Nikolai Makarov is 70!

On the eve of the 70th anniversary Traktor has had a chat with Nikolai.

Nikolai, do you feel that your anniversary is coming?
No, I don`t. My wife and me have birthdays in three weeks difference. I care more about hers. I know that mass media, my colleagues, Traktor are busy preparing to my anniversary, I can see posters about it everywhere.Tatyana Ivleva does a great job! So I don`t have birthday mood yet, but everything comes and goes, you know.
You have such a bright and rich career of a player and a coach! What are the most memorable momemnts? 
I have a lot of such moments. Playing career was brighter, I had a lot of flights all over my country and the world. We were always looking forward to New Year holidays as it meant going abroad. 
Call-up to the national team is a big event. It makes you so motivated and inspire you to play beautiful hockey.
I think, a coach`s life is calmer, though there are a lot of trips too, but those trips are within the country and you travel by buses and trains and it`s not that fun. Of course all the players you used to manage stay in youe memory forever. I always have a warm feeling in my soul when I meet guys who used to play in Mechel, Traktor`s affiliated team. Sometimes they call me and say that they have only positive things to remember about the time I used to coach them. Many of those guys became coaches."When you become a coach, you`ll understand what is the difference", I used to tell them. Now they know it.

There is a lot said and written about Zvezda, the Chebarkul ice hockey team, there is even a film. Nikolai, what can you say about time there? What was players` life like?
When I came there, guys lived in the military barracks and came together for practices only. After practice the bus drived them back to the barrack. Later the division commander Muzykantov provided them with two three bedrooms appartments in the new building. It becams our dormitary.

I came to Zvezda thanks to Yury Gomolyako. He was two years older than me, we used to play together for Voskhod sportclub and we were on good terms. Once he asked me why I stayed there and kept playing in the junior league, he said that I should try going to Chebarkul as it was in Chelyabinsk region and it was close to Chelyabinsk. Gomolyako arranged with AlferFilippovich about it and I went to Chebarul in summer of 1967.I didn`t come of age to serve in the military, I had to go there in September. I just came to Alfer and surrendered, Alfer used to say. He hired me a civilian employee.

The rink was always full of fans. It was unbelievable! Just imagine, there was freezing cold, but there was on empty seat in the venue of 10,000 capacity.

«Звезда» Чебаркуль 1968/1969. Н. Макаров первый во втором ряду справа
You mentioned the trips abroad. Do you remember Spengler Cup of 1973? The irrepressible Nedomansky, for example. Did you have a chance to play against him shotting?
No, I didn`t have such a chance, but he was like a warrior on ice. He skated towards our net, pointed out the area of the net where he shot, even tried to rip the net. 

Vaclav Nedomansky. Spengler Cup, 1973. 
Do you remember the North America road trip?
When the World Hockey Assocation was founded, many NHL veterans went there. I had a chance to play against them, for example, I played against Gordie Howe. My team had powerplay advantage and Howe was on my way, I got a pass and he literally lied on the ice to stop my shot. He was 52. I looked at him, his hair was solver grey, he didn`t wear helmet. I couldn`t do that slap shot I wanted to do. I had to pass the puck to another player. 

Nikolay, you often got call-ups to the national teams. You beacme a world champion in 1981 and became the first Traktor player who got Honoured Master of Sports title. What was the atmosphere during that time? What was the chemistry like?
Tikhonov frequently called me up for precamp and different tournaments. You work there, then you receive recomendations from Tikhonov. They always keep you in mind but if there is a major tournament you aren`t in. I wasn`t positive about it. You realise that you aren`t worse than many players, you aren`t worse than Bilelyatdinov, Pervukhin. Of course, they are younger than me, but we played on the same level. The national team coaches prefered to work with the players they worked in their home teams. If you wanted to get a place in the national team, you would have to play in Moscow. "Kolya, I see that you are often called up to the national team, but you aren`t on ice anyway. Come to Moscow and we will see what we can do", Robert Cherenkov told me once. I didn`t have enough courage to go there in 1976, but in 1977 I was going to go to Spartak. I went to the preseason camp. After that Vyacheslav Starshin, the Spartak head coach, said that I should stay as they liked me. But Yevgeny Tyazhelnikov perservery asked me to stay.

