More on the Malkin Situation

As I previously noted, I've spent much of the past thirty-six hours online, eagerly trying to glean the latest news on the whole Malkin saga from blogs, message boards, and Russian news sources. (Yes, obviously I am seriously desperate for Malkin to come to the Penguins if I'm seeking to gain credible information from such sources--I realize this.)

In spite of the twenty-first century feel for how I'm obtaining news and information about the Malkin affair, I nevertheless feel as though I've been transported back to the late 1980's. Sure, I'm getting all my information from the Internet. Sure, unlike the 1980's, I'm quickly able to get information from Russian news sources, and with a click of a button, I'm able to translate Russian into something in English where at the very least, "the gist" of the translated article more often than not gets through and makes sense. Yet in terms of the feel of Malkin leaving his team's training camp in Finland, in terms of the tight-lipped comments or lack thereof from the Penguins and from the NHL--wow. Is this seriously what it felt like in the late eighties?

Back in the late eighties, I was a child of about five or six and had no clue about the geopolitical context of the world in which I lived. One of those silly e-mail forwards that was passed around mentioned that students who graduated high school when I did never grew up with the threat of nuclear war. Seriously, this was my world as a child and an adolescent. I didn't know what it was like to be in a perpetual Cold War. I never experienced nuclear bomb drills throughout all my years of attending school. This was the context in which I grew up, and that context translated to my love of hockey and understanding that hockey was an international sport.

While I watched hockey in the late eighties (at age 5, Paul Coffey was my first favorite player when he arrived from the Oilers in 1987), I really got into hockey about the time my team started winning championships. When I turned eight and Jaromir Jagr arrived as a rookie from Czechoslovakia, Jagr quickly replaced Coffey as my favorite player. Jagr's the best example I can think of as to how my relationship with hockey is so different than that of even a generation before me. Jagr didn't have to defect to come to America (granted, I'm certain strings were pulled, and I'm certain Craig Patrick and the Penguins helped to ensure Jagr's arrival in Pittsburgh). But with the Berlin Wall down, with the Soviet Union crumbling, wow, presto--Jagr was free to come to America and be a star, and so he did.

Along with Jagr, dozens of other talented Soviet-bloc Europeans began to arrive in the NHL. Soviet-bloc Europeans, now free to come to the NHL, began to be drafted where they rightfully should have been drafted if teams had known for sure that the European players would be available to come and play in the NHL. And thus as I grew up and started writing about the Penguins when I got bored in school (suggesting line changes and potential trades was often more interesting than typical middle school work), it became natural to root for European players. I had never really known a NHL without Russian or former Soviet-bloc players. I cheered for Jagr, the two Samuelssons (Ulf and Kjell), Martin Straka, Alexei Kovalev, Aleksey Morozov, and Darius Kasparitis as they arrived in Pittsburgh. My Penguins teams of the early nineties had a slight international flair, but when Detroit began winning Cups in the late nineties, I never questioned the very eastern European make-up of their roster. This was the NHL I'd known, really, since Jagr had arrived in Pittsburgh in 1990. I knew an international NHL, knew the stereotypes that went along with a player's particular nationality, and I knew that a team that wanted to win in my NHL needed to have the right mix of European and North American players.

So why is the Malkin saga such a big deal? Probably, because, really, I've never known "that" NHL. The world where players had to choose to defect, knowing that they'd probably never see their homeland or families again, that's a world I know only through reading Sports Illustrated articles and watching television documentaries. But it's not a world that I actually know in the sense of knowledge gained by experience.

Yet as I thought about it, I realized that players like Petr Nedved and Alexander Mogilny do know "that" NHL and the geopolitical context that used to exist in the world. Nedved was seventeen when he arrived in Canada and announced he wanted to defect. I cheered for Nedved when he was a Pen and always enjoyed watching him play (as you might have guessed, aesthetic play is highly appealing to me). Yet today Nedved is a veteran NHL player, a streaky player, and recently one whose marriage to a supermodel was extremely important to him. But at age 17--he just made a decision and did it? He didn't know--not for sure--that the world would change as it has. He didn't know that he would have the chance to see his parents again and to return his homeland. He didn't know any of that, and at 17, he's saying, I'm defecting.

