ON THIN ICE : Soviet Star Defects to Play in NHL, but His Status Remains Questionable

Almost a week after May Day, Alexander Mogilny went outside here Sunday morning to find three inches of fresh-fallen snow on the ground and the temperature barely above freezing. It must have reminded him of his home, not Moscow, where he has toiled as a member of the Central Red Army’s ice hockey team, but his native Siberia.

Mogilny, 20, was en route to a news conference at Memorial Auditorium, where he may or may not be playing in the future for the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres.

He would be asked by an international cast of reporters to explain the reason he left the Soviet Union without the permission of his team and, perhaps more pertinent, his military commanders, a question he might have been asking himself considering the foul weather.

Since Mogilny arrived in the United States Friday night from Stockholm, where he was the right winger on the triumphant Soviet national team’s third line at the world championships, speculation has centered on his longings for a girlfriend in Alaska, for freedom to display his much-publicized affinity for Western ways and for money, not necessarily in that order.

Speculation will have to do for now because Sabre General Manager Gerry Meehan, a former immigration law attorney, would not allow Mogilny to answer specific questions about his motives for departing the Soviet Union while the matter is under investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI.

As best as could be determined from Mogilny’s responses, he did not like the Soviets’ retirement plan.

Asked about charges from the Soviet Union that he is selfish because he has jeopardized the chances of other Soviet players from receiving permission to play in the NHL, Mogilny said: “I heard that they write I think only of myself. But who was thinking about me when I finish playing hockey in the Soviet Union? They don’t think about that.”

He did not elaborate. But he did say that the woman reported in a Swedish newspaper to be his girlfriend, a 23-year-old University of Anchorage biology major whom he met at the world junior championships last December, was not a factor in his decision.

“She is just a friend,” he said.

Mogilny spoke through an interpreter, although reporters who have interviewed him at international competitions say that he speaks English well. He indicated that Sunday when asked by a television reporter to speak a few words in English for the camera.

Without waiting for an interpretation of the question, he grinned and said, “Later.”

Meehan said the Sabres will attempt to ease Mogilny’s transition by enrolling him in language classes and introducing him to the culture and customs of his new land, but, like many young Muscovites, he apparently already had a fascination with Western life.

Ken Hitchcock, coach of a Canadian junior league team, told the Toronto Star last week that Mogilny has No. 99 (Wayne Gretzky’s number) printed on the inside of his hockey gloves and, unlike other Soviet national team players, uses sticks, gloves and a helmet manufactured in Canada.

“He even laces up his skates not in the tight European way but like a Canadian with the top three holes open and the tongue hanging out,” Hitchcock said. “And off the ice, he’s in cowboy boots. How many Russians do you see in cowboy boots?”

Mogilny did not wear boots to the news conference, which would not have been appropriate in the medieval-style Aud Club. He was fashionably dressed in a khaki-colored double-breasted suit with a striped shirt and a smart green paisley tie. There was an expensive-looking gold chain bracelet around his right wrist. He would not look out of place on the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly except for a missing front tooth, almost obligatory for a hockey player.

According to virtually everyone in the NHL who has been asked, Mogilny is quite a hockey player. Because of his deft touch and skating ability, his nickname is Magic.

In a recent poll of NHL scouts conducted by the Hockey News, he was rated the world’s best junior player. With three goals and two assists in six games in the 1988 Winter Olympics at Calgary, he became, at 18, the youngest Soviet hockey player to win a gold medal.

A few months later, the Sabres, recognizing a thaw in the relationship between the NHL and the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation, made Mogilny their fifth-round draft choice, the 89th selection overall, although Meehan said he did not believe the rising young star would be available to them for several years.

“You’re talking about an impact player,” Meehan said.

If you believe Soviet officials who have been quoted, Mogilny’s impact on their hockey program in recent months has been primarily negative. After a fight in a national league game earlier this year, Mogilny was stripped of his Master of Sport designation and suspended for 10 games.

“You got the feeling he was a tremendous individualist, a free spirit,” Hitchcock said. “Even on the bench, he sits way down at the end with his back to the players. He has mannerisms like us. He’s even into high-fiving.”

That was not considered endearing in the Soviet Union. During the world junior championships last December at Anchorage, Valentin Zozin, secretary general of the Soviet Ice Hockey Federation said: “It is my opinion he will be out of hockey in two years. He loves himself more than the game. He is not committed.”

An editorial last week in Sovietsky Rossiya, the Russian Federation daily newspaper, claimed: “This is no tragedy for Soviet hockey. We’ll manage without that deceitful forward.”

But for someone with so few attributes, the Soviets are at least trying to make it appear as if they will go to great lengths to get him back. A military prosecutor, Leonid Obyektov, told a daily sports newspaper, Sovietsky Sport, that Mogilny, a junior army lieutenant, may be charged with desertion, in which case the Soviet Union would request his extradition from the United States. There is, however, no extradition agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“This whole affair is childish,” Obyektov said. “We ought to be more serious in our attitude to life, service and one’s own business in general, in this case hockey.”

The headline on the story: “The Golden Calf and the Horsethieves From Buffalo.”

Meehan said, however, that the Sabres only rounded up a loose thoroughbred. He said that the team’s director of amateur evaluation and development, Don Luce, received a call in Buffalo Tuesday from a Soviet defector in Stockholm who told him that Mogilny wanted to join the Sabres. Luce had given his business card to Mogilny five months earlier at Anchorage.

Fearing that it may be a hoax, but not wanting to miss an opportunity in case it was not, Meehan and Luce flew to Stockholm, met with Mogilny and the defector at an undisclosed location and returned with them Friday to the United States, where they have been consulting with the INS and the FBI.

Meehan would not say whether Mogilny will ask for asylum. But there was speculation in Sunday’s Buffalo News that he might seek an accommodation with the INS and the Soviet government that would enable him to play hockey in the United States and return to the Soviet Union during summers. Meantime, he is in the United States on a seven-day visa, meaning that he is not officially classified as a defector.

The NHL also has asked for a full report from Meehan. Although the NHL would allow Mogilny to play for the Sabres if he receives government clearance, the league’s president, John Ziegler, told the Toronto Star he is worried about the incident’s potential impact on the expanding contacts between the NHL and the Soviets.

Two NHL teams, Calgary and Washington, have scheduled a tour of the Soviet Union next fall, while four Soviet teams, have agreed to tour North America next winter. One Soviet player, Sergei Priakin, was allowed to join the Flames late this season, and three prominent veterans were believed to be on the verge of receiving permission to join NHL teams. Most of their salaries, however, would have gone to the Soviet federation.

Mogilny apparently wanted to be a free agent.

“I’ve been thinking about it for maybe a year,” said Mogilny, who left his parents, an older brother and a fiancee back home in Khabarovsk, a city next to the border of Manchuria in Eastern Siberia. “The circumstances didn’t make it possible. It’s very hard to take a step like that. I fought it with myself for some time.”

He made his move last week.

“They in the Soviet sport federation, why should they do the thinking for me? I wanted to make my own decisions.”