by Wayne Coffey
____
The teams lined up and shook hands. For ten days, Jim Craig had made a point of studying Tretiak whenever he saw him in the Village or after practice. He looked intently at his face. “I’d heard so much about him. I wanted to get a feel for who this person was. I think you can always tell a little something about a person when you look at their face,” Craig said. On the handshake line, there was Tretiak’s face again, except now it looked blank and distant. When the last Russian hand had been shaken, Craig did a hop and a little spin, a huge smile on his unshaven face.
Mikhailov went to the referees’ dressing room and sought out Kaisla. Mikhailov shook his hand. “Thank you,” the Russian captain said. “Everything was correct. You did good job.” He returned to the Soviet locker room, where an irate Tikhonov jabbed a finger in the face of four of the biggest stars in the hockey world—Tretiak, Kharlamov, Petrov, and Mikhailov—and told them one by one, “This is your loss!” “This is your loss!” Later, in his room in the Olympic Village, Tretiak spent a long time by himself, head in his hands. He had come to hate the room and the whole Village. It felt as if it were dropped in the middle of the woods, with no pulse to it, no Olympic energy or sense of place.
Vasiliev went shopping for moon boots with some teammates and actually pulled out a champagne bottle and said, “Let’s drink to the Americans.” Zhluktov joked, “Yes, we can drink to the Americans. If it’s the Czechs who win, then we jump in Lake Placid.” Helmut Balderis made it a point to find Brooks and congratulate him, doing it within view of Tikhonov. Nagobads, Balderis’s fellow Latvian, urged him not to do this in front of his coach. “He can go shit in his pants,” Balderis said of Tikhonov, his long-running tormentor.
Vladimir Lutchenko, the previously exiled star, watched the U.S. game at home in his Moscow apartment, staring vacantly at a small black-and-white television until the very end, which came about 2:30 in the morning Moscow time. It was hard to know what felt worse: that his teammates lost or that he was unable to do a thing about it. If he were a more vindictive sort, Lutchenko probably would’ve found some pleasure in the defeat. But these were Lutchenko’s teammates, his comrades, the guys he grew up with and played with all over the world. How could he take joy from their hurt? Years later, Lutchenko would move to the United States with his wife and daughters, settling in Massachusetts, where he started a hockey clinic and coached kids alongside Jim Craig. They would became friends, and they would both laugh when Craig would tell Lutchenko that he had made it possible for him to be an Olympic hero—by not being there. But there was no joking about it in the winter of 1980.
“It was heartbreaking,” Lutchenko said. Several weeks after departing Lake Placid, Tikhonov brought Lutchenko back to the team, and the Soviets won a major international tournament in Sweden.
“It was too late. The Olympics were over,” Lutchenko said.
In the locker room, a couple of Communist party bureaucrats came up to Starikov and shook their heads. “You guys just made one of the biggest mistakes of your lives,” one of them said. “Ten years from now, twenty years, everyone will still remember this game.”
“They were right,” Starikov said.
Mark Johnson had worn his knockoff Soviet sweaters for years and had his first exposure to the real Russians in the 1975 world championships in Düsseldorf, Germany. He was awestruck at their skating and creativity. He took special note of the guys whose jerseys he wore. Now, five years later, Johnson was randomly selected to be drug-tested after the United States beat the Russians. He walked into a little room off a corridor beneath the Field House stands, and sitting there waiting were Kharlamov and Mikhailov, the Russian des-ignees. The language barrier might as well have been an Iron Curtain, but the Russians didn’t need English to be gracious. Johnson thought about all those private screenings of the Summit Series, all the Sundays when he wore their jerseys, a boy impersonating world-class hockey players. His mind flickered happily with reminiscences of his life in the sport and where it had already taken him at age 22. There was one game left in his amateur career. It would be his last drug test as an amateur, and his favorite one.
