Interview of the best NHL goalkeeper of the 80s: about the great Edmonton, matches against the USSR and punishment for drugs

From the editors of Sports.ru: You are on the Hockey Books blog , which translated two fiery autobiographies – Phil Esposito and Sean Avery, a smart book about hockey analytics, a book about youth hockey, and also periodically uploads transcripts of a hockey podcast. Support the authors with pluses, subscriptions and comments so that interesting translations appear more often in your feed.

The publication of a book about the Canada Cup is, of course, good, but you should not forget about podcasts either. This time I pulled from the archives an issue of Spittin’ Chiclets with Grant Fuhr, the main goalkeeper of the Maple national team in the 1987 tournament.

If you don’t know anything about him, then be sure to look at least a couple of highlights sewn into kilometers of text below. And if the standard of athletic style is Jonathan Quick, then who is Grant Fuhr? The man kept jumping into the air at the level of the crossbar to catch the puck.

His best days came in the 1980s, when North America in general and sports in particular was in the era of cocaine. Fur, being a rather good-natured person, not particularly burdened with education, also fell for this bait, which was mentioned in passing in the interview, so I insert a small disclaimer here.

In short, many used then, and only Grant was caught: he was handed over by his wife, with whom he was in the process of divorce, and a former agent. Fuhr said that the hype was raised from scratch, and he was nothing more than indulging. However, according to another version, the matter was not limited to pampering there. How it all ended – find out below. There’s a lot of tasty and old-school stuff there.

“I said before the interview that the younger generation will only be happy to learn from you how everything happened there in the old days. Then everything was exactly the way we love, ”Biz said at the end.

I don’t know about you, but the tales of those times come to me like nothing else.

Just a reminder, if you want Sean Avery and Phil Esposito’s autobiographies in EPUB format, as well as other books, write to me here in a personal on Sports.ru. To do this, you must first add me as a friend. There are six books in total. Besides old Sean and Phil these are:

– “While the Lights Burn” about youth hockey in Canada (my personal favorite) – “Hockey Analytics” – Theo Fleury’s autobiography (my first translation, crooked by today’s standards, but someone saved it) – Surprise (pleasant)

If you want to help the project financially, there is a card number below. Donations, to be honest, motivate like nothing else. The most valuable rubles in life, really. I’ll imagine that someone is not too lazy to read all this, and then go somewhere else to enter the card number, so it immediately becomes warm. And I want to translate the entire Internet to hell 🙂

Next up is Paul “Biz” Bissonnett, Ryan “Whit” Whitney and RA (Rear Admiral or Rear Admiral is the nickname of Brian McGonagall, co-host of the podcast). Occasionally, producer Mike Grinell also chimes in. There are miles of letters ahead. Read at your own risk.