“I want you on my staff,” said Prime Minister John Diefenbaker
File story, Gabriola Sounder, Thursday, March 4, 2004
Monday, October 6 2008
Aggie Kukulowicz can still hear the announcement over the PA system on a fateful day in 1965 at the airport in Winnipeg where he had landed a job “slinging luggage.”
“They wanted to know if anyone in the terminal spoke Polish and I volunteered thinking that it something like a little old lady having problems with customs.”
“Instead I was told the Prime Ministers of Poland and Canada wanted a translator to negotiate a major wheat deal,” he recalls. Three hours later, after signing the agreement, “Dief the Chief” said he wanted Aggie on his staff, but blown-away Air Canada officials also had a flight plan for the suddenly former baggage handler, including language aptitude tests, the results of which, would rival his hockey skill and NHL glory days.
He was posted as operations manager at Air Canada’s new base in Moscow, from 1966-71, lived in an apartment adjacent to Red Square, the Metropole Hotel and Bolshoi Ballet, signalled in the flight of Prime Minister Trudeau’s historic visit, and rubbed shoulders with the Soviet’s first man and woman in space, Juri Gargarin and Valetina Tereshkova.
In 1969 he got a call from the Canadian Ambassador Robert Ford to meet Alan Eagleson at the world hockey championships in Stockholm and interpret for the Russian Ice Hockey Federation. Canada had recently quit international competition but wanted to return with professional players. The Soviets said unless Eagleson spoke for the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, the meeting was over. “The Eagle got up saying he represented players and didn’t come all the way to Moscow to waste his time,” Aggie recalls. “He used words that would curl your hair and asked me to quote him verbatim even though there was a lady present. The Soviets said there was no need for translation. They got the message.”
Eight gruelling hours later the road was paved and the stage set for what was eventually the 1972 series that culminated in the goal by Paul Henderson, indelibly etched in the Canadian consciousness and national soul.
Kukulowicz advised Air Canada they would need more than one flight and he was right. Fourteen charters carried 3,000 Canadian fans to Moscow and, because Canada didn’t want all of its players on one plane, two were used.
“One of the greatest sporting events of all times, and a highlight of my career,” says Aggie, who adds that “not one suitcase was lost.”
There would be many more for the former centre who was now front and centre in international hockey, the link between hockey organizations from Canada, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, earning him the title of the “Henry Kissinger of hockey” in the world press of the time.
Any doubt that Kukulowicz is a born diplomat were erased in such incidents as the famous “finger” salute of Eagleson during the 1972 series. Aggie told the Soviets he had jammed his finger in the player’s gate and was holding it aloft while running around the ice until the throbbing stopped.
In 1974 he relayed the message to the Soviets that unless they returned to the ice after a protest over refereeing, they would never play in North America again. Before, during and after the Summit Series, Canada and Challenge Cups, the Olympic Games and the negotiations to bring Russian and Czech players to the NHL, Aggie has been there, an insider and key player.
“Why don’t you write a book?” the Sounder asked.
“I wouldn’t have as many friends and, if you published some of the confidential stories I could tell you, I would probably have to sue you.”
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