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“They hate us and we hate them.”
Keith Tkachuk, 1996 World Cup
It is not quite the Battle of the Atlantic — which celebrated its 65th anniversary here last weekend — but at least it will be a real hockey game after several days of shinny.
Team Canada versus Team USA.
"This is a lot about bragging rights," Canadian head coach Ken Hitchcock says.
"From an intensity standpoint, this goes way up."
Well, it certainly couldn't go down, not after Canada waltzed through its first two games in the world championship with a 5-1 win over Slovenia followed by a yawn-inducing 7-0 pounding of Latvia, while the Americans rolled over poor Latvia 4-0 and beat Slovenia 5-1.
Still, this afternoon's match at the Metro Centre has a far, far way to go before a Canada-U.S. match could reach the intensity of the World Cup in 1996. In that international tournament, Tkachuk muttered his famous line about mutual "hate," where he said the Americans were "sick of taking a back seat to teams like Canada and Russia" — and where he and his American teammates then went out and beat Canada in the one game Canadians cannot bear losing in.
It has always been so.
It was so back in 1924, when Canada sent the Toronto Granites sailing for Chamonix, France, and the Olympics' first Winter Games. Harry (Moose) Watson sent back a telegram from London to a Toronto newspaper saying he and his teammates were keen to "start heavy training again and justify the confidence that has been placed in us and retain for Canada supremacy in the hockey world." With big Moose firing 36 goals — including 13 in one game against the weak-ankled Swiss — Canada easily won the gold medal it had to have.
It was so in 1972, when Phil Esposito stood on the ice in Vancouver after Team Canada's 5-3 loss to the Soviet Union and pleaded with "the people across Canada" to understand that "we gave it our best" and did not deserve the angry booing that had cascaded down on the disappointed and disheartened Canadian players.
And it was so in 2002, when Team Canada executive director Wayne Gretzky said, "The whole world wants us to lose," after the Canadians got off to a less-than-stellar start in a tournament they would still rally to win.
"Nobody," an impassioned Gretzky added, "understands the pressure these guys are under."
Shane Doan does. The captain of the 2008 version of Team Canada stands in a hallway off the rink and says, simply, "We expect to win gold," when you play for a country that seemingly will accept no less.
"You feel it every tournament you play in," said Doan, who has represented Canada internationally multiple times.
Doan, who was born in Halkirk, Alta., in 1976, will join his teammates in wearing Team Canada '76 replica jerseys for the game, as the tournament honours numerous players, including Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull and Darryl Sittler, from the team that won the initial Canada Cup.
The more pressure the better is Doan's attitude.
"We want to be tested," he said. "We want to be pushed. We want to see what we can do."
Which brings us back to today's match against the United States, the team that has become, more or less, Canada's main hockey rival in recent years, beginning with the U.S. victory in the World Cup in '96 and including Canada's gold-medal win over the Americans in the Winter Games in 2002.
The Canada Cup in 1976 featured a final between Canada and Czechoslovakia, but the Soviets (later Russians) were considered the top rival for decades before the U.S. rise in the game.
"That's the only rivalry for our players," said Brian Burke, the Anaheim Ducks' general manager, who is here as an adviser to Team USA.
Both teams boast their young stars — Jonathan Toews for Canada and the Patrick Kane of the United States, who are also teammates on the NHL's Chicago Blackhawks — and impressive firepower in their forward lines.
"Canada's roster is like an all-star team," said Tim Thomas, who will be in the U.S. goal.
"This is going to be one of the toughest games in the tournament, if not the toughest."
"It will be a like an NHL high-level game," Hitchcock said. "We're going to have to be at our best to beat them."
To that end, the Canadian coaches are already dismantling their second line. Jason Spezza has been centring Martin St. Louis and Chris Kunitz, but the line has fizzled from the opening match. Hitchcock plans to fiddle by inserting Derek Roy and Toews at various points in the hopes that the line can find some chemistry and offer Canada a secondary scoring unit behind the dominating line of Heatley, Ryan Getzlaf and Rick Nash, which has 16 points in the two wins so far. Cam Ward will get his second start in the Canadian goal.
Getzlaf, a Regina native, has no trouble getting up for a game against the United States — he's still stinging from Canada's loss to the United States in the world junior championship in Helsinki in 2004, when Patrick O'Sullivan scored that awkward goal on Canada's Marc-André Fleury to take the gold medal.
"It sucked," Getzlaf remembered. "It was brutal — one of the worst things I've been through."
"We're not going to get wrapped up in what Canada's all about," U.S. coach John Tortorella said. "We're going to get wrapped up in what we're all about."
But what both teams are clearly about is gearing up for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Tortorella and Burke consider their very young team a complete "changing of the guard" from the days of U.S. World Cup victories and Tkachuk's incendiary comments.
The faces and words might change, but the aim remains the same.
"When you put that uniform on," Tortorella said, "you're here to win."
