No. 288: MOGILNY REVISITED / "I was 12, travelled 5,000 miles on the train to Moscow with 100 rubles. When I got to the academy they weren’t expecting me. I didn't see my family for two years."
From the archive on the occasion of his long overdue selection to the Hockey Hall of Fame, Alexander Mogilny in exile,
THE Hockey Hall of Fame announced its class of 2025 yesterday, which was headed by Joe Thornton in his first year of eligibility. Usually those who have had to wait out their selections aren’t headline items. Alexander Mogilny is an exception, as he ever was.
There’s no good reason why the HHOF selection committee put off Mogilny, who last skated in a professional game in 2006, only bad ones, the worst and latest being Russian forces rolling into Ukraine in 2022—with Russia shunned by the sporting establishment in general, Russian teams excluded from international competition and the like, those who voted on players’ and builders’ worthiness had to consider the optics. Still, they should have found a way.
A-Mo was never like you or me or the average hockey player or the standard-issue superstar. It’s only fitting to see he was awakened from a deep sleep to get the news of his selection, only fitting that he went back to bed immediately after.
From Mike Zeisberger with nhl.com:
As the 56-year-old woozily answered, the voice on the other end of the line was Ron Francis, the former NHL great who now serves as the Chair of the Hockey Hall of Fame Selection Committee. The message to Mogilny, who is currently president of his hometown team of Amur Khabarovsk of the Kontinental Hockey League: Congratulations on being elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Francis didn't use the word “finally.” He probably should have.
Mogilny’s reaction did not include any whooping, any jumping for joy, any screams of jubilation. In this, his 17th year of eligibility for selection, after being overlooked time after time after time, there understandably was just a respectable acknowledgement.
“I am happy to be part of a great organization like the Hockey Hall of Fame," Mogilny said. "I want to thank both my Russian and NHL teammates for helping me achieve this honor.”
Francis mentioned the 2003-04 season, when he played the final 12 games of his own Hall of Fame career with Mogilny and the Toronto Maple Leafs. He’d presented Mogilny with a special bottle of wine at that time, and now wondered if his former teammate, if he still had it, would open it in celebration.
“It’s 3 a.m. in the morning here,” Mogilny replied.
Shortly afterwards he was snoozing again, thereby making him unavailable for the Hall’s media conference call with all the selections for the Class of 2025.
I wrote about Mogilny in this space a couple of years ago: No. 118: ALEXANDER MOGILNY / "I was 12, travelled 5,000 miles on the train to Moscow with 100 rubles. When I got to the academy they weren’t expecting me. I didn't see my family for two years."
I serve you up the nuts of the piece below.
Mogilny in the wind-down of his career.
I had talked to Mogilny a few times over the years, but the last time we spoke was pretty amazing, one of my favourite interviews ever and under strange circumstances: I talked to him at the Times Union Arena, then the home rink of the Albany River Rats, who were then the New Jersey Devils AHL affiliate. Lou Lamoriello had signed Mogilny to a two-year deal coming out of the cancelled 2004-05 season and, in a rough introduction to the salary-cap era, quickly realized the error of his ways; the GM told A-Mo it was nothing personal but he had to get the contract off the books. Yup, in a case of hockey’s cycle of life, a guy who skated for an Olympic championship team with Hockey Hall of Famers and owns a Stanley Cup ring was going out with the River Rats. A guy who had defected to play the game played out his last contract, effectively in exile.
Strangely, Mogilny’s Wikipedia page features him in an Albany sweater
Working on When the Lights Went Out, my book about the Soviet Union vs Canada game at the 1987 World Junior Championships, the infamous Punch-up in Piestany, I drove from Toronto to Albany through a brutal snowstorm with nothing more than a press pass to a practice and a game guaranteed. The River Rats’ media-relations guy told me he hadn’t spoken to Alex in a while and I’d be taking my chances of getting stiffed. Mogilny’s agent J.P. Barry (an occasional reader of this SubStack) told me that Mogilny could be good if I caught him at the right moment … but, yeah, this didn’t figure to be the right moment given that his family had stayed in New Jersey and he was commuting back and forth for games.