In 1982 you went to Jokerit Helsinki. I was common in 90s for players to went abroad on unfavourable conditions of Sovintersport. What was it like to be in the European club in 80s?
The conditions were more than just unfavourable. I left with my family and I was paid 2,500 Finnish markkas. It`s little. Avarage payment in Finland was about 10,000 markkas.
I had a Finnish neighbour in the house welived in, he visited us frequently. He didn`t have children so he spent a lot of time with them playing in the yard. He missed Russians. He used to live in the village which became Finnish after the Winter War. 

It hasn`t been discussed much but in Mechel you coached many talanter Traktor youth, many of them were leaders in Belousov`s team and even won bronze medals of the Junior Hockey League (MHL) and became world championship in 1993.
Many good players weren`t claimed by Traktor, for example, Bobykin, Valerii Andreyev, Kulev, Vardugin...Guys had to play somewhere. Metallurg was sort of Traktor`s farm club.  Young players were often called to Traktor or to military service. It is really hard to work with such team when players come and go that often. The top priority task was to stabilise the roster. And those guys came to me, they came from other cities. We began building a new team which could achieve any goals.
In the 1997 you won the Eastern conference of the Supreme League and got a right to play in the Super League. Do you consider it the greatest achievement in your coaching career?
As a coach, yes, I think it`s the greatest achievement in my career. Unfortunately, it was the time when Mechel was thought as Traktor`s rival. It was said everywhere that Mechel was the face of Metallurgichesky part of the city and Traktor was a face of Chelyabinsk. It was really tough to work in such atmosphere. In 2001 we manage to make to the Super League play off quaterfinals.

You were named as Traktor head coach in 2002. The team had quite good season in the Supreme league. Why did you have to quit?
The reason was simple, it was low budget. We needed resources to sign good players, it`s worth saying that we were focused on players from Chelyabinsk. After the season ended the Traktor director Igor Tregubenkov and I went to the regional government and our budget plan was cut as twice. When we left, Igor asked me what should we do, I said that I had a job offer from Novokuznetsk. He expressed the hope that everything would get better the next year. I said that it was pointless and it would be impossible to work under such conditions.
You became a manager of the regional ice hockey federation in 2017. What difficulties did you face in our ice hocky household organization? What tasks does your job involve?
In general my job consists of holding regional competiotions. No one cares about regional ice hockey. I know towns where ice hockey was developed really well, for example such towns as Zlatoust, Miass, Ust-Katav, Asha, now the situation is totally opposite. Outdoor ice rinks became rare things.Recently I was visited by the head of the Nizhny Novgorod ice hockey federation Mikhail Presnyakov and he asked how many indoor ice rinks we had. We have 7, they have 38! I worked in Krasnodar in 2011, in that region 8 ice rinks were built but they don`t use them. People are busy with agriculture, they are not interested in ice hockey. There are two clubs in Krasnodar, so probably it would be enough to build two or three ice rinks and those 5 left should have been built here.
The Leninsky region of the city used to have 8 teams, every factory created its own team...It was so great, we could hold city tournament. The talanted players grew up and became stars of Russian and international ice hockey. How did it happen that they were from here? Every factory had a sport school where everyone from children to sport masters could go. Just imagine, now there are about 300-500 students in ice hockey school and in the past every school at every factory had such number of students! Only for Leninsky region of the city you would have to multiply the number by 8. Just imagine!

Traktor Ice Hockey Staff congratulates Nikolai with his 70th birthday! May you be healthy, full of energy and achieve all your goals in your uneasy work!

Photos kindly provided by E.Tkachenko, O.Vyguzov, World.Hockey.Classic forum and from E.Sidorov`s and A.Patuk`s archieves.