by Wayne Coffey
At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the mining industry on the Range had hundreds of mines and employed some 17,000 people, producing about 80 percent of the country’s iron ore. In 2004 it consisted of six mines, 4,000 mining employees, and a fraction of that production. On the outskirts of Virginia, an old mining site has morphed into an overlook where a short caged boardwalk lets you glimpse a massive pit with red banks and small bare trees poking up from the sides, the reforestation process slowly at work. The pit was once filled with hundreds of working men. Now it’s filled with blue-green water.
With almost no high-grade iron ore left, Range mines have turned to taconite, a lower-grade ore. The production of taconite involves crushing the ore into powder, the iron extracted magnetically and then rolled into marble-sized pellets, a process that requires vastly bigger processing plants and investment. In Eveleth, mining cautiously awakened from a completely dormant state when shuttered Ev-Tac reopened under a new name (United Taconite) late in 2003, thanks in part to a 30 percent ownership stake by a Chinese company. Taconite mining has saved the Range for a time, but it may be only a reprieve.
All over the Range, population is down and schools are being consolidated. Eveleth once had a population of 6,000 and is now down below 4,000. Steve Schneider, Buzz’s brother, a gifted hockey player himself who went on to captain the Notre Dame team, was part of a graduating class of 140 students in Babbitt High School in the mid-1970s. In 2003 the senior class had 28 students. “People are leaving because there are no jobs,” Bill Schneider, Buzz’s father, said. Memorial Arena in Babbitt has a big photo of Buzz Schneider in his Olympic uniform in the lobby, and used to draw 1,500 fans for games against Ely or Eveleth or International Falls. Now Babbitt High doesn’t have enough players to field its own team. Castellano started the program in 1959 and closed it in 1991. He coached kids who grew up and went to work in the mines and became fathers, and then he coached their sons. Then he watched entire families pack up and leave and try to find a job and build a life someplace else.
“It was brutal,” Castellano said.
Like old ballplayers who lament that kids don’t play baseball enough anymore, Iron Rangers of a certain age will tell you about the halcyon days of hockey on the Range: how Eveleth’s John Mayasich, a two-time Olympian and Minnesota legend, would rack up goals and assists by the bucketful for the U in the 1950s; how Mike Antonovich dominated at Coleraine; and how John Rothstein would outrace everyone in Grand Rapids. It is not knee-jerk nostalgia. In the early 1940s, the six-team era in the NHL, three of the starting goaltenders were from Eveleth. Eveleth High School has won more state hockey tournaments than any other school in the state, including four in a row between 1948 and 1951. On Hat Trick Avenue, on a bluff overlooking Highway 53, sits the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, which inducted the entire 1980 Olympic team in its fall 2003 class, commemorating the occasion with a gala dinner with 1,000 guests. The plates were rented from a place in the Twin Cities, and the Iron Rangers who hosted the event honored their self-sufficient ways. They woke up early the next morning and washed all 1,000 plates by hand.
Iron Range hockey rivalries used to run hot and deep. Friday night games would determine Monday morning bragging rights in the mines. The Eveleth Hippodrome, a local landmark at the corner of Jackson and Douglas, dates to 1919, a brown brick building with yellow walls and a hangar-style roof and oversized photos of John Mayasich and Mark Pavelich, Eveleth’s gold medalists, that you see as soon as you enter. Virginia’s Memorial Arena has poster-sized photos of its own Olympians, Steve Sertich and John Harrington, looking out from under a Dutch-boy haircut. When Virginia High would make the four-mile trip to the Hippodrome, or Grand Rapids would come from the west, the 2,800 seats would invariably be full and the emotions overflowing. In Grand Rapids, visits from Hibbing or Eveleth would draw a standing-room crowd of 4,000. It wouldn’t take much to get a fight going, on the ice or in the stands. All season the Iron Range Conference would be a boiling, competitive cauldron, but whoever won and went on to the state tournament in the Twin Cities for the finals—a statewide holy week, every March—would have the whole Range behind them. The only thing better than winning the state title was doing it by beating a couple of the big schools from the south along the way. There’s no Mason-Dixon line in Minnesota, but the differences between north and south Minnesota are as deep as any of the state’s 15,000-plus lakes.
“There’s a lot of pride in all those little towns up north, and a lot of respect people have for each other,” Steve Schneider said.
