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

by Wayne Coffey

  Craig has never been one to worry about editing his thoughts or feelings. He is unhesitatingly forthright. If he feels something, he says it; if he is angry, he vents it. Just as quickly, the feeling and anger pass. Hugh Gorman III, Craig’s longtime friend and agent, jokes about how Craig can be hollering one minute about some business deal and turn around the next and say, “Where are we going to have lunch?” It’s the same when Craig has a disagreement with his wife, Sharlene. You get it out and move on. Craig lost his mother to cancer when he was 20, two and a half years before the Olympics. He lost his oldest sister, Ann, a couple of years after. He’s sure there’s a connection there in his desire not to hold on to things.

  “In our household, you didn’t waste your time being mad at someone you loved,” he said. “You can be mad, but get over it. You don’t want to be mad at someone and wish you had said something that you didn’t.”

  Craig wasn’t overly chummy with most of the guys on the Olympic team. It just wasn’t his priority. The dozen Minnesotans were from a different universe. Even his three BU teammates on the Olympic squad—Eruzione, Silk, and Jack O’Callahan—were different, raised in more urban environments in and around Boston; North Easton had much more of a small-town feel. Craig didn’t mind going off on his own. He was one of eight children, and like a lot of children from large families, he learned self-sufficiency early, learned how to carve out his own space and his own routine. “He was a loner,” Warren Strelow said. When his BU teammates headed off to throw back some Molsons at the Dugout, the team’s office headquarters on Commonwealth Avenue, Craig wasn’t often among them. Nineteen guys on the team use one agent to represent their marketing and promotional interests; Jim Craig has his own. Brooks had the players take a 300-plus question psychological profile in the summer before the Olympics. One of the few who didn’t take the test was Craig, who didn’t see the point. Brooks could’ve taken his refusal as insubordination or as a sign that Craig had some latent vulnerability he didn’t want exposed. Instead he took it as evidence of Craig’s take-on-the-world mentality, which the coach had liked so much in the 1979 world championships.

  During the pre-Olympic tour, the players moved into apartments together in the Twin Cities area; Craig lived in the basement of Doc Nagobads’s house. It not only spared him from paying rent and left him more money to send home each month, but it was the homier, family environment he preferred. Craig missed his mother profoundly and became especially fond of Velma Nagobads, Doc’s wife. He was much more inclined to spend time at the kitchen table with the Nagobadses than to go out with the guys. “He was like our own boy,” Nagobads said. “We became very, very close.”

  Craig doesn’t forget the people who have been there for him. After coaching him in the National Sports Festival, Tim Taylor got a kind note from Craig thanking him for his work. When BU goalie coach Andy Filer was stuck and needed a ticket a half-hour before the Russian game, Craig didn’t hesitate. Loyalty is something he prizes. “If you were Jim’s friend, he absolutely could not do enough for you or say enough to make you feel good,” said Billy LeBlond, his roommate at BU. LeBlond would go home with Craig for weekends, and he still fondly recalls how Don Craig would greet him with a hug, a pat on the back, and how he would be completely embraced into the family fold.

  Family meant everything to Jim Craig, and it still does. “He’s a wicked homebody,” Sharlene Craig said. “He’d rather be home than anyplace else.” Craig now lives in a handsome, three-story gray colonial in an upscale subdivision four miles and quite a few income brackets from where he grew up. Don Craig’s salary as a food service manager for Dean Junior College had to stretch a long way for eight kids. Clothes were handed down, allowances didn’t exist, and the food bill was trimmed when Don would pull up in the driveway with a perk from his work: cartons of fish, milk, bread, and other groceries. The boys would scramble out to carry them inside.

