by Wayne Coffey
While they did not draw Western-sized paychecks, the Soviet players were, by any measure, professionals, training together nearly year-round—whether with their Russian club team or the national team as a whole—and accorded perks and privileges that were as alien to their fellow workers as a stock portfolio. Cars, nice apartments, vacation places on the Black Sea were common; it wasn’t abnormal for the apartments to get nicer still after a major triumph. Adulation and international travel were part of the lifestyle, too. Of course the travel was made in the company of KGB agents, but the Russians grew up being watched. “You knew they were going to be with you, even if you didn’t know who they were,” said Vladimir Lutchenko, a longtime defensive stalwart and winner of two Olympic golds (1972 and ’76) who would go on to serve as general manager of CSKA in Moscow. The most storied of all Russian hockey teams, CSKA was the feeder club for most of the stars on the national team.
Lutchenko grew up in the Moscow suburb of Remenskoe and was typical of how Soviet players of his era were developed. He started playing hockey at 6, showed promise, and by 12 was deemed gifted enough by Soviet sports officials to be placed in the CSKA school, where he would get rigorous training under skilled coaches. By 15 he was on the junior national team, and several years after that was wearing No. 3 and stationed on the blue line for Tarasov.
A rotund, jowly man with wayward white hair, Tarasov was a towering figure in hockey by the late 1960s. Lou Vairo, on one of his first visits to the Soviet Union, asked Tarasov for five drills to work on transitioning from defense to offense. Tarasov pushed his glasses back on his bulbous red nose and told Vairo to meet him at six a.m. the next morning and to have 100 drills ready for discussion. Vairo stayed up all night preparing. “There are two people in the hockey world you did not say no to. One was Herb Brooks, and the other was Anatoly Tarasov,” he said. Tarasov reviewed Vairo’s homework, then presented him with the five exercises he wanted. “My eyes were as wide as pucks,” Vairo said. “There was nobody like Tarasov. Without question, he’s the finest coach in ice hockey who ever was. He could motivate like nobody I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen him work with Swedish kids and Finnish kids. He didn’t even speak their language and he could motivate them. He didn’t just coach. He made players better.”
And he didn’t mind trying to help make American players better, maybe because they posed so little threat. Tarasov gave a talk at Northeastern University in Boston not long before Lake Placid, and 1960 hero Bill Cleary went to see him. Tarasov greeted Cleary with a bear hug and said, “Billy, you almost sent me to Siberia.” Cleary invited Tarasov and his interpreter over to his house. Tarasov arrived with a bottle of vodka and the following greeting: “Ice, ice, ice.” They reminisced and talked hockey and looked out over the Charles River, and when the vodka was gone, Tarasov grabbed the empty bottle, went outside, and tossed it into the shrubs. “Leave it there until the next time America wins the Olympic gold medal in hockey,” he said, laughing. Cleary still has the bottle.
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Brooks knew he’d need everything to break right for his team to get a shot at the Russians, and the Lake Placid schedule makers—a committee consisting of Hal Trumble, executive director of the Amateur Hockey Association of the United States (AHAUS); Robert Fleming, chair of AHAUS’s international committee; William Croft, a technical adviser retained by the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee; and Ken Johannson, the U.S. general manager—did all they could to cooperate. There were two six-team divisions in the Olympic hockey tournament, determined by seedings and sorted out by the International Ice Hockey Federation, the sport’s worldwide governing body. The U.S. team was seeded seventh overall and was placed in the Blue Division, with Czechoslovakia, Sweden, West Germany, Norway, and Romania. The Red Division consisted of the Soviet Union, Canada, Finland, Poland, Holland, and Japan. After the world championships in the spring of 1979, the committee met in the National Hotel in Moscow. A slap shot away from Red Square, the men drew up the entire twelve-team Olympic hockey schedule—dates, times, locations, and order of all games—and it wasn’t a coincidence that the particulars fell the United States’ way. Brooks didn’t attend the meeting, but he had full input into the schedule gerrymandering. The home team always has an advantage in sports, and in the committee’s mind, this was just a way of enhancing it a bit, like the fleet-footed baseball team that keeps its grass long to help its runners. The United States received another perk, too, setting up in the most spacious of the locker rooms. The Soviets, as world champions, were supposed to get first choice but were instead sent down the hall.
