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

by Wayne Coffey

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  After the diving defensive efforts of O’Callahan and Ramsey wrecked the Russians’ two-on-one chance, Krutov regained possession and pushed the puck back to Valery Vasiliev at the left point. The game had the frenzied feeling of the final seconds of regulation, not the second period. Vasiliev swung it to Pervukhin on the right. Pervukhin fired a slap shot into the S of USA on Craig’s chest. Craig held on and took a little skate out of the crease.

  Broten faced off with Lebedev and gave hard chase after Christoff backhanded the puck into the Soviet end. As the clocked ticked toward zero, Broten, the slightest player on the ice, skated hard into the corner and drove the Soviets’ brilliant young defenseman, Fetisov, into the boards. The horn sounded. The teams headed off and Jim Craig skated slowly out of goal, unstrapping his mask as he went. He looked up at the scoreboard. Someone rubbed him on the head. The goaltender looked over his shoulder at the goal, a hint of displeasure on his face. He’d seen 30 shots in two periods and stopped 27 of them. The Americans were behind by a goal, against a team that had dominated third periods for decades. In five previous Olympic Games, the Soviets had outscored their opponents, 14–4, in the final period. The U.S. team had won its third periods by a score of 11–3 in these Olympics. For months Brooks had been saying that while he wouldn’t guarantee a medal, he would guarantee that no team would be in better condition than the United States. His team’s goal was to be in a game with the Soviets with twenty minutes to play. The team had gotten its wish, and nobody knew better than Warren Strelow that it would be Craig who would be spending the third period under the most competitive duress. Nobody knew much of anything better than Warren Strelow when it came to playing the goal.

  “He’s probably as outstanding a coach in understanding the fundamentals of goaltending and making goaltenders better as there is in the game,” said Sonmor, the former North Stars coach who brought Strelow in to work with his University of Minnesota goalies in the mid-1960s.

  Strelow was working as a high school English and social studies teacher at the time, coaching the school team in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. He would go on to become the first full-time NHL goaltending coach, with the Washington Capitals in 1983, and he has been helping goaltenders stop pucks ever since.

  More than a half-century has passed since Strelow played his first game in goal and learned a lesson for a lifetime. The debut came at an outdoor rink in St. Paul with goal judges stationed behind both goals. Strelow’s team outshot the opponents 56–3 but lost 1–0 because Warren let in a goal when he was talking to one of the goal judges. He has never needed another reminder of the perils of wandering focus. His team won the city championship the next year with Warren in net.

  Strelow grew up by the railroad tracks in east St. Paul, an only child, a banker’s son. He lived down the hill from Brooks, and they played countless hours of hockey together at Phalen Park, taking turns jimmying the lock of the warming house so they could turn the lights on and keep playing. They both went on to star for St. Paul’s Johnson High School, Strelow graduating in the class of 1951 as an all-state goaltender. The Johnson team played outdoors then, drawing sometimes as many as 2,000 spectators. Strelow was a big, quiet kid who wasn’t inclined to date or socialize or make small talk. Sports were his passion, and there was one for every season: football, hockey, and baseball. Strelow was never happier than when he was in the net, or behind the plate, catching. He liked strapping on equipment and going to work. He once got behind the plate without a mask and had his cheek broken by a foul ball (“I looked like a squirrel with nine million nuts in my mouth”), but neither that nor a series of pucks in the face could persuade him to wear a mask in goal. Real goalies didn’t wear masks in the 1950s.

  Strelow relished the responsibility that came with playing goal. He coaches the same way he taught. In the classroom, he preached patience and doing your best, and if he had to correct or critique a student’s work, he would always try to finish with something positive. Goaltenders are fall guys in a rectangular cage, scapegoats waiting to happen. Screw up and a red light goes on. Screw up and your team loses. What’s the gain in beating up a goaltender after he lets up a soft goal? It may be more important to minister to a guy’s psyche than to refine his technique.

  “The position is negative. Why put any more negativity on it?” Strelow said.