In the locker room, the team broke into a spontaneous chorus of “God Bless America,” filling in the words they couldn’t remember with hums and whistles. President Carter called and Jack O’Callahan joked that Brooks probably put him on hold. Mike Moran, U.S. press officer, dispatched three attachés to the locker room to try to get Craig, Eruzione, Johnson—someone—to meet with the world’s press, per Olympic requirements. All three attachés were summarily rebuffed by Brooks, who wasn’t about to veer off his no-interview course now. “The sports moment of the century, and we couldn’t get a single player to the interview room,” Moran said. Main Street in Lake Placid had turned into Miracle Boulevard, thick with revelers, the “U-S-A, U-S-A” chant cascading from one end of town to the other. Craig and Eruzione and their fathers walked through the snow and the mayhem, ABC’s Jim Lampley in tow. A bunch of players and their families went up the hill—the same hill Brooks had them run in full gear—to the Holiday Inn. In the hotel bar they watched ABC’s taped delay broadcast. The United States won again. People put down $10 apiece and closed down the bar. A few hundred yards down Main Street, Mirror Lake Liquors sold out of champagne and had to bolt the doors to stop any more customers from coming in.
“It was a retailer’s dream,” said Jim Shea, a 1964 Olympian who was working in the store that night and would later own it.
Amid the iron mines of Virginia, Minnesota, Mary Harrington, mother of Bah, listened on the radio in the family room. Her husband, Charles, caught all the action he could on a scratchy transistor radio in the cab of his locomotive as he hauled iron ore from the mines. Neighbors descended on the Harringtons’ new colonial for a Friday night party, whether the Harringtons wanted them or not (they did). In Winthrop, Massachusetts, the lawn in front of the Eruzione home on Pleasant Street was as crowded as a Cape Cod beach on the Fourth of July. Before long, Eruzione’s picture would be on the cover of the Winthrop phone book and Eruzione would be the recipient of two marriage proposals and for the first time in his life people were actually pronouncing his name right.
On the Iron Range, from Babbitt to Grand Rapids and even in Embarrass—“The Nation’s Cold Spot”—people ran outside and hollered and shot off guns. In the Mediterranean Sea, the U.S.S. Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, flashed the score to a Soviet intelligence ship that was nearby.
Chris Ortloff, the director of ceremonies and awards for the Games, had to leave the Field House with 10 minutes to go, an ill-timed medal ceremony requiring his presence. The ceremony—held on Mirror Lake—wound up being delayed because the only thing people were paying attention to was the hockey game. Ortloff was listening on the radio as he sat in an Econoline van when he spotted Sergei Pavlov, the chief of mission for the Soviet Union. Ortloff invited Pavlov to warm up in the van and listen to the end of the game with him. As time got short, Pavlov clasped his hands together.
“Are you praying?” Ortloff asked.
“Don’t tell Brezhnev,” Pavlov replied. They both smiled. When the game ended, they shook hands.
“Congratulations,” Pavlov said.
____
Two days after the loss to the United States, the Soviet Union scored nine times in the first thirty-five minutes and crushed the Swedes, 9–2. The Soviets would not lose another official international game for five years. They would not lose to the Americans again for eleven years, and would beat the U.S. teams by a total score of 38–9 in their next five meetings in world championship play. But the future domination came with no rewind mechanism, no clause that could undo what happened on Friday night, February 22, 1980. It was the thirtieth anniversary of the film debut of Walt Disney’s Cinderella. Maybe it figured.
No unbiased observer could credibly claim that the United States was the better team in Lake Placid, or even that it played the stronger game, a difficult argument to support when you are outs
hot, 39–16. What the Americans did do, however, was to score more goals, 4–3, and that is enough to be called the winner. They didn’t concern themselves with the skill and experience and international pedigree they were giving up. They simply skated and hit and never relented, and they got sixty minutes of stubborn brilliance from Jim Craig. “It was the greatest game he ever played, before or since,” said Harry Sinden, general manager of the Boston Bruins, who would trade for Craig before 1980 was over. Rob McClanahan put it well in a newspaper interview for the tenth anniversary of the victory. “We were just naïve college punks,” he said. The naïveté spawned a boldness to shoot for a completely far-fetched goal. You never know if you never try. They put aside their regional issues and fed off their unanimous abhorrence of how they were treated and became a whole that was something to behold. Or as Sergei Makarov said, “Their eyes were burning. They were team.”