Sweden was selected to be the first U.S. opponent, the thinking being that the youthful Americans would be hyped up to play and would bring lots of energy against a strong team. The Czechs were second, because they were a very skilled and physical bunch, a team that could beat you up and that you didn’t necessarily want to play two days before the medal round. Then came what figured to be the easiest games, against Norway and Romania, and finally, the last divisional game against West Germany, historically a nation that played the United States well. In 1976, a loss to the West Germans had knocked the United States out of medal contention. The committee took equal care in scheduling the Red Division games. The three top teams in the division—the Soviet Union, Canada, and Finland—had easy games in the beginning and the toughest games, against each other, at the end.
Play commenced on February 12, a day before Opening Ceremonies, the extra day of competition necessary to ac-commodate the largest Olympic field in history. The Soviets opened against Japan and Holland (they won by a combined score of 33–4). The U.S. start wasn’t nearly so auspicious, the decision to meet Sweden first very nearly backfiring. Pelle Lindbergh, future Philadelphia Flyer, was superb in goal for Sweden, and the United States was still down 2–1 with a minute to play when Brooks ordered Craig to vacate the goal and sent out six skaters. With 27 seconds remaining, defenseman Bill Baker scored on a slap shot, and a loss turned into a tie.
All ties are not equal. This was a phenomenal tie, and it carried over into Game 2, against the Czechs. A day after the U.S. athletes marched in opening ceremonies in cowboy hats, sheepskin coats, and blue jeans, the team played a game straight out of the frontier of its imagination, a Valentine’s Day massacre over the second-best team in the world. The final score was 7–3, the most explosive offensive effort by a U.S. team since the gold-medal game in 1960 in Squaw Valley, also against the Czechs. This time the United States scored five times over 26 minutes in the second and third periods, playing creative, aggressive, and dazzlingly artful hockey. “It was the best game we played in the tournament,” defenseman Ken Morrow said. Even the Russians were stunned at the result. Buzz Schneider, who had become friendly with renowned Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak during previous international competitions, ran into him after the game in the Olympic Village. “I think we can do something here,” Schneider told him.
The United States followed with convincing triumphs over Norway and Romania, then got its quadrennial headache from West Germany. This time the trouble commenced in warm-ups, Craig getting knocked out when a shot from Eruzione hit him in the neck. Brooks told Janaszak to get loose. Craig finally gathered himself, but he let in a seventy-foot slap shot for one goal and a fifty-five-footer for another, and the United States was still down two goals as the game neared the halfway point. Right wing Rob McClanahan finally got the Americans on the board with a backhander, and Neal Broten tied things up in the final 90 seconds of the second period by jamming in a rebound. The United States went on to a 4–2 triumph, and though the Americans were hoping to win by more goals and thus move ahead of the Swedes in the standings (goal differential is the main Olympic tiebreaker), they couldn’t complain too much. They were second in the Blue Division, in the medal round, in the Olympic semifinals. The next opponent would be the winner of the Red Division: the Soviet Union, which, surprisingly, had to come from behind to beat Finland and Canada in its previous two games.
