The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team

by Wayne Coffey

  O’Callahan and his three BU teammates—Eruzione, Silk, and Craig—were all descendants of Boston’s long history in intercollegiate hockey, which dates to January 19, 1898, and a game between Harvard and Brown on a pond in the city’s Dorchester section. Hockey took hold rapidly in Boston, its headquarters in Boston Arena, a drafty, two-tiered building with wooden seats and nonstop schoolboy games and wickedly parochial passions that mirrored those of the city itself. Boston is a forty-nine-square-mile seaside hub, the most compact major city in the country, smaller even than the Denver airport. It teems with ethnic pockets and educational institutions; with NASCAR-wannabe drivers and perhaps the worst signage of any urban road system in America; with citizens who do remarkable things to the letter R: in Bostonese, the BU coach’s name isn’t Jack Parker but Pahkah. Boston got its name, and its status as capital of Massachusetts Bay Colony, 350 years before Jack O’Callahan rehabbed his knee in Lake Placid. The year was 1630, the name derived from an English town called St. Boat Helper, a port town known for its kindly ways toward strangers. Boston was selected as the capital largely because of its supply of fresh spring water, the colonists having lost many family and friends to illness, and clean water being an essential element to good health.

  It was on Greater Boston’s frozen water that O’Callahan began to distinguish himself. He grew up in Charlestown, Massachusetts, a tough Irish-Catholic enclave across the river from Boston. His house was a short walk from the site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, where American patriots, outarmed and outmanned, twice repelled British troops before running out of ammunition in 1775. The British attacked again and the patriots finally had to retreat, though they managed to wipe out half the redcoat force before they did. The battle became an enduring symbol of the unyielding American spirit, and O’Callahan, Boston University captain and All-American, most valuable player of the NCAA tournament in 1978, seemed to relive it every time he hit the ice. “Some of the talks he gave in the locker room, it was almost as if we were the ones getting ready to storm Bunker Hill,” said Billy LeBlond, a BU teammate. “He would take no prisoners. He’d say, ‘If we take this guy out then the rest of the team will follow.’ You’d see him playing, with that toothless grin and the scar on his cheek (a souvenir of a broken bottle in a barroom fight) and it was a scary sight. He was a nasty, nasty player. There was no other option than winning. He played hurt a lot, lots of times when he shouldn’t have been playing, when other guys wouldn’t.”

  O’Callahan went to Boston Latin High School, a superb student who was fifth in his class and one of the only bespectacled hockey players around, because he couldn’t afford contact lenses. O’Callahan was accepted to Harvard but chose Boston University instead, considering it his best chance to compete for a national championship. The headmaster of Boston Latin tried to explain to him that you didn’t say no to Harvard. O’Callahan listened, then said no to Harvard.

  Plenty of guys were bigger and stronger than the six-foot one-inch, 185-pound O’Callahan, but none were feistier. “There was always this dichotomy to him,” said Jack Parker. “He was the kind of guy who could hang with the president of the United States or the Hell’s Angels.” He looked bookish and unimposing in his horn-rimmed glasses and street clothes; then the game would start and O’Callahan would turn almost demonic. When he was at BU, he estimated that he lost about a dozen teeth and ran his lifetime facial stitches total to between eighty and a hundred. “Some of them came from just growing up in Charlestown,” he said once. “Some of them came from not keeping my head up. And some of them came from keeping my head up and not caring anyway. And with each one, I’ve learned a lesson.” O’Callahan was a freshman in 1976 when BU and Minnesota got into their fabled brawl in the NCAA semifinals. He didn’t pair up with anybody, Parker recalled. He just ran around the ice and tried to whale on people. An hour after the game O’Callahan was still in his uniform, frozen in front of his locker, the adrenaline rush of the fight fading against the finality of the outcome. The Terriers had lost.