In fact, it turned out to be the perfect moment.
I’ve edited some snippets of the text from When the Lights Went Out and the latter of the two sections should give you the gist of my conversation with Mogilny. You could cut and paste a few of his remembrances into an acceptance speech for the Hockey Hall of Fame, which to my mind isn’t worth the price of a ticket until Alexander Mogilny gets in. Yes, he’s a Russian but as he suggested when we spoke 17 years ago, he had no choice in the matter: “Other people would never have thought of me as American or Canadian if I wanted to be that. They won’t let you. They won’t admit that, but everyone knows it’s true.”
Linger on that thought while we watch the events in Russia unfold today.
From: WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT (2006)
TO outsiders, the Soviets’ 1987 junior team looked more homogeneous than the Canadians’. Yet they came from all over the USSR. Vladimir Konstantinov played on a frozen river in Murmansk. Alexander Mogilny travelled even farther, from China’s northern border … But most of the players, including Sergei Fedorov, grew up in Moscow or outlying industrial towns. And all of them had been recruited in their early teens by the state hockey academy in the Soviet capital. They stayed in residence at the academy and trained there for eleven months of the year. Mogilny, for one, didn’t see his parents for two years. “It’s hard, but the way that we saw it, it had to be done,” Mogilny says. “It’s an opportunity that thousands try for. All of us cared about our game and about our team. That was something that we didn’t need to be told about. I think the Russians are a very proud people—we didn’t need to be told to be proud about playing. It came from inside us, not from above.”
Mogilny grew up in Khabarovsk, a city of 500,000, near the border with China. He grew up in a city that little resembled the western Soviet Union. Khabarovsk was a fraction of the size of Leningrad in population, yet it was spread over an area about the same size. Some Soviets longed to leave the country, but Khabarovsk, improbably, had an illegal immigration problem. Many Chinese workers were permitted into the region as labourers; others slipped in without the paperwork and found either legiti- mate work or a life of crime.
Mogilny grew up thinking of Moscow as the other side of the world. He grew up closer to Alaska than to Moscow. He grew up closer to Beijing than to Moscow. Moscow was the power behind his life, but it was a city he never thought he was going to even visit.
It stayed that remote until he was in his early teens, until his family got a call one day. He didn’t know how it happened. Someone—it might have been an official, it might have been a coach—saw him play hockey in a tour- nament. Or maybe even just on a frozen pond. Someone found out somehow. That was how it was back then. The Soviet sports establishment had an amazing facility not only for finding talent but for finding it without ever seem- ing to look for it. Mogilny was asked—or rather, told—to come to Moscow to enter the elite sports academy. He never went to a tryout; he was just called.
His whole world had been contained within his city, within his family and within the game that he played. His father worked as a train repairman, and the job afforded them a humble existence, but one that looked better when compared to other townspeople. Alexander Mogilny wasn’t trying to escape. He didn’t try to transcend. He just played and goals were at either end of the rink—goals in the other sense, career objectives, didn’t crowd his thoughts. He lived—and played—in the moment.
He was an outsider when he went to Moscow. Fedorov, the son of an official; Pavel Bure, son of an Olympic athlete—they were connected. Mogilny seemed to have dropped out of the sky. Alone from his town in that sports program. Alone from his area. Alone from his time zone. But he excelled. “Mogilny was difficult to coach but genius is always a challenge,” says Igor Kuperman, a former Soviet hockey journalist. “The others, Bure and Fedorov, were excellent too, but Mogilny was excellent and different.” He was proud in a way that outsiders are proud, thinking that he didn’t just have to show his talent but defend it. He was resigned in a way that outsiders are resigned, thinking that he could earn his place but never feel comfortable or confi- dent in it. He looked at Moscow as if he was still outside it.