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Poised over center ice in the hilltop arena, a Finnish referee named Karl-Gustav Kaisla dropped the puck. The first Olympic semifinal—the thirty-second game of the hockey competition in the XIII Winter Olympics, and the most anticipated event of the Games—was underway. The Field House, with a capacity of 8,500, was completely overstuffed. Ten thousand people? Twelve thousand? The turnstiles couldn’t keep up. Petrov won the draw from Johnson. The Soviets controlled the puck. Not even two minutes in, defenseman Valery Vasiliev carried through center ice, passed to forward Viktor Zhluktov, and kept on skating, getting the puck back to the right of Jim Craig, then threading a perfect pass to Zhluktov, who was charging in from the point. Already the Soviets were showcasing their intricate game, a defenseman in deep, a forward up high, the pieces moving seamlessly, the puck quickly. Zhluktov skated in on Craig, who moved out to cut down the angle. The Soviet wristed a lefthanded shot and Craig blocked it, blocked the rebound, and covered up. Craig knew it was critical that he get off to a good start. If you let the bear jump on your back early, you were done. Look at what happened at Madison Square Garden. The Russians were famous for their conditioning, another legacy of Tarasov’s. Educated at the Soviets’ sports think tank, the Institute of Physical Culture, Tarasov studied science and exercise physiology and developed novel ideas about training athletes to improve their lateral movement and agility, and to sustain a fast pace from start to finish. The conditioning regimen was practically year-round, consisting of everything from soccer to running on the beach to long, grinding rides on bulky, one-gear 1950s bicycles. “They were doing plyometrics before the rest of the world knew how to spell it,” said Michael Smith, general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks and a Ph.D. in Russian Studies. Tretiak, the Hall of Fame goaltender, once said that he didn’t take a day off training for twenty-one years, including his wedding day.
“You and the Canadians have the wrong approach,” Tarasov told Lou Vairo. “You want to win games in the last period, but a well-conditioned team wins in the first ten minutes, maybe less. The opponent is destroyed not just on the scoreboard, but their will is broken when an opponent [comes out hard and fast].”
After Craig turned away Zhluktov, the Soviets were buzzing the goal again, Alexander Golikov forechecking hard, and rising star Sergei Makarov, a square-chinned 21-year-old winger with a wide face and a penchant for making wisecracks, right there with him. The night before, Makarov and Craig had played Centipede against each other in the Olympic Village video arcade. Craig wasn’t much for video games, but he liked this one because it was a great test of hand-eye coordination. It was also free. “Isn’t this great that we can stand here and play the game all night for nothing?” Craig said. They mostly communicated with nods and laughs. “The real game is tomorrow night,” Craig said when they parted.
Makarov’s linemate Alexander Golikov got the puck in front and was about to fire when Broten, backchecking assiduously, alertly got his stick on the puck and foiled him. Brooks’s plan was to attack the Soviets and skate with them, but it was also to get all five skaters back in the zone when the Russians had the puck. You don’t even think about containing the best forwards in the world with a pair of defensemen—a lesson that was reinforced for Brooks the night before when he dined with his agent, Art Kaminsky, and Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender and ABC broadcaster, an erudite man who had extensive knowledge of the Russians. Brooks spent the meal peppering Dryden with questions, probing for a revelation, eighteen hours before game time.
Despite the vigilant defense, the United States was having trouble clearing the puck out of its zone. Just inside the blue line, Makarov flicked a pass to Alexander Golikov, who went in on Craig but backhanded it wide, and then it was Makarov’s turn, steaming past Mike Ramsey on the right wing, dangerously pushing the puck across center.
On the Soviet bench, Viktor Tikhonov was at his usual station, standing in front of his players, not behind them, the location preferred by Brooks and every other Western coach. He looked like a gatekeeper in a brown suit, jabbering constantly to his players, hair cemented in place. The Soviets were skating hard and passing crisply, and Tretiak had made a sprawling stop of the first American threat, defenseman Bill Baker making an end-to-end rush down the right side, getting in deep, and centering to winger Phil Verchota, who tried to ram the puck in from the doorstep.
Bill Baker had a poised and savvy approach to the game. He didn’t carry the puck that often, but he could be plenty dangerous in the offensive zone. He had proved that ten days earlier when he had saved the Americans with his late heroics against the Swedes. The Olympic Field House was half-full then, the atmosphere so flat that right wing John Harrington thought to himself, This is the Olympics? The United States had missed a flurry of early chances and was on the verge of paying for it. As Jim Craig raced off in the final minute and Dave Silk hopped on, the United States forced a face-off in the Swedish zone. Center Mark Pavelich won the draw and got the puck back to Mike Ramsey, whose shot from the point was stuffed. Moments later, Buzz Schneider fought off a clutching Swede near the corner and steered the puck over to Pavelich, on the left boards. Pavelich spun around and centered it to Baker, who was open between the circles. The pass landed on his stick and Baker wound and fired, launching a slap shot no more than a foot off the ice, making sure he got it on net, beating Lindbergh low on the glove side. The red light came on and so did the entire American bench, engulfing Baker, a pile of blue shirts on the ice, the crowd roaring. Now it felt like the Olympics to Harrington, and everyone else. The goal turned out to be Baker’s only one of the Olympics. Without it—and with the Czechs up next—the likelihood was that the Americans’ Olympics might well have been over before Opening Ceremonies. “I knew if we could skate with that team we had a good chance to win a medal,” Lou Vairo said.
