by Wayne Coffey
The BOYS of
WINTER
The Untold Story of a
Coach, a Dream, and
the 1980 U.S. Olympic
Hockey Team
Wayne Coffey
FOREWORD BY JIM CRAIG
CROWN PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team
1980 U.S.S.R. Olympic Hockey Team
Foreword by Jim Craig
PROLOGUE: The Last Reunion
THE FIRST PERIOD
CHAPTER 1: Weeding the Garden
CHAPTER 2: Stirrings of Belief
CHAPTER 3: Beat the Clock
FIRST INTERMISSION: Intrigue in the Woods
THE SECOND PERIOD
CHAPTER 4: “It Was Team”
CHAPTER 5: Holding Pattern
CHAPTER 6: Sticking Around
SECOND INTERMISSION: The Puck Stops Here
THE THIRD PERIOD
CHAPTER 7: Short End of the Shift
CHAPTER 8: Leading Men
CHAPTER 9: Dream Weavers
POSTGAME: Finns and Farewells
Box Score
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Wayne Coffey
Copyright
For my bride, Denise Willi,
and our children,
Alexandra, Sean, and Samantha
FOREWORD
Years before I ever heard of Lake Placid or the Olympics, before I knew the name of a single Russian hockey player, I was a kid in Massachusetts who wanted to be the next Bobby Orr. I grew up skating on Holmes’s Pond, which took its name from our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Holmes, who owned it. A man named Phil Thompson, our postman, was the person who told me I should try organized hockey in the Easton Junior Hockey League. He had already been working on it with my mother. He was a fine postman and an even better salesman.
The game we played against the Russians in Lake Placid twenty-five years ago has been acclaimed and saluted in every way possible, but for me, it has always felt like a passage on ice, the attainment of a dream that started on Mrs. Holmes’s pond. It’s impossible for me to separate the miracle that we achieved as a team with the memories and gratitude I have for all the people who helped me get there, from my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, to ten years’ worth of coaches and friends and teammates. You don’t make a journey like that alone. You make it with a lot of love and sacrifice. That’s probably why I was searching the stands for my father after we won the gold medal against Finland. It was a moment that was begging to be shared.
I don’t believe those Winter Games in Lake Placid will ever be duplicated. I don’t say that because we beat maybe the greatest Soviet hockey team ever assembled, or even because Eric Heiden won five gold medals, a performance that I honestly think dwarfs what we did. I say it because there weren’t doping scandals or judging scandals or an Olympic Village that was overrun with millionaires and professionals in Lake Placid. Herb Brooks, God rest his soul, wasn’t coaching a Dream Team. He was coaching a team full of dreamers. There is a big difference. In Lake Placid, it didn’t feel as if the Games were being run by corporations. It felt as if at the heart of them was a brotherhood of athletes, the best in the world, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.
I’ve visited quite a few places that have hosted the Olympics in the past, and you almost can’t tell that the Games were ever there. You aren’t in Lake Placid for more than a minute before you are flooded with Olympic memories, whether it’s from seeing the Olympic Arena at the top of the hill, or the oval next door where Heiden skated into immortality. Whenever I’m in town, I like to go out at night when it’s dark and quiet and the shops are closed, and stand in the middle of Main Street. I close my eyes and in an instant it takes me back to that magical Friday night of February 22, 1980, to the memory of walking down that same Main Street with Mike Eruzione and our fathers and other family members, and ABC’s Jim Lampley interviewing us as we went. Snow was falling, and everywhere you looked people were waving flags and chanting, “U-S-A, U-S-A.” We were in our primes, athletically and physically. We were surrounded by people we loved, getting loved some more by people we didn’t even know. We had just done the impossible, and we were happy to be alive and thrilled to be Americans and thrilled to think that Herb was right: maybe we were meant to be here. It’s a feeling you wish everybody could have at one point in their lives.
Being in that goal on that Friday night was the pinnacle of my athletic life, the greatest joy I have ever known as a hockey player. It was the culmination of a journey, and then other journeys followed, for all of us; that is what this book is really all about—the journeys that brought us to that semifinal game against the Soviet Union, and those we’ve taken since. Sometimes people ask me if I wish I could go back and do it again, if some part of me is sad that I will never experience that pinnacle again. You can’t look back. You can’t dial up euphoria on demand, or try to re-create what happened a quarter century ago. You move forward and you live your life and try to be a better person every day than you were the day before. You take each day as a new journey, even as you are grateful for the ones you have already had.
Jim Craig
North Easton, Massachusetts
PROLOGUE
THE LAST
REUNION
Morning broke hot in St. Paul, Minnesota, on August 16, 2003. The sky was gray, the air as thick as porridge. Beneath the gilded dome of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, 307 feet over the east bank of the Mississippi River, men in dark suits and women in dark dresses fanned themselves to fend off the heat. It didn’t work. It was a Saturday in Herb Brooks’s hometown. There were an estimated 2,500 people in the cathedral, the fourth largest in the United States. Many of the people arrived a full ninety minutes early. On a day when you could melt a puck on the sidewalk, it was a little surreal to be memorializing a man who spent most of his life around the rink.
