Jan. 2—ROCHESTER — The last time the World Junior Championship hockey tournament was held primarily in Minnesota was 44 years ago.
Bloomington was the host city, but games in late December of 1981 and early January of 1982 were held in 15 different cities.
At the time, the WJC was an eight-team event, and those eight teams got to see more of Minnesota — and parts of Manitoba and Ontario — than they likely ever imagined.
The WJC field has since expanded to 10 teams and the number of cities that host games has been cut from 15 to two. This year, those two are St. Paul (Grand Casino Arena) and Minneapolis (3M Arena at Mariucci).
The tournament now is divided into two five-team groups for round-robin play, with the top four finishers in each group advancing to single-elimination bracket play.
But 44 years ago, there was no bracket play, no single elimination. The WJC was strictly played under a round-robin format, with each of the eight teams playing the others once. Teams received three points for winning a game and one for a tie. The team with the most points at the end of the tournament received the gold medal, while the teams with the second- and third-most points were awarded the silver and bronze medals.
That’s where Rochester and Graham Arena enter the picture.
Rochester was offered the opportunity to host one game in 1982. Prior to that tournament, many thought it would be a meaningless game — the last game of the day on the last day of the tournament, Canada vs. Czechoslovakia.
Neither team had medaled in 1981. Czechoslovakia had finished fourth, and Canada had finished seventh, narrowly avoiding relegation by one spot. The Canadians had never won a World Juniors title and no Canadian hockey team had won an amateur international championship at any level in 21 years, since Canada won the 1961 men’s World Championships.
So, much to the surprise of the six other teams in the field, the large international media contingent and the fans of all eight teams, Canada and Czechoslovakia came to southeastern Minnesota in first and second place, respectively, in the WJC standings.
What looked like a throwaway game in Rochester turned out to be the biggest game of the tournament.
Canada and Czechoslovakia played for the gold medal. At Graham Arena. In Rochester, Minnesota.
“Realistically, we came into this meet just hoping for a medal, thinking our best chance would be for a bronze,” Team Canada coach Dave King told the Post Bulletin on Jan. 2, 1982, the day of the unexpected gold medal matchup. “What’s happened is a little miraculous, and an inspiration to us all.”
Canada came to Rochester for its final game of the WJC with one slight advantage in its pocket. The Canadians took a 6-0-0 record into the game, while Czechoslovakia entered at 5-1-0.
The Canadians didn’t need to win, they just needed to not lose.
——Canada’s path to the gold-medal game in 1982 started immediately after the country’s seventh-place finish in West Germany in 1981.
Hockey Canada, fed up with undisciplined play and nearly getting relegated to what was at the time called Pool B (now WJC Division 1A), made a bold decision that was equally praised and second-guessed among Canadian hockey fans.
Up through the 1981 tournament, Canada’s World Junior Championship team was made up almost exclusively of players from the reigning champions of the Memorial Cup, the top major-junior team in the country.
But starting in 1982, Hockey Canada meticulously constructed its roster. Though the World Junior Championship had only been around for five years, the Canadians were fed up with their lack of success in the event.
“The change from last year to this? That’s easy, the change in attitude and overall talent,” Team Canada forward Mike Moller, a 1980 second-round draft pick of the Buffalo Sabres, told the Post Bulletin after the 1982 gold medal game. “Instead of taking our winning junior team to the tournament this year, the government decided to go for it, to make it an all-star team. That’s the first difference.
“The other is having the discipline to play the way Dave King told us we’d have to to win.”
——Czechoslovakia knew it needed to beat Canada that day to claim the gold. And it played that way for the first two periods. The Czechs outshot Canada 29-10 over the first 40 minutes, but led by a narrow 2-1 margin after two periods thanks to 28 saves from Canada’s Mike Moffatt, as well as two shots by Czech forwards that hit the crossbar.
“We were struggling badly in the first two periods,” King said, “not applying any pressure. You would have thought we were tired, even with a world championship within our reach.
“Between the last two periods, we asked a few key people to be the sparks, to take the body and impede their progress. We needed some guys to be our strength, to get us going.”