  After Lake Placid, O’Callahan played seven years in the NHL with the Chicago Blackhawks, then turned his competitive instincts to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he trades stock-index futures and works with Jack Hughes, his Olympic teammate right up until Lake Placid. The company is called Beanpot Financial Futures, after the famed intracity hockey tournament held each winter in Boston. O’Callahan has a shaved head and a goatee, and a full set of teeth, and hasn’t lost his ability to inspire. Years after Lake Placid, O’Callahan and Mike Eruzione made an appearance in Pennsylvania on behalf of the U.S. Olympic Committee, giving a talk to the workers for York, the refrigeration company and prospective Olympic sponsor. There were about 500 employees in the room. O’Callahan and Eruzione each made a short, impassioned speech and then they pulled out their gold medals and passed them all around, from one set of workman’s hands to another, the whole place suddenly silent. “You would’ve thought you were in church and this was communion,” Mike Moran, then the chief USOC press officer, said. “People were crying, holding the medals as if they were gold bullion.” At the end, the employees gave O’Callahan and Eruzione a standing ovation. York became an Olympic sponsor.

  ____

  With three minutes to play in the period, Makarov tested Craig with a hard drive that the goalie kicked away with his left skate. On his next trip down, Makarov got to the blue line and saw a space between Ken Morrow and Mark Johnson. He made a small leap and squirted through them. He was demanding attention every time he touched the puck, creating on the fly, and then he came again, taking a drop pass from Vladimir Golikov, carrying it in, looking to pass back to Golikov, to the right of the U.S. net. Makarov’s pass deflected off Morrow’s skate, right back to Makarov, who was in on Craig alone now, and he whipped a shot over Craig’s glove into the upper right corner.

  The net bulged. The crowd booed. Two to one, Soviet Union.

  Craig’s shoulders slumped, his discouragement detectable even behind his mask.

  There were just over two minutes to play, and the Soviets were gunning for more. After Pavelich’s pass for John Harrington, his Minnesota-Duluth teammate, was intercepted, Balderis skated in on the left side and drove a hard low shot that Craig kicked aside, a sparkling save. Skvortsov picked up the rebound and smacked another shot on goal. Craig stopped that, too, with a flick of his glove, popping the puck up in the air with his stick. Craig was almost four minutes into the last five-minute chunk of the period. He didn’t want to think about going into the locker room two goals down. Another goal would take the crowd out of it totally. They had to try to stay close, and then see how the Soviets dealt with it.

  That was the goal. It seemed a long way off.

  The Americans weren’t in awe of the Soviets the way they were in the Garden, but they were still giving them too much room to operate. The defensemen were effective at times in stopping the Soviets at the blue line, but once the red jerseys got inside the zone, they usually stayed for a while. With just over a minute to play, Mike Ramsey, the 18-year-old defenseman from the U, used his stick to take down Zhluktov in front, and then slammed Balderis and Skvortsov in the corner, as if he wanted to see if teenage brawn might slow the Russians down. It didn’t. When Morrow lost his edge behind the net, Petrov picked the puck away from him and fed Mikhailov in front, another point-blank shot that Craig kicked away with his left skate. The score could easily have been 4–1 or even 5–1 at this point. Craig was keeping the Americans in it. The Soviets kept pushing, playing well but with no special urgency. Patience was as much their hallmark as the jets in their skates. “They would never shoot unless they had the perfect setup,” said Warren Strelow, who played against the Soviets in the 1950s as the goaltender for a German all-star team. There was something else at work here, too, though, Makarov acknowledged.

  “We believed we could score whenever we wanted,” he said. “If we didn’t score on a chance, it wasn’t big deal because there would be others, many others.” Th
e only team the Soviets were concerned about coming into the Olympics was the Czechs. That the Americans had soundly beaten the Czechs, 7–3, in the second game of the Olympic tournament hadn’t seemed to change the Russian mindset.

