by Wayne Coffey
Brooks would have to pare six more players from the squad before the Olympics, but his more immediate challenge was finding a way to surmount the entrenched regionalism the players carried within them. Hockey wasn’t played in many places then, but the places where it was played—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and New England—were profoundly parochial pockets with fierce regional pride. The Easterners tended to be edgy and emotional and tart-tongued, seeming to pack skepticism in their equipment bags. The Minnesotans were more reserved and less cynical, more trusting and less vocal, guys who believed in hard work and selflessness and hunting and fishing, clinging to an unstated faith that things would work out, you betcha. Twelve Olympic team members were from Minnesota, and nine of them played for Brooks at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities (the U, as it is known throughout the state). Four were from Boston University, and two apiece were from Wisconsin and Michigan. Five of the guys on the team were on opposite sides of one of the nastiest college hockey brawls anyone could remember—the 1976 NCAA semifinal bloodbath between Minnesota and Boston University. The puck dropped, a minute later so did the gloves, and it was an hour before they played any more hockey. It was so bad that even Gopher trainer Gary Smith got into it, punching a BU player who had spit on him. Time had done little to heal the hostilities; bloodbath II broke out at the National Sports Festival in Colorado.
“Don’t get regional,” Brooks implored his players. His strategy for uniting the team was set from the start. He would make himself the enemy. A shared disdain for his ceaselessly demanding and Machiavellian ways would be the rallying cry, the reason guys would want to go out on the ice and bust their tails, just to show him. With distance and inscrutability, he kept nearly everyone anxious about their prospects for making the team, almost to the end.
“I’m not here to be your friend,” Brooks told the players. “I’m here to be your coach.” He would later call it his loneliest year in hockey.
The players traded horror stories, commiserated with one another. “Eastern guys thought Brooks was singling them out for abuse, but the Minnesota guys told them he treated them that way, too,” said Dave Silk, a rugged winger from Boston University who for a long time was convinced his coach loathed him. When the team exchanged gag gifts at Christmas before the Olympics, the gift for Brooks was a whip.
____
Two paunchy, middle-aged men in hockey sweaters walked slowly into the cathedral, toward the alcove where Herb Brooks’s body lay. They were graduates of Brooks’s alma mater, Johnson High School, and lifelong residents of the east side of St. Paul. They didn’t know Brooks personally, but when you’ve grown up playing hockey around St. Paul, it’s impossible not to feel a connection to him. The men had the halting body language of people who felt unentitled to be there. They sat near the end of a row in the back of the church and listened to the eulogies from Mike Eruzione and Bill Butters, a former player of Brooks’s at the U. Butters, a wild college kid turned devout Christian, talked about how Brooks had “made a man of character out of a character like me,” and about Brooks’s beautiful skating technique, fleet and fluid, blades never even seeming to cut the ice. The men heard Butters read from the book of Proverbs and say, “As iron sharpens iron, so does one man sharpen another.” No matter what Brooks achieved, especially after Lake Placid, he was disinclined to trade on his fame and was wary of people who wanted a piece of him or had a proposition for him. He seemed most at ease with his Minnesota homeboys, at Schwietz’s Saloon on Payne Avenue, or Vogel’s, another east-side watering hole, or drinking his Coors Light with old pals at his annual Fourth of July barbecue. The men said that Brooks never seemed to change even when he became a celebrity coach, and allowed that maybe that was what they liked about him best.
____
Brooks didn’t just put up a wall between himself and the team; he threw in a moat and alligators, too. It was a way to make sure that his own regional bias, and his personal feelings, didn’t get in the way of personnel decisions. “One of the first things Herb said when he hired me was, ‘I’m going to be tough on them, and you are going to have to be the one who keeps everyone together,’ ” assistant coach Craig Patrick said. Patrick, a former All-American and a teammate of Brooks’s on the 1967 U.S. national team, was an amiable, soft-spoken fellow who was impossible not to like. He was not only a man with nine years of pro experience but a scion of America’s First Family of Pucks, his grandfather (Lester Patrick), father (Lynn Patrick), and uncle (Muzz Patrick) all having played and coached for the New York Rangers, dating to the early twentieth century (Lynn also was general manager of the Boston Bruins and St. Louis Blues). Patrick slid easily into the role of part-time sounding board and ombudsman, and full-time nurturer. It was an elaborate and flawlessly constructed game of good cop/bad cop.
