by Wayne Coffey
Jukka Porvari, the Finn captain, wanted to keep the crowd out of the game as much as possible, and did his part just over nine minutes into the final game, one-timing a slap shot that flew over Craig’s glove from fifty feet to give Finland a 1–0 lead. It was the sixth time in seven games the United States had fallen behind. Valtonen turned away fourteen U.S. shots in the first period, the Finns content to play most of the game in their zone and pick their spots for a counterattack. Mike Ramsey was sent off for roughing early in the second period, but the Americans did a superb job of killing the penalty, and as Ramsey was coming out, Neal Broten checked Finnish forward Ismo Villa, who coughed up the puck to Steve Christoff in the right circle. Before the game Brooks had laced into both Broten and Christoff for their spotty play over the fortnight, not knowing he’d get such an immediate return. With a little under five minutes gone, Christoff moved in on goal. Valtonen had robbed him in the first period, making a stop on his knees, then reaching up and plucking the puck out of the air before it could go in.
With Finland’s Marku Hakulinen trying to ride him off, Christoff kept moving, got off a soft backhand shot—and was as surprised as anyone to see it slip through Valtonen’s pads. The score didn’t stay tied even two minutes. Schneider uncharacteristically missed a perfect pass that would’ve given him a dead-on shot in front, and even more uncharacteristically swung his stick like an ax on Finn defenseman Olli Saarinen about five seconds later. It took thirty seconds for Finland to score on a power play and the United States again found itself down a goal going into the third period.
Just over two minutes in, Christian started in his own end, weaved up ice, split the defense. He held on long enough to draw the defense toward him, then shoveled a pass on the left wing to Verchota, who ripped a wrist shot inside the right post. The game was tied, 2–2. In the stands, Bill Christian, Dave’s father, scorer of two goals to beat the Russians in 1960, and Roger Christian, Dave’s uncle, scorer of three goals against the Czechs in the final, stood and cheered.
The fans started a new chant: “We want a goal!” Johnson stickhandled away from two defenders behind the Finland goal and slid the puck to McClanahan, who waited for Valtonen to go down, saw him split his legs, and shot it right through the gap. The next gap you saw was the one in a beaming McClanahan’s mouth, where a tooth used to be.
United States 3, Finland 2.
Broten pulled down Villa and got two minutes for hooking. The United States killed the penalty. Six seconds after Broten got out, Christian got whistled for tripping. Brooks took a deep breath. “Gotta do it, gotta do it. Let’s be positive now,” Brooks said calmly as he walked up and down the bench. The only permutation he was thinking about now was winning. It was still a one-goal game when Verchota got called for roughing with 4:15 to play. Broten and Christoff forechecked like madmen, locking the Finns in their own zone. The puck shot out toward the blue line. Johnson picked it up, skated in, and backhanded a shot that a diving Valtonen stopped. Johnson got the rebound and popped a forehand over the goalie’s right skate, into the net, and in an instant he was buried in blue shirts and the arena was erupting, as loud now as it had been Friday night.
United States 4, Finland 2.
Buddy Kessel wrapped his arms around Brooks and bounced him against the Plexiglas behind the bench. “Attaboy, Magic!” the coach shouted. Now there was yet another chant: “We’re No. 1.” Craig made one last sparkling save, kicking out a slap shot with his left skate. The noise kept building, and the Americans kept coming, pressuring, the bench standing, players smacking their sticks against the boards, even as Schneider blasted a slap shot that hit both posts, and a rebound that hit the crossbar. No goal. No matter. The clock went to 10 seconds and 5 and then 0:00, and the conga line, this time in blue, was on for one last engagement, the whole bench spilling onto the ice, heading for Jim Craig. Dave Christian flung his stick into the stands. Broten saw him do it, so he flung his over the glass, too. Brooks took off for the locker room again. Eric Strobel took a swig from a champagne bottle and he and John Harrington doused each other. Leslie Schorr, Mark Johnson’s fiancée, jumped on the ice in her red-and-white Badger cheerleading top, because she always jumped on the ice after games in Dane County Coliseum and why should the Olympics be any different? The first player she got to was Dave Silk, so she leaped into his arms. One of Mark Johnson’s wedding presents later that summer was a blown-up photo of his bride wrapped around Dave Silk in Lake Placid. A handful of other fans got on the ice and handed players flags and gave them hugs. It was madness. It was beautiful. The players lined up and shook hands with the Finns. When the last hand had been shaken, Craig, mop-haired and delirious, skated over to the edge of the ice and searched the stands. He clutched a flag someone had given him. “Where’s my father?” he said. He counted the rows. He kept looking. Dave Silk came over and hugged him. “Where is he?” Craig said. Finally, Jim Craig found him. He skated toward the gate and held up a single finger. The noise would not let up. There was one event left in the 1980 Winter Olympics—the Soviet Union–Sweden hockey game. It would have no impact on the gold medal. That belonged to the United States of America.
