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

by Wayne Coffey

  It was not as if pro hockey were a long-held dream for Morrow. He just loved to play and was grateful for the chance to do it. “The way I viewed it, at every level I played at I’d think, ‘If this is as far as I go, I’ll be very happy,’ ” Morrow said.

  Morrow started playing at age six, on a rink his father built in the backyard. Don Morrow put up low boards at first, then floodlights, then four-foot boards. He had a shopworker make goals out of metal pipe, and he cut the core out of the pucks so they weren’t so heavy. The games would go on morning, noon, and night. The brothers became expert at digging pucks out of snowbanks by studying the angle of entry. “What better way to spend a winter in Michigan than playing hockey in your backyard?” Ken Morrow said.

  Eighteen months Ken’s senior, Greg Morrow played a more physical, grinding style than his brother. Hours before games, Greg would be restless and energetic, getting his bag together, checking his equipment. Ken would be flopped on the sofa, watching TV. Greg and the other kids they played with would spend hours training in the summers. Yet when it was time for preseason conditioning, Ken would crank out one wind sprint after another while guys all around him were collapsing. “I dare say that if you were honest, if anyone thought either one of the boys would’ve made it, it would’ve been Greg,” Loretta Morrow, their mother, said. “He worked so hard at it. Ken was so laid back it looked like he wasn’t even trying.”

  “He ain’t human,” Greg said. Ken Morrow laughed, a hearty, staccato sound.

  Greg and Ken were on the Detroit Junior Red Wings together before splitting up for college. Greg had two knee operations coming out of juniors, and after a stellar freshman year for Ohio State, he ripped up his other knee as well as his chance of making the Olympics and the NHL. There were times he felt sad and envious. His brother helped him through it. “He never said anything to make me feel like he was doing something superior to what I was doing,” said Greg, now superintendent of a golf club in Flint. “He has always been very humble about it and sensitive to how I felt.”

  Not even a week after the Olympics, Ken Morrow was on the blue line for the Islanders, showing at 23 the poise of a man of 33. The seamlessness of his transition enabled Torrey to trade popular veterans Billy Harris and Dave Lewis to the Los Angeles Kings for Butch Goring, a deal that was widely credited as being a key component to the team’s subsequent run of Stanley Cups.

  Like the careers of most of his Olympic teammates, Morrow’s career predated the explosion of NHL salaries. He made $50,000, $55,000, and $60,000 in his first three years. When a bad knee forced him to retire, his top salary was $1.9 million. He negotiated the way he played, preferring to avoid acrimony. He was content with where he was and what he had. People have reversals in life and ask “Why me?” Ken Morrow has good fortune in life and asks the same thing: “Why me?”

  “I think about that all the time,” he said. “I don’t want to get too philosophical about stuff, but I was drafted by the Islanders in 1976. What if the timing had been different? What if I hadn’t made the Olympic team? What if we hadn’t won the gold medal? What if the Islanders hadn’t won four Stanley Cups? There are a lot better players in this game who haven’t had that success. People say success is where preparation meets opportunity. Maybe I did prepare myself, but still, so much of it is in the timing.”

  For Don Morrow, the timing was not nearly so kind. Around Thanksgiving 1975, he wasn’t feeling right. During a Junior Red Wings scrimmage, he passed out on a chair. He underwent tests and they revealed the worst: a brain tumor. That winter, he made it down for an Ohio State–Bowling Green game to watch the boys play against each other. He wore a knit cap that had the red and gray of Ohio State on one side, and the orange and brown of Bowling Green on the other. “He was on Cloud Nine, being at that game,” Gale Cronk said. Don Morrow got much sicker in the spring and was hospitalized at the Hurley Medical Center in Flint. He was starting to slip away. The children were there, and so were a few other close friends and relatives. At about three in the morning, Ken Morrow was saying his final goodbye to his father. Don Morrow looked up from the bed. “If you ever get a chance to play in the Olympics, for your country, make sure you do it,” he said. Don Morrow died a few hours later, four years shy of seeing Ken crunch Vladimir Krutov by the blue line.