Mogilny was precocious on the ice and off. Others saw only the game. He noticed other things. He was aware of society because it was new to him. Life in Moscow wasn’t just new but also evolving, changing almost daily. He didn’t know what to think of the men who came and went in the Kremlin. He did notice other things. “I started to see more people with more things from the West,” he says. “They were allowed to have clothes from the West. They were allowed to have other things as well. I saw that. I heard about people being allowed to travel. People weren’t free to travel even inside the Soviet Union. By ’85 or ’86 there were people travelling to the West.” He saw them travel- ling outside the Soviet Union but he didn’t think that he might go west and stay there. He didn’t dream about going to the National Hockey League or playing pro. “It was the farthest thing from mind,” he says. “I lived each day for the day.” He didn’t think about where the game was going to take him, not until it was taking him there. He didn’t think about where playing for the national junior team would take him until he was packing his bags for Piestany. He wasn’t impressed by the prospect. “It wasn’t that far to travel,” he says. “I’d already travelled a lot farther just to get to Moscow.”
DON Luce watched [the 1988 WJC final in Moscow], but not with a patriotic rooting interest. No, his rooting interest was for his employer, the Buffalo Sabres, the team he used to play for, the one he was now scouting for. He was looking at players, not countries. He saw an amazing talent in Alexander Mogilny. He wasn’t alone. That was the consensus of the scouts in attendance. Mogilny was the best junior player in the world—the next big thing.
He was the lone Soviet player to squeeze onto the 1988 WJC all-star team. “If he was free to go, he would have been the top pick in the draft,” Luce says. He made a note to himself: If we have an extra draft pick, we could do worse than waste it on a guy who likely will never make it out of the Soviet Union. At some point the possible rewards justified buying a lottery ticket.
Don Luce only knew about Mogilny what he saw on the ice. He had heard little about his personal story. Not the goods. Not that he was a curious young man, one who looked for answers in a system that didn’t brook questions. Not that he had come so far to Moscow and was disen- chanted with not seeing his family for eleven months at a time. Not that he was curious about a world that he hadn’t yet seen. Again, this colours inside the lines but does not draw the big picture.
Weeks later, Mogilny was the youngest player on the Soviet team at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary. His place on the roster looked like a sign that he was being groomed for a lead role down the line, the next Kharlamov. At least it did until Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov slugged the eight- een-year-old Mogilny on the bench in an inconsequential game against Finland. Supposedly something to do with selfish or lazy play. Not the Olympic spirit you’d expect. Not out of character for Tikhonov, either.
Mogilny is reluctant to discuss the incident with Tikhonov in Calgary. “It’s a long time ago,” he says. “I understand a lot more today than I did as a young man. I understand why he did what he did. That is a lifetime ago.”
Maybe Mogilny and Tikhonov could have reconciled. Maybe the player could have “got with the program.” Soviet coaches and officials tried to get Mogilny to buy in, but ultimately he wouldn’t. He didn’t want a military life, which was just part of the package for members of Red Army and the national team. He declined to take an officer’s rank—open, almost casual defiance. Mogilny wasn’t just bitter about Calgary, but pessimistic about the prospects of life with the program. Tikhonov was the national team coach, not going anywhere for the foreseeable future, not about to back down or blink or make exceptions for Mogilny. He had already made Mogilny’s Olympic turn miserable. He had a chance to blow up the teenager’s career. At that point, Mogilny wanted out. To what, he didn’t really know, but out to anything else would do.
Alexander Mogilny knew about perestroika. He knew sport wasn’t the biggest thing that was broken in Soviet society. People living in hunger, lining up for food that wasn’t there—that was bigger than sport. He knew this was the case in Moscow. He knew that this was the case back in his hometown.
Sport, like so much of Soviet society, was failing. The Soviet sports system was still turning out talented athletes,
Olympic gold medallists, championship teams, but resources for the sports programs were being cut to the bone. Sport by the late ’80s paid out more in tax than it took in from the government.
But sport in the Soviet Union was transformed about as quickly as a coach changed lines. The closed society opened for business. Everything amateur was put up for sale. The supermarkets’ shelves were empty, but Soviet sports pro- grams were well stocked with talent and pro teams were cordially invited to load up their shopping carts. First, Soviet soccer players were being sold to European clubs. By 1988 Tikhonov was admitting that high-ranking officials were negotiating with the NHL and that veteran players such as Slava Fetisov and Igor Larionov were likely headed to North America. It seemed, however, that the Soviets were negotiating for the release of the veteran players only. It wasn’t simply a matter of having to wait his turn; Mogilny had a reasonable concern that he might play in some type of exile, like Helmut Balderis—that his rocky relationship with Tikhonov or his status as an outsider might come back to haunt him, even if he put in his time and paid his dues.
