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Pavel Gossip Line
Summarized from PBFC newsletter
- March : During the month, Pavel practices regularly with the team. he takes a couple of days off to go to Toronto to appear in publicity photos regarding the World Cup.
- March 15: Pavel flew to Las Vegas for the weekend to watch the Mike Tyson heavywieght boxing title fight.
- March 21: Pavel flew to Los Angeles for the weekend.
- March 21: Pavel puts on hockey equipment for the first time since surgery.
- Visitors to Vancouver are reminded that GM place is now offering a 'behind the scenes' tour of the new arena. Tours operate seven days a week, three times per day. For more infor phone (604) 899-7400.
- PBFC member Kim Wolfe, from Grapewine Texas was in town, as part of her college graduation present. PBFC had sent her a range of tourist brochures prior to her arrival in Vancouver, as well as suggesting for he to log on to the Cunick web page on the Internet, through which she selected and purchased her seats for the home games she attended.
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With any luck, Bure back at practice in 1 week
by Elliot Pap - - Vancouver Sun
Pavel Bure put on his hockey equipment for the first time in four and a half months last Monday as he moves closer to a premature return from reconstructive knee surgery.
Barring any setbacks, the Canucks' Russian Rocket will join his teammates for a full practice the following week. If all goes well again, Bure may play in a regular season game. If not, he still appears a distinct possibility for the play-offs that begin inmid-April.
"It's exciting", said Canuck trainer Mike Burnstein, who has been resisting the urge to admit Bure is headed for an early return.
"It's exciting not only for the medical people, but for the players and everybody else in the organization. If you has asked me two years ago about a torn anterior cruciate ligament, the answer would have been the player will be out for a year. It seems the time line has changed".
Bure blew out his right knee in Chicago on November 9 and had surgery five days later. he began light skating February 26 and has increased that to six days a week for about 60 minutes a session. Canuck conditioning coach Peter Twist gave Bure the weekend off to prepare for the rehabilitation stretch.
"Everything is going great", Twist said. "Right now Pavel needs to do some read-and-react drills and once I'm comfortable he can do those with me, he should be able to handle the team drills. If I had a set date when I thought he would be ready, I'd tell you. It's week to week".
A precedent for returning in five months from ACL reconstruction, (instead of six), has been set by Dallas Star Richard Matvichuk.
The rangy defenceman played a minor-league game four months and three weeks after blowing out his knee last season. Matvichuk played an NHL game five months and one week following surgery.
Stars' winger Bob Bassen duplicated Matvichuk's feat when he returned Wednesday after five months and nine days. Included in that period was a minor setback blamed on tendinitis.
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The Russian Rocket ... A brief history
by Jim Taylor - - Sports Only
Pavel Bure comes to the interview in sweats, hair still damp from the shower after another of the workouts that inch him closer to the day he can play hockey again.
He does not look like a hockey player or a millionaire at 24. He looks like Ron Howard playing Opie or Tom Sawyer after Aunt Polly made him take a bath. Okay, he drives a Mercedes - but he willnever forget the Lada.
"In Russia, a big difference", he says. "You can't just go out and buy a car. You had to line up, to get on a list, some people for years. But if you do something special, something big like win a world championship, then you get a favour: You still have to buy the car, but you go to the top of the list".
"I remember, we go to Bern and win the world championship and I go to the coach (Victor Tikhonov) and say, 'Can I get a car now?' He says 'No', I have to do something else. So we go to the Goodwill Games, which is very big, almost like the Olympics for us. We win that too, and I say 'Now can I get it?' he says 'yes, now you can'. Even then, I waited six or seven months, so it was a big deal, getting that Lada".
Even then, by Moscow standards, he had it all: The car, the apartment, the great clothes, the money - "not like here, but not many people at 19 have these things there, so I was at a pretty big level. At 19, if you have a car, it is a huge deal. here, at 19 you've got a car, so what?"
"The police used to stop me all the time because they could see me driving this car. In Russia, you're not allowed to drive your father's car without special permission.
