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

by Wayne Coffey

  “Start skating, Silk,” the coach would bark. I am skating, Silk would think. Silk was among the most diligent weight lifters on the team. There was a signup sheet where you were supposed to write down what you’d lifted, but the guys who signed up usually were the ones who came by once a week and wanted to get credit. Silk lifted conscientiously but never signed. “Hey, how about the weights? They’re there for a purpose,” Brooks said to him one day. Silk did a slow, silent burn, wondering, What does this guy want from me? Is this how he is trying to motivate me, or does he just hate me?

  Dave Silk lost his father when he was eight years old. The coaches who meant the most to him—people like BU coach Jack Parker—were usually those who became surrogate fathers, men who were strong and kind and present. “I wonder if coaches’ careers shouldn’t be measured by wins and losses as much by the number of weddings and christenings they’re invited to,” Silk said. In time he came to appreciate how much Brooks’s demands and incessant prodding had helped build both his character and his game, but the coach’s harshness and aloofness were difficult to get accustomed to. Compliments from Brooks came around only a little more often than Halley’s Comet.

  “The greatest compliment I can give you is a sweater,” the coach said.

  A few months before Brooks’s death, Silk sipped black coffee early one morning in a Boston office building, sunlight streaming through a wall of glass, commuters streaming in from the T station across the street. He has a rugged, handsome face and a sturdy, five-foot-eleven physique.

  “Herb didn’t have much of a bedside manner,” Silk said. “He had no bedside manner. He had a decision early on whether to be a doctor or a veterinarian. He chose to be a veterinarian.”

  Silk came to BU from Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts, and the town of Scituate, Massachusetts, an old seacoast port on Cape Cod Bay between Boston and Plymouth. The town is known for fishing and its historic lighthouse, the eleventh oldest in the nation, and for two of the youngest heroines in early American history, Rebecca and Abigail Bates, teenage daughters of lighthouse keeper Simeon Bates and his wife, Rachel. During the War of 1812, the girls were on watch at the lighthouse one night while the rest of the family was away. Looking out to sea, they saw rowboats full of British soldiers making their way to shore. With no time to alert others, Rebecca and Abigail grabbed their fife and drum and played as loudly as they could. Believing that the music heralded the approach of the town militia, the British turned around and rowed back to their ship.

  Dave Silk had his own technique for commanding attention: he scored goals. He had 35 of them in 34 games in his freshman year at BU, 1976–1977, getting named New England’s Rookie of the Year, and he had 27 more in the national championship season a year later. His hands were strong, his shot hard, his touch soft. He said once that after graduating college his goal was “to own my own island.” That hasn’t happened yet, but much else has. Silk played parts of seven seasons in the NHL, starting with the Rangers and finishing with the Jets, and then played five more years in Germany, where he watched the Berlin Wall come down even as his own life was being rebuilt. The man who Dave Silk thought hated him turned out to be one of the great influences on his life. A year before Brooks died, Silk told him so. “It was not a problem at all, Silkie,” Brooks said.

  The BU teams Silk was on were talented and combative and hard-driving on the ice, and hard-partying off it. Their regular hangout was the Dugout, a bar near campus where they’d head for the back room and decompress after practices and games. The night the Beanpot Tournament was postponed because of the blizzard of ’78, a bunch of the guys were in the Dugout until dawn. Silk didn’t miss any of the rounds, and by the time he got to the pros, his drinking had gotten out of control. Being a strong, young pro athlete lends to feelings of invulnerability by itself; throw in Olympic glory and it is heightened that much more. When he was with the Rangers organization, more than a few people were worried about his alcohol consumption.

  “It was a hard time for me,” Silk told a reporter once. “It took me some time to get my head screwed back on straight. I had trouble after the Olympics and most of those troubles were due to use and abuse of alcohol. I thought I could control it. I didn’t know it was something I couldn’t control until years later.” When he had to confront his problem, he did it with a courage and intensity that didn’t surprise people who knew him. “He’s had to fight a few demons, and he’s won,” BU coach Jack Parker said.