The twenty-six-man roster had an August training camp in Lake Placid, then flew off to Europe for three weeks in September, a trip that was timed to keep the players out of sight as NHL training camps opened. The last thing Brooks needed was the pros poaching on his roster and fouling up his plans. It was the beginning of a five-month, sixty-one-game whirl against teams ranging from Reipas of Finland to the Cincinnati Stingers of the Central Hockey League. Team officials worked out an arrangement with the CHL commissioner for games against the Olympic team to count in league standings, thereby ensuring a demanding schedule against motivated opponents. There was even a series of exhibitions against NHL clubs, a first for a U.S. Olympic team. Game after game, week after week, Brooks was consumed with reprogramming his team to play his new system, keeping his distance, punishing his players’ bodies and working over their psyches, and letting Craig Patrick heal all the wounds.
____
In his eulogy Eruzione joked about how, even at age 48, he would be afraid that he’d done something wrong when Brooks would call the house, and how the conversations were so one-sided that he could go make a sandwich and come back and Herb would still be talking. He was sure that Brooks, an inveterate tinkerer, was already weighing in on celestial matters in his brutally candid, Brooksian way.
“Right now, he is saying to God, ‘I don’t like the style of your team. We should change it,’ ” Eruzione said. In the pews, a few thousand people laughed.
The wall that Brooks erected between himself and his players never really came down completely. At times it did, with some players more than others. But on the whole, he remained somewhat apart, the moat too deep and wide to cross, even after a couple of decades.
Lefty Curran, a longtime friend of Brooks and the star goaltender on the 1972 Olympic team that won the silver medal in Sapporo, Japan, was on the golf course with Brooks hours before his death.
“Herb had a hard time reaching over and coming to them,” Curran said. “It would’ve been great if he could’ve embraced each and every one of them and say, ‘I love you guys.’ But Herb wasn’t going to do that.”
____
The Olympics broke Herb Brooks’s heart in 1960 and made him the most celebrated American hockey coach in history two decades later. They were the emotional bookends of his competitive life, and what filled the shelf between them was a restless chase of the perfect game of hockey. He sought it desperately and wasn’t happy when he didn’t get it. There were high points along the road to Lake Placid, such as the holiday victory over Tuzik’s Russian junior varsity, successive triumphs over Sweden and Czechoslovakia and Canada. But there were low points, too: a 9–1 thumping by the St. Louis Blues, a 1–0 loss to the AHL’s Adirondack Red Wings, and most maddening of all to the coach, a 3–3 tie in Norway in mid-September. The low points stayed with Brooks much longer than the high points did.
Norway was a team the Americans should’ve trounced, and Brooks was disgusted with what he saw as an alarming lack of effort. “If you don’t want to skate during the game, then you’ll skate after it,” he told the players. And so they did, lining up on the end line, ordered to skate Brooks’s dreaded Herbies—the name they’d given
to his sprints: end line to blue line and back, end line to red line and back, end line to opposite blue line and back, end line to end line and back. The crowd filed out and the Americans skated. The custodians turned out the lights and the Americans skated. The usually mild-mannered Mark Johnson whacked his stick on the boards and the Americans skated. George Nagobads, team physician for Brooks at the U and the Olympics, urged Brooks to stop. But he kept skating them, for close to an hour. The next night, the teams played again. The United States won, 9–0.
When the team did not respond so positively, there was no mistaking his angst. After the team lost four straight games to Canada around Thanksgiving of 1979, Lou Nanne, general manager of the Minnesota North Stars and an old friend of Brooks’s, got a four a.m. phone call. There was only one person who called him at four a.m.