  During the mid-1990s, the Islanders trained in Lake Placid. Ken Morrow would sometimes go up to help out. One year he decided to work with the young defensemen. He tied up his skates, methodically as ever, and went out on the Olympic Field House ice for the first time since February 24, 1980. He skated a solitary lap. It started to come back. He saw the benches and the penalty box and remembered the corners where certain things happened, and what the feeling was like. The building was unchanged, with the same red seats and the same flat blue roof, the same white girders and black tracks of lights. It hadn’t been junked up with neon and overcommercialization. He was grateful for that. Morrow had heeded his father’s parting words and lived a hockey life he never imagined possible. Elaborate sentimental excursions are not his style, but Ken Morrow knew just where he was and what it meant.

  “It was pretty neat to be out there,” he said.

  ____

  Morrow’s hard check sprang the puck free from Krutov, and not long after a sustained American possession yielded sharp passing but no shots on goal, Mike Eruzione picked up a loose puck and started out of his own end. Eruzione, who had not been involved much offensively to this point, crossed the red line and spotted Christian, who had sprinted to catch up to the play and surged into an open space on the left wing. Eruzione backhanded the puck to him, and Christian moved into the Soviet zone and swept toward center and dropped it for Broten, who ripped a slap shot wide, five and a half minutes into the period. The crowd let out a collective groan of disappointment and had the same response on the ensuing U.S. push, which ended when Mikhailov, Stan Laurel–look- alike, hustled back to prevent McClanahan from getting off a straight-on shot from forty feet out. The Soviets broke out quickly, and Viacheslav Fetisov hit a streaking Alexander Golikov. Mark Johnson skated with him and took Golikov down with his stick and then quickly pulled it back, as if to conceal the evidence. There was no whistle. The Russians were stepping up the pressure. Fetisov found Alexander Golikov again, and this time he took the puck behind the American goal, where it was picked up by brother Vladimir, who backhanded it right across the crease, just inches ahead of a speeding Makarov, who had most of the net to shoot into but couldn’t get a good shot off and poked it inches wide. Fetisov teed up from the point, another dangerous chance that was blocked in front. Scrambling to calm things down, Silk lifted the puck into the seats.

  The Soviets were playing at an astonishing pace. This was why Brooks was so adamant about having good skaters. If you couldn’t keep up, the Russians would bury you. In the U.S. end, Mark Pavelich, one of the fastest U.S. skaters, dug the puck from along the boards and slid a perfect breakout pass to John Harrington, shooting up the middle, both Soviet defensemen caught up ice. Harrington took the puck at center ice and found himself alone. Fetisov scrambled futilely to catch him. Harrington crossed the blue line. Fetisov swung his stick wildly, as if it were an ax, but caught all air and no Harrington. Harrington moved in on Myshkin but looked tentative, the puck not obeying his stick. His best shot was top shelf, right side. That’s where he aimed, but the puck sailed far to the right and into the endboards. Once more the crowd groaned. When you are a counterpuncher trying to take down a heavyweight, you have to not only pick your spots judiciously, you have to convert them. The Russians knew they were going to get ample scoring chances, because they always did. The Americans had no such assurance. Harrington was disheartened but kept skating and caught up to the puck along the sideboards. He’d been playing catch-up for years. It was no time to stop.

  With a strong, handsome face, tidy salt-and-pepper hair, and a Kirk Douglas chin, John Harrington looks more like a U.S. senator than a U.S. gold medalist. Most everyone knows him a
s Bah, a nickname he’s had since he was an infant. His older brother, Joe, tried to say “Baby” and could only get out “Bah.” It stuck. “Nobody who has known him a long time ever calls him John,” said Mary Harrington, his mother.

  A retired history teacher, Mary Harrington was a high school valedictorian at 16 and a college graduate at 19. She already had two master’s degrees when she turned down a fellowship to Yale to marry her husband, Charles. She does crossword puzzles in minutes and can name every king and queen of England since the Norman Conquest in 1066. She once handed John a copy of her favorite quotation: “Perseverance and discipline are omnipotent.” Her son built a life around it.