  After Craig turned away Mikhailov, Steve Christoff started out of the U.S. zone and threaded a nice pass to Broten, one of the fastest skaters on the U.S. team. Broten had just made a terrific hustle play, sprinting out to poke the puck away from Kharlamov, who was about to tee up the rebound of Mikhailov’s shot. Now Broten was charging over center ice and carrying into the Soviet zone, faking a shot and drawing defenseman Zinetula Bilyaletdinov toward him, then switching to the backhand, centering it, Bilyaletdinov barely getting a piece of his stick on the puck. On the left side, Eruzione skated hard to the goal but couldn’t catch up to the puck and it slid through the crease.

  There were under thirty seconds left in the first period. On the next U.S. trip into the Soviet zone, Eruzione, at the left point, shot the puck toward the goal, but Christoff was tied up in front and Dave Christian, forward-turned-defenseman, skated in deep, hoping to pick up a loose puck that didn’t come. Christian then turned and headed back on defense, the Soviets clearing the puck into the U.S. zone. Ken Morrow got the puck and with seven seconds left dropped it back to Christian, who skated across the U.S. blue line. Morrow shouted to him to shoot. The captain Mikhailov, the only Soviet player nearby, was offering little more than token resistance, seemingly ready to head into the locker room. One stride on the American side of center ice, about 100 feet out, Christian launched a slap shot, a hockey version of a Hail Mary pass. Put it out there and hope for divine intervention. Tretiak blocked it easily with his right pad but allowed the rebound to kick out some twenty feet in front of him, instead of steering it toward a corner. It was a careless bit of work, something you probably would never see him do except in the waning seconds of a period. The Russian defensemen, Pervukhin and Bilyaletdinov, had already begun to relax, straightening up, not much less stationary than statues in Red Square.

  “Everybody thought the period was over,” said Bilyaletdinov, now the coach of Moscow Dynamo. “We were all watching the clock. It was just a few seconds left.” He was sitting in a chair on the second-floor landing of the Dynamo training center, about a half-hour out of Moscow. It was a sunny autumn day. Bilyaletdinov, 48, looked strong and fit, a handsome man with a warm smile and a smooth, deep voice, dark hair flecked with gray. He smiled faintly. “With so little time, you don’t think anything can happen. What can happen?”

  Chapter Three

  BEAT THE

  CLOCK

  Mark Johnson had just hopped over the boards, a late line change for Neal Broten. As Christian wound up for his hundred-foot shot, Johnson skated across the blue line. “I skated hard, because that’s the way we were trained and taught. You skate until the horn goes off. If you get by the defensemen you never know,” Johnson said. Suddenly, the rebound from Tretiak was coming toward him. Pervukhin and Bilyaletdinov, the defensemen, saw him coming, saw him splitting them, but couldn’t mobilize fast enough to stop him. Johnson picked up the puck between the circles. Tretiak had come about eight feet out of his net, almost as if he were ready to skate off. Fewer than three seconds were left. Johnson did not shoot right away. For an instant the time went out of his mind. He was a goal scorer with a puck, one-on-one with a goaltender, and his instincts took over. Johnson stickhandled around Tretiak, deking him, sweeping left, giving himself an open net to shoot for. Johnson flicked the puck. Tretiak sprawled backward and stretched out his stick, desperately trying to get a piece of it.

  The puck shot into the net.

  The crowd erupted. Johnson raised his stick and wheeled his right arm twice, bolo-punch style, but even as his teammates mobbed him, he was momentarily filled with panic, for the clock showed three big zeroes. Did I blow it? he thought. Was I too patient? Kaisla, the referee, huddled with the timekeeper and the other officials. Tikhonov briefly lobbied that the goal had come after time had run out, but the red goal light would not have come on if the horn had sounded. Kaisla ruled that the shot had beaten the clock and that one second remained in the period. Even in the box score, the digital digest of the game’s action, the time listed next to Johnson’s goal shrieks of its magnitude: 19:59. The game was tied at two. “It was not a question if there was any time left,” Kaisla said. “It was a good goal.”