Canada flipped the tables in the third. It outshot Czechoslovakia 19-12 over the final 20 minutes and took a 3-2 lead thanks to goals by Marc Habscheid, a sixth-round draft pick of the Edmonton Oilers, and Moller. Those goals came three minutes apart and put Canada ahead with 12:41 remaining.
The Czechs kept pressing, needing two goals in the final 12 minutes to win the gold. They got one, when Buffalo’s first-round pick in 1981, Jiri Dudacek, blasted a shot over Moffatt’s shoulder with 4:30 to play, tying the score 3-3.
Czechoslovakia continued to press and press, but couldn’t solve Moffatt. With 17 seconds remaining in the game — no overtime periods were played in the WJC at the time — the Czechs won a faceoff in Canada’s end and sent two consecutive point-blank shots toward the goal. Both hit Moffatt squarely in his chest, the puck rolling down his sleeve and into his glove after the second one.
Canada then ran out the remaining few ticks of the clock and secured its first-ever WJC gold medal.
“Without (Moffatt) the game would have been over in the second period,” King said of his goalie, who finished the game with 38 saves. “I was concerned when they pulled their goalie. They’re so strong with the puck. I could see it happen, and it just about did. It would have broken our hearts.”
Instead, Team Canada — a collection of players who were nearly all headed to pro hockey, many to the NHL — celebrated wildly in front of a reported crowd of more than 3,000 fans at Graham Arena.
According to the Post Bulletin’s account of the game, “many corks were popped amid disco tunes, with players shouting their glee.”
“All we have heard is how good the Europeans are,” said Canadian defenseman Paul Boutilier, who played more than 320 NHL games, including 10 with the Minnesota North Stars in 1986-87. “But this is for Canada. We’re champions of the Earth.”
That the WJC gold medal game ended up at Graham Arena in 1982 wasn’t through any extensive lobbying by local officials and organizers.
“There was no brilliant planning involved,” local hockey legend Ken Johannson, who helped secure a game in the WJC for Rochester and Graham Arena, told the PB in late 1981. “With the tournament going to 28 games, the Met Center (in Bloomington) couldn’t handle all of them. I got a call asking me to set up sites in southern Minnesota where some of the games could be played.”
In addition to Bloomington and Rochester, other Minnesota cities that hosted games in the 1982 tournament were Duluth, Grand Rapids, Brainerd, Virginia, International Falls, St. Cloud, Burnsville, New Ulm, Minneapolis and Mankato.
Games were also played in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Brandon, Manitoba; and Kenora, Ontario
“The Met Center wanted the U.S.-Finland and Sweden-Russia games, because they figured to be the best draws,” Johannson told the Post Bulletin. “Sweden was the defending champion and Russia always has strong teams, and that looked like it would be the title game.
“I said ‘What the heck! We’ll take the Canadians. As you can see, it was nothing but blind luck that we got their game.”
Rumors had swirled during the days leading up the game at Graham that the Canada-Czechoslovakia game would get moved to the Met Center due to its significance. But Walter L. Bush Jr., the chairman of the organizing committee for the tournament, stepped in and put a stop to that conversation.
“We couldn’t pull that game from the people in Rochester,” Bush Jr. told the Post Bulletin just prior to the game. “It would have destroyed our credibility.”
One footnote from the gold medal game for southeastern Minnesota hockey fans: One of the referees in the gold medal game was Austin, Minn., native John Morrison.
The 1982 tournament was the second in a row for Morrison, who was 34 at the time, and scheduled his officiating duties around his full-time job at Hormel in Austin. His first World Junior Championship was in 1981, the tournament that was held in West Germany.
He was one of two referees from the U.S. in that year’s tournament.
“I guess it’s a combination of knowing the right people to get the chance, and favorably impressing the right people when you do,” Morrison said after the gold medal game.
Morrison played youth hockey in Austin, then “I hung up my skates” until he was in his mid-20s, when he said he played for the Austin Arrows, a Senior B team.
“That’s where I got the idea to start officiating,” he said. “Now getting the chance to referee at this level with my hockey background is a great thrill.”
