THN Archive: Quebec Nordiques Extremely Fortunate To Employ Stastny Brothers

In the history of the one-time NHL team Quebec Nordiques, the franchise employed many excellent players. But two of the best were brothers Anton and Peter Stastny – and in 

this cover story from The Hockey News’ January 2, 1981 edition (Vol. 34, Issue 14), writer Allen Abel put together a story on the Stastny’s evolution into NHL stars.

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The Slovakian Stastny brothers were pioneers at the pro hockey level, with Anton being the first Slovak-born-and-bred player to be drafted into the NHL. Another Stastny, winger Marian Stastny, became a fixture in Quebec City as Peter and Anton did. Their brother, Marian Stastny, joined the Nords in the 1981-82 season. And Jamie Hislop, a linemate of Anton and Peter, was bowled over by how talented they were.

“(T)hese guys, geez, they’re phenomenal,” Hislop said of the Stastnys. “They’re so far ahead of us, it’s unbelievable. The thing is, they don’t care who scores. They’re just as happy with the assist. They’re just as happy if they don’t even get an assist, as long as the team scores. They impress me so much by the things they take for granted, the way they know each other’s moves so well.”

Peter Stastny was the most successful of the three brothers, playing in 977 regular-season NHL games and amassing 789 assists and 1,239 points in that span. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1998, and he told Abel how much the sport meant to him, even in his very early years.

“I was playing hockey from when I was six or seven,” Peter Stastny said, “but not until I was 11 or 12 did I have skates. I had the old kind — you needed a key to attach them to your boot — but I was ashamed to wear them. I wanted the real good skates. We called them, ‘Canada skates.’ “

Peter Stastny also discussed the financial realities at that point in pro hockey history. Growing up in then-Czechoslovakia, the “amateur” system paid out money to those involved, but was nowhere near what the NHL had to offer.

“If we beat Sweden, we got from 1,200 to 1,700 crowns,” he says, noting that an average monthly salary for a factory worker in Bratislava was 2,500 crowns. “For beating the Russians, it was 1,500 and 2,000. For a world championship, about 2,000 crowns for each player."

“The goal was to play long enough and well enough to be allowed to play your final seasons in the West, in Germany or Austria. That was my goal. You got to keep most of the money — about 75 percent, but you had to convert it to crowns after you came home. You could not possess other currency.”

The Stastnys were students of the game, with Peter Stastny telling Abel how deeply he respected Canada’s place in the history of the sport.

“When you had the first confrontation (with the Soviet Union) in 1972, I held my fingers crossed for Canada,” Peter Stastny said. “I was so very glad when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal. We did not think of Russian hockey as our hockey. If they had won, it would be a victory for Russia, not for European-style hockey. In Czechoslovakia, we went our own way. When Russia played Canada, I wanted Canada. I said, ‘That’s tradition. That’s hockey.’”

By Allen Abel

January 2, 1981

I look in the newspaper and I see I have so many goals, so many assists, but zero penalties. Very bad. Very bad. What kind of Canadian hockey player has zero penalties? So I go out and tonight I am slashing at somebody. But the referee, he doesn’t see. – Anton Stastny

The chuckling Calder Trophy candidate with no lust for Lady Byng is Anton Stastny, escaped draftsman of Bratislava, late of the Plains of Abraham. He is in the dressing room of Quebec’s polyglot Nordiques beneath the Joe Louis Arena, which has been less than half-filled for a match between two occupants of the lower rungs of the National Hockey League ladder. Most of this city’s hockey fans have stopped showing up. Those who do, boo.

At the next stall dresses brother Peter, darker-haired, taller, three years older at 24 than the blond Anton, but no less fluent in English or the game itself. This night, in the Nordiques’ first road victory in two months, the brothers have shone brilliantly; their playmaking has been exquisite, their defensive work somewhat less so.