  ____

  Mark Johnson knew about Vladislav Tretiak and the Russians years before he faced them in Lake Placid. His entertainment of choice as a kid wasn’t Get Smart reruns or Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In but endless viewings of his father’s tape of the 1972 showdown between the Soviet Union and Canada, reel-to-reel inspiration of end-to-end action. On Sunday afternoons, in his father’s weekly pickup games against selected University of Wisconsin Badgers in the Dane County Coliseum, he’d put what he saw into practice, wearing one of the red Russian jerseys his father had made for the designated opponents. Each week Mark would be a different magician, Valery Kharlamov or Vladimir Petrov or Boris Mikhailov, a junior high kid in a Summit Series of his own. The games were intense, the experience invaluable. This was one of the things his father did best: make hockey games.

  Bob Johnson was a warm and upbeat character in a sport known for missing teeth and dropped gloves. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Minneapolis, the son of a Swedish immigrant who changed the family name from Olars to Johnson upon passing through Ellis Island. Two decades before he would become a legendary coach, he was a 24-year-old Army lieutenant stationed in South Korea. He couldn’t bring the neighborhood to Asia, but his passion was more transportable. He carved a rink out of rice paddy, flooded it with water, and got a hockey game going.

  “He was like the pied piper. He could create a game of hockey anywhere,” said Martha Johnson, his widow.

  Bob Johnson died at age 60, late in 1991, only three months after he was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. The funeral was held in Colorado Springs, home of USA Hockey. Simultaneous memorial services were conducted in Pittsburgh, where Johnson coached the Penguins to a Stanley Cup only six months before; in Calgary, where he’d once coached the Flames; in Minneapolis and in Madison, Wisconsin, where he’d led the Badgers to three national titles. Badger Bob they called him, and he was renowned for his optimism and his personal mantra, “It’s a great day for hockey.” Johnson wouldn’t look at a glass and believe it was half-full; he’d believe that at any minute it would get a refill. When he was coaching the Flames in 1985–1986, the team staggered through an eleven-game losing streak, the last of them a 9–1 drubbing by the Hartford Whalers. Every game was the one Johnson was sure would end the drought. The Flames made it to the Stanley Cup finals that year.

  Bob Johnson believed in enjoying the journey, and he clung to that philosophy even with the heartache that came when he and Martha became parents of a developmentally disabled child. There was no going back, no use plunging into self-pity. You change what you can and deal with everything else. In handling players, he tried to find the positive things they could do. The sign on the wall of Johnson’s Penguins office said, “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”

  Mark Johnson learned many hockey lessons from his father over the years, about creating open space and finding a goalie’s soft spot, but the most enduring lesson he got was unspoken, conveyed in the daily laboratory of life. The lesson was about staying positive in the face of adversity.

  “When one door closes here, another one is going to open over there,” Mark Johnson said. He was behind his desk in his University of Wisconsin office, three stories up in Camp Randall Stadium, behind a door as red and glossy as a candied apple. “Women’s Hockey,” it said succinctly. More than a quarter-century after his last Badger shift, he remains the school’s greatest player, its all-time leading goal scorer, with 125 goals in three years. He doesn’t need his name on a door. Johnson was wearing a gray fleece vest and faded
blue jeans and hiking shoes, a uniform that made him look no different from the thousands of students along the lakeside streets of Madison, a quintessential college town with the bicycles, bars, and backpacks to prove it. Situated between two lakes in the south part of the state, Madison has its columned state capitol and its sprawling state university down the street from one another and is equally diverse in its sociopolitical flavors—a place alternately flamingly liberal and ardently middle-American. It was Berkeley with more cheese in the 1960s and 1970s, and Mayberry with more snow the rest of the time, at once deeply progressive and staunchly traditional.

  Johnson could fit in anywhere. He always had. He had a mop of brown hair in Lake Placid, over a hawkish nose. The center on Brooks’s top line, he led the team in scoring with 11 points in seven games. The hair is much shorter now and swept back, but it is still brown and his body is trim and youthful looking, as unchanged as anyone’s on the team. On top of a bookshelf was a photograph of Johnson’s goal in the final second of the first period. Tretiak, good guy and a good sport, signed it.