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Historian sheds new light on hockey villain
MarioBartel editorial@newwestrecord.ca
A Douglas College historian is shining a new light on one of the greatest villains in Canadian sports lore
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Cedric Bolz, the head of the school’s history department, has published an alternate view of the famous 1972 Canada–Russia hockey Summit Series as it was seen through the eyes of Josef Kompalla, one of its referees Kompalla and fellowWest German Franz Baader were among eight officials that also included four Americans, a Swede and a Czech, who were assigned to work the historic eight-game showdown between hockey’s two greatest superpowers at the time
But Canadians old enough to remember the grainy liveTV pictures from Moscow’s Luzhniki Ice Palace beamed into their living rooms and even classrooms that September 51 years ago likely recall Kompalla as Public Enemy No 1
Even those who’ve only experienced the series second hand through subsequent memoirs and documentary films have come to vilify Kompalla, said Bolz.
Authors and filmmakers have perpetuated the narrative that the amateur ref- eree was out of his depth arbitrating games between hockey’s greatest professional players and the mighty Soviets.
Or worse, they surmised, he was a complicit East German.
Until now.
Bolz’s book, The September He Remembers, flips Kompalla’s story and his role in the Summit Series on its head.
It is, Bolz said, “the first step in correcting a major historical oversight and adding a new chapter in the Summit Series’ growing, mutable legacy.”
Bolz said he first heard of Kompalla through his stepfather, who’d played professional hockey in
Germany for several years before moving his family to Canada.
The veteran referee officiated more than 2,000 games including several world championships.
He was revered in Europe and even earned a place in the International Ice Hockey Federation’s (IIHF) Hall of Fame.
But in Canadian hockey lore, Kompalla is a reviled figure who seemed determined to derail the NHLers from affirming their superiority on the ice over the Soviet Union.
Player J.P. Parise physically attacked him after he’d been assessed a penalty.
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