Lalli Partinen, a hard-spoken but humorous defender of the troughs, died at the age of 80.
Lalli Partinen was one of the great Finnish hockey players of the 1960s and 1970s, known to the entire sports audience by his first name or nickname. Partinen, who died on Wednesday at the age of 80, was a large-scale and hard-spoken defender with a burning spark and a rare sense of situational comedy.
– He was a really liked and funny man. The bear I knew was Dr. Jekyll and Hyde. He was a really laid back, nice person within the team, but the style changed on the field, he played as a goalkeeper at HIFK for many years. Stig Wetzell says.
Partinen was born in August 1941 on an evacuation trip to Kannonkoski and got his first name according to his father’s wishes. The father was overthrown in the Continuation War in the winter of 1942, and Lalli Partinen was left with no memories of his father, who had time to see his son at the baptism.
The hockey audience knew Partinen as the “giant of the East” or the “Red Three.” The party rigged loudly and the chin guard swayed as he spoke to opponents and spectators alike.
Partinen felt that he was the referee’s eye stick, who got on the ice rink even from clean tackles.
– I remember the game situation when Lalli stumbled in the corner and the referee whistled. Lalli thought he was getting cold or pretended to be so, and rushed to the ice rink at a terrible pace. The judge spun confused for a moment as he hadn’t whistled Lalli cool about the tackle. The judge then sentenced Lalli to conduct conduct, Wetzell says.
The party was a favorite of the home audience and an eye-catcher for the guest audience. He knew how to make the most of it.
– In Pori, Lalli left for a substitution, but stumbled and fell at the b-points. The audience laughed. Lalli got up and fell again. The audience laughed, but already more quietly. Then Lalli fell for the third and fourth time, and at that point the audience no longer reacted. He must have been immensely annoyed by the way the audience treated him, Wetzell says.
“I was completely bored”
Partinen’s Main Series career began in 1959 at SaiPa, which he represented until 1969. At that time, SaiPa dropped out of the series, and Partinen moved to HIFK. At the same time, work in the paper mill changed to sales work.
At his first men’s World Championships in Tampere in 1965, Partinen attracted attention by tackling three Canadian players at a time. Partinen represented Finland five times at the Men’s World Championships and once at the Olympics.
Partinen was still aiming for the World Cup team in the spring of 1977, but the race was under the rumble of the league season. In a match played against Ilves in Tampere in October 1976, Partinen became nervous and deliberately pulled the heat towards the referee. In a match played in February 1977, HIFK-KooVee Partinen lost his nerve and beat KooVeen Arto Jokista and KooVee’s guardian Hannu Soroa.
Partinen was banned for a month and announced that he would end his career. He did so in October 1977 after a farewell match he played. After playing, Partinen served as the managing director of the Finnish Hockey Association from 1986 to 1988.
– I was completely tired of the quarreling and squabbling behind the scenes of the sport, Partinen told Helsingin Sanomat in 2001.
As a pensioner, Partinen was elected to the Lappeenranta City Council in 2012 as a candidate for the non-attached Myö civic movement. He garnered the sixth most votes in his hometown in the election and sat on the council for one four-year term.