  Harrington was part of the U.S. Olympic hockey team for eight months and spent seven of them living in fear of being cut. It wasn’t until mid-January, after he’d played strong back-to-back games against the Winnipeg Jets, a team that was considering signing him, that Craig Patrick told him that he didn’t need to sign; he would be going to Lake Placid.

  “I felt like a grand piano had been lifted off my back,” Harrington said.

  Harrington grew up in the Iron Range town of Virginia, four miles up the road from Eveleth, the hub of Range hockey. He was a lunch-pail winger, a hard-skating, ultra-dependable kid who outworked most everyone and always had. He’d look around and see better players, then try to find a way to be better than they. When he set a goal, it almost always got met. He was the kind of player coaches love, because he elevated the whole team’s work rate.

  “I don’t think you’re pushing us hard enough,” Harrington would tell Gus Hendrickson, his coach at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. “We need to do more.”

  Harrington came by his grit honestly. His parents had been in Lake Placid for the first week, but his mother had to return home under threat of being docked her $300 salary, notwithstanding that a clause in the teachers’ contract in Virginia said that if a teacher were absent because of an event of school or community interest, he or she would not be penalized. “I don’t know what could be of more local interest than having a boy from Virginia going for a gold medal in the Olympics,” she said. The Minnesota Education Association sent her a lawyer. Mary Harrington fought hard for her rights. She was mortified when the Duluth Evening News ran a headline when her son came home that said, “Hero’s Welcome Dimmed by Mother’s Plight,” but she didn’t back off. Ultimately, no penalty was assessed. For Mary Harrington, it was the principle. “She’s got one of those wills that doesn’t let go,” said Tom Harrington, John’s younger brother.

  The Montreal Canadiens were Harrington’s first hockey heroes. He loved their flair and their French names but learned pretty early that he was no Guy LaFleur. There’s a home movie of John on the ice at six years of age, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up. He was a second-line center in peewees, an unspectacular forward in high school, a walk-on at UMD who saw the eighty kids at tryouts and wondered if he should even bother. In his first game he scored an overtime goal to beat the 1976 Olympic team, a squad that featured Steve Sertich, another Virginia guy, but even as late as his junior year at UMD, Harrington wasn’t making every road trip. Brooks regularly told him he might not be good enough to play on this team.

  “I had been hearing it my whole life,” Harrington said.

  Diligence and dedication were as much a part of daily life in the Harrington home as sticks and skates. Like a lot of Range towns, Virginia had its share of saloons (54 at one count for a town that then had about 12,000 people), the miners getting their paychecks and heading for Main Street, a wide boulevard with old brick storefronts. But that wasn’t the routine for Charles Harrington, a locomotive engineer who made runs from the hulking mines in Virginia to the ore docks in Duluth. He worked in the post office when the mines were slow. Plenty of nights he’d come home from the train, sleep in a chair for a few hours, then go off to sort mail, though he turned down lots of overtime shifts driving his engine so he could be at his kids’ games. “I can always work, but this game will never be replayed,” he’d tell anyone who asked. Mary Harrington worked late, too, often typing out three different 100-question tests for her history students, in the years before computers. John and his brothers helped with the construction when the family moved into a new colonial on First Street North in Virginia. The summer before he became an Olympian, John built a deck for his mother in the back of the house, complete with flower boxes. She told him he’d never have to buy her another Mother’s Day present. He did anyway.

  Charles Harrington grew up poor, moving from place to place, troubled by the chronic instability. Having a home and providing for his family meant everything to him. After the Harringtons moved into the new house, Charles told Mary, “I don’t want to move anymore. I hope they carry me out of here.” And twenty-two years later, in 1995, they did. Charles Harrington got kidney cancer. Mary Harrington got a hospital bed and set it up in the family room. The family had six months to say goodbye, to share feelings. Even in the face of his own mortality, Charles Harrington didn’t want any slack. Two days before he died he made sure the recycling was out. He felt lucky to have the family he had, the life he had. The feeling was very mutual.

