Kournikova, Nike, and Soviet slurs: Sergei Fedorov’s controversial Hall of Fame legacy

TORONTO – Picture this hockey player.

He’s got blazing speed. His offensive creativity is only matched by his defensive prowess, becoming the only player in National Hockey League history to win the Hart Trophy and the Selke Trophy in the same season. He hoists the Stanley Cup three times during his career.

Yet he’s constantly clashing with his coach, who happens to be the most successful man at that job in hockey history. They butt heads about his ice time, about his role, about playing second fiddle to a Canadian star, and the player feels it's because he's Russian. At one point, the coach moves him from forward to defense to make a statement. At another point, the player signs a blockbuster offer sheet with another team to make a statement of his own.

And off the ice, he’s a rock star. He’s one of the League’s most marketable talents, even during an era of defensive hockey. His electric style brings butts out of seats and suits into meetings with his agents, as he signs a deal to be the face of hockey equipment for a basketball shoe company. He dates – and marries, although there’s some debate about that – the single most ogled and objectified female athlete in history. One whom he befriends when she is 15 and he … isn’t.

You’re picturing Sergei Fedorov, who enters the Hockey Hall of Fame on Monday after a remarkable career that met both the requirements of “hockey” and “fame” for immortality.

You’re picturing a player whose controversial existence would have been amplified in unfathomable ways, had it not occurred in the age of dial-up Internet.

***

Sergei Fedorov was born in Pskov in 1969, one of the players whose official biography lists the USSR as his nation of origin.

He can rattle off the names of his Russian forebearers in the Hall of Fame: Fetisov, Larionov, Bure, Tretiak, Kharlamov. “To be in the same category as them, I think it’s amazing. Like I said, it hasn’t sunk in to me,” he said.

Fedorov exudes national pride when discussing their influence in the NHL, both statistically and systematically, as the five-man unit that Russian hockey exemplified remains influential on today’s game.

“I’ve been reading that with you, in the 20th celebration of the Russian Five,” he said of the Detroit Red Wings’ outstanding quintet of Fedorov, Igor Larionov, Vyacheslav Kozlov at forward and Slava Fetisov and Vladimir Konstantinov on defense.

“What we did was enjoy our company on the ice. Played together as a group. We learned that style in Russia, under the greatest coaches, and we put that together in front of North American fans.

“So thank you, Scotty Bowman."

There's something you didn't hear often 20 years ago.

Bowman and Fedorov haven’t always seen eye to eye, which is usually the case between player and coach but especially the case when the coach is trying to get inside a star player’s headspace.

Fedorov was a player under constant scrutiny for his effort, or seemingly lack of it. He used to explain it away by citing the different standards for North American and Russian players – the former is lauded for exhaustion at all times, the latter never credited for conservation of energy.

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Bowman’s stern-faced tactics didn’t mesh well with a heart-on-his-sleeve player like Fedorov. In 1997, he infamously shifted Fedorov back on the blue line to play with Larry Murphy, a move designed to reinforce that Fedorov was expected to be a complete player rather than a one-dimensional scorer.

The move didn’t set well with Fedorov. And it didn’t set well because his Russian teammates and fans considered him the best talent on the team, and yet Steve Yzerman – a Canadian – had more ice time and less public scorn. (While both faced rather public trade rumors, leaked for motivation, Fedorov was the one who saw his ice time and position change.)

He wanted to be appreciated. Other teams appreciated him. The New York Rangers kicked the tires on an offer sheet after the Joe Sakic gambit failed. When Fedorov and the Red Wings had their epic contract squabble in 1998, the Carolina Hurricanes inked him to a six-year, $38 million contract. The same Hurricanes that were owned by fellow Class of 2015 inductee Peter Karmanos Jr., a rival of Detroit owner Mike Illitch. It was a bit like leaving Wonka for Slugworth.

The Red Wings matched. Fedorov claimed it wasn’t about the money.

His number still isn’t retired in Detroit.

Lazy. Streaky. Enigmatic. Selfish. Difficult. Not the leader his Canadian peers were.

Fedorov was hit with every clichéd sling and arrow Russian players still face today.

“If my name were Sam Jones, I would be a superstar here forever,” he told Mitch Albom in 1997. “People judge me differently because I am Russian.”

***

Fedorov has an encyclopedic mind. He glances at the Jumbortron at highlights of his career play, having just received his Hall of Fame blazer at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday afternoon.

“I remember them all,” he says.

I mention his commercials for Nike.

“I remember them by heart,” he says, smiling.

Fedorov signed a deal with Nike in 1995, when the company began making hockey skates. They were white, with black trim, with a Nike swoosh on the side. The Air Jordan of blades.

Playing for Detroit was to his benefit. Pavel Bure, every much the on-ice Russian sensation that Fedorov was, playing in Vancouver. Hence, Fedorov was the safer bet for advertisers and a company like Nike.

The campaign, like everything Nike touched at the time, was genius. It build Fedorov up as an unstoppable force that legions of defenders and a gaggle of goalies couldn’t stop. It literally took a Zamboni to fell him.

(Seriously, how great is that ad?)

It continued with a series of spots in which goalies that he terrified attempted to gain a measure of revenge by pranking Fedorov, like this …

And like this …

And in the end, Fedorov simply drove opposing goalies insane:

Fedorov remembers them fondly.

