Fifteen years after they shared the ice surface in the closing seconds of one of most iconic games in the history of their sport, they shared locker space next to one another in the Detroit Red Wings' dressing room.
One wore the red, white and blue of the young, rag-tag American team, the other wore all red, with the hammer and sickle, symbol of one of the most powerful nations -- and hockey clubs -- on earth.
"Do you believe in miracles?" broadcaster Al Michaels screamed as the final few seconds ticked off.
Mike Ramsey did after he and an eclectic group of college kids completed a stunning upset of the mighty Soviets and went on to win the Olympic gold medal at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York.
But Slava Fetisov? He just goes silent and shakes his head. Soviet Russia's hockey players didn't usually need miracles. They just won.
And when they didn't? Well, that's what the film "Red Army" is about as it explores Russia's soul through the sport of hockey. The 85-minute documentary/biopic attempts to do that in a story told by Fetisov, one of the most decorated athletes in the history of Soviet-Russian sports.
The film opens tonight at the Main Art Theatre 3 in Royal Oak. It is must-viewing for anyone who admired the wizardry of Detroit's Russian Five, which helped the Red Wings end a 42-year Stanley Cup drought with back-to-back titles in 1997-98.
"Red Army is about how an incredibly oppressive system produced one of the greatest teams in history.
"That success came with tremendous personal costs," says writer-director Gabe Polsky, the son of Ukrainian immigrants. "My intention in making this film is to honor the Soviet struggle and to celebrate the art that emerged from such a charged and unique time in history."
In doing so, he leans heavily on Fetisov to tell his fascinating story, which began with him as a youngster trying out for the Red Army's youth program. It goes on to tell the of his team's failure at Lake Placid, then returning home humiliated and subjugated to a brutal training regimen designed to make sure that this would never again happen to a Soviet team.
It didn't, but those tactics came with a price Fetisov wasn't willing to pay.
The story portrays Fetisov's transformation from national hero to political enemy. From the USSR to Russia, the film examines how sport mirrors social and cultural movements, and parallels the rise and fall of the Red Army team that doubled as the Soviet national team for international events.
It includes archival footage from the Cold War, featuring intercontinental ballistic missiles being launched and President Jimmy Carter announcing the United States would boycott the Summer Games in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
It chronicles the final days of the Soviet Union, when President Ronald Reagan -- from the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 in what was then West Berlin -- implored Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev to "tear down this wall." Gorbachev ultimately did, and in the process dissolved the Soviet Union.
The fall of the Iron Curtain was supposed to open the door for all those great Russian players to head west and continue their careers in the National Hockey League. Except it didn't. Promises were made, then broken. And when Fetisov stood up to the regime, he learned how quickly things can turn, even for a national sports hero.
His stories are compelling, and they are garnished with interviews with three of Fetisov's teammates; journalists from Russia and Canada; Scotty Bowman, the architect of Detroit's Russian Five unit; and even a former KGB agent assigned to making sure his country's hockey heroes stayed put and didn't defect.
But at times the film disappoints. Documentary filmmaking and journalism are rooted in the same traditions. We try to tell as many sides to a story as possible and let readers -- or viewers -- draw their own conclusions.
"Red Army" is missing some key sources that might have added some interesting layers to an otherwise great story.
When Fetisov finally gets to the NHL, he's greeted with bias and hatred, some of it from his own teammates.
"Nobody liked me in the U.S.," he says. "They think in cliches. I'm a bad guy, a Communist."
Fetisov noted that many former Soviet players struggled to adapt to a North American game they found to be, by his acknowledgement, brutal and primitive compared to the grace and creativity of the Russian game.
"There was no style," he added, his eyes taking dead aim on the camera.
This might have been a good time for Polsky to put just one North American player on camera to explain an important point of view for the audience. Ramsey would have been a great candidate. My conversations with him and Fetisov about that game in Lake Placid and what followed, with the Russians finally gaining acceptance in the league, were some of the most captivating I've ever had.
Missing, too, were comments of the heavily criticized Soviet coach, Viktor Tikhonov. Near the end of the film viewers are told he declined to be interview for the project.
But where was Igor Larionov? He shared many of the same experiences with Fetisov -- with Red Army and the Red Wings -- and with several teammates stood up to Tikhonov and the Soviet regime holding them back from joining the NHL teams that drafted them.
Larionov's absence from the film is glaring. He centered the famous KLM unit, with Vladimir Krutov and Sergei Makarov on the wings. Together with a defensive unit of Fetisov and Alexei Kasatonov, they formed the original Russian Five, described by Bowman as the best five-man unit ever assembled.
"I played 23 professional years," Fetisov says in the film. "One-thousand-eight-hundred-plus games. I never had more fun than playing with those five guys, together."
He came close in Detroit. After the Wings drafted Sergei Fedorov, Vladimir Konstantinov and Slava Kozlov and orchestrated their departures against the will of the reluctant Soviets, Bowman traded for Fetisov and Larionov, and in the 1995-96, Detroit's Russian Five was born.
"Together again on the same team," Fetisov said. "It was like a fish back in water."
The film really loses its way near the end. Instead of seeing more highlights of Detroit's Russian unit, viewers get a collage of heavy hits and brawling, including the famed melee with Colorado in March 1996 that had nothing at all to do with Red Army hockey. It felt like a weak attempt to appeal to a North American audience that had been sitting through more than an hour of hearing about how the Russian game was so much better.
And there's far too little about the Stanley Cup's first visit to Russia in August 1997, when Fetisov stood up to NHL officials who felt the country was too unsafe for that precious trophy. It desperately needed some context from Russian fans and hockey officials about what this moment meant for their beloved sport.
Fetisov, now a Russian senator, faces his moment of truth near the end of the film when he's asked -- we all ask, and he's clearly sick of the question -- about the 1980 Olympics.
The camera closes in on him. His countenance hardens. His eyes water.
He says nothing.