  Working with goaltenders is like building a house, Strelow believes. You begin with a solid foundation, with fundamentals such as balance, being square to the puck, knowing how to read and react to certain situations. When the foundation is in place, you build up from there. But underpinning everything is self-confidence and the ability to cope with good things and bad things with the same emotional stability. One of the first things Strelow admired about Jim Craig was his ability to bounce back. If he made a mistake he wouldn’t wallow in it. Outwardly he’d stay supremely confident, even if he were going through a rough patch. After Craig gave up the two long goals in the first period against West Germany, Brooks thought about pulling him and putting in Steve Janaszak. Brooks told Janaszak to get loose and get ready, then talked to Strelow.

  “No,” Strelow said. “He hasn’t lost a game. We have to stay with him. He’ll play his way through this and be a better goalie because of it.” Strelow has always been his goalies’ staunchest ally, a rotund and outsized advocate in thick glasses and street shoes. He doesn’t believe in embarrassing them or humiliating them. He plays to a guy’s strengths. He never says, “Do it this way.” He says, “I have something that may help you.” His approach inspires profound loyalty from people such as San Jose Sharks’ goaltender Evgeni Nabokov, who won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s Rookie of the Year under Strelow’s tutelage, setting franchise records of shutouts and victories.

  “It’s hard to describe what this guy does for us, how helpful he is,” Nabokov once said. “You’ve got to see him with us day after day. This guy gives up all his heart—everything that he has—to hockey. His life is hockey. He’s watching the tapes all the time. He’s talking to you. Anybody can coach. Any goalie who retires can tell you what to do. It’s not that hard. But it’s harder to go deeper, to get to know the goalie as a person and to understand them. Nobody is able to understand you like Warren does.”

  Strelow wanted to be an Olympic goaltender himself, once. He tried out for the 1956 team, but was No. 3 on a team that was only going to keep two goaltenders. In the summer of 1955, he had another tryout. Strelow was working a summer construction job with a guy who was a bird dog for the Boston Red Sox. He arranged for Strelow to have a workout when the Red Sox minor-league affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky, visited St. Paul. Then about six foot two and 200 pounds, Strelow stepped in the cage and knocked the first five pitches he saw over the fence. The bird dog was astounded. The club’s head scout came in a little later in the summer and invited Strelow to come to spring training. One month later Strelow heard from his draft board. He didn’t go to spring training in 1956. He went into the Army.

  After his hitch was done, Strelow returned to Minnesota and reconnected with Brooks. When Brooks got the job at the U, Strelow was one of his first hires. When Brooks got the Olympic job, it was a foregone conclusion who would be coaching the goaltenders in Lake Placid. Before the tryout at the National Sports Festival in the summer of 1979, Brooks told Strelow that a panel of top coaches would pick the players.

  “And you will pick the goalies,” Brooks said.

  “What if I pick someone you don’t like?” Strelow replied.

  “I don’t care who you pick, you just better be right.”

  Strelow paused and laughed faintly, remembering. “Herbie believed in me. He gave me a chance. He was my best friend,” he said.

  The fall of 2003 and winter of 2004 were some of the saddest and loneliest times Warren Strelow ever had. Seriously overweight and suffering from a kidney disease, Strelow was waiting for a kidney transplant when Herb Brooks died. He had been on the list for eight months. Nine days after
the funeral, Strelow’s wife had a dream that Brooks had come over to the house, concerned about Warren’s health and inquiring about the transplant. The next morning, Strelow got a phone call from his doctor. A kidney had been found. It was a perfect match in all six of the critical categories. The doctor told Strelow he had better odds of winning the lottery than of getting such a match. The doctor called it a miracle. Strelow hung up and wondered if Herb Brooks was still looking out for him. He had a transplant operation a day later.

  It took well, but there were complications with medication, requiring him to recuperate at home in Minnesota. The goaltending coach for the San Jose Sharks, Strelow found himself apart from a team for the first time in nearly twenty years, not happily immersed in the minutiae of stopping pucks but wearily trying to get his body right. As grateful as he was for his miracle kidney and the chance to be with his wife, Carlene, it was hard to be away, and harder yet to fathom that his best friend was gone. Strelow talked to his goalies every Monday through the season, watched game tapes constantly, and conversed almost daily with Wayne Thomas, former NHL goalie and the Sharks’ assistant general manager. The phone can accomplish only so much. “This is a guy who loves his job and loves being around the players,” Thomas said. “I think it would be hard on anyone.”