Down the line stands the beneficiary of the defections of the deft puck handlers of Slovan Bratislava, a round right winger from Sarnia, Ont., named Jamie Hislop. This night, Hislop has recorded a pair of goals that — he won’t disagree — could have been scored by a skating bear from the Moscow Circus. Twice he has been sent in alone on an empty net; Red Wing goaltender Gilles Gilbert and his attendant defensemen having been lured far out of position by Anton’s behind-the-back passes.

Things rarely have gone so swimmingly for the Nordiques, but they are a young team forced to play without their two most proficient non-Slovak forwards — Real Cloutier, yet to begin his season because of a broken ankle received in a fastball game, and Marc Tardif, who has missed several games with a sore hand. Now Jamie Hislop is being asked about the proficiency of his linemates and he fairly gasps for breath.

“I hate to knock the North American game,” Hislop says, “because we have stars as well. But as far as working together goes, these guys, geez, they’re phenomenal. They’re so far ahead of us, it’s unbelievable. The thing is, they don’t care who scores. They’re just as happy with the assist. They’re just as happy if they don’t even get an assist, as long as the team scores.

“They impress me so much by the things they take for granted, the way they know each other’s moves so well. When we first were put together, I was totally lost. They sat down with me and took out a piece of paper and showed me where I should be. Anton told me, just break down my wing and if he doesn’t get the puck to me, that’s his fault.”

And Anton says, “If I see the man and I have the time, I can do anything.”

“Always,” says Peter Stastny, “they ask me, ‘Why did you come? Why did you come? It must have been for the money.’ But it was not for the money. No, not for money.”

He is in a Titan T-shirt and blue satin briefs in a room on the 32nd floor of the Detroit Plaza Hotel in the megalithic Renaissance Center on the river shore, and he says that the grand, fountain-filled lobby of the hotel has impressed him as much as anything on his first swing through the NHL. He mentions the beaches of Southern California and the marvellous play of a St. Louis goalie named Mike Liut as other surprises, and then offers one of his own. The brothers Stastny, he claims, left the homeland they had represented so impeccably in league and international play mainly because they disliked their coach.

“He was destroying our team,” Anton says, and in a 90-minute conversation the word “freedom” never will be mentioned. “In Czechoslovakia, it was not like here. You could not change teams if you did not want to play some place. Our coach, he did not care about the team. We would practice for two hours and he would only be there for 30 minutes. He had duties at the university and he coached the second national team. The players, they wanted to practice more and more. Is that crazy? I never have heard of hockey players who wanted to practice, but we did.

“He would send his assistant around, a man who had never played in the First Division. He would show us a piece of paper and say, ‘Horsky wants you to do this and that.’ That was the coach’s name, Horsky. In 1979, we won the championship of the league, the first time a Slovak team had ever won. We were 20 points ahead of Kladno. But in 1980, we were 20 points behind them!

“Sometimes, the players would joke. They would say, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going to Canada to play in the NHL.’ But it is not so easy. All right, you could go, and you would show up at the training camp and say, ‘Hello, I am from Slovan Bratislava.’ And they would laugh and say, ‘Who are you?’ You had to have a name, like Nedomanskv.

“Our coach, he went to the board of directors and made them get rid of six players. They sold Sakac, the goalie, just to make money for themselves. He destroyed the team, but he came to us and said, ‘I am rebuilding a prospective team.’ And I said, ‘We are the prospective team.’ Seven years I worked hard. I said, ‘I want it now.’

“So I come to Quebec. Here, yes, we are building too, but at least I have a goal. Last year, they were 19th. This year, we hope to reach the playoffs, next year higher, and so on. Here, you get the money. There, you got the money only if you were winning games. And now I look in the newspaper and Slovan Bratislava is in last place.

“And the coach — they fired him.”

They learned to play the game before they learned to skate. On a frozen playground near the housing development where the Stastnys lived, the young boys of the family — there were five of them — would bandy about with sticks and pucks, but the skates were made of wishing.

“I was playing hockey from when I was six or seven,” Peter recalls, “but not until I was 11 or 12 did I have skates. I had the old kind — you needed a key to attach them to your boot — but I was ashamed to wear them. I wanted the real good skates. We called them, ‘Canada skates.’”