  The Craigs did most everything together, in good times and otherwise. When his mother got very sick his first year at BU, Jim took the Green Line on the T to Massachusetts General Hospital almost every night after practice to be with her. He would dab her lips with Q-Tips and keep her company. She would ask about his life at BU and his hockey and tell him how wonderful it would be if he could play in the Olympics one day. Margaret Craig lost her hair, suffered from shingles, a dignified woman being robbed of her dignity. It was a horrible process to watch. She dropped to forty-seven pounds. Early in September 1977, before returning to BU for his junior year, Craig was at his sister Maureen’s house in the coastal town of Mattapoisett, near Cape Cod, where his mother was living out her last days. He went swimming with his brothers that day and remembers jumping into the bay off a place called Peanut Rock and plunging toward the bottom. The water was cold and dark, and as Jim Craig moved through it he heard a voice tell him that his mother was gone, that her suffering was over. He swam to the surface and got out and grabbed his two little brothers’ hands. He started walking down the dirt road. He looked up and saw his brothers-in-law walking toward them.

  “They were coming to tell me my mother had died, but I already knew,” Craig said.

  Craig had a much happier premonition six years later, in Salt Lake City. He was playing for a minor-league affiliate of the Minnesota North Stars. There was a fashion show in Craig’s hotel, and one of the models was a young woman named Sharlene Pettit. Craig had been a major heartthrob ever since the Olympics, with letters, come-ons, and overtures coming faster than pucks on a Russian power play. Once in a Chicago hotel he walked into his room to find a naked woman on his bed. “Please leave,” he said, which was also what he said to the redhead who showed up in his office one day, after mailing a series of photos of herself in various stages of undress. The moment Craig saw Sharlene he was smitten. He approached her awkwardly after the show. “Are you from Salt Lake City?” he asked.

  “She looked at me like I was an idiot,” said Craig, who’s embarrassed by the lameness of his opening line even now. He saw her again later and didn’t do much better. He went up to his room and called a friend. “I just found my wife,” Craig told him.

  Sharlene Pettit knew nothing about the 1980 Olympics or the U.S. team’s heroic goaltender. Jim Craig liked that. He didn’t have to worry about whether she liked him or his stardom. There wasn’t an image that he felt he had to live up to. It wasn’t always easy being Jim Craig after Lake Placid.

  “He had a hard act to follow, which was himself,” Andy Filer said.

  Six days after the Olympics, Jim Craig was in net for the Atlanta Flames, the patriot in pads who would save a reeling franchise. A sellout crowd turned out for his debut, ice storm be damned. Craig won, 4–1. For a time he was more famous and popular than Wayne Gretzky. His introductory press conference was held in a shopping mall, 2,000 people stuffed into a rotunda. The governor declared it Jim Craig Day in Georgia, and he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated after he played one game. He and his father filmed a Coke commercial, a $35,000 deal. He was 22. Ten days earlier, almost nobody outside of North Easton knew his name, and now everybody did, and everybody wanted a piece of him. Fame was fun and lucrative for a while, and Craig didn’t flee from it. His white Lexus still has an Olympic license plate, complete with the five rings and his uniform number, USA 30. The extension at his office is also 30. After years as a sales and marketing executive, he has made a successful switch to corporate and motivational speaking. In the spotless third-floor office in his house—Craig is as fastidious about his work space as he was about his goalie equipment, and he may have the tidiest briefcase in America—dozens of hockey photos and Olympic keepsakes can be found, including the famous flag he wore after the final Olympic game, folded into a triangular wooden case behind his desk. But fame could also be overwhelming, a roiling tidal wave that was going to go whatever way it wanted, that could just as easily drown you as carry you in triumphantly on its crest. Four games into his NHL career, Craig, physically and emotionally spent after what am
ounted to two straight years of competition, left the Flames and took a mental-health break in Florida.

  “After the plateau he was on, nothing he did was ever going to be good enough,” Sharlene Craig said.

  “It was like going from being a tavern singer to playing Carnegie Hall, overnight,” Jim Craig said. “That kind of change doesn’t come with an instruction manual.” He has big, strong hands, and they were on the table before him as he rode an Amtrak train from New York to Providence after a memorabilia signing in the city. His voice is deep and thick with a Massachusetts accent. His shaggy Olympic mane of dark brown hair has given way to a shorter style, flecked with gray. The long hair in the family is now worn by his son J.D., short for James Donald, a rangy 15-year-old who likes to play center (don’t even try to talk him into playing goal) but who has seen enough photographs of his father from Lake Placid that he wants to grow out his hair. “I like it when you get that little flip in the back,” J.D. Craig said.

