Crystallization of childhood

One of the best books about Soviet hockey was published

“Crystal people. Notes about Soviet hockey, made with love, a Saratov boy who dreamed of becoming a goalkeeper and playing like Tretyak or Myshkin ”Stanislav Gridasov (1947–2017. M.: Fifth Rome, 2018) - one of the best books about Soviet hockey. And for sure - the most unusual book about hockey as such. There are two amazing properties in it: the volume is 1136 pages of coated paper, this volume weighs as an essential part of the hockey ammunition, and the angle of view is the eyes of a Saratov boy born in the 1960s, hockey through a special optics-a team of not quite the first row, which regularly hit the Premier League, but just as regularly flew out of it, “Christmas” (Saratov).

One familiar sports journalist, when I informed him of the release of the book about the Saratov "Crystal", ironically clarified: "Why not about the Penza" dieselist "?" Why not? In order to penetrate the unspoken secret of the unprecedented popularity and successes of Soviet hockey in the 1960-1970s, to understand a little more in the structure of the Soviet system and history, including economic, political, social, psychological, that heated Soviet Atlantis, the biography of the Penza team would also be very useful. Saratov was simply lucky in the sense that one of the most successful sports journalists and editors Stas Gridasov, the founder of the Sports.ru website, originally from this city on the Volga. And that at some point after the closure of the PROSport magazine he was unemployed, which means he gained freedom and time in order to write about his childhood.

And it, this childhood, consisted of two points-the Saratov of the 1960-1980s and the Hockey team "Crystal".

Gridasov spent six years on the book. At the presentation in the Hockey Glory Hall of the Hockey Museum, the legendary Spartakovets Viktor Shalimov, with delighted bewilderment, looking at that “crystal people”, said: “It was necessary to collect all this.” And in fact: the book reproduces many things, details, artifacts of the era. Photos, newspaper clippings, hockey tickets, handwritten protocols of matches, the most detailed statistics. The life of the Saratov hockey is scheduled by days, if not by the hour, and time bursts into the book through these details. And the breath - the ebbs and the ebbs - the largest hockey, Soviet, Czechoslovak, different, even Polish.

And it turns out that from the same childhood you remember all these surnames, the sound of the disappeared era that provoke the injections of nostalgia for such a force, as if someone on the site hit you with a hook of Efsi's club in an unprotected place. And you made a pain on the ice cut by the skates of Botas (in an optimistic version), and with your nose you feel the smell of black torn island from your own club. And the amazing fate of completely forgotten hockey players who were not destined to become stars of the first magnitude, and they played no worse, and, most interestingly, went through the Saratov Crystal: Alexander Smolin, who was considered the player more than Valery Kharlamov, the goalkeeper Sergei Babariko, the first in Moscow Dynamo, thrown out of Moscow, thrown out of the Moscow Hockey some kind of bastard in kagabash unit. For a short time, he was the second number in the USSR national team after Vladislav Tretyak - who remembers this now ...

And who remembers that in 1962, 18-year-old Boris Mikhailov came to play in Saratov and there was formed as a player, fighting, angry, aimed at breaking everyone on his heel and clogging, scoring, Boris Petrovich Mikhailov, alert, albeit hard for 70, was at the presentation of the book-like a Saratov hockey player, at a number of other Saratovs, at a number Elderly, but strong and ridiculous men who walk today as if they have skates on their feet, and clubs are in their hands. The legendary Phil Esposito once noticed that he did not know if he can ride on skates without a club.

So these men have invisible skates and clubs always with them. Otherwise, they would not have known whether they could have been able to walk on the ground.

I, the always fan of the Dynamo Riga and Helmut Balderis, did not know or did not remember, more precisely, in his childhood I did not pay attention to it, how many Dynamo guys went through Saratov. For example, Anatoly Emelyanenko, Vladimir Krikunov. Or goalkeeper Viktor Afonin. And so with many teams of the Premier League. The “Crystal” exposed to almost every year - who moved to other teams “to raising”, whom they called for the army to CSKA or different SKA - every time he was gathered bit by bit, which, of course, did not contribute to stability.

A separate end-to-end character-with all his advantages and disadvantages, unusual methods, friendship with Viktor Tikhonov-the famous coach Robert Cherenkov, from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s, and then a little in the 1980s, the Crystal (and the Moscow Spartak in the 1977/1978 season).

Every year he collected the Crystal again, filling the giant holes in the puzzle of the composition. Cherenkov somehow quietly died last summer. Another is an extremely important person for the “crystal”, the director (for 33 years!) Of the Tantal Saratov plant Georgy Umnov, who helped the team. Well, Vladimir Myshkin, of course, Myshkin is a miracle on the ice of the Chalus Cup 1979, 6: 0 in our favor! The heads of applications-about the legendary trainer “Philadelphia Flyerz” and a fan of the methods of Anatoly Tarasov Frede Sherro, whose vulgar Gridasov suspected the presence of Saratov, more precisely, the Volga-German roots, and about “the first Saratov in the NHL” David Schrainer, one of the stars of the League of the 1930s and the early 1940s. In general, all Saratov - on ice, in hockey locker rooms, in the stands.

But the main thing is a feeling of childhood and hockey, living in everything, heard everywhere, tangible physically, to the touch and by weight, and penetrated into the circulatory system - in Moscow, in Saratov:

“We played hockey everywhere: in the courtyard and on street sidewalks, at the Dynamo stadium, <...> on the Volga cleared ice and even on the central terrace of the astronauts embankment - a match on a neutral field, between the legs of passers -by, our courtyard against children from Lermontov Street. They played in felt boots and skates, in Kharlamov and Balderis. <...> The straight hook had to first heat over the fire of the kitchen burner, and then bend, sticking the batteries into the cast -iron ribs and leaving it for a while. Then treat with epoxy, wrap with blue isolet, and forward - on the ice! ”

Crystal childhood.