Sergei Fedorov is on the phone from halfway around the world, and he is laughing. Mostly because there’s no simple answer to the question the former Red Wings star is being asked. What would the hockey executive he is today tell the player he was 20 or 30 years ago?
“Oh, a lot of things,” Fedorov finally sighs, a few months shy of his 50th birthday and now a married father of two young children, both of whom are chattering away in the background at home in Moscow.
But “history is history,” Fedorov notes, and besides, the thing that was true then – way back when Fedorov defected from the Soviet Union in 1990 to begin a Hall of Fame career in Detroit – is just as true now.