Importing the Glitz

By SALLY DONNELLY/MOSCOW

Center ice at the Red Army rink on Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow is hallowed ground in the history of Soviet athletics. Players nurtured there in the dogma of the perfect slap shot have won 32 world hockey championships and formed the core of eight Olympic gold medal teams. But economic hard times along with the departure of star players for lucrative contracts in the West have forced the Ministry of Defense, which oversees the team, to redeploy forces. At a game at the Red Army rink last week, the star performer was not a skater but a bear. A dancing bear. In a team uniform.

Could such goings-on have had anything to do with the legendary Central Red Army Hockey Team? Well, not quite. The squad that now takes the ice to the sounds of James Brown's I Feel Good is called the Russian Penguins. If that has a familiar ring, it's because Howard Baldwin, the chairman of the National Hockey League's Pittsburgh Penguins, is the head of a group that paid the Russian army $1.2 million last June for a stake in the team. (Among the other investors: N.H.L. star Mario Lemieux and actor Michael J. Fox.) The Penguins, from their new $200 jerseys -- a hip, hockey-playing bird has replaced the hammer-and-sickle motif -- to the circus performers and striptease acts between periods, are Russia's first glimpse at the American custom of big-time sports mixed with even bigger-time marketing.

If home-game attendance is any indicator, the Russian Penguins may also be the first successful example of military conversion in the former Soviet Union. The Soviet-style sports palace is drawing more than 3,000 fans a game -- hardly a Rose Bowl throng, but better than the average 500 who turned out last year. For the equivalent of 30 cents a ticket they get a taste of American-style showboating along with the spectacle. The players, who once lumbered onto the rink as their names were shouted over the public-address system, now race to center ice and skid to a sudden stop. Says spectator | Yevgeni Balashov, 18, a private in the Russian army: "The music, contests and stuff make the whole night better now."

The squad, the Interstate League's youngest team, with an average age of 20, is responding too: halfway through this season, the Penguins have won more games than in all of last year. Says center Alexander Kharlamov, 18: "This is the first time most of us have felt this kind of excitement from the spectators." There may be a more fundamental explanation, however, for the upswing. The players, who on paper are soldiers in the army, this year are being paid up to $12,000 a season. Last year the army never managed to send out any paychecks at all.

In their earlier incarnation, the Penguins turned out players who now star in the N.H.L., like Vancouver's Pavel Bure and Buffalo's Alexander Mogilny, and the club will continue to serve as an informal farm system for the North American league. To reciprocate, the Pittsburgh Penguins are assisting the army by funding clinics and a summer camp to help develop young players. Two other N.H.L. teams are reportedly looking into signing similar deals in Russia.

Steve Warshaw, the Penguins' vice president for marketing, admits to a "psychological rift" between the Russian side and the Americans on how to promote the team. Or more important, on how to make it self-sufficient. Nights of rinkside fun and fantasy have already cost upwards of a million dollars. On the day of a game last week, Warshaw approached Russian coach Viktor Tikhonov with a request from one of the team's sponsors, Pittsburgh's Iron City Beer, to have advertising patches put on the jerseys. Tikhonov, who is revered in Russia for his guidance of the Red Army and Olympic teams, turned him down. "It's bad luck to do anything like that on game day," said Tikhonov.

The fans have to adjust to the new ways as well. When the team gave away free beer one night, Penguin supporters pitched empties onto the ice in disgust at some unsportsmanlike play on the part of the opposition. Warshaw has devised a solution: next time the beer will come in "collectors' cans" emblazoned with the Penguin logo. "They won't throw those away," he predicts.

All this effort is expected to start paying off within two years. The club is talking with such Western firms as Seagram's, McDonald's and Pepsi about crucial sponsorship deals. It is also looking to sell Penguin paraphernalia abroad in hopes of winning a chunk of the $800 million N.H.L. merchandise business.

Russian general manager Valery Gushin, who helped orchestrate the joint venture, is of two minds about the new approach. "Of course it's more normal for a sports team to be self-sufficient instead of state supported," he says. But Gushin explains that the lack of a transition period, as well as the general poor state of the Russian economy, has made work, even life, difficult. "I used to have a job, do it and go home at night. Now I am always thinking about how to sell the team." Oh, by the way, he adds with a smile, "I signed up four Russian firms as sponsors in one week."