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In Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where the opener of walleye season is a holy day and the mighty Mississippi is more creek than river, nobody who knew Billy Baker was surprised by his nerveless game-tying feat against Sweden. Years before he became a blond-haired Olympic icon or a successful oral surgeon, Baker was a star without an attitude, a leader without locker-room histrionics, a tough guy without flaunting it. Baker was the kid you wanted to be like, a smart, good-looking athlete whose charisma was as understated as everything else about him. He had a gift for reading situations, deciding where he needed to be, on the ice and off. Baker was about 10 years old when he was trying to figure out whether he wanted to spend his winter playing basketball or hockey.
“How many basketball scholarships have come out of this area?” asked Gus Hendrickson, who would be Baker’s hockey coach at Grand Rapids High School.
“None,” Baker replied.
“I think you should play hockey,” the coach said, with enlightened self-interest.
With his selection made, Baker would go down to Hernesman’s Feed Store with the other kids and get his skates sharpened, next to the railroad tracks by Highway 169, which comes 200 miles all the way up from the Twin Cities. Then it would be out to River View rink, a couple of blocks from the family’s house. His routine was steady, his bearing humble, his achievements exemplary, whether as a two-way football player (he was a tight end/defensive end) or a single-minded student, or even now, as a husband, father, and doctor in Brainerd, Minnesota. John Rothstein was Baker’s teammate on the Grand Rapids team that won the Minnesota state high school championship in 1975, Baker starring on defense, Rothstein up front, with two of the fastest skates anyone had ever seen. “He was always a leader in everything he did,” Rothstein said. “He’s blessed with so much God-given talent, but never stopped being a genuine person. He’s still Baker. You would never know he has an Olympic gold medal.”
Rothstein went from colleague to competitor in college, after Baker went to play for Brooks at the U, and Rothstein played with Mark Pavelich and John Harrington at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. That was when Rothstein truly began
to appreciate how good Baker was, how resilient he was mentally. Not that he would advertise it, or anything else about himself. When he went to dentistry school, Baker told few of his classmates about what he’d done in his previous life. If you were out grouse hunting with Baker, or on a boat in Forest Lake, or hanging out with him at the lumberjack show during Tall Timber Days, the annual summer festival in Grand Rapids every August, you saw one side of Billy Baker. If you competed against him, you saw something else entirely, not fire and feistiness so much as skill and self-control and an unshakable faith that the job would get done. In Grand Rapids, kids felt good that they were his classmates. In Lake Placid, nineteen guys felt good that he was their teammate. Championship teams—in Grand Rapids, the U, and the Olympics—kept following Baker around. “I’m sure his forefathers led people into battle,” said Dr. Bill Hoolihan, a childhood friend and Grand Rapids teammate.
Baker’s contributions went far beyond his goal. Early in the Czech game, he took a slap shot in the neck, crumpled to the ice—and scarcely missed a shift. In the second period, he lined up Czech defenseman Frantisek Kaberle by the bench and checked him so hard Kaberle went head over heels and disappeared behind the sideboards. At six feet one inch and 195 pounds, Baker had the look of a kid who came off a Viking ship, and the work ethic of someone who might’ve built it. His father worked in the Blandin Paper Mill, the big employer in town, on the banks of the Mississippi. The mill produced the first coated stock in the country—glossy pages that were used by Sports Illustrated, Time, Life, and other magazines. Who knew Billy Baker would wind up in those glossy pages?
