‘The Russian Five’ is a sports film to savor

The Los Angeles Times

One of the most dramatic and emotional of sports stories gets the expert film it deserves in “The Russian Five,” a documentary that is moving in ways you won’t see coming.

The sport is professional ice hockey, specifically the saga of the Detroit Red Wings, who in the 1990s changed both their professional trajectory and the way the game is played in the National Hockey League by boldly adding Russian players to the mix.

All this may sound very inside baseball, a tale that couldn’t possibly be of general interest, but, in fact, the reverse is true. The intensely human situations revealed by director Joshua Riehl will captivate you even if you don’t know a puck from a ping-pong ball.

Key to “Russian Five’s” success is Riehl’s ability to get almost all of the story’s key participants in front of the camera for extensive interviews.

These include expected folks such as key players and Red Wings’ executives and coaches, but also people you might not expect, including the actor Jeff Daniels, who turns out to be a die-hard Red Wings enthusiast and an inspired choice to give voice to the thoughts of the average fans.

More Epic Tales From Detroit’s ’97 Stanley Cup Conquest

Picking up where the international best-selling book The Russian Five left off, Vlad The Impaler will have readers alternately laughing, and in tears, with dozens of more memorable, untold stories and anecdotes from the Detroit Red Wings’ Stanley Cup championships seasons in 1997-98.

The book includes a foreword by Hall of Fame defenseman Slava Fetisov, along with lengthy excerpts from interviews of several members of the team, from captain Steve Yzerman, teammates Brendan Shanahan, Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Slava Kozlov and coach Scotty Bowman, among many others.

A portion of the proceeds from the book will be earmarked for the Vladimir Konstanov Special Needs Trust to help ensure the care he needs after suffering catastrophic injuries just a week after he helped lead the Wings to their first Stanley Cup title in 42 years. #BELIEVE

"Hockey Hall of Fame Coach Scotty Bowman: ‘ Those four guys, they made all the difference’ The Grind Line, featuring some of the most popular athletes in Detroit sports history, is one of the most successful units in the history of the National Hockey League, and without peer among so-called ‘ fourth’ lines, for those who insist on numbering them. Kris Draper, flanked by Kirk Maltby and Joe Kocur, and later Darren McCarty, deserve their rightful place in Detroit shoulder to shoulder with The Production Line – the most famous line in NHL history: Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay alongside Sid Abel, and later Alex Delvecchio, four men whose numbers hang from the rafters at Hockeytown’ s Little Caesars Arena. This book argues – and has the receipts to prove it – that the Grind Line was every bit as important in its era (1997-2009) as the Production Line was in the dynastic 1950s."

Keith Gave is the author of three books that capped an eclectic work career that included lengthy stints as soldier, spy, newspaperman, radio host, TV analyst, publicist, college professor and filmmaker – all before he set out to write books.

Gave spent six years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist working for the National Security Agency during the Cold War, including three years in West Berlin when it was surrounded by a wall. Nothing could have better prepared him for a career as a sports writer covering hockey for the Detroit Free Press. That’s when he experienced the cloak-and-dagger assignment of his career; on a covert mission to Helsinki, Finland, he passed along messages to two young Soviet hockey players who would eventually lead the Detroit Red Wings to the Stanley Cup summit for the first time in 42 years.