Mogilny saw the West as an opportunity and an escape. “It’s not complicated,” Mogilny says. “I had to do what I thought would help me become the best player I could be. I thought that I had a better chance to do that in the NHL than in the Soviet Union.”
At the 1988 NHL draft the following June, Don Luce convinced the Sabres to spend a spare fifth-round pick on Mogilny. “It seemed like a small price for a longshot that could really pay off,” Luce says. “We had no idea what was happening with [Tikhonov and Mogilny]. If we had known [that he was unhappy], it probably would have changed things. More teams would have been interested.”
Mogilny’s discontent became clearer the next season. He had been just one player in the roiling mob in Piestany,
and the unsuspecting victim of an outrageous attack in Calgary. In the Soviet elite league, though, Mogilny was acting out. It reached a breaking point when he was sus- pended for ten games without a month’s pay and stripped of his title of “honorary master of sport.” He was sus- pended for what Robert Edelman described as “the most violent on-ice fight in recent memory, severely injuring a Spartak player.”
Mogilny won’t talk about the incident, about the fight and the suspension. He acts like he has no memory of it.
Only a few weeks later, the Sabres made their first con- tact with their draft gamble. Luce introduced himself to Mogilny at the 1989 WJC in Anchorage, Alaska. Luce waited for Mogilny outside the Soviet dressing room after a game. He gave the player his business card and told him to call him someday. “I didn’t even let myself think about it,” Luce says of the likelihood of Mogilny calling him. “Maybe as something in the long run—the long run. But I didn’t have my hopes up. Really, I just wanted to shake his hand.”
Four months later, Luce’s home phone rang. “I thought it was another scout playing a prank, someone pretending to be Alex,” Luce says. “I hear how he has defected at the world championships and wants to talk to the Sabres. I played along for a bit and then I realized that maybe it was him. As soon as I realized it was him, everything changed. In an hour, Gerry Meehan [then Buffalo’s general manager] and I had our tickets to Stockholm.”
Mogilny’s defection was headline news, not only in the sports pages but in the political circles, too. Many had defected before him—artists, writers, dissidents of different stripes, ballet stars, soccer players—but never a hockey player. The Soviets had sent some players and coaches to the European leagues prior to that. But never had anyone walked away from the national team.
“Walked away” wasn’t a figure of speech. That was literally what he did: walk away. In a Toronto Star interview,
Slava Fetisov had mentioned that the Soviets could “walk away from the team” anytime but wouldn’t risk losing the chance to “return to the motherland.” No one believed it was that easy to defect, and no one believed that the play- ers were so attached to the USSR, either.
In the West, people presumed that flight would require planning and daring, but Mogilny didn’t have to crawl under barbed wire or break a KGB agent’s tackle. He was being watched, but only some or most of the time, and maybe not that closely. The most daring thing might have been his decision to drop by Sergei Fedorov’s room and try to talk his linemate into walking out with him. He knew Fedorov could have called team officials and tipped them. He also knew Fedorov might even have been implicated— that the officials would at least suspect that Fedorov knew what Mogilny was up to. And maybe that was Mogilny’s intent—not to urge Fedorov, but to push him out of the hotel and into the free world. Fedorov declined, but kept Mogilny’s overture a secret until the Soviet Union’s collapse three years later.
Mogilny wasn’t fearless, but he wasn’t terrified, either. He wasn’t fooled by the idea that his status as a national team member offered a truly privileged position in Soviet society. His only habit was independent thinking. He knew the risk wasn’t walking away. No, the real risk for Mogilny was staying. That placed his career in greater risk than going to North America. And even greater was the risk that his family would suffer in the fallout from his decision. His family faced no greater hardship than their day-to-day existence. They were questioned by the KGB but otherwise took no revenge. The lack of high intrigue leads you to wonder how it had never happened before.
