Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

Le numéro vingt..." the public-address announcer said, pausing a beat for silence, "Anton Stastny!"

Cheers. Yes, those were actually cheers Anton was hearing. Not just little wee ones, either—a great thunderous ovation. He skated to join his teammates at the blue line, head down, drinking it in. Eleven thousand people—foreign people who spoke a strange language—clapping and whistling in a building where he had never played a game. Not quite the sort of exhibition he had grown accustomed to in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, his home for 21 years, where he and his brothers could excite a crowd into song—but sweet all the same. You are home now, they were saying. You are one of us. A moment later, le numéro vingt-six—Peter Stastny, the better known of the brothers—received much the same loud welcome.

The two of them stood with their Quebec Nordique teammates and gently tapped their sticks on the ice to acknowledge the applause. And 15 minutes later Peter scored his first goal in the Colisée in Quebec City, lifting the puck over Vancouver Goaltender Richard Brodeur, in a game destined to finish in a 3-3 tie. This was in late October.

It had been a long time between cheers. The Nordiques played their first nine games on the road, while their arena was being enlarged and renovated. The Stastnys had played their last game for the Czechoslovak National Team on the road in August in Innsbruck, Austria, on a line with their brother Marian—before defecting to Canada, to the Nordiques, to the NHL. They had played in their last home game sometime last spring, as members of the Slovan Bratislava team. Anton doesn't remember if they won or lost.

While Anton and Peter now play in the NHL, Marian has been suspended from Slovan Bratislava. At 27 he was the team leader, a player in his prime. He had been a star on the Czechoslovakian world-championship teams of 1976-77. He was a hero. Now he cannot find work—and he is a father with three children. "They do black things, very black things to make us go back," Anton says. "This is one of them."

The flight of Anton, 21, and Peter, 24, took place in August, when the Nordiques were contacted by the Stastnys and then helped them defect to Canada. But the story really begins in June of 1976, when one Gilles Léger traveled to Lanseau, West Germany to scout Marian and Peter.

Léger is a suspicious-looking character. He has thick lips that are wrapped around a cigar from morning till night. His sad eyes are concealed behind tinted glasses, and his hairstyle might be called lawn-mower shag. It hangs in uneven lengths straight down over his forehead. He wears a trench coat.

In 1974 Léger, then the director of scouting for the WHA's Toronto Toros, had overseen the defection to Canada of Czech star Vaclav Nedomansky. Now he wanted the Stastnys—all three of them—for the WHA's Birmingham Bulls, the former Toronto Toros. Unfortunately for Léger, the brothers were a national treasure. What did they need with a floundering league and a Birmingham, Alabama? What is that, an Alabama?

As Peter says, the '70s were "the golden age of hockey in Czechoslovakia." In 1972 that country won the world championship. In 1976, Peter's first year with the National Team, it did so again, defeating the Soviets. The Czechoslovaks also won a silver medal at the '76 Olympics and finished second to the professionals of Canada—Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, et al.—in the '76 Canada Cup. When Czechoslovakia won the world championship again in 1977, Marian and Peter Stastny were lionized. What could Léger offer them? The next year their younger brother Anton would join them on the National Team and would play on their line. They had apartments; it took others three or four years to get one. They had cars. They had money: 1,000 korunas (a bit more than $100, a Czech workman's wages for a week and a half) for a win, half that for a tie—sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the opposition. A win over the Soviets was worth 1,800 korunas.

By 1979 the WHA and NHL had merged, the Birmingham club was defunct and Léger was out of a job. Enter Marcel Aubut, the young, portly, ambitious president of the Nordiques. His team had been plundered by the terms of the merger, and he didn't fancy groveling in the NHL cellar for the years it would take to rebuild via the draft. "The people in Quebec are not so patient," Aubut says. He, too, had been trying to get the Stastnys, and one of the first people he hired following the merger was Gilles Léger, whom he named director of personnel development. He also placed Léger in charge of what was called "The European Project"—the Stastnys.