  J.D.’s middle name is in honor of his grandfather. He was born in 1988, the same year Don Craig was suddenly stricken with a brain aneurysm. Don Craig had been teasing his son and Sharlene about giving him a grandchild. Before Don Craig went in for surgery, Sharlene spoke to him as he lay on the gurney: “Dad, don’t worry, I’m going to have your grandson.” She didn’t know it at the time, but she was pregnant with J.D.

  Sharlene Craig is a Mormon. One of the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is that babies are gifts from heaven, sent to earth to replace people who are dying. Before the babies come down, they get to know the person who is about to pass away.

  “No matter what your beliefs are, it’s still a nice thing to think about, don’t you think?” Jim Craig said.

  After the 1979–1980 NHL season, the Flames relocated to Calgary, where the promotional value of having an American icon on the roster was considerably less than it was in Atlanta. The team traded Craig to Boston, a deal that seemingly scripted another fairy tale—the professional homecoming for an Olympic hero. Craig beat the Canadiens in his Bruins debut and had a solid first year in Boston, but he found out soon enough that playing Carnegie Hall was much more complicated than seeing his name on the marquee. It was hard to hit all the right notes, harder still to perform up to people’s expectations and to control what the reviewers would say. Everything was magnified because he was playing for his hometown franchise. Before the 1981–1982 season, Craig suffered a broken finger, required shoulder surgery, and then ripped up his ankle when he fell through a ladder. The same day he fell through the ladder, his dog was run over by a car. He struggled to find his game, and things weren’t much better in the locker room, where some veteran teammates found him aloof and didn’t necessarily appreciate the adulation and attention being accorded an as-yet-unproven pro goalie. The Bruins have long been a lunch-pail organization, and Craig and his sudden celebrity were not a good fit. He did himself no favors by letting himself get overbooked with appearances, a distraction no rookie needs, especially one who came bundled with the expectations that Craig did. “I think he was very isolated during his time with the Bruins,” LeBlond said. When Bruins general manager Harry Sinden wanted to send him to the minors to get some work in, Craig refused and effectively wrote his own ticket out of town.

  “I think he could’ve developed into a pretty good goaltender, but he had an aversion to going down to the minors and it kind of deteriorated from there,” Sinden said. “He had problems dealing with his success. He just couldn’t accept that he’d won the gold medal but couldn’t make our team.”

  Craig felt lost and confused and then, twenty-seven months after Lake Placid, close to midnight on a wet and treacherous stretch of Route 6 in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, he hit a much deeper bottom, his BMW colliding with a Toyota, a young woman dying, the newspaper headlines blaring. He had just purchased the BMW from a friend of Filer’s, and Filer is convinced the sturdiness of the car saved his life. Craig was charged with vehicular homicide. The media coverage of him being acquitted was much more restrained than the coverage of the crash.

  “If it had been me in the accident, it would have been nothing. But because it was him, it was big news,” Filer said. Fame turned on Craig as fast as it had arrived. Some were quick to cast him as an NHL washout, a poster boy for the perils of instant stardom. “All of a sudden people are saying harsh things, making harsh judgment—people who have no idea,” Craig said. “You just want to be you, left alone, and there’s never, ever a chance. What I learned is that I spent so much time trying to make everyone else happy and trying to be what they wanted me to be that I didn’t know who I was.” For someone who loved to be in control of his world, it was also hard to have so little. There was no stopping people from taking shots at him, connecting dots that weren’t there, and no stopping reporters from asking him to replay the accident, either, even after more than two decades. Do you know what it’s like to be regularly reminded about one of the worst moments of your whole life? Craig has never wanted to hide, or lie, but the experience made him wary, and careful about who he puts his trust in.

