singer darted around in the frame and beat, and caught, and covered the puck. How to describe it? How to describe the feeling of delight that rose in my soul when the Spartak goalkeeper, sprawling on the ice, covered the puck on the very goal line for the twentieth time in a match? This must be seen, but where is that film and where are those legendary matches in which the brothers Mayorovs and Starshinov always rode against the first army troika with a helmet strap that pulled forward his strong-willed jaw?

The goalkeepers of that era are all preserved in my memory. This was an era when hitting was forbidden to attackers in a foreign zone, in the middle of the third period a change of goal followed, none of the players yet wore boxing caps, and goalkeepers did not yet hide their heads in knightly helmets made of metal and plastic. The famous Swede Holmqvist played without a mask at all. Ours, Konovalenko and Singer, played in simple masks that covered their faces. Viktor Singer was not such a bum as Viktor Konovalenko, a man with a powerful neck, who stood at the gate sullenly and powerfully. Singer had the face of an intelligent person, which is made of nerves, not steel. Singer was never as calm as the young Tretiak, who was already starting to play, before whom Ragulin, Kuzkin, and later Lutchenko skated. These army defenders were not only huge men capable of driving any attacker into the ice, but they were still soldered by iron military discipline and knew their every maneuver perfectly. Completely different people played in front of Singer, and I also remember them: the huge, good-natured Valery Kuzmin, who sometimes seemed to be just too lazy to chase some kind of attacker, or Evgeny Poladyev, a man of incredible physical strength and dashing. If Poladiev crashed into the side, then the roar was as if a cupboard with dishes had fallen on your head. He was periodically expelled from the team. And the fans told each other how Poladyev, returning to the training camp after lights out and wanting to avoid Tarasov guarding, climbed to the second floor through the window, but he screwed up and collapsed into the bushes with his usual roar. It was in our way, in Spartak's way!

Singer broke into the national team with a fight. They did not take him, in which we saw the constant meanness of CSKA, who could not forgive Spartak for being Spartak. And yet, our Vitya Singer ended up in this company of the best, in the circle of the greats. Knowledgeable people explained to me in the yard that Konoval got drunk and therefore Vitya would go to Sweden for the World Championships. There, as usual, he missed a few optional goals from some miserable Finns and miserable Americans, but he gave out a grand match against the Swedes, which I still remember. And again, how to tell? How to describe his desperate battle on the goal line, when he once covered the puck crawling into the goal with his back, tipping over backwards?

But still, I do not consider this match the greatest game of Viktor Singer. I remember the game against CSKA, which from the very beginning did not work out for Spartak, and the pucks flew into our goal one after another. After the fourth or fifth, the team practically quit playing. Not abandoned one Singer. He single-handedly resisted the army machine, alone fought against a whole cohort of honored masters of sports.

I watched the game on TV. I was desperate about what was happening to my Spartak, but I did not turn off the TV because I could not leave Singer alone in the middle of this nightmare. I had to go through it with him. They beat and scored, but he got up and still threw himself under their skates, and caught, and beat, and rushed about in the frame. On that day, he took three dozen dead, non-pickable pucks and conceded twelve, but it wasn't the number of pucks that mattered. At the end, when the siren finally sounded and the beating ended, Singer pulled his mask off his face and, holding it under his arm, drove to the center. He was soaking wet, his eyes were hollow, his face was pale, and it was clear that he had no words, that he simply could not speak now. And in his whole goalkeeper figure there was something that was made clear: this goalkeeper can be killed, but cannot be broken.