After his games for Babbitt High, Buzz Schneider and his teammates often played shinny hockey on an outdoor rink. Schneider was always playing something. In football, he was a quarterback and defensive back and field-goal kicker. In baseball, he played third and outfield. He had an arm you didn’t dare run on and a left-handed bat that could hit the ball into the next mine pit. Schneider practiced hitting constantly, studying cutouts of Ted Williams, standing in front of a mirror and swinging again and again and again. Baseball scouts are sighted on the Range about as often as palm trees, but they made it up to see the Babbitt Rabbit. The Pittsburgh Pirates invited Schneider to try out, and he might’ve done it, except that almost every big college hockey program was offering him a scholarship, including Minnesota and its new coach, Herb Brooks.
Brooks never saw Schneider play a high school game in person, but when you can shoot and skate like Schneider, coaches find out. Gus Hendrickson, hockey coach at powerhouse Grand Rapids, was so absorbed with trying to stop Schneider before playing Babbitt one year that he drove his pickup truck into a snow-filled ditch thinking about him. “He could beat anybody all by himself,” Hendrickson said.
Before Schneider’s senior year, Castellano decided he wanted to make Schneider, his leading scorer, a defenseman. It was a switch that would get him more ice time and give him a chance to rush as often as he wanted, but one that most forwards would have greeted with revulsion.
“Whatever you want,” Schneider said.
That was Buzz Schneider, never one to make a fuss or let his ego get out of hand. He has deep-set eyes, thick eyebrows and lips, and a prominent nose. He exudes the sort of laid-back warmth and sincerity that makes you feel you’ve known him for ten years after ten minutes, his all-purpose affirmation “you bet” sprinkled through conversation. He used to sell tractor-trailers and now he sells real estate. You would definitely want to buy from Buzzy Schneider. Said his friend Lefty Curran, “I think he would’ve made a great pastor, because he has such a gentle way. He’s always giving and thinking of other people.” Steve Schneider still appreciates how Buzz encouraged him to go to Notre Dame, where Steve would be unencumbered by comparisons to his big brother. During the Scandinavian swing the Olympic team made in the fall of 1979, Schneider was thrown out of a game in Norway for getting into a scrap. The game ended in a 3–3 tie, the listless effort that triggered Brooks’s now-infamous Herbies-in-the-dark session. Out of uniform, the ever-earnest Schneider turned to assistant coach Craig Patrick. “Should I go get my skates on?” Patrick told him not to worry about it.
Buzz Schneider was 25 in Lake Placid and is 50 now, and even as he talks about the debilitating back condition that ended his career and the misadventure his pursuit of pro hockey turned into, he does so without complaint or regret. The Pittsburgh Penguins wanted to sign him after he graduated from the U in 1976, but then the Internal Revenue Service locked the team down and off Schneider went to the Olympics in Innsbruck. A year later, he married Gayle, got cut by the Penguins, and wound up on seven more teams before the season was over, playing in places ranging from Hershey, Pennsylvania, to Oklahoma City to Hampton, Virginia, to Birmingham, Alabama, where Frank Mahovolich wanted him for his Bulls, a new World Hockey Association team. “It was the year I met everyone in hockey,” Schneider said. A team in Germany wanted to sign him to a three-year deal, but by then it was 1979 and Brooks, who badly wanted Schneider on the Olympic team, thought he could get a better de
al if he performed well in Lake Placid. So Schneider held off, scored five goals in seven games to tie for the team lead, and in fact got an upgraded offer and headed for Bern, Switzerland, where the money and playing conditions were better than the minor leagues in the States, and where he wouldn’t have to worry about rampant goon activity.
Schneider played well in Bern and kept playing on U.S. national teams. In 1983 he was on the left wing again, even after Dr. Richard Steadman, Olympic orthopedist, took a look at the herniated disk in his back and said, “What the hell are you doing still playing?” The back got progressively worse, and Schneider, nearing 30 and by then the father of two boys, had decided not to go for a third straight Olympics. If there is a hole in his soul about the way his career played out, he does a great job hiding it. His oldest son, Billy, played Buzz in Miracle, the Disney feature film that came out in February 2004. Gayle Schneider cried when she saw her boy on the big screen, playing his dad. “He’s better looking than I am,” Buzz said.