Logistically, defection was easy for Mogilny; emotion- ally, it was hard. “I didn’t do it lightly,” he says. “You don’t do anything lightly . . . not when they convict you of treason and refuse you the right to see your family. But many things could have happened if I had not left the team in Sweden.”
At the same time, he makes it sound like his defection was impulsive. “It wasn’t something that I had thought about all my life,” he says. “I didn’t have a clue that I’d be the first.”
It’s just impossible to say whether it was impulsive, calculated or instinctive because Alexander Mogilny shows his cards only when it suits or amuses him. One possibility: Mogilny hadn’t thought about his defection straining the Soviets’ negotiations with the NHL—his former masters threatened to walk away from the talks that opened the door for Fetisov, Larionov and Sergei Makarov among others. Another possibility: Mogilny had factored the effect his defection might have and didn’t care. One last possibility: Mogilny realized that the Soviets would complain loudly and seem indignant, but would continue to negotiate with the NHL. The third scenario seems the most likely.
Don Luce believes Mogilny saw which way the wind was blowing. According to the scout, the teenager was almost a visionary.
Mogilny moved in with Luce and his family when he arrived in Buffalo and spent his first season in the scout’s household. Other teenage sensations had billeted with team officials, but they had faced nothing like Mogilny’s culture shock. Then again, Mogilny had reason to believe he had already stared down far tougher things.
“Pretty quickly, we realized that he was a very special character,” Luce says. “He was extremely cautious about other people but extremely confident in himself. He was highly intelligent. He was getting the hang of the language faster than people realized—he understood almost every- thing you said to him after a while, but he was reluctant to talk himself. He kept his cards very close to the vest. He didn’t want people to know everything that he knew.
He was just twenty when he came in 1989, but he still had this sense of himself. He’d get a reputation later on as someone who isn’t a team player but I never thought that was fair or accurate. If you can score 76 goals in a season like Alex did, I don’t know if he’s being a better team player by shooting [rather than by] passing the puck. He was great with our family and we’ve stayed close to him and even his parents later on. He was a young man with an old soul. He was very sensitive to people. He was very aware of things going on. And I think when it came to the changes in the Soviet Union, he was way ahead of the [hockey] scouts and executives.”
Dateline: Albany
ALEXANDER Mogilny’s hair is close-cropped, better to hide the grey. There’s no hiding his talent, though. Not even in Albany. Not even during a practice in mid-winter. He does something practically every time he touches the puck that gives away the fact that he has played at a much higher level. He’ll do something that a career minor leaguer wouldn’t even think of. Talent, though, isn’t the issue. Never has been. He was the New Jersey Devils’ second-leading scorer when general manager Lou Lamoriello assigned him to the team’s American Hockey League affiliate. Lamoriello dispatched him to the minors because he was displeased with Mogilny’s play, his attitude or the team’s return on the dollar. Maybe all three. When Lamoriello signed Mogilny to a two-year $7-million contract, it didn’t seem to fit into the redefined NHL marketplace, especially since Mogilny was coming off major hip surgeries. Dubious when announced, disastrous for the Devils now. Mogilny’s contract made him untradeable.
“There is the game and there is the business of the game,” Mogilvy says. “I’m here [because of] the business of the game. There is not much that I can do about it.”
It’s an unusually direct statement for Mogilny, whose musings often read like Russian postmodern literature. Black-and-white statements fade into cryptic clues.
Others have done damage control on his behalf. Devils teammate Sergei Brylin told reporters that the dispute between Mogilny and Lamoriello traced back to a language problem, a misunderstanding, something lost in translation. Some would grab hold of that lifeline. Not Mogilny. No use claiming that, not when he had no trouble with the language of his contract.
Some would dissemble. Some would say there’s still hope when there obviously is not. Some would talk about injuries or trades opening up a roster spot, all the industry shoptalk. Not Mogilny. No shoptalk when a metaphor is available.
“There is no road to New Jersey for me,” Mogilny says.
