“They’ll never beat us again,” said Team Canada’s spare goaltender Eddie Johnston, and guess what: he was right. It was on this date 49 years ago, a Sunday in Moscow, that Johnston’s teammates outlasted their rivals from the Soviet Union to win the sixth game of that fall’s epic Summit Series by a score of 3-2. The Canadians followed up with wins in game seven and eight, too, with Toronto Maple Leafs’ left winger Paul Henderson scoring the deciding goal in each of those final three games. That’s his September 27th game-seven goal here, above, with Vladislav Tretiak in the Soviet goal and defenceman Valeri Vasiliev sprawled at left. That sixth game wasn’t pretty, it has to be said, featuring iffy refereeing by the West German duo of Josef Kompalla and Franz Baader as the bad blood flowed freely between the two teams on the ice. In the second period, a slash by Canada’s Bobby Clarke fractured Valeri Kharlamov’s ankle.

In 2002, on the Summit’s 30^th anniversary, Henderson lamented the swing of his teammate’s stick. “If Clarke hits him with a bodycheck and knocks him out, that’s fair and square,” Henderson said then. “To go out and deliberately try to take somebody out, there’s no sportsmanship in that. To me, it’s the same as shooting a guy in the hallway. Clarke was probably the only guy on the whole team that would have done it.”

Clarke wasn’t best pleased: he thought Henderson’s comments were “foolish.”

“I think it’s improper to criticize a teammate 30 years later,” Clarke seethed. “If it was so offensive, why didn’t he bother to say something after the game?”

Henderson apologized to Clarke that same week, “for causing him aggravation.” The then-GM of the Philadelphia Flyers wasn’t buying it, though. “Henderson called me,” Clarke told TSN. “He used his grandson as an excuse. His grandkids said it was poor sportsmanship. But to me it was all phony.”

(Image: Frank Lennon. Library and Archives Canada, e010933339 )