Billy Schneider had his father’s speed. He could run a 4.2 40-yard dash and skate by people as if they were mannequins, and he was the most valuable player on his American Legion team, which won the Legion World Series. Unfortunately, he had his father’s back, too, his career done in by the same herniated disk—L-4—as Buzz’s was. He appreciated the way his father never pressured him to play, never yelled. Whether he was watching Billy or his younger son, Neil, who played junior hockey in North Dakota, Buzz’s preferred seat was in the corner of the rink. You would barely know he was there. “He always felt comfortable with himself. He didn’t have to live through us,” Billy Schneider said.
When they were selling tractor-trailers together, Lefty Curran used to tell Schneider all the time, “Buzzy, you’ve got to hang that medal around your neck once in while—let people know what you did.” Schneider never would. He lives outside the Twin Cities, but when winter finally lifts, he and Gayle and family and friends spend as much time as they can in the family cabin on Hunter Lake, northwest of Grand Rapids, in the Chippewa National Forest. Buzz’s grandfather bought it from a bootlegger during Prohibition. The price was $300. “I think he was in a hurry to get out of town,” Buzz said. It came with a still, but the Schneiders were more interested in the stillness. The cabin is called Fugarwe, as in “Where the Fugarwe?” It has 10 acres and 1,500 feet of lakefront, and there are only two other houses on the lake. The nearest store is a half-hour drive. It has been the Schneider family retreat for three-quarters of a century, the serenity and the northern pike and the time together passing from generation to generation. They’ve made upgrades, added on, gotten plumbing, but the soul of the place is not much different from Buzz Schneider himself. It has never changed.
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Schneider’s goal sent a surge through the crowd and seemed to do the same thing to the Soviets. Not even two seconds later on the game clock, Soviet forward Alexander Skvortsov climbed on Schneider’s back, a gratuitous mid-ice mugging that went unwhistled. Skvortsov took a drop pass from teammate Helmut Balderis, the only Latvian on the team and a player scout Lou Vairo said was the fastest skater he ever saw. Skvortsov eluded Christian and fired on Craig, who kicked the puck away with his skate. Balderis got the rebound but shot it wide with Baker strapped to his back, and Zhluktov missed on another good chance, Baker flinging himself on the ice in an effort to block it. Schneider astutely sensed that the Americans were scrambling and disorganized, and pinned the puck against the boards for some needed respite. On the ensuing face-off, Valery Kharlamov ripped a wrist shot low and hard to Craig’s glove side. Craig made a spearing, sprawling grab and held on, Soviets swarming around him. The spool of black tape at the end of Craig’s stick had unraveled, granting another moment of rest while Eruzione skated to the bench and got a replacement. The Americans were living dangerously. When play resumed, Broten’s twenty-foot wrist shot from straight on was turned aside by Tretiak, and then here came Krutov again, sweeping around Eric Strobel and going in on Craig, who alertly dove from the cage and knocked away his centering pass to Maltsev.
More than sixteen minutes into the game, Krutov and Makarov had unquestionably been the Soviets’ most dangerous forwards, creating mayhem on almost every shift. The legendary No. 1 line of Kharlamov, Petrov, and Mikhailov, by comparison, had been unthreatening. It was surprising they hadn’t been more effective, but then, the Russians had had a bizarre eleven days in the Olympics. After defeating Japan, Holland, and Poland by a combined score of 41–5 in their first three games, they needed third-period rallies to get by Finland and Canada. They seemed strangely vulnerable. “They didn’t take a man and their power play, their pass-ing, was not one hundred percent,” said Jukka Porvari, the Finnish captain. “They were just waiting. They had the same guys, but they weren’t playing at the same level.”
Part of the problem may have been the absence of defenseman Vladimir Lutchenko, who had already won two consecutive Olympic golds and dreamed of capping his career with a third. He never got the chance. Immediately after the Soviets’ victory in Madison Square Garden, Lutchenko was informed by Tikhonov that he was being sent back to Moscow, along with fellow defenseman Sergei Babinov. At 31, Lutchenko knew Soviet sports bosses had a history of pushing athletes into retirement soon after they hit 30. Still, he never saw this coming—and neither did his teammates. “It was heartbreaking,” Lutchenko said.
“Lutchenko was a superstar, and he was my mentor,” said Viacheslav Fetisov, who went on to become one of the first Russians to play in the NHL and is now Russia’s minister of sport. “His experience and skill is what you need in a game like that.”
