Today is a good day for me, even with a depressing Habs hangover. Twelve years ago on this day, Luci and I were married in the Palace of Marriage in St. Petersburg, Russia. We had gone through an unbelievable amount of red tape and craziness, but it got done, surprisingly enough. The Russian bureaucracy doesn’t [...]

I’m very proud to show my step-granddaughter Anastasia’s new school picture. The beautiful Anastasia is eight years old and is the daughter of Luci’s son Denis in St. Petersburg, Russia. She’s really, really smart, just like her mom and dad, and is even learning some basic English now.

My stepson Denis Brel in St. Petersburg did this for his Russian site Brel’s Hockey

In the winter of 2000/2001 I was in St. Petersburg, Russia, and while there Luci and I heard about a restaurant in the inner core off Nevsky Prospekt called the Montreal Canadiens Restaurant, of all things. So one day we went for a long walk and found the thing. We went in, looked around, made [...]

This is my stepson Denis’ wife Natasha, wishing you a Happy New Year from Russia. She’s a tremendous gal, smart,(she notched straight A’s throughout university), she spends hours helping daughter Anastasia with school work, and she was as easy going as can be when the bunch of us drove to California last spring. She also [...]

The first time I went to Russia, with my two kids and first wife, was in 1991, when St. Petersburg was still called Leningrad, and when historic changes were underway. Statues of Lenin had been toppled, revolution was in the air, the U.S.S.R. and its communist ways were in the process of collapsing, and although [...]

My Russian stepson Denis Brel went to a KHL game a few days ago in St. Petersburg, and it just happened to be Ilya Kovalchuk’s first game at his new home rink after returning to his homeland due to the lockout. Denis says the rink holds 12,000 people, but 14,000 squeezed in, because to see [...]

They’re back home now, in St. Petersburg, with more than 4000 pictures taken while here, and memories to last them a long time I’m sure. Denis, Natasha, and Anastasia were great fun, and we miss them already.

As we wait for the finals and the fun of seeing Boston get their ass’s kicked,  I’ve been reading a book by an American minor league hockey player named Tod Hartje, who, in 1990, played a full season in the Ukraine and was the first North American to play hockey for a top club in the Soviet [...]

Ilya Kovalchuk has signed with the New Jersey Devils and another Mats Sundin-like saga comes to a close. There’s nothing that turns me off more than a player humming and hawing about trying to figure out the difference between 70 million and 100 million or thereabouts, and choosing a team the way The Bachelor chooses from [...]