The sport was their city’s, and their country’s, tradition, fed in the Stastnys’ boyhood by the far-off successes of a fellow Slovak who took the name of Mikita. In 1970, when Peter was 14 and Anton was 11, Stan Mikita came to Czechoslovakia, practiced with the national team and “people were crazy and I was too.”

Peter remembers the reports of NHL games that made their way to the television screen in a flat that did not have and still does not have, a telephone. When the defectors call home, they ring a neighbor who is eager for news of two young men who, since the report of their escape was uttered in their hometown press, have not been mentioned officially.

“When they would have a big fight, say, Toronto and Chicago, they would always show us the ice and the gloves and the sticks. It made a fun picture. But people said, ‘That’s not hockey. That’s boxing.’ In Europe, if we played like that with the referees we had, the penalty box always would be filled. If you fought, you were suspended for five or seven or 12 games.

“Always, we looked up to the Canadian players. But then there were the years that Canada did not send a team to the Olympic Games or world championships, and we only knew what our journalists would write: ‘Why? Why? Hockey without Canada is not hockey.’

“When you had the first confrontation in 1972, I held my fingers crossed for Canada. I was so very glad when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal. We did not think of Russian hockey as our hockey. If they had won, it would be a victory for Russia, not for European-style hockey. In Czechoslovakia, we went our own way. When Russia played Canada, I wanted Canada. I said, ‘That’s tradition. That’s hockey.’”

“I would like someday to visit Japan,” says Peter Stastny. “I have read about it and it sounds so exotic.”

“So buy a ticket and go to Japan,” he is told.

“Buy a ticket?” he replies, “Ah, yes, such a thing is possible. It is one of the advantages here.”

“I look here at the good Canadian players who are my age,” says Anton Stastny after his 25th National Hockey League game and his 24th and 25th scoring points. “I look at Wayne Gretzky and Denis Savard in Chicago, and I see players who know how to use the good passing. They’re not so strong, not so fast skating, but they pass, and a good pass, it changes the position and all the action.

“I look at them and I see something from Europe in them, and something from the NHL. They have taken from us just as we have taken from you. Formerly, in Czechoslovakia, they never had the play where you passed back to the point and they took a shot. But from Canada, we learn that.”

“We have played against professional teams so many times now,” says Peter who earlier this season managed at least one point in 16 consecutive games, “that there was no surprise when we came here to live. I was used to the hitting. I liked it. I wasn’t scared. But so many players in Czechoslovakia, they were scared. That’s why Canada used to play tough when they came to Europe. They knew what our players felt. We had players, they would say, ‘let them win, just so we get out alive.’ here, it is the worst thing, to be scared."

The imminent arrival of Marian Stastny to play the right wing beside his two brothers is regarded as a fait accompli in the Quebec media and “just a cruel joke” by Peter. Maurice Filion the club’s general manager, says only that “if Marian is available, we would like to have him. But of course he would be a free agent.” So, technically, were Vitezslav Duris and Jiri Crha of the Toronto Maple Leafs. But it is likely that Marian, who may be the most accomplished of the three, would make it known that he would play only for Quebec and nowhere else. It had been reported that Marian would arrive “before Christmas,” but his brothers professed to know nothing of this. What they do know is that, if he does defect, it will be farewell to Jamie Hislop.

(Hislop may be displaced anyway; coach Michel Bergeron is toying with the notion of using the flamboyant Real Cloutier with the two Stastnys when his ankle heals. But Cloutier may not be disciplined enough to stick to his wing.)

“With Jamie, if I have time, it is easy,” Anton says. “If I can see where I am passing, I can make behind-the-back, through-the-legs, anything. But if I play with both my brothers, then I do not even have to see. We have practiced together for 10 months a year for four years. With Jamie, I must see him. With my brothers, I know.”