  Parker had told Brooks long before the Olympic roster had been set that the sum of Silk’s game was so much more than its parts. Silk had a competitive edginess hard-wired into him. His grandfather, Hal Janvrin, played seven years for the Red Sox and was the first high school player to go right from the schoolyard to Fenway Park. His cousin, Mike Milbury, had a solid NHL career with the Bruins and is now general manager of the New York Islanders.

  “He doesn’t get around the rink like some of the other guys, but he’s so smart, and he’s as much a competitor at both ends of the rink as anyone I’ve ever had,” Parker told Brooks. “I guarantee that if you have a one-goal lead and there are thirty seconds left in the game, he’s one of the guys you’re going to have on the ice.”

  Parker was right. Brooks knew that now. Silk started the Olympics on the fourth line, but he put in the first U.S. goal of the Olympics to get them going against Sweden, and found himself playing with Johnson and McClanahan on the first line.

  Now Silk’s pass skittered toward the net at the end of an almost completely ineffective American power play. Soviet defenseman Sergei Starikov, in front, couldn’t control it, the puck caroming into his skates, squirting free. Right behind Starikov stood Mark Johnson, who picked it up and shot it right through Myshkin’s splaying pads.

  Three to three.

  Starikov slammed his stick on the ice. Myshkin stayed frozen for a moment, his legs still split. On the bench, Tikhonov leaned forward and spoke sharply to the players in front of him. The arena shook from the noise. You could feel the tremor at the Woodshed, a restaurant across the street. Brooks thrust both arms overhead, fists clenched. Johnson’s first goal had come from nowhere, in the final tick of the first-period clock. This was even more from nowhere, born not of a harmonious and artistic buildup but of a bounce, a blade, and a Badger, who more than anyone else on the team knew exactly what to do in such a circumstance. Upstairs in the standing-room-only press box, officials from Tass, the Soviet news agency, closed the door to their office and locked it. They were tired of the Scandinavian press coming over to taunt them about how the Americans might win. The din in the building would not let up for the rest of the game.

  Not even thirty seconds later, Vladimir Petrov got the puck as he was stationed at the red line with an open captain, Mikhailov, skating hard on the other side of the rink. Petrov pivoted and passed wildly ahead of Mikhailov, and an icing call resulted. Another icing call brought the face-off to the right of Myshkin, and Pavelich outdueled Zhluktov and got the puck back to Bill Baker at the left point. Baker flipped it in and defenseman Bilyaletdinov controlled it behind his net and swung it along the left boards to Helmut Balderis. He centered to Zhluktov, who found Makarov, whom a tinkering Tikhonov had just switched off his regular line with the brothers Golikov, trying to get something going. Makarov flew down the right wing and rifled a hard wrist shot toward the lower right corner, Craig making a fine save with his left pad. Pavelich, back to help, knocked away the rebound. The Soviets pushed forward again, Balderis sweeping behind the goal, centering a dangerous pass in front that Christian got to before Zhluktov could.

  Forty seconds were up, and the United States needed a line change. Christian passed to Schneider on the left side, who carried it out of the U.S. zone. Just across the red line, Schneider launched a slap shot on goal and turned for the bench as the puck traced toward the boards. Eruzione hopped on. If overachievement were an Olympic sport, Eruzione would’ve won the gold. His name is the Italian word for “eruption
,” and that was how he played, with a spirit and energy as hot as lava. He knew when to erupt. His breakaway goal helped launch the rout of the Czechs in the second game of the Olympics, and two days later he knocked in an unassisted goal to awaken the team from its lethargic start against Norway. Six years earlier, in his senior year at Winthrop High School, he was in the middle of a three-goals-in-a-minute rally to carry the team to the Massachusetts state title. Eruzione was about five feet six inches and 145 pounds at the time, but his teammates will tell you a disproportionate amount of the weight was heart.

  “He never shied away from anything,” said Eddie Rossi, who was a year ahead of Eruzione at Winthrop, before going on to play at Harvard. “You could always count on him in the clutch.”

  Said Jack Parker, Eruzione’s coach at BU, “If you woke him up at three in the morning and told him you were going to have a little pickup game at the Boston Skating Club in Brighton, he’d be out there backchecking and forechecking like crazy.”