Too cute. Mogilny has just parked his car after the drive in from, yes, New Jersey. There’s a road to and from New Jersey, just no spot in the Devils’ parking lot. He com- mutes a couple of hours each way a few times a week to be with his family.
MOGILNY’S reputation has evolved over the years: first, a problem child, then a mercenary and later an enigma. The truth is, he has always defied easy categorization. He might be the most inscrutable player of his generation.
Consider this anecdote: Mogilny hurt his hips when in Toronto. Reporters pressed him about time spent out of the lineup. They wanted to hear how hard it was to watch his teammates carry on without him. They wanted to connect psychic pain to physical pain. He volunteered that it was hard to come to the arena for games and feel powerless to contribute. He was asked: Is it tough when you’re at home and you think about the team having to play without you?
“When I’m not at the arena, I never think about hockey,” he said with a straight face.
It got a huge laugh even though he kept a straight face. His whole life was shaped by something he never thinks about. Earning millions at a job that he leaves at the office. Others struggle to get the game out of their mind, but for Mogilny it was a flip of a toggle switch.
No one among the reporters huddled around him knew whether Mogilny was kidding or not. No one could know the lot of the original defector. No one could empathize with the conflict, the torment, the inner turmoil. He left the Soviet Union behind, and it ceased to be. He came to North America, and he continued to be a Russian in his heart. He walked into a dressing room full of strangers as a teenager, speaking a different language, owning a gold medal earned playing for a country that he could no longer even visit. He started playing in a city that he couldn’t have found on a map.
“Of course there were times I was misunderstood,” he says. “That’s the language barrier. It’s also a cultural difference. I’ve always thought of myself as a Russian, not a Russian-American or Russian-Canadian. Other people would never have thought of me as American or Canadian if I wanted to be that. They won’t let you. They won’t admit that, but everyone knows it’s true.”
Mogilny came from the Soviet Union and without permission, the first to do so. It’s a different player who comes from Russia now, he says. A different player with different values.
“Now the Russian game is much more for the individual player,” Mogilny says. “Maybe people thought I was selfish. I don’t think I ever was. I tried to score when I was in Buffalo. I tried to score everywhere I played. But I always thought of the team. Maybe some people [outside the game] didn’t see it that way, but it’s true. It still is. Robbie Ftorek [the River Rats’ coach] will tell me to look to score—sometimes I’ll make the pass just because that is what feels good to me . . . that is the game I learned to play, the team in front of the player.”
He was once thought of as a prime example of the spoiled athlet,e and yet he balks at the idea that his minor- league assignment is a hardship, that his career deserves a more dignified denouement.
“I can’t feel bitter,” he says. “Things are much harder for other people. I see it when I go home. I see it here. I say that I never have lived in straight lines, and I don’t even like straight lines. I have never been afraid of change. I like to change. I had to change when I came to North America. I had to change when I came here. When hockey is finished for me, I’ll have to change again. When it’s over, there is just one change I want to make. I want to go some place sunny. Whether it was in Khabarovsk or Moscow or one of the NHL cities I played, I never had a chance to live someplace sunny and warm.”
How his career will end is not clear. He knows that New Jersey will buy out the last year of his contract over the summer. Maybe a team will offer him a contract—after all, talent remains scarce and the new NHL is made to measure for the Alex Mogilny who scored 76 goals in a season. But maybe that offer won’t come, or won’t pay enough to justify the risk of another more serious or even crippling, hip injury. Maybe the non-straight line will end in Albany.
The suggestion that his hockey career started as a straight line cracks his straight face.
“The funny thing is . . . I cannot say who told the sports academy—the national pro- gram—about me all those years ago. I travelled 5,000 miles to Moscow with 100 rubles in my pocket, and when I got to the sports academy they weren’t expecting me. I couldn’t tell them who it was who told me to come. I travelled 5,000 miles and I never asked who did this for me. I’ve never found out. It just happened. The big mystery.”
Thanks for reading. Don Luce became a good friend over the years. Here’s how he recounted the story of A-Mo’s defection for a Buffalo podcast a while back.