When Craig Romanok learned of his son Clayton’s new high school hockey coach this fall, he made Clayton, a goaltender on the team, sit down to watch “Red Army,” a documentary on the famed Soviet hockey team of the Cold War era. Romanok wanted to ensure that his son had the proper appreciation for the man who is now his coach.
The coach, Sergei Starikov, has lived many lives. He has been a star defenseman for the Soviet Union’s national hockey team, as well as its convenient scapegoat. He is an NHL pioneer and a former castoff. Now, at 57, he is in his latest iteration.
In October, he took over at the helm of the South Brunswick High School team. When the school’s athletic director asked Starikov, a Russian, to send over a résumé, she received a list of his achievements: two-time Olympic gold medalist, member of five world championship teams and one of two men at the forefront of the Russian integration into the NHL.
“I kind of hope the kids understand how cool it is that he’s their coach,” said Kristin Romanok, Craig’s wife.
Starikov is more reserved about his new job. After playing professionally across two continents, he has settled into a comfortable routine. He gives lessons at ProSkate, a skating center in Monmouth, New Jersey, and coaches at South Brunswick. His interest now is in teaching a new generation of players the fundamentals of hockey.
He also nitpicks at other coaches he has seen at the center. Too much screaming, he said, not enough instruction. He prefers a more hard-nosed approach, focusing on exercises and drills reminiscent of the kind he learned in the former Soviet Union. Parents sometimes quibble with how difficult they are and complain that their children are too young for them, but Mark Gordin, a colleague at ProSkate, says that once they look up Starikov’s past, they become more receptive.
“I’m not saying I’m the best coach,” Starikov said. “But I have good experience.”
Starikov has known the glory of the Red Army team and been part of its lowest depths. He has lived for more than three decades with a reputation for being a player who failed to prevent the game-tying goal in the third period of the Soviet Union’s loss to the United States in the 1980 Olympics at Lake Placid. It has been a notion he has been unable to dispel and has grown weary of discussing. His voice booms with confidence as he discusses his career but grows defensive when that goal comes up.
“I’m tired to talk about it,” he said.
At first, Starikov professes no memory of the moment, but then runs through the play all over again. Sitting on a chair in an upstairs room overlooking the ice, he sticks his foot out to explain what happened on Mark Johnson’s power-play goal. He utters the excuses a former teammate used to pass off blame on him and then shoos them away.
It is obviously a sore spot, Gordin, a friend, says. When he, Starikov and a group of Russian friends hang around, they joke and discuss nearly everything — life, coaching and old training tales — but they do not touch this third rail.
“There’s some things he doesn’t like talking about — the Olympic 1980 game,” Gordin said.
Starikov has spent a considerable part of his life moving on from that moment. Viktor Tikhonov, the dictatorial former Soviet coach, barred him from the senior team for nearly three years. Even now, Starikov does not understand why he was banished. The goal, he points out, did not give the Soviet Union the loss, only a tie.
“This game, it was a huge pressure for us,” he said. “People in the stadium, in Lake Placid, are screaming so loud. We played a not-so-well game. The American guys, they played a very well game. They played very fast. They played like forever. Just win or die, like that.”
Starikov returned to play in two more Olympics, skated for six more years on the Soviet team and earned enough acclaim that when the Soviet Union began to allow its hockey players to find an entry into the NHL, Starikov was chosen in the eighth round of the 1989 draft, 152nd overall, by the New Jersey Devils.
No longer tied to the Soviet army or its hockey team, Starikov and Slava Fetisov, another Devils draftee from the Soviet Union, began an arduous and convoluted path to the NHL. Unlike Sergei Priakin, who a year earlier became the first Soviet player to sign with an NHL team but with the stipulation that the Soviet hockey federation would receive a significant part of his salary, Starikov and Fetisov wanted contracts independent of the government.
But negotiating and signing contracts was one thing; leaving the country was another. Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess grandmaster, volunteered to help navigate their exit, Starikov says. It cost him and Fetisov 10,000 rubles each and a donation of a bus to a children’s organization to ultimately obtain foreign passports. They signed their contracts inside the Rossiya Hotel in Moscow’s Red Square.
Their arrival in the NHL was heralded — they were on the cover of Sports Illustrated — but their careers diverged. Fetisov went on to play nine seasons, winning multiple Stanley Cup championships. Starikov was out of the league after 16 games and two seasons.
As he recounted his career, Starikov was able to find happiness. After retiring, he moved back to Moscow and worked in the communications office of the Russian Penguins, a merger between the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and CSKA Moscow, a team Starikov once played for. Though the club’s existence was short-lived, it gave him a chance to mend his relationship with Tikhonov.
“He said: ‘Sergei, forget it. I like what you do,’” Starikov recounted Tikhonov saying. “But we don’t have to be friends and this and that, but we don’t have to be enemies. He let me do my job. I don’t go to his part of the job in hockey.”
By now, Starikov feels more at home in New Jersey than in Russia. When he worked in the Kontinental Hockey League, he spoke the same language, he says, but did not understand those around him.
In the last decade, Starikov coached four years in the KHL. When his number was retired by CSKA Moscow, his players, he said, were dumbfounded, unaware that he had been a star there for a decade a quarter-century earlier.
His current players have a tighter grasp on his life’s story. Nick Gazzale, Starikov’s assistant coach, says they revere him.
Gazzale knows more than most about Starikov’s story. He teaches social studies and each spring leads his classes in a discussion about the Cold War. The Miracle on Ice is one topic.
Gazzale has yet to mention that game to Starikov, and he has not invited him in to talk to his class.
“It seems like a sore subject,” Gazzale said. “He was blamed for the loss. For him, it was real personal. I haven’t brought it up yet. One day I will, and I’ll see if he can come in and talk.”
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