George F. Kennan, Russian scholar and Cold War expert, once said, “Heroism is endurance for one moment more.” And indeed, it was ultimately the U.S. players’ endurance that made them so endearing, and so heroic. They endured their coach and his ceaseless demands and mind games. They endured his Herbies. They endured their own doubts and insecurities and youthfulness and the almost universal conviction that they would be doing swell to get the bronze. They kept falling behind. They kept coming back. Each time they did, each time they lined up before leaving the ice and raised their sticks in salute to the crowd, on one side of the rink and then the other, thanking their fast-growing legion of fans for their support, they were more and more becoming poster boys for the American dream, homegrown proof of what’s possible if you work hard and stay together. You watched them play and you were struck by the power of a simple, single thought: Hey, we really can still do it. In a profoundly pessimistic time, they brought hope. In a time of malaise, they brought spunk and spirit. The hostages and gas lines and the rolling Russian tanks were fairly flogging the American psyche, until Phil Verchota and Mark Pavelich and Mike Ramsey and the rest of them started flogging back. And the best part was they didn’t even know they were doing it. They thought they were just trying to win hockey games.
The most storied U.S. Olympic hockey victory in history also turned out to be the most serendipitous. The winning goal of the Russia game was scored by a captain who had almost been cut, on a broken play, off the wrong foot. Two of the three goals that preceded it were the work of hard work and hustle but also of bounces that bordered on the karmic. The opponent was arguably as great a hockey team as has ever been assembled. The coach was not the first choice for the job, and maybe not even the second. But he was a man as daring as he was detached, and it’s hard to say which was bolder: reprogramming his players to learn an entirely different style of hockey in seven months or uniting a team rife with geographical factions by making himself the common enemy.
A little bit of the miracle of Lake Placid died with Herbert Paul Brooks on the hot, hard asphalt of Interstate 35 in Forest Lake, Minnesota, on August 11, 2003. He was, after all, the architect of it. But even amid the tears and the sorrow as the team gathered for its last reunion in the Cathedral of Saint Paul five days later, there somehow remained the same sense of possibility that the team had so powerfully come to symbolize twenty-five years before. To see the honorary pallbearers raising their sticks as his body was carried down the steps, the salute this time for the coach, was to celebrate Herb Brooks’s passion for the game and his quietly held conviction that in one game on one night, his team of overmatched and underaged kids could beat the best team in the world. It was to believe again in the nation’s capacity for greatness, in the collective power of a true team, foibles and frailties notwithstanding. For the cover of the program that was handed out before the service, the Brooks family chose not a formal portrait or an image of Brooks as 66-year-old grandfather or family man but a close-up photo of a 42-year-old coach on the ice in Lake Placid, USA warm-up suit in place, whistle around his neck, an uncharacteristic softness to his smiling face. The miracle was still before him. Hope was high.
Six months after the funeral service, the NHL All-Star game was played in Herb Brooks’s hometown. A statue of Brooks was unveiled outside the Xcel Center, and many of the 1980 team members were on hand for the occasion, among them Jim Craig. The day before the game, Dan Brooks, Herb’s son, met Jim Craig at his hotel and they drove together to the cemetery where Herb Brooks was laid to rest. Dan Brooks brought an extra pair of boots and the two of them, the coach’s son and the coach’s goalie, tromped through knee-high snow and quiet and unspoiled whiteness. They shoveled snow off the graves in the family plot, and when they finally found Herb’s gravestone (the headstone hadn’t been completed), Jim Craig stood at the foot of it with Dan Brooks, and then he had a conversation with his coach. Jim Craig thanked Herb Brooks for being hard on him and for making him a better goaltender and a better person and for preparing him for the greatest three periods of his hockey life. He thanked him for believing in him. Mostly he thanked Herb Brooks for a night in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York when snow fell and the Olympic Field House throbbed and whether you were in the goal or on the ice or in the seats or at home, you came away feeling that greatness wasn’t a realm strictly for the superhuman, remote and unattainable, but rather something much closer, real, and reachable, something within every one of us.