“It was a national deal. I think it was amazing. My agents did a great job. They sold my profile, and they built a program around it. The commercial with the goalies? It was hilarious,” he said.

The spots made him a global celebrity in ways that Fedorov is still coming to terms with.

“It pushes you as a person, as a player, to get to really recognized everywhere. I have a lot of fans in China and Japan because of their ads, that I didn’t know about. And then I went there and I was like, ‘oh,’” he said.

Fedorov and Nike parted ways in 1999, after four years in which he “never really felt comfortable” in their skates. But he said Nike decided to go in a different direction.

“Tiger Woods signed his deal. Then that was the end of the program,” he said.

“I thought if they gave it a chance it would still be going on. Working with other players. Making that brand bigger and better.”

***

As brands go, they didn’t get much bigger than Anna Kournikova in the early days of the Internet boom.

The tennis star’s name would be searched as often as Pam Anderson and Carmen Electra. "Women tennis players had quite often been objectified or seen as sex symbols in a way that overtook what they were actually doing -- but I feel like at that time it really went up a notch," said PR and marketing consultant for pro athletes David Skilling, in a recent interview with CNN. “And I don't think that was necessarily Anna's fault. It's just the way the media took it and ran with it."

She was a fixture on ESPN’s Page 2. She was a fixture in lad mags, and particularly when Penthouse ran nude photographs of her. Her exposure in the media and online was in total unbalance with her success on the court, in the sense that there was an enormous amount of the former and none of the latter.

To put it in modern Internet terms:

Imagine if Alex Ovechkin had won the hand of Kim Kardashian before Kanye.

The families of Fedorov and Kournikova were friends, and the two athletes found common ground as star athletes when she was 15. They were romantically linked when she was 16 and he was 28, in a Sports Illustrated article that discussed how the tennis star rode with Fedorov in the Red Wings’ 1997 Cup parade.

From Michael Silver in March 1998:

At last summer's U.S. Open, Fedorov, who declined to be interviewed for this story, attended Kournikova's matches. This led the New York Post to quote someone in the Queens district attorney's office as saying, "Mr. Fedorov had better watch his step. Or more to the point, he had better watch his hands."

Kournikova rolls her eyes as the quote is recounted to her. "Where did that attorney come from?" she asks.

"Who is he to care? When I go to New York this year, I'll be 17, and I've been told that's the legal age there. So I can do whatever I want. At this year's Open, I'll have five boyfriends. 

Fedorov told ESPN in 2005 that his relationship with Kournikova was a friendship for quite a while. “There was no romance for a long time,” he said.

And then there was some.

“We spent quite a few days together. Anna expressed that kind of [romantic] interest, I was kind of surprised because I was a little bit older and wilder than her and I was going in a different direction. But I looked at the situation and said she was a great person, so why not? So, then we started dating. It was tough because her schedule had her based all over the world and I played games in so many different cities.”

Fedorov says they married in 2001. Kournikova has denied it. Bure and Kournikova were said to be engaged in 2000. It was all rather complicated.

Her name was brought up by Fedorov at the Hall of Fame in an unpredictable way: By relaying a story about Bowman.

Fedorov said that Bowman granted him a leave from the Red Wings in order to patch things up with Kournikova. Detroit was headed on a road trip, and Fedorov was allowed to miss a few days of practice.

It was a moment, Fedorov said, that made him see his former coach in a new light.

“I really, truly, finally figured out who Scotty Bowman was,” said Fedorov. “After that, I played even harder for that gentleman."

***

What would Sergei Fedorov have been if the prime of his career was shifted 20 years, to where the game is in 2015?

“The game is faster. Guys are bigger. It would be hard,” he says.

That’s on the ice. Off the ice, it’s hard to conceive how Fedorov’s examined life in the late 1990s would have been received in a social media age. The conflicts with Bowman. The offer sheet drama. The endorsement deals. The relationships, both with Kournikova and with other women like Tara Reid of “American Pie” fame.

Maybe he's a crossover celebrity, getting his actions debated on ESPN chat shows. Maybe he's villified by Twitter and playing in Russia instead. Who knows?

The closest proxy is, of course, Alex Ovechkin. He’s dated a tennis star. His commercials are popular. And he’s passing Fedorov for the most goals scored by a Russian player in the NHL.

Ovechkin has played his entire career in a spotlight of media saturation, here and across the ocean, and social media scrutiny. Fedorov’s career, and his personal life, occurred as that tidal wave of attention was just starting to build. It's crashed on Ovechkin.

The Washington Capitals captain hears the same clichéd slams that Fedorov did, from his attitude to his leadership. (The long-term contract helped him avoid the offer sheet drama.) For a time, Fedorov was criticized for his lack of success in the postseason, despite doing what Ovechkin’s done with the Capitals: Exceling while his team hasn’t. Fedorov scored 77 points in his first 75 playoff games, before winning his first Cup in 1997. Ovechkin of course hasn't yet played for the Cup.

Fedorov played with Ovechkin in Washington for two years, from 2007-09. He said he didn’t expect Ovechkin to break his goals record when he first saw him as a rookie.

“I never thought of it that way. But I’m glad he does it,” he said. “We went through a lot of things together, on the ice and off the ice.”

On the ice, Fedorov was a hockey god. Off the ice, Fedorov had beguiling fame. He enters the Hockey Hall of Fame as one of the game’s true superstars because of both.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.