“I’m done with coaching,” Brooks said. “That’s it. This is going nowhere.” He was ready to go back to Minnesota and tend to his plants and shrubs—perhaps Brooks’s foremost interest outside hockey. He knew everything about them, including their formal Latin names. Buxus sempervirens wasn’t a Finnish winger; it was a species of boxwood.
Nanne told him what he always told him. “Go to bed, Herb. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Warren Strelow, the Olympic goalie coach who had grown up with Brooks on the east side of St. Paul, knew that Brooks could no more walk away from hockey than stop breathing. A dozen years before Lake Placid, he listened to Brooks struggling to find his way. Brooks had just retired from playing. He was selling insurance. His voice sounded hollow. He didn’t care about annuities or the relative merits of whole life and term. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he said. Herb Brooks told his friend that all he wanted to do was be a hockey coach.
____
In the gauzy morning air, Jim Craig stood near the bottom of the cathedral steps and squinted into the haze. Three vintage airplanes had just flown over the church, the missing-man formation. Craig never much worried about being one of the guys when he was the Olympic goaltender, and he still doesn’t. He wasn’t thinking about the night 8,576 days before, when he backstopped history. Craig was looking around at all the hockey people, hundreds of them, and the nonhockey people, too, not just from 1980 but from places and connections that went back more than fifty years in Herb Brooks’s life. There were fellow coaches and scouts, players and teammates, owners and trainers and rivals, from all over the country and all levels, mite to NHL. Not far from Jim Craig was John Mayasich, a Minnesota legend whom many regard as the greatest U.S. player never to play in the NHL. To the left was Tim Taylor, who had just started at Yale in 1979 when Brooks called and asked if he would be interested in being his Olympic assistant. Taylor turned Brooks down, not wanting to alienate his new athletic director. “It was the dumbest decision I ever made,” Taylor said. Brooks teased him about it for years afterward. A few steps from the hearse was Joe Micheletti, who played on Brooks’s first national championship team at the U and once was the biggest thing to come out of Hibbing, Minnesota, since Bob Dylan and Kevin McHale. “It’s a cult in the richest, most positive sense of the word,” Craig said.
Hockey is a club that holds its members tightly, the bond forged by shared hardship and mutual passion, by every trip to the pond, where your feet hurt and your face is cold and you might get a stick in the ribs or a puck in the mouth, and you still can’t wait to get back out there because you are smitten with the sound of blades scraping against ice and pucks clacking off sticks, and with the game’s speed and ever-changing geometry. It has a way of becoming the center of your life even when you’re not on the ice. Brooks met his wife Patti in the emergency room of a Twin Cities hospital. She was a nurse. He had just fractured his hand skating into a goalpost.
____
After Lake Placid Brooks would make ten more stops in a nomadic coaching career, in places ranging from Davos, Switzerland, to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to New York, New York. He did superb work at most of those places, his teams skating fast and playing creatively. Brooks would look at an open sheet of ice and all he would see would be possibilities, new ways to break out and beat traps and exploit weaknesses. And the possibilities would never be greater than on a Friday night in upstate New York, February 22, 1980, so close to the Canadian border that you could hear French on the radio. It would turn out to be the pinnacle of his life in coaching, the three defining periods of nearly six decades spent around rinks, the reason, ultimately, why his death would be mourned as if he were a head of state, not another guy with a whistle around his neck.
For years people have been telling the players they remember exactly where they were the night the Americans played the Russians in Lake Placid. Such recall seems to come naturally in the wake of tragic events—President Kennedy’s assassination, the Challenger disaster, September 11—but not so with good things. So that said something right there. People were desperate for something to feel positive about. There were hostages in captivity in Iran, seized by Iranian militants three months before the Games. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan, restoking old images of the Red Menace. Inflation was galloping along at 18 percent and interest rates were not far behind, and gloom was spreading faster than the lines at the gas pumps. For the first time in American history, when pollsters asked citizens about what life would be like in five years, a majority said they thought it would be worse, not better. Six months before the Olympics, President Carter gave a speech telling of “a crisis of the American spirit.” The nation felt rudderless, less like a superpower than like a neighborhood weakling. And then came the Olympic semifinal against the Soviet Union, a Cold War on blue-white ice, specially tinted for television. The Soviets had their old red sweaters and steel-reinforced bodies and their swirling, high-speed game. They were grown men, seasoned pros. In the last four Olympiads, their record was 27–1–1, their goal differential 175–44. They were the Enemy, and they were tremendous. “It’s David against Goliath, and I hope we remember to bring our slingshots,” Brooks said.