________________________
POSTGAME
FINNS AND
FAREWELLS
Outside the U.S. locker room in the Olympic Field House, a cinder-block wall was disappearing beneath a pasted-up patchwork of yellow congratulatory telegrams that had come in from all over the world, faster than a Buzz Schneider slap shot. As soon as they arrived, Sheldon Burns would tape them to the wall. Burns, a young physician, was relocating his practice in Minnesota and had a little free time that winter and had contacted Ralph Jasinski, the team general manager, asking if he could volunteer to help. Burns has since gone on to be a prominent sports physician for several U.S. Olympic hockey teams as well as the Minnesota North Stars, Timberwolves, and Vikings, but then he was just a well-educated go-fer who wanted to be part of the team. The messages inspired the Americans, and annoyed others, specifically Jorma Valtonen, the Finnish goaltender who had stoned the United States in the world championships the year before.
“Who’s playing?” Warren Strelow, the U.S. goaltending coach, inquired of Valtonen upon meeting him in the hallway before the U.S.-Finland final.
“Who the hell do you think is playing? I am, and you are not going to be getting any more of those,” Valtonen said, pointing to the yellow wall.
Brooks needed no reminders whatever that his team’s business wasn’t finished with the victory over the Russians. The morning after the miracle, he ripped into his team after seeing them signing autographs and schmoozing with fans and, to his way of thinking, acting as if they had no further challenges ahead of them.
Brooks, always wound tight, was even antsier than usual Sunday morning, February 24. He shared a trailer in the Village with Craig Patrick, equipment manager Buddy Kessel, and Jasinski. He got in the shower, medal permutations bubbling in his brain. The order of the final standings would be determined by all the games between the final four teams—even games in the preliminary round. You got two points for a victory, one for a tie, none for a loss. If teams had the same point total, goal differential would decide the order. Here’s how the hockey standings looked heading into the final day of the XIII Winter Games:
If the United States beat Finland, the gold medal was assured for the Americans. But if the Americans lost to Finland and the Soviets beat Sweden, the Soviets would win the gold, the United States the bronze. If Finland beat the United States by two goals and the Swedes managed to tie the Soviets, the gold would go to the Soviets—and the United States would actually slip out of the medals altogether, since all four teams would have three points and the United States would have the worst goal differential. Brooks kept lather
ing, and got himself into more and more of a lather. “Herb, you’re wasting your time,” Jasinski told him. “Don’t go through all this folderol about how we could end up with nothing. Let’s go out and play the game.”
The game started shortly after eleven a.m. On the ride over to the arena, Neal Broten and Dave Christian held out their usual hope that figure skater Tai Babilonia, their favorite Olympic athlete, would be in their shuttle van. She wasn’t. Brooks told trainer Gary Smith, “You better get your kit ready, because if we lose, a lot of people are going to get hurt jumping off our bandwagon.” The coach’s message to the players wasn’t much more long-winded than it was in the Soviet game. “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your bleeping grave,” Brooks said.
“He didn’t have to say much more than that. We knew he was right,” Mark Johnson said. Steve Janaszak was struck by the utter contrast from the Friday night speech. In thirty-six hours, Brooks had gone from mystical and uplifting to pragmatic and threatening. “His speech before the Finland game was negative, but the impact was positive,” Janaszak said. “You wanted to avoid that scenario at all costs.” Janaszak sat in the locker room and envisioned a 40-year-old guy sitting at a bar and saying, “We were that close. We could’ve had it all.” “It was the classic rip-your-heart-out kind of picture,” Janaszak said.
Finland had never won a medal in Olympic hockey and had never beaten the Americans, but this was no team of pushovers. They had a gold lion on their chests and a lot of guys who could get up and down the ice and, in the 33-year-old Valtonen, a confident veteran of a decade of international competition. The Finns were a strange team to peg, though. They opened their Games by losing to Poland, 5–4, right after Baker’s slap shot tied the Swedes on the first day of hockey competition. They lost despite outshooting the Poles, 49–25. A week later, they were tied with the Russians with five minutes to play, before they were done in by a trademark Russian rampage, three goals in 79 seconds.