In the center of the cathedral, nineteen middle-aged men filed solemnly down the center aisle, behind the casket. They sat behind the family of Herb Brooks, who used to coach them. Most of them had thickened bodies and thinning hair, and sturdy athletic bearing, even in their suits, even a couple of decades past their primes. Their faces were heavy and sad. The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, twenty-four summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them, by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games. Other than fast skaters and constant motion, Herb Brooks liked few things more than mind games, keeping people guessing, cultivating uncertainty as if it were a crop, because it was a productive feeling for a player to have; it would make him more motivated, work harder.
Now Herb Brooks had brought the 1980 Olympic team together again, five days after he became the first among them to die, in a one-car accident on Interstate 35 in Forest Lake, Minnesota. Brooks was returning home from the town of Biwabik, in the Iron Range area of northeast Minnesota, where he had attended a golf tournament and fund-raiser for the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. It was mid-afternoon and the pavement was dry. Brooks was less than a half-hour from his suburban St. Paul home when his Toyota Sienna minivan swerved out of control and rolled over, ejecting his body. Brooks was as principled and uny
ielding as any man alive; getting him to move off something he believed in was as easy as moving an iceberg. One of the things Herb Brooks did not believe in was seat belts.
This was only the second time the entire team had been together since February 25, 1980, the morning they left the Adirondack village of Lake Placid for the White House, red, white, and blue heroes at an average age of 21 years old. “It’s the one reunion that nobody wanted to go to,” said Buzz Schneider, who had been the oldest member of the team at 25. But they all came. The only player missing from the funeral was the reclusive Mark Pavelich, who had paid his respects at the wake the night before.
In the pulpit, Mike Eruzione delivered a eulogy. He was the captain in 1980, and he remains the captain, the team’s most recognizable name and face. His teammates call him Rizzie and tease him about his unabashed opportunism, how he has parlayed a weekend and a goal a quarter-century ago into a lifetime on the rubber-chicken circuit, talking about dreaming big and working hard and staying together, at upwards of $15,000 a pop, in a voice that leans a bit toward squeakiness. Brooks joined in the teasing, too. “Mike Eruzione believes in free speech,” Brooks used to say. “He’s just never given one.” He gave one at the funeral, guided by his heart and the sentiments of his teammates, but without a formal text. Eruzione likened Brooks to a father whom you love deeply but don’t always like because he pushes you so hard. “I firmly believe he loved our hockey team, but we didn’t know it,” Eruzione said.
____
Herb Brooks spent the afternoon of February 28, 1960, watching a hockey game in the house he grew up in. It was a Sunday on the east side of St. Paul, the last day of the 1960 Olympic Games. Brooks was 22, and he was sitting in the living room next to his father, Herb Sr., an insurance man and former coach of his son’s junior hockey team. In the semifinals the night before, the U.S. hockey team had shocked the defending champions from the Soviet Union, 4–3. Now both Herbs were taking in the gold-medal game between the United States and Czechoslovakia, the images grainy and black and white, the sting as clear and cold as ice itself. How could the younger Brooks not feel stung when, on the cusp of an Olympic dream, he was tapped on the shoulder and told to go home? Days before the 1960 Olympics began, coach Jack Riley replaced Brooks on the roster. After months of recruitment, Riley had finally convinced 1956 Olympic standout Bill Cleary to rejoin the team. Bill Cleary’s one condition was that his brother be able to play with him. Bob Cleary’s head was pasted over Herb Brooks’s body in the team picture. The United States scored five third-period goals and won the gold medal, 9–4. The Cleary brothers were a major reason why.
“Well, I guess the coach cut the right guy,” Herb Sr. told his son.
Herb Brooks would go on to play for the 1964 and 1968 Olympic teams, and would recycle his father’s line often in his life, unflinching in the face of its hardness. It was the greatest motivational tool he could ever ask for, and it would come to embody Brooks’s own modus operandi as a coach: toughness on the brink of cruelty, passionate pursuit of perfection at the expense of feelings. Even in his photo in the 1980 team media guide, he already had his game face on, thin lips taut, face set, eyes deep and intense, roiling with ideas and insecurities and innovation. The photo fairly shouts, “Don’t mess with me.”
Brooks applied for the 1980 Olympic coaching job in the fall of 1978. He wasn’t the coach selection committee’s first choice—that was Bill Cleary, who’d gone on to coach at Harvard. But Cleary declined, so Brooks requested a meeting with Walter Bush, the general manager of the 1964 Olympic team Brooks played on and the head of the committee. Bush knew all about Brooks’s impressive coaching résumé, how he’d taken over a last-place University of Minnesota Golden Gophers team in 1972 and captured three national titles in the next seven years. He was somewhat wary of him nonetheless. “Herb could be a one-man band,” Bush said. “He wanted to be coach, general manager, everything. He had a way of irritating people at times.” Yet Bush agreed to let Brooks interview for the job. Brooks and the other candidates—Boston University coach Jack Parker and Michigan Tech coach John MacInnes—met with the committee at the O’Hare Hilton. Armed with binders stuffed with details about everything but what brand of tape the players would wrap their sticks with, Brooks presented a plan regarding player selection, staffing, conditioning, pre-Olympic scheduling—all the variables that could help the United States compete for a medal against the Russians, Czechs, Swedes, and Canadians. But by far the most stunning part of the package was his proposed style of play.