They indeed brought their slingshots that Friday night, along with a wonderful confluence of good karma and dogged effort and fierce togetherness. There was no crisis of spirit around Herb Brooks’s hockey team. They played with skill and heart and never got discouraged. If people wanted to make them out to be puck-toting patriots, saviors in skates, well, that was okay. When they themselves looked in the mirror, they saw hockey players. It was one more reason to fall for them. The most enduring heroes are people who don’t try to be.
Brooks had a second tour of duty coaching the U.S. Olympic hockey team, in Salt Lake City in 2002. Most everyone hailed the work he did in taking the team to the silver medal, but nobody tried to pretend it was the same world that he had coached in at Lake Placid. The concept of amateurism in the Olympics is as obsolete as eight-track cassettes. The expression Dream Team has become part of the five-ring lexicon. The United States doesn’t send anonymous college kids to the Games anymore. It sends NHL All-Stars. Glamour is way up at the Games, romance is way down, and the upshot is that there may never be another generation of kids like Eric Strobel and John Harrington and Mark Wells, going from utter anonymity to the cover of Sports Illustrated. The world seemed simpler in 1980, if not purer. You knew who your friends were, and who your enemies were. Eight years after the massacre in Munich, terrorism was by no means an unknown evil, but it wasn’t the stuff of daily, deadly dispatches, either. There was no such thing as the Department of Homeland Security. There wasn’t a $1.5 billion budget for security, as there was in Athens in the Summer Games of 2004. For most Americans, the bad guys were the Russians, and wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow beat them in a hockey game?
“With the way the world has changed and the way the Olympics have changed, what we did will never happen again,” goalie Steve Janaszak said.
____
In the moments before Herb Brooks’s funeral began, the players from the 1980 Olympic team and thirty-three honorary pallbearers crowded in
the basement of the Cathedral of Saint Paul, going over the final game plan for the salute to their coach. Then they went upstairs and executed it. A gospel singer named Tom Tipton sang “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and after 103 minutes of memoriam the casket that contained Herb Brooks’s body and the miniature flag and the rose and sweet notes from his grandchildren was carried down the steps, beneath a curved canopy of hockey sticks raised up by the honorary pallbearers, a traditional salute in an untraditional place. Many of those holding sticks were fighting tears, and losing the fight. A lone bagpiper played. As the hearse left for the cemetery, the heat thickened and the players began saying goodbye again, their last reunion complete.
Even in their mourning, life was moving on, just as it had since 1980. Twelve of them went on to play in the NHL, and most of them have built lives and careers that fit somewhere between comfortable and prosperous. They are stock traders and coaches, oral surgeons and pilots, businessmen and horsemen. Many of them have kids in college or high school and do what guys in their forties do, joking about their shortage of hair, their excess of weight, and the twinges of pain and stiffness that didn’t used to be there. They’ve known the joys of watching their sons and daughters grow; of taking in the wooded stillness of a lake house; and of finding their way after the miracle. They’ve known hardship, too, death and alcoholism and bleakness so deep that suicide seemed the only option. They deal with their residue of fame in ways as different as their personalities. A few of them embrace it and are actually engaged in it. Some feel defined by it and wish they weren’t. Others wouldn’t mind if they never had to field another 1980 question, and several don’t want to talk about anything unless there is money in the discussion. The regionalism still surfaces from time to time; there have been some differences over money and the mechanics of various marketing deals. More than a few of the Midwestern guys feel there has been an Eastern bias to how their achievement has been represented over the years. “Even though everyone doesn’t agree on everything, I think most of the guys know what’s really important,” Jim Craig said.
