Free The Goal of My Life by Paul Henderson

claimed by California in the 1967 expansion draft, came back to Toronto early in the season. Although he was older, at thirty-four, hewas just as tough as ever and really contributed with his crushing bodychecks. Baun could block shots with the best of them and was a warrior who never backed off when he was on the ice. He was a real help to our younger defencemen on the team too, a real role model for them by the way he played.
    Despite those additions, we lost out in the playoffs again, dropping a six-game series to the Rangers. That was a hard-fought series and we competed, but we just didn’t have the depth to beat the better teams in the league. Harold Ballard hated spending money, and if he had, we might have been a much better team. But he didn’t have to spend an extra dime, since the Gardens was filled every night.
    I hit another personal best in 1971–72 by scoring thirty-eight goals in seventy-three games. With Boston, New York, and Montreal all cracking the 100-point barrier, the best we could hope for, though, was another fourth-place finish, with eighty points.
    McLellan got sick that year and was replaced by King Clancy for a stretch. It was a great run for King, as we went 9–3–3 while under his reign, and even though his time as a top-flight hockey strategist had passed, he was a funny and charming man and kept us loose and winning.
    It was another early playoff exit, as the powerful Boston Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, took us out in five games. We still didn’t have the depth we needed. But we had a solid core, I was playing some of the best hockey of my career, and there seemed to be a lot to look forward to once the 1972–73 season came around – if Ballard didn’t screw it all up, and believe me, that was always a possibility!
    But first, there would be the little matter of taking care of some business with the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE SUMMER OF 1972 WAS A GOOD TIME IN MY LIFE . I was coming off a very solid season with the Maple Leafs, and Eleanor and I were looking forward to a trip overseas. An auto parts company, AP Parts, that I was doing some work for in the off-season was taking us and twenty-five other couples on a European river cruise down the Rhine River. It sounded like a fun trip, and Eleanor and I were looking forward to it.
    Well, we wound up travelling overseas, of course, but to the Soviet Union – and it certainly was no vacation.
    I guess I should first provide a little background on how much the Russians were dominating in world hockey at that point.
    Canada had always been the power in international hockey, of course, as it was our country’s national game. As the years went on, a few things happened. First, European nations started playing the game a lot more and a lot better. Their game emphasized speed and skill with less focus onphysicality, and playing on the bigger ice surfaces over there certainly helped.
    The second thing that happened was that in both the world championships and the Olympics, Canada sent only amateur players, not professionals. The Soviet Union was producing great players, many of whom could – and should – have played in the NHL . In the days of the Iron Curtain, however, that wasn’t possible.
    So the Russians took over on the international scene, as their top players wound up playing against our amateurs in all the major events, which was hardly fair to Canadian hockey.
    The Russians were great players, make no mistake about that, and they were really improving as a hockey nation. That, combined with the fact that Canada didn’t send its best players to international competition, led to the Soviet Union dominating world and Olympic competition from 1956 until 1972.
    From 1920 until 1963, Canada usually sent the most recent Allan Cup championship teams. Following the 1963 world championships, Father David Bauer founded the Canadian National Team to take over that role. Canada withdrew from official International Ice