  John told his father once that he regretted not being able to spend as much time with him as his siblings had, because he was away so much, training for the Olympics, playing in Switzerland, coaching. “You’re living your life,” his father told him. “You’ve done a lot of things and gone a lot of places. That’s good.”

  Harrington’s current place is Collegeville, Minnesota, where he is the head coach at St. John’s University. He is the only player on the 1980 team who coaches men’s college hockey, a man with a plan, and perfectionistic proclivities. He makes out his tidy to-do list every night before bed, folds the laundry a certain way, likes his clothes crisp and pressed. Even when he wears jeans and a knit shirt he looks dressed up. His kids and players tease him about his lawn, which is something out of a turf magazine, crosscut and carpet-thick, all but manicured with tweezers.

  “He mows it in certain ways and certain days, and we don’t even walk on it because we’re afraid he’ll yell at us,” said Chris Harrington, John and Mary Harrington’s oldest son, a star defenseman for the University of Minnesota. “He’s definitely one of the obsessive-compulsive people when it comes to order. He pays serious attention to detail. I guess that’s what makes him a good coach.”

  Harrington plays an hour of half-court basketball just about every day in the St. John’s gym and still outworks people. He gutted out an impressive three-hour, thirty-six-minute time in the Twin Cities Marathon once, though he had never gone farther than twelve miles in his life before. He wanted to die with two miles to go, but he had set a goal.

  Harrington has a military man’s approach to life, and it seemed to be a good fit when he enrolled in the Air Force Academy out of Virginia High School. On Day 1, he got a haircut, got hollered at by his first upperclassman, and was out of there. “I stayed two days, because it took one day to get processed out,” Harrington said. “I was a small-town guy. To me the earth was flat outside of Minnesota, and I was sure I would fall off. I didn’t even give it a chance.”

  Harrington was the team chronicler of Brooksisms, the coach’s favorite sayings, duly recorded in a little spiral notebook. He collected them all: “You’re not talented enough to win on talent alone.” “The legs feed the wolf.” “You’re playing worse every day, and right now you’re playing like it’s the middle of next month.” “We went to the well again and the water was colder and the water was deeper.” He took them all in, and now has his own sayings: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” In his tidy office, the sign on his bulletin board says:

  St. John’s Hockey: Old School

  Not Guts, No Glory.

  Harrington signed with Scotty Bowman and the Buffalo Sabres after the Olympics, but he never made the NHL and never was paid his $20,000 signing bonus, either. In his second pro game, with t
he Sabres’ AHL affiliate in Rochester, he got welcomed by a goon and wound up in the hospital, a bunch of teeth knocked out and his jaw wired shut. He was set to return to Lake Placid—the Sabres’ training-camp site—when Pavelich called him from Switzerland in the late summer of 1980 and said his team had an opening for another American player. Unconvinced that there would be a place for him in Buffalo, Harrington headed for the Alps. He and Pavelich became the most prolific scoring tandem in the top Swiss league.

  Life after Lake Placid wasn’t easy at first for Bah Harrington. He felt adrift at times. Ever since Steve Sertich had made the 1976 team, the Olympics had been Harrington’s mission in life. It was what drove him. After it had been achieved beyond all measure, it was almost as if he’d lost his direction, his adrenaline supply. The NHL had never really been a big dream of his, so he never went after it in his full-bore way. He regrets that now. He got into coaching and started as an assistant at the University of Denver, where one of his players was Danny Brooks, Herb’s son. Harrington had some of Herb in him. He’d berate kids and motivate them by keeping them guessing, and he would live and die with every game to the point that Jeff Sauer, coach of Wisconsin, told him, “You’ve got to learn how to lose.”

  Harrington got the head job at St. John’s, a Division III school, in 1993. He was almost maniacally intense at first. In between periods of one game he lit into his captain with such a string of curse words he cringes to think about it even now. He slammed one of his wingtip shoes so hard into a rack of water bottles he almost broke a toe. Harrington still isn’t a blithe spirit after a loss, but he has mellowed. Coaching his son, Chris, in a couple of off-season tournaments helped him to realize he wouldn’t want anyone hollering at his son that way. Slowly, haltingly, he began to lighten up.