  Close to forty years ago, Rossi and Eruzione were pint-sized hockey pioneers in Winthrop, an old seaside town on a jutting piece of land a little east of Boston, bounded on the east by Massachusetts Bay and on the west by Logan Airport and the harbor, a compact place where 20,000 people live in just over one square mile, rows of clapboard and shingled homes wedged together like Monopoly houses, on lots not much bigger than a penalty box. The Boston skyline rises across the harbor but feels much farther away. You can walk along the well-worn cement seawall and see the surf hit red rocks at sunrise, then look at the Boston cityscape against an orange-pink sky at sunset. Gentrification has nibbled at some of its soul, but mostly Winthrop still feels like Winthrop.

  The winter sport of choice in town during Mike Eruzione’s childhood was basketball. The town had no more hockey tradition than Albuquerque. There were no youth hockey programs and few rinks, and not even a high school hockey team to root for. Rossi and Eruzione had to head to Revere, the next town up the coast, to have the privilege of playing in a game. When nothing official was happening, they’d play on lakes or flooded tennis courts, inspired by Mike’s cousin, Anthony Fusillo, a teacher and football coach at Winthrop High School and the only person they knew who actually owned a pair of skates.

  Fusillo lived in the same three-decker building as Eruzione, a family compound partitioned into apartments, the doors always open, aunts and uncles and cousins forever coming and going, the air thick with the smell of pasta and sauce. They spoke Italian and stuck together, the way many immigrant families stick together. Eruzione is a second-generation American, the son of Eugene Eruzione, whom everyone knows as Jeep and who worked as a maintenance man in a sewage treatment plant and as a waiter in Santarpio’s pizzeria in East Boston, right by the Sumner Tunnel. Mike Eruzione spent his summers painting houses and watching planes come and go, and if his collar color has changed from blue to white, not much else has. He could live in much leafier Boston suburbs but has stayed put on a sloping street not more than 100 yards from Winthrop Golf Club and not even a mile from Winthrop High School, walking distance from the houses he and his wife, Donna, grew up in. He still goes to his aunt’s for dinner on Christmas Eve and still plays hockey at Larsen Rink, an aging brick building with a gabled metal roof, across from Scott’s Auto Repair. The rink has blue cinder-block walls, except at the ends, where the colors are a blue-and-gold checkerboard, in honor of the Winthrop High Vikings. On the far wall, there is a big American flag by the refrigeration coils, and a collection of championship banners and another banner honoring Eruzione, the 1980 Olympic captain. Just up Pauline Street is the main town square and a stately nineteenth-century town hall, a building with weathered brown bricks and arched windows, and monuments honoring the veterans of every war the nation has ever fought, along with a row of miniature flags. There are flags all over town, including the one outside Mike and Donna Eruzione’s gray colonial. Winthrop is a very patriotic place. Eruzione is an officer of the Winthrop Youth Hockey Association. His boys, Michael and Paul, came through the program, and his sister, Nettie, is the secretary. Eruzione’s roots are as deep as the Atlantic, though they were shaken early in 2004, when Winthrop voters turned down a budget increase that effectively shut down the entire sports program at Winthrop High.

  “I’m not moving,” he told the Boston Globe once. “I live here nice and easy. When I cross the bridge, it’s like a gate closes behind me and says, ‘I’m home.’ ”

  Twenty-five years old in Lake Placid, Eruzione came to the Olympics from Toledo and the International Hockey League with a wide face that made him look older than his years and a skill level that did not compare to that of most of his teammates’. Eruzione was a football and baseball star growing up, but he wasn’t the most fluid skater and dazzled nobody with his puck-handling. He didn’t even have a Division I hockey scholarship until the summer after he finished high school. The University of New Hampshire was his first choice, but the school’s interest in him was as a football player, not a hockey player. Parker, who had just taken over at BU, was scrambling for players. He had seen Eruzione play before and hadn’t been overly impressed, but while refereeing a summer league game he saw Eruzione—four inches taller and 40 pounds heavier—and was starting to become intrigued.

  “Where are you going to school?” Parker asked him.

  “I think I’m going to Merrimack,” Eruzione replied, referring to a Division II school.

  “Why not a D-I school?”

  “Because no D-I school has talked to me.”