  “To me it’s a terrible tragedy, something I wish had never happened,” he said. “You can’t explain an accident. You can’t change it now. You just try to live your life and be a better person every day.”

  Craig was let go by the Bruins, and he returned to play for Team USA under coach Lou Vairo in 1983, helping the United States qualify for the 1984 Games, then got picked up by Lou Nanne, general manager of the Minnesota North Stars. Nanne had seen Craig dozens of times before and during the Olympics and was convinced he could be a capable NHL goaltender. “I don’t know if anyone can imagine the kind of pressure that kid was under after the Olympic Games,” Nanne said. “I thought if we got him out here, away from his hometown and where there weren’t such high expectations, he could get on solid footing.” This time Craig willingly went down to the minors, where he played well and met Sharlene. He worked hard and fit in well, according to Nanne.

  Craig was recalled to the North Stars in 1983–1984. He played in three games, one of them against the Washington Capitals in Minneapolis. The Capitals’ goaltending coach was Warren Strelow. Before the game Craig saw Strelow in the hallway and hurried over to talk to him, asking if he could take a look at him, offer any insight into his game.

  “Jimmy, I’m not your goaltending coach anymore,” Strelow said. Strelow felt awkward saying it, but it was the truth. Strelow told the Caps to shoot low on the stick side on Craig. The Capitals scored six times.

  Not long after, Craig was in goal against Detroit. Nanne had told Craig he was going to trade Dan Beaupre to the Los Angeles Kings and make Craig the No. 1 goaltender. Up 5–2, withstanding a furious Red Wings charge in the third period, Craig made a sprawling save, reached back to snare the puck as it rolled down his back, and ripped up his hamstring muscle, a significant injury that would require extensive rehabilitation. He decided he’d had enough. He was 27 years old. The body of Jim Craig’s NHL work consisted of thirty games. He never played in the league again.

  “My goal was to prove that I was good enough to play, and I did that,” Craig said. “I didn’t play for the adulation. I never sit on a bar stool or go to a party and say, ‘I could’ve done this,’ or ‘I could’ve done that.’ I never look at it that way. It’s over. I’m comfortable with what I did, and that’s important. I wasn’t very good as a pro. So what? I made a choice. Ask how I’m doing as a father or husband. That’s what’s important.”

  Jim and Sharlene Craig still lead a hockey-centered life, except that now the players are J.D. and his 12-year-old sister, Taylor, a top player in her age group in Massachusetts. The family has a vacation home in Mattapoisett—a retreat on 15 acres of land overlooking Buzzards Bay, a place with marshes and tidal pools and osprey and cranes and salt air that Jim Craig could breathe forever. You can walk out of the house and jump in a kayak and paddle away. The Craigs want to live there full-time, as soon as they can wo
rk it out with the kids’ school and hockey schedules.

  Relaxation doesn’t come much more easily to Jim Craig than it did to Herb Brooks. He’s spent most of his life being on the move, a goalie in a hurry to get good, to go places, to be in the net, always. If he put off some people with his chatter and his swagger, there are many others like Billy LeBlond and Andy Filer who value his honesty and kindness and think he is as misunderstood as anyone they’ve ever known. As Craig edges toward 50, his view is getting longer, and clearer. It was a Friday night game against the Russians that made him famous, but that isn’t how he defines himself. Herb Brooks constantly prodded him and goaded him and made him feel uncomfortable. Craig didn’t always like it, but it made him better in the long run, as a goalie and as a person. It taught him to take risks and dream big. Life is all about change, and you have to embrace it. You can’t devour yourself with regret, get consumed with second-guessing, worry about people who think they know you but don’t. You deal with what is, strap your pads back on, and get ready for what’s next. You remember what really matters. He has the same tender relationship with his kids that his own parents had with him.

  “Life is a marathon,” Craig said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in front in the first five meters or the first five miles. It’s where you get to. It’s how you’re doing, and where you are when you cross the finish line. That’s how I look at it.”