Putin invited as Russia gets a rematch with Flyers

For the last 10 months, ex-Flyers defenseman Joe Watson has been trying to go to Russia.

It was kind of just on a whim.

He had played against the Russians in European tournaments and always promised he’d visit their country with a full team in tow. He’ll make good on that next week when he takes a few Flyers alumni to play a series, including an outdoor game on Moscow’s Red Square.

One Russian in particular wants to play the Flyers: Vladimir Putin.

Yes, that Vladimir Putin.

His hockey stats are actually impressive. In an exhibition in 2015 he had eight goals in an 18-6 win against a team of retired NHLers. Russia's defense minister had a hat trick, too, with assists coming from Hall of Famer Pavel Bure and Stanley Cup champion Valeri Kamensky.

Will he get a royal treatment from the Flyers, too?

“I don’t know about that,” Watson said. “He’ll have to earn it from us as far as we’re concerned. We may be stuck in Siberia, but what the hell? We’ll have a good time.

“They never release Putin’s schedule until 24 hours before because of security reasons, so Putin, if he’s around, he wants to play the game against us.”

Watson had trouble putting a roster together because many alumni feared the current political landscape between the U.S. and Russia. Only nine actual former Flyers are making the trip from New York to Moscow on Valentine’s Day with the rest of the roster filled out with Watson’s nephews and a few former Flyers who live in Russia anyway.

“When I couldn’t get enough players I thought they might cancel,” said Watson, who estimates he reached out to 150 alumni to ask if they wanted to play. “(The Russians) said, ‘No, no, we want you to come.’ Everyone’s very excited and we got sponsors, (vodka manufacturer) Stolichnaya is a big sponsor of ours and Gazprom (gas).”

Why is everyone in Russia so excited about the Flyers?

“I think it has something to do with the '70s,” Watson said.

Forty-one years ago, the Russians came to the now-defunct Spectrum and the Flyers beat the daylights out of them. Not on the scoreboard. That was only a 4-1 margin thanks to terrific goaltending by Vladislav Tretiak.

Four years after Bobby Clarke slashed — and fractured — the ankle of Valeri Kharlamov in the Canada-Russia Summit Series, Ed Van Impe delivered a devastating check on Kharlamov and the physical intimidation was taken care of. The Russians left the ice until the Flyers’ late chairman, Ed Snider, marched down to the locker room and threatened not to pay them.

This was in the midst of the Cold War, but the Flyers’ motivation wasn’t political.

“I just hated them,” Clarke said. “I played against them in ’72 and that was a pretty nasty series. For me, in my career playing against them, I just hated them. Absolutely hated them. Politics had nothing to do with it.

“The Russians were as good as the North American players at that time, and I think we were kind of pissed off at all that. It was reality that they were as good as us and we didn’t want to admit it.”

Clarke’s alumni playing days are over. He won’t make the trip. Watson is the only member of that 1976 team that will.

“I don’t know how well they were liked for a lot of reasons,” Hall of Fame winger Bill Barber said. “It was always Russia this, Russia that and their players are the best players in the world. I begged to differ.”

An alumni game wouldn’t drum up such questions over talent. It’s not uncommon in those situations to go easy on the home team. After all, there’s no Stanley Cup for alumni games, just strictly entertainment.

The respectful declining of alumni to go overseas has more to do with politics. In December, the CIA confirmed a report that Russian hackers had an effect on the U.S. presidential election with the specific intention of helping Donald Trump win.

“Oh I think it had to do with politics,” said Watson, who has no apprehension in that regard. “Some of our guys said, ‘They’ve got bad gas in their planes and their engines go down.’ I said, ‘Well, I never thought of that before,’ but we’re flying Aeroflot directly from Kennedy to Moscow, so I think we’ll be fine.”

And if politics seems far from a hockey game, what if the Russian president is playing?

“I think our guys that are there … obviously he’s a powerful figure in the world,” Flyers President Paul Holmgren said. “It would be interesting.”

“I don’t know if that’s going to work against the Flyers, let’s be honest,” current Flyer Jake Voracek joked. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for the Flyers to go there. I don’t know if they’ll come back.”

Voracek, a native of the Czech Republic, educates himself well on world events, and while he sees the reasoning for alumni who didn’t want to make the trip he doesn’t think playing against Putin presents a big risk in a hot political climate.

“This isn’t World War II,” Voracek said. “With the weapons and the armies that countries like the U.S. and China and Russia can use are so advanced, it could literally (screw) up the whole world. It would be the end. It would be a crisis. Is he dangerous? Who is dangerous? You can’t be dangerous anymore. You have some power, sure, but you can’t do stuff that maybe sometimes you want to do because it would end the world. I’m sure he knows that and everybody knows that. Of course we have to battle against ISIS and those guys, but to count him as a dangerous guy? I don’t think so.”

Watson doesn’t either. He’s looking forward to the trip, especially after all the hard work he did to make it happen. It took three weeks for background checks to be completed after the nine travel companions submitted their passports to the Russian embassy in New York.

“I think a lot of people were skeptical about it when I first started doing it,” Watson said. “They thought it was a waste of time, but I didn’t think it was a waste of time because they’re excited about the Flyers coming. The Flyers are a big name in Russia.”

Dave Isaac; 856-486-2479;disaac@gannett.com