There were other issues, as well. In goal Tretiak had been nowhere near his peak through the preliminary games, and the offensive production was spotty enough that Tikhonov had even toyed with the notion of splitting up Petrov, Mikhailov, and Kharlamov. They had been together nine years. They talked him out of it. Mike Eruzione wondered out loud about the Soviets’ level of motivation.
“You look at a guy like Mikhailov,” the captain said in an interview the day before the game. “What does he care? I was watching him in 1972 when I was a senior in high school, and he was a champion. He was with the best team then, and he’s with the best team now. He’s done everything, won everything. Doesn’t there come a time when it doesn’t matter anymore whether you win again? If you’re the Pittsburgh Steelers and you’ve won four Super Bowls, do you have to win a fifth to prove that you’re good? I don’t know. I’m only wondering. I’ve never been on a team like that.”
Jim Craig hadn’t either, but he wasn’t worrying about the Russians’ heads so much as his own body. He had been fighting a sinus infection and recurring headaches for most of the Olympics, and he couldn’t even take an over-the-counter decongestant medication for fear of a positive drug test. But at least his ankle was behaving. He had a floating bone chip in it and could never be sure from game to game how much the chip would hurt; before the Garden game, he needed a cortisone injection in his bone. Craig didn’t much care for uncertainty. He was particular about his routine, and his gear. His mask was white and angular and open in back, his long dark hair exposed, a jarring contrast to the whiteness in front. It was made for Craig by Ernie Higgins of Norwood, Massachusetts, mask maker for Gerry Cheevers, Ed Giacomin, and other NHL goalies. The masks cost upwards of $100 apiece, but the Olympics were no time to go comparison shopping. He’d buy them himself and stay with what worked. Craig had one preferred skate-sharpener who knew just how he liked his blades. Before games he would go over every square inch of his equipment, like a surveyor poring over a land map. He’d get the jitters out of his system the day before, when he was snarling and short-tempered, working himself up to full competitive combustion.
Then on game day he tunneled in, kept quiet. He never wanted to send a nervous signal to his teammates. Not even a half-hour before the Russian game, he was sufficiently relaxed to take care of a ticket request. A burly state policeman stuck his head i
n the locker room and told Craig that Andy Filer, Craig’s goalie coach at Boston University, was outside and needed a place to watch the game with his daughter. Craig asked the cop to take good care of him and then returned to his tunnel. Brooks didn’t even know this went on. “He would’ve flipped,” Craig said. “If we had lost, it would’ve been the reason we lost.”
When the game started, Craig was a different guy, locked into an almost trancelike concentration, always trying to be extra focused in the first and last five minutes of a game. The other fifty minutes, he’d break down into similar five-minute chunks. He never let himself think about throwing a sixty-minute shutout, just twelve five-minute ones. It was all a self-constructed mind game, Craig’s one-save-at-a-time mantra.
After Craig broke up Krutov’s pass, the Americans cleared their zone and tried to settle themselves. As Mark Wells, the fourth-line center, flipped the puck in, defenseman Jack O’Callahan skated hard and deep into the Soviet end, lining up Pervukhin along the boards and hitting him with a crushing check, the crowd roaring in delight even as O’Callahan went crashing to the ice. Pervukhin somehow stayed on his feet. O’Callahan got up and skated off.
“You okay?” a couple of teammates asked. O’Callahan gave a little nod. He wasn’t okay. He was great. He was playing hockey again, and that was far from certain only a week earlier. O’Callahan had suffered ligament damage in his knee after absorbing a hard check from Valery Vasiliev in the Garden game, an injury that left him highly questionable for the Olympics. Brooks had to submit the final Olympic roster with twenty names on it less than forty-eight hours later, and there was no changing it after that. If he stuck with O’Callahan and he couldn’t play, it would be a wasted spot and would leave the team with only five defensemen. If he called back Harvard’s Jack Hughes, a defenseman who had been a late cut after spending six months with the team, and then O’Callahan made a quick recovery, he’d be depriving the team of a gritty and galvanizing back-line presence and capable puck-carrier. Brooks loved O’Callahan’s toughness, and the depth of his commitment, and early on recognized he could use these traits, and O’Callahan’s natural charisma, to reach other players. Brooks called O’Callahan during the beginning of the Olympic run-up and hatched a plan: “When I call you O’Cee and I rip into you, I’m really just trying to send a message to the team. When I call you Jack, then I am talking to you.” O’Callahan made sure he listened well. The medical staff was optimistic O’Callahan could get back for the second week. Brooks decided to keep him.
