FORTY-ONE YEARS ago, amid incendiary rhetoric between the two countries not unlike the rhetoric of today, an NHL referee reportedly walked into the Flyers' locker room at the Spectrum before an extremely important game of hockey against the Soviet Red Army team and crossed the line of any definition of sportsmanship.
"Play your game, fellas," Joe Watson remembers referee Lloyd Gilmour telling him and his teammates, and a wink or nod was not needed. In the visitors' locker room was a Soviet Red Army team that had already embarrassed several of the NHL's revered franchises, leaving the Flyers as the league's last hope to save face from a series that was arranged to display North American superiority.