They live the life now of the itinerant professional athlete, and in some ways it is the life they always have known and in other ways it is so new. Peter recalls their cushy travel schedule — short trips were by bus, flying excursions from Bratislava to Prague never took them away from home for more than three days — and he reveals the pay scale of the Czechoslovakian “amateur." It was a bonus system whose rewards depended on the quality of the opposition and the importance of the event.

“If we beat Sweden, we got from 1,200 to 1,700 crowns,” he says, noting that an average monthly salary for a factory worker in Bratislava was 2,500 crowns. “For beating the Russians, it was 1,500 and 2,000. For a world championship, about 2,000 crowns for each player.

“The goal was to play long enough and well enough to be allowed to play your final seasons in the West, in Germany or Austria. That was my goal. You got to keep most of the money — about 75 percent, but you had to convert it to crowns after you came home. You could not possess other currency.

“The top players, it is true, had many advantages, but not a car, not a house. There was always a big problem with flats. Some people, they would wait five or seven years. If you were a sportsman, you had a chance to get a new flat in a few months, Your food was free. There was a hotel where you could go and eat breakfast, lunch, dinner for free. This was only during training, but we trained for 11 months.

“Everyone had to go into the army for two years, but a sportsman would be assigned to practice his sport. I had to take courses at university, ‘soldiering courses,’ they were called, but instead of two weeks at camp, I had only to go one week. Later, I would have had to go for one month to the hard training and be a real soldier, with a rifle, like everyone else, sportsman or no.

“They would invite you to speak at a school or factory or workers’ club, but never for money. Sometimes, after an important tournament, there would be an appearance on radio or television on the open-line discussion, and for that you would be paid. When you went to a factory, usually the workers tried to find a gift for you, but never money.”

It was a life of comparative luxury, of frequent trips to the West, the first of which took him to Montreal for one night en route to Winnipeg for a junior tournament when Peter Stastny was 18. Their plane was late and Peter, away from Czechoslovakia for the first time in his life, spent an unforgettable evening in the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. When he recalls the trip, he rubs his neck in mock pain at the stiff neck caused by craning at the skyscrapers of a free, if stumbling, economy.

Now the land of the tall buildings is his own but sometimes an immigrant forgets. “Sometimes I talk about ‘home’ and I am meaning Bratislava but now this is my home, my new country.”

He is silent for a moment, pondering the scope of his vast, adopted motherland. Then he rattles off the names of some fellow National Hockey Leaguers.

“There are many foreigners here, yes?” he asks. “I see the names. Ee-VAN Bol-DEE-rev. TER-ry Rush-KUV-ski.”

Following the brief layover in Montreal, there would be other trips across the ocean for the Stastnys, the most fondly remembered being the Canada Cup tournament of 1976 in which the Czechs, backed by the impenetrable goaltending of Vladimir Dzurilla and Jiri Holocek, reached the final round before losing on Darryl Sittler’s overtime goal. A 1-0 defeat of Canada remains the summit of Peter’s hockey experiences.

Far less memorable would be the utter collapse of the Czechoslovakian nationals upon the leasing to West German teams of the two aging goalkeepers. Humiliated at Moscow in 1979 and at Lake Placid last winter, the homeland was promising a facelift that would not include two, and possibly three, of the Stastnys of Bratislava.

In the spring of 1977, Canada rejoined world championship play with a collection of NHL veterans whose rough and occasionally obscene play at Vienna did little to reinforce the belief that the lessons of 1972 and ’76 had been learned. But Peter remembers Team Canada ’77 as “the best team Canada ever sent to Europe. Such big stars like Phil Esposito. They had a very bad reputation, but they played us so well. We lost three points out of four to them, and we were the world champions!”

A year later, they lent him to the Kladno team for a game at Maple Leaf Gardens. Peter Stastny scored two goals and was named the game’s first star. They gave him a silver bowl and when it is remembered the hotel room on the 32nd floor clouds over for the first time in a remarkable day.

“It had a nice place in my flat in Bratislava,” Peter Stastny says. “But I had to leave it there. I went away and left so many things.”

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