They would stop me and ask for the driver's license, then ask whose car it is. i say 'Mine' and they say 'How come?' Then: 'Oh, you must be a hockey player. Is okay then".
By the time he was 16, Pavel had tried rich and he'd tried poor. It wa sno stretch to figure that rich was better.
"We had money", he says. "We weren't rich like here, but my father (Vladimir) was a great athlete, a champion swimmer who swam in the Olympics, so we got money - not money like hockey players got, because hockey and soccer are the two main sports, but we could afford an apartment, car and good clothes. We could go for vacation. So we had some money. But when he retired in 1979, aftera couple or three years, it was gone. Because he couldn't swim anymore, he couldn't make the good money. He was a professional coach, but coaches in Russia don't make much".
"So basically from 11 to 16 it was a really hard time. We weren't starving, but it was hard. My mom, she never worked before. She had to go to work as a manager in supermarket and it was hard for her because she had lived well, and now she had to do this".
He knew that somehow he had to change all that, and thought of the logging camps of Siberia. But just about then, things started to get good. Suddenly, he was playing hockey for money.
"My first hockey salary, I was 14, and it was 40 rubles (five rubles per US dollar at that time) every month for playing junior hockey with the Red Army team. My mom was making 180 rubles for managing a supermarket, and I was making 40. The next year, they start to pay me 70 and when I got to the main professional team at 16, the salary was 120 rubles. But I would get only 10, because the rest of the money I would give to my mom".
He discusses money only because the subject was raised, and to correct a common misconception of a poor kid from a foreign country suddenly faced with the twin pitfalls of North America and sudden wealth.
"there was no big-headed jump", he says. "My father, whenhe was swimming, made 300 rubles a month. Normal people were making 150 and at 16 I was making 120. It was quite a bit, you know? At 18, I make the national team and they start to pay me in dollars if you win something big. The first time we win the worlds, theygave us $1,200 and it was, like, huge".
"When I was a kid, we would to canada for 15 days and they would give us 100 bucks, and this time they gave us $1,200 and it was really big money. A year later, I went with the national team and won the world championship and they gave us $10,000".
"So, it is not like suddenly I had eerything. It came slowly: A little more money every year, then the car, then the aprtment. So when I come here, I thought, "Okay, maybe I get a better car". And I got a Toyota Camry".
He had taken the next step. He was in the National Hockey League. Now all he had to do was prove he belonged. Buthe was used to that. You listen to Pavel Bure, and time and countries melt intoone. In Moscow, the yopung pavel dreams of owning a car, as a young wayne Gretzky did in Brantford, Ontario a decade earlier.
In Moscow, Bure knew that some day he would have a lot of money. In brantford, Gretzky's grandma Mary reached back to her European roots and said he would , too. "Hairy arms", she xplained. "You have hairy arms. It means youwillbe rich".
In Brantford, the pre-teen Gretzky wants to sleep ratherthan attend an early practice. "Okay", says Walter Gretzky. "But when you're an adult taking a lunch kit to work, you remember whatyou had a chance to be, and gave it up". Gretzky gets up, and goes to practice, the workethic given stronger root. InMoscow, the pre-teen Bure gets another best-forward trophy and Vlad is there beside him.
"Congratulations", he says. "But it's no big deal. You may be the best player here, but there are lots better than you. You have to get better".
Valdimir Bure began working with his two sons (Valeri, three years younger, is in the Montreal Canadiens' chain) when Pavel was six. He was a swimmer who knew nothing about hockey. "He would go watch the Red Army of the national team", Pavel says, "and when he see someone doing something he would bring it back to me and say, 'Do this. Learn this move'."
His conditioning methods were based on what he taught as a professioanl swimming coach.
"Usually, kids could do nothingin the summer", Pavel recalls. "H would give me 20, maybe 25 days off, then send me to train with the swimmers".