  “I’m talking to you right now,” said Parker, who offered him a partial scholarship. Eruzione accepted, enrolled in the fall of 1973, two years ahead of O’Callahan and three years ahead of Silk and Craig. Eruzione would go on to become BU’s all-time leading scorer, with 208 points, a fact of absolutely no consequence to Brooks, who was on the verge of cutting Eruzione more than once in the weeks before the Olympics, railing at team doctor George Nagobads, who had pushed Brooks to make him captain. Nagobads had been the Team USA physician at the 1975 worlds, where the U.S. team went winless and where Eruzione kept up his spirit and intensity better than anyone else on the team. Brooks didn’t know if Eruzione’s intangibles were enough to cover up his tangibles. His skating had never been his selling point, and now he was in a terrible scoring slump as well.

  “Now I’m going to have to cut my captain, and it’s all because of you,” Brooks told Nagobads. Right before Christmas, Brooks reached out to University of Vermont star Craig Homola, Pavelich’s friend and former teammate from Eveleth, asking if he’d like to join the team. Homola was given a USA jersey with his name on the back right above No. 21, the number Mike Eruzione wore. The implication was clear: you impress us, and the number, and the spot on the team, are yours. Homola, however, wasn’t eager to bail out on his Vermont team midway through the season or to forfeit the semester he’d almost completed. He also didn’t want to be a pawn in one of Brooks’s motivational gambits. Homola wound up declining. Brooks kept searching, and when Eruzione hit his drought, he found a willing pair of freshman forwards: Tim Harrer and Aaron Broten from the U. Brooks had recruited both of them, and both were players with speed and skill and explosive scoring ability. Brooks’s plan was to tell the press that Eruzione had injured his back, then make his erstwhile captain an assistant coach; that way he could still be in Lake Placid and contribute to the team. When the coach laid out this scenario to Eruzione, the captain was aghast. Making the Olympic team meant everything to him. In the fall, he had fractured his wrist one day in a collision with Eric Strobel, then fainted in the van as trainer Gary Smith drove him to the hospital for X-rays, not so much from the pain of the fracture as from the prospect of it costing him his roster spot. Now he was on the brink again, and for once this was no Brooksian mind game. In a hotel lobby in St. Paul, before a team dinner in late January, Brooks had a private conversation with Gus Hendrickson, his friend and the coach of Minnesota-Duluth.

  “I’m going to cut Eruzione. He
’s just not very good,” Brooks said. “I think I’m going to go with Tim Harrer.”

  “But Eruzione’s your leader. You need a leader,” Hendrickson said. “Herbie, don’t start screwing things up now.” It was exactly the sentiment of the team. They’d been through Brooks’s boot-camp grind for six months. Eruzione had become a widely admired captain, an emotional linchpin.

  “If he cuts Eruzione, we’re not going to go,” John Harrington told Hendrickson, his former coach.

  The players on the team were furious when Harrer and Broten arrived—even the Gopher guys who knew and liked them. “Great to see you, Tim,” Janaszak said to Harrer. “When’s your flight back?” Not even three weeks before Opening Ceremonies, the team confronted Brooks about his revolving door and had a four-letter suggestion for him: stop. It wasn’t fair to bring in guys so late, to send guys packing who had been making sacrifices for months. Of course the imports might stand out during their audition; they hadn’t spent months getting beaten up by Central Hockey League thugs looking to make a name for themselves by working over an Olympic kid. Led by Eruzione and O’Callahan, the players told Brooks that they were a family and that the team needed to come from the guys in the room right there. Brooks for once backed off. The final cuts were Jack Hughes, a defenseman from Harvard, and Ralph Cox, a forward from the University of New Hampshire. Cox had broken an ankle in the summer and struggled to catch up ever since. He was another guy whose skating wasn’t what Brooks wanted, but he had a goal-scoring gift that was the equal of anyone on the team. Hughes was a smart, strong player who set a school record for points for a blueliner and had the sturdy disposition to make everyone on the ice better. They were brutal cuts for Brooks; it was impossible not to go back to the way he had felt twenty years before, when he heard the same news from his Olympic coach Jack Riley. A bunch of the players were together in an apartment in Minnesota when Brooks called and spoke to Hughes and Cox.