  For decades Strelow has talked to his pupils about being patient, not expecting improvement to come instantly. He has an artificial hip and an artificial knee. He has diabetes. He has struggled with his weight problem. The nurturer of netminders, Strelow hasn’t been too successful in getting himself to be patient. He keeps reaching for the phone to call Herbie, keeps thinking it might be Herbie on the line when someone calls him. Mostly the house has been quiet. The Sharks made it to the Western Conference finals in the 2004 playoffs. Maybe that would be something to build on for the following season. For Warren Strelow, it was a nice thing to think about.

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  SECOND INTERMISSION

  THE PUCK

  STOPS HERE

  Jim Craig had the corner seat in the locker room, closest to the door. As his teammates charged in, Craig kept to himself and did what he always did, taking off his skates, his pads, his chest protector, all his gear, and then methodically putting it all back on again. He had started doing this at Boston University, finding it a good way to occupy his time between periods, to ready himself for another twenty-minute test. He lived period to period when he was in the net, breaking them down into four five-minute installments, and his ritual equipment-shedding was one of the ways he calibrated the time.

  “Whether I had a good period or a bad period, that was my signal that it was time to start over,” Craig said.

  Goalies are different from other human beings. By workplace location and mindset, they occupy their own distinct space. A goal cage is six feet wide and four feet high, twenty-four square feet to keep the puck from penetrating. You are quite literally the last line of defense, the ultimate determinant of who wins and who loses. You need a special sort of self-reliance to play the goal, and a willfulness that borders on defiance: You are not getting this puck past me. Jim Craig had both in abundance. His self-confidence was staggering at times. If somebody scored on him, it was an aberration, a screwup by someone, somewhere, and one that wouldn’t be repeated. When Craig first got to Boston University, the incumbent goalie was Brian Durocher, and a heralded recruit named Mark Holden was on the way. Craig told Jack Parker, the Boston University coach, “I’ve seen Durocher and I’ve seen Holden, and I’m going to be your goalie.” Never mind that Craig was not hotly recruited coming out of Oliver Ames High School in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, or that he came to BU from Massasoit Community College, nobody’s breeding ground of big-time hockey players. Parker was stunned at the kid’s cockiness. It made the coach think of Paul Newman’s line in The Hustler: “When you’re good and you know you’re good, it’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

  Jim Craig was good. He was very good, and he picked a wonderful time to be even better than that. In the first period alone, he faced 18 shots and stopped 16 of them, kicking, gloving, sprawling, an acrobat in a white mask. He faced 12 more shots in the second period and turned away 11 of them. He had first caught Brooks’s eye the previous spring in the world championships, stifling Czechoslovakia in a 2–2 tie. Craig could skate, had a good knack for cutting down angles, and at six feet one inch and 190 pounds did not give opponents much net to shoot at. “Jimmy had the fastest glove I’ve ever seen,” said Randy Millen, a high school teammate who went on to play at Harvard. “He’d just steal goals from guys with that glove.”

  The only time the United States had won a hockey gold medal in the Olympics, in 1960, it had gotten a superb effort from the man in goal, Jack McCartan. The two times the Americans had won silver, Willard Ikola (1956) and Lefty Curran (1972) had likewise delivered big plays in the net. Brooks and Strelow both believed that Craig was the man best equipped to face the crucible of Olympic pressure, no matter that backup goalie Steve Janaszak had been the most valuable player of Brooks’s 1979 championship team at the U.

  Craig started playing goalie at age 11, in borrowed skates with cardboard toes. The invitation came on Holmes’s Pond in North Easton, Massachusetts, forty-five minutes south of Boston, not far from the snug, roadside colonial where he grew up with his parents, Don and Margaret Craig, and seven brothers and sisters. It was a house where the ashtrays were usually full—both parents were heavy smokers—and affection was present in equal bounty. Don Craig was a warm-hearted man, huggy and kissy in a time when a less secure guy would not have been so. Before Jim left for school each morning, he would write a little note to his mother—“Have a great day, Mom, I love you”—and leave it in the porchway mailbox. Margaret Craig saved every note. A few times when Jim got mad at his parents, he tried to storm off to bed.