Alexander Mogilny might be languishing in the minor leagues and he might be suffering from injuries that have hurt his play (actually there's no might about those things), and while his story is different than Nedved's, Mogilny, too, defected. Sure, Mogilny had already been drafted by the Buffalo Sabres and knew he would have a real shot at the NHL. But still, even at twenty, he was just a kid. And again--wow--he just defected. I remember reading in a Sports Illustrated article sometime during my high school years about Mogilny turning to friends, searching for the meanings of once strikingly familiar Russian words; I think one word was "dinner." Leaving one's family and country, that was par for the course when a player defected, but to lose your native language also? The fact that I still remember reading that sliver of information years later tells you how much it stuck with me.

So all I know of Nedved and Mogilny are the stories of the children who defected, of the young men who both for awhile struggled to carve out an effective niche in the NHL, and who both in time became extremely effective NHL players. Likewise, I know that many believe the best days of both players are behind them. But that's the thing. I know the almost-complete story. While perhaps I should have referred to Nedved and Mogilny as young men when they defected (such a move required all those character traits of skill and guts and heart that both players were routinely accused of lacking at some point in their NHL careers), Nedved was the equivalent of a high school student when he defected; Mogilny of a sophomore in college. Kids. They were kids. But we know the end result--we know now that the world did change, that the USSR did crumble, and we know Mogilny and Nedved took a risk that rewarded them handsomely financially and in other ways as well.

Yet being caught up in the Malkin saga in 2006, wow. Is this what it felt like in 1989 to be a Buffalo Sabres fan and wonder what would happen with the Mogilny kid? Or is this what it felt like to be a junior hockey fan who watched that kid Nedved play? Because when it comes to Malkin, geopolitically speaking, anyway, I don't know what is going to happen. Is Malkin going to be allowed to play in North America? Will he be allowed to play for Russia in international events? How will the intrigue surrounding Malkin be resolved? Perhaps more importantly for me as a Penguins fan, if and when Malkin does arrive, how's he going to do his first season? And after that? What's his career trajectory going to be? Who knows? I don't know, but it's going to be exciting to watch. It's already exciting from the sidelines as I scan the Internet, hoping for new information, hoping that somebody is going to clue me in and really let me know what's going on with Malkin.

One final thought to close: My junior year of college, I was on a hockey kick, and I had to write a short screenplay for a writing class. I made up a fictional character, a 17-year-old Soviet named Pavel, who defected from the Soviet team at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. The first two pages of the script I loved and those pages worked; the rest of the script I hated and those pages, needless to say, didn't work so well. But there was one thing that everyone could agree about: Pavel's page 1 decision to defect to North America revealed a tremendous amount about his character. In a single decision, my fictional character announced who he was, what his dreams were, and who he desired to be.

Maybe that's why it's been so nice and fun to follow the Malkin saga over the past thirty-six hours. Because if it's not true that he left Finland and if he really is staying in Russia for another year, then oh well, sigh, ho-hum, my Pens still need a second line center, and maybe Malkin's not yet (not saying he never will be) a player determined to get to the NHL.

But if any of these reports are true, if Malkin really has left his Russian team, then he's telling the NHL and fans of the Pittsburgh Penguins exactly what we want to know. He's telling us who he is, what his dreams are, and who he desires to be--he's telling us he wants to play in the NHL for the Pittsburgh Penguins. And if Malkin really is telling us that, well, it's a story that, this time around, as a grown-up, I want to watch, relish, and simply just enjoy.

For now, the cautious "Who knows?" holds, yet I hope very soon, for example, by the start of the 2006-07 season, my "Who knows?" is said in reference to the question "What's Malkin's career going to be?"