NHL President in a Bind Over Soviet Defection

One of the things John Ziegler is proudest of in his 12-year reign as president of the National Hockey League is the new ground he has broken with hockey interests in the Soviet Union.

At the moment, though, he is crossing his fingers, hoping that the Soviets don’t bury his hopes in that new ground.

Ziegler is in a bind not of his making. He was only weeks away from announcing the specifics of an international sports breakthrough, a visit to the Soviet Union by the Washington Capitals and the Calgary Flames of the NHL. Each team would play four games.

The games were scheduled between Sept. 13-22, and they would mark the first time, after more than a decade of trying, that NHL teams, per se, would be allowed into the Soviet Union to play.

It was virtually a done deal, the NHL’s own piece of the glasnost action.

And then, along came Alexander Mogilny.

Mogilny, a member of the Soviet national team and a wing-and-a-prayer draft choice of the Buffalo Sabres, apparently decided last week that winters in Buffalo just might be his cup of vodka. He defected from the Soviet team in Stockholm, where it had just won the World Championships, and flew to the United States with Sabre officials.

Now, what his status is to the Sabres and the NHL, not to mention American work permits, short-term visas or even long-term defection, is unclear. Tuesday, Mogilny filed for political asylum in the United States. He was granted a 60-day permit to live here while U.S. Immigration and Naturalization officials decide his case.

What is clear, however, to both Ziegler and the heretofore friendly Soviet sports officials he has been wooing since the Soviets started playing games against NHL teams in the United States, is that it is not well received in Moscow when a Soviet athlete shuffles off to Buffalo.

So, when a harried Ziegler met here Tuesday with a committee of the Associated Press Sports Editors for an annual news briefing, he was not particularly happy.

He did, however, break his self-imposed silence on the issue long enough to say, “This is a very sensitive time right now.

“Hockey is a very high-profile sport in the Soviet Union and this (the NHL trip) is the first time this has happened in hockey.”

When asked what his reaction had been when told of the Mogilny case, Ziegler grimaced and said quietly, “Damn.”

The NHL president said that NHL teams had been told many times “not to get involved with the intrigue of getting players out of countries,” but that Buffalo had not violated laws or NHL rules.

He seemed to put the onus on Mogilny when he said: “I have told the Soviets that the action of one individual should not ruin what we have done in the past.”

What Ziegler and the NHL have done is negotiate a total of 75 games between various Soviet teams and various forms of NHL teams since 1975. Those games followed the highly publicized and dramatic series between Team Canada and the Soviet nationals, both in the Soviet Union and Canada in 1972. That series ended dramatically when the Canadian team scored a goal in the last 10 seconds of the last game to win, 6-5.

The difference in that 1972 series and what Ziegler had arranged for September in the Soviet Union is that Team Canada was an all-star team. The Capitals and the Flames planned to play their regular groups--the first such test on Soviet soil.

Since he took over as NHL president in 1977, Ziegler has made nearly 20 trips to the Soviet Union. He and his sport have carried on a dialogue with the Soviets. He hopes their long-nurtured relationship will save the proposed trip.

“We played many games over the years, even when relations between our governments were strained,” he said.

But will these relations survive one Alexander Mogilny? Nobody knows.

Clearly, the defection has put an international sports relationship on the cutting edge.