  “I could never do it,” Craig said. “I’d always have to come back down. I couldn’t go to sleep without kissing them goodnight.”

  Phil Thompson, the Craigs’ postman, encouraged Jim to try out for the local youth hockey league. On Holmes’s Pond one day, Craig heard kids talking about a team called the Aces. Craig decided to give it a go, though he didn’t know the red line from the blue line, and thought offsides was a rule from football. A catcher in baseball, he immediately liked the idea that the position of goalie came with a bunch of gear and an assurance that he’d be on the ice the whole time. None of this shift-to-shift stuff for him. At Oliver Ames High, the only time Craig exchanged words with his coach, Gerard Linehan, was when Linehan pulled him from a game. Ames was up 8–0 and Linehan wanted to give the backup guy a chance. “He wanted to play every minute of every game and every practice,” Linehan said.

  Playing goal quickly took center stage in Craig’s athletic life. He and his brothers beat up the basement of the house, blasting slap shots at each other with a street-hockey ball. At 13, he’d make early Sunday morning trips to Boston Arena to play the goal against 16- and 17-year-olds. He’d want Linehan to shoot 200 pucks a day at him after practice. He loved to challenge people, and to accept challenges back. Dave Silk had the same hypercompetitiveness, and their practice battles were a BU staple, Silk saying he was going to put a puck in the upper corner and Craig telling him he had no chance and taking it away. “There was nothing Jimmy wouldn’t take on,” said Billy LeBlond, a defenseman and BU teammate. “He was as hard as stone in goal.” In his spare time as a young teenager, Craig would draw pictures of rinks and goals and practice signing his autograph. Craig was a relentless worker and knew exactly where he wanted the work to take him.

  “He truly believed in himself,” Linehan said. “This wasn’t just another kid from a small town who was going to be a businessman like his father or an accountant like his brother. He was going to be a hockey player. He set his goal and he was going to do whatever he had to do to get there.”

  Craig grew eight inches in his last year in high school and once he got acclimated to his bod
y, his goaltending career took off. After Craig’s one-week stay at Norwich Academy, a military school in Vermont (he couldn’t stand the regimentation any more than John Harrington could at the Air Force Academy), and part of a year at Massasoit, Parker brought him into BU. Craig went 25–1–1 in his sophomore year, then went undefeated (16–0–0) as a junior in 1977–1978, helping BU capture the NCAA championship, doing it with his usual swagger. Craig played Boston College a total of 15 times in his BU career and won 14 of the games. Midway through his senior year, before the annual Beanpot Tournament—the midwinter intracity competition among BU, BC, Harvard, and Northeastern—Joe Concannon, the late Boston Globe sportswriter, asked Craig how he wanted to remember his last Beanpot.

  “I want to play BC in the finals, be up by a goal, look at the scoreboard, and shake their hands as losers one more time,” Craig said. Concannon wasn’t taking notes or taping when Craig was talking, and Craig wasn’t sure if the interview was on the record or off. But he said what he said and didn’t back off it when his comment showed up in the Globe.

  Craig had a penchant for stirring things up, getting people riled, whether with his stick or his mouth. He talked constantly to his teammates during games and practices, a not-always-welcome stream of pleas, admonitions, and critiques. “He never shut up,” Mark Johnson said. “You just had to tune him out.” Even in no-check adult leagues, Craig, now a forward, not infrequently gets embroiled in heated exchanges, sometimes egged on by opposing players wanting to record their own Olympic moment by making a run at the miracle goalie, sometimes by his own chatter and stickwork. A few years ago, Randy Millen, an adult-league teammate, urged Craig to tone it down. “The goal for this year is not to score the most points or win the most games. It’s for you to win the Lady Byng,” Millen said, referring to the sportsmanship trophy the NHL awards each year. Craig throttled himself back. Millen admired his behavioral adjustment.