He thinks sometimes about those lost summers, but never for very long. More often his thoughts go back to the endless hours spent after his own practice, sitting in the stands with his dad, watching the RedArmy or national team work out, dreaming of the day when he would be like Valeri Kharlamov or Boris Mikhailov or Vladislav Tretiak as Gretzky had dreamed of being Gordie Howe.
And Vladimir would look at him and say, "If you want to get there, you've got to work hard. You're not supposed to drink, you're not supposed to smoke, you're just supposed to concentrate on hockey".
"The first time my dad was really happy", Pavel says, "was when I go the best forward on the world junior team in Anchorage. 'You're almost there', he told me, 'but it's another step to be on the national team'. And the next year I made it".
The first year, he admits, was very bad. "I would go go home to watch TV, just the pictures, because I couldn't understand the words. I could not understand the news, the movies, the game shows. It was like when I was 16 and the coach took me, just me, to Japan to show the drills where he was doing clinics. Just me and my coach. 'Here's the hotel. Here's the rink'. Nothing else. No one to talk to. It was lonely". Here the loneliness was short-term. Igor and Lena Larionov took him in. He lived with them for the first two weeks, played with their kids, spoke Russian.
"They help me in everything", he says. "I couldn't even call a cab myself because I didn't know the words. Then my mother arrived with my girlfriend, and my dad a few weeks later, and I had a family. So I was never by myself".
His parents are divorced and Vladimir has remarried. Pavel's girlfriend is history. ("Don't ask me questions like that", he grins when asked about his current social status. Then: "You can say 'I don't have my old girlfriend'.)"
More comfortable with the language and the media ("They asked me questions I didn't have the words to answer"), he concentrates now on rehabilitating the injured knee that willkeep him out of the game for the season, and on keeping the injury in perspective.
"When it happened, it goes through my mind: 'Well, it could be worse'. A real tragedy is something like Grinkov (30-year olf Russian Olympic figure skating star Sergei Grinkov, who collapsed and died while he and wife and skating partner Ekaterina Gordeeva were practicing for an ice show). A knee is just somthing you have to work through".
The game is still the game of his childhood, only better, because here the ice is smaller and it takes less time to score.
"In Europe", he grins, "you enter the zone and there is still a long way to go. Here, as soon as you get into the zone you can shoot. And every shot could go in".
"Much better", he grins. "Much better".
He leans back, scoffing a sandwhich, staring out over the floor of GM Place where, in a matter of hours, a superstar named Michael Jackson will put on a show of his own in the building that was supposed to be his showcase.
He is 24. and the games lie ahead beyond number. "Maybe", he says dreamily, "I will play until I'm 40".
Siberia is a universe away.
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Rocket celebrates 25th!
March 31, 1996
Pavel's Zodiac sign is Aries: Aries people have active and dynamic personalities. They have natural, charming manners and good mental power. Aries are fond of having people look up to them and fortunately they often do. Aries are courageous to the point of daring, are quite sensitive emotionally and have quick temper which they are usually able to overcome my making use of their excellent power of reason.
A look at the world the day Pavel was born, Wednesday March 31, 1971
- Celebrities born on March 31
- Herb Alpert: musician, 1935
- Leo Buscaglia: author, 1925
- Dick Chamberlain: actor, 1935
- Liz Claiborne: designer, 1929
- Gabe Kaplan: actor, 1946
- Gordie Howe: hockey player, 1928
- Entertainment
- Best Picture: The French Connection
- Best Actor: Gene Hackman
- Best Actress: Jane Fonda
- Top TV Show: All in the Family
- #1 Hit Song: Knock Three Times
- Sports Highlights
- Super Bowl V: Baltimore Colts
- World Series: Pittsburg Pirates
- NBA: Milwaukee Bucks
- Kentucky Derby: Canonero II
- Indy 500: Al Unser
- Stanley Cup: Montreal Canadiens
- In the News
- Smiley face button becomes popular
- All in the Family is a hit
- Hot pants are the rage
- The Exorcist frightens audiences in theatres
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