Brooks wanted to abandon the traditional, linear, dump-and-chase style of hockey that had held sway in North America forever. He wanted to attack the vaunted Russians with their own game, skating with them and weaving with them, stride for high-flying stride. He wanted to play physical, unyielding hockey, to be sure, but he also wanted fast, skilled players who would flourish on the Olympic ice sheet (which is fifteen feet wider than NHL rinks) and be able to move and keep possession of the puck and be in such phenomenal condition that they would be the fresher team at the end. A hybrid style, Brooks called it. Brooks had played against the Russians through most of the 1960s and been fascinated by them ever since. Whenever he saw Anatoly Tarasov, the legendary Soviet coach, he would pump him with questions and take note of his methods. Before the 1979 world championships in Moscow, he snuck into Russian practices, and he cornered Igor N. Tuzik, coach of the Russian “B” team, at a Lake Placid tournament two months before the Olympics. “He wanted to know all the details,” said Tuzik, now the vice president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation. “ ‘Why? Why? Why? Why do passes go this way? When do you go off the boards? Why is the key the speed of the wing?’ He wanted to know everything.”
In the two decades that had passed since the U.S. team had upset them in Squaw Valley, California, the Russians not only had won every Olympic gold medal but had beaten the Americans by an aggregate score of 28–7. The Soviet team in Lake Placid would be perhaps their strongest ever. In Brooks’s mind, the logic behind changing strategy was as clear as vodka on the rocks: Why give up possession of the puck to the best stickhandling team in the world? Why play a reactive, checking game when it allows them to dictate tempo? How many times do we have to get hit with the same hammer and sickle before we learn? Brooks’s teams had largely played dump-and-chase hockey at Minnesota. He was calling for a switch no less radical than it would be for a grind-it-out football team to start flinging the ball downfield.
Bush and his committee were blown away by Brooks and the depth of his presentation. He got the job.
____
Inside the vast cathedral doors, someone had put up a large poster of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. If anyone thought this sacrilegious, the complaint was not aired. Nearby Salvation Army volunteers offered cups of cold water to mourners, who clutched service programs that showed Brooks on the ice in his 1980 USA warm-up suit, wearing hockey gloves and a whistle and a smile, looking uncharacteristically at ease. Beneath the picture it said:
HERBIE
1937–2003
On a table were keepsake bookmarks featuring a photo of Brooks as a Team USA player, ice shavings spraying in front of him. It was the same photo that had been displayed inside his casket and at the wake the night before. By the hundreds, people came to express condolences to Brooks’s family, some waiting in line for two hours, many kneeling in prayer in front of the coffin. Alongside Brooks’s body were a single rose and a little rolled-up American flag, an assortment of cards from his children and grandchildren. A drawing of a flower, colored by one of his grandchildren, peeked from the chest pocket of his suit.
Presiding over the service was Rev. John Malone of Assumption Catholic Church in St. Paul. “Most miracles are dreams made manifest,” he said. “Herbie had a dream. The players had a dream. If we could all dream . . . and do our best, we could make this a better world. It’s within our reach; it’s within God’s reach.”
____
Brooks went lookin
g for twenty-six players at the National Sports Festival in Colorado Springs in the summer of 1979. He had a good idea who his leading candidates would be. Brooks wasn’t necessarily eyeing the most talented players or most prolific scorers—all-star teams don’t win games, he kept telling his players—but for those most willing to rewire their games to embrace his system, skate hard and fast, and fit together as a whole. Hockey is the quirkiest and most capricious of sports, a game played at a dizzying pace, on a slippery surface, players coming on, players going off, championships decided by a bad bounce, a well-positioned blade, by whether a speeding disc hits the inside of the post or the outside. There are a million things a coach can’t control. Brooks, an obsessive planner, was going to make sure he was on top of what he could control.
For two weeks sixty-eight of the country’s top amateurs showed their stuff to Brooks and his nine-man advisory panel. Brooks punished them in drills on the ice and gave them a 300-question test to assess their psychological makeup off it. He was relentless. If they couldn’t take this small sampling of life under Brooks, they wouldn’t last through one Olympic practice shift. Most of the players were in a Colorado Springs biker bar named The Finish Line when they heard that the roster had been finalized. Even the surest bets—Mark Johnson, Ken Morrow, Jim Craig, and Neal Broten—felt relieved when they heard team general manager Ken Johannson call their names. It was a squad long on speed and skill, the better to shed the United States’ dump-and-chase ancestry. Buzz Schneider was the only holdover from the 1976 Olympic team.