There was more delirium in the locker room, and a goaltender with a message. Still in his pads and his No. 30 sweater, Craig revisited Brooks’s stinging mind game of a month earlier when he called the goalie in his office and told him he was going with Steve Janaszak. He playfully jabbed a finger in Brooks’s chest.
“I showed you,” the goalie said.
“You showed me all right, Jimmy,” the coach replied.
The medal ceremony was moved from Mirror Lake to the Field House, at the urging of ABC. Mats Waltin, captain of the bronze-winning Swedish team, got on the lower step of the podium, and then Boris Mikhailov, captain of the Soviet team, made his way to the second step. On the top step was Michael Eruzione of Winthrop, Massachusetts, representing the United States. “The Star Spangled Banner” began, the American flag went up, and twenty U.S. hockey players sang, loudly and proudly. Once they all got their individual medals, Eruzione beckoned the whole team to join him on the top step, and the dash was on, the ice full of kids in blue warm-up suits trying to squeeze into a space meant to hold one person.
After the Soviets were awarded their silver medals, they never turned them back in to have their names inscribed on them—the customary procedure. “I don’t have mine,” Makarov said. “I think it is in garbage in Lake Placid jail.”
As a team and a culture, the Soviets did all they could to expunge the memory of February 22, 1980. In the next day’s edition of Pravda, the Communist party newspaper, there was no mention of the game with the United States—nor in an Olympic wrapup article on February 25. Not far from the Moscow River, the offices of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation are bisected by a corridor that runs for fifty meters or more, the length of it covered with historic photos of hockey glory from all over the world. Conspicuously absent are all images from Lake Placid. After the Russians cleared out of their rooms in the Lake Placid Olympic Village, cleanup workers found 121 empty vodka bottles in the dropped ceiling of their units, the detritus of despondence.
On the team’s flight home, Tikhonov continued to rail about the poor play of his No. 1 line—Vladimir Petrov, Boris Mikhailov, and Valery Kharlamov, along with Vladislav Tretiak. Defenseman Valery Vasiliev had heard enough. He got up and went over to Tikhonov’s seat and grabbed him around the neck. “I will kill you right now!” he shouted, before being pulled off.
When the Soviets landed in Moscow, there were crowds gathered to greet such athletes as skier Nikolai Zimyatov, a big hero of the Games. “We were demonstratively shoved aside, and rightly so,” Tretiak wrote in his autobiography. The response from party officials was not so indifferent. “The politicians almost wanted to kill us,” Makarov said. “The relations with the U.S. were not good. We had invaded Afghanistan. They gave a very hard talk to coaching staff and older players.”
Bill Schneider, Buzz’s father
, had to leave Lake Placid before the hockey medal ceremony Sunday afternoon to catch his flight home from the Albany airport. In the car were his wife, Ann, Buzz’s sister Amy, and Dave Brooks, Herb’s younger brother. They stopped at a little roadside tavern about forty miles out of Lake Placid to watch the medals being handed out. When the bartender found out who they were, he bought them a round of beers. Everyone cheered. Ann Schneider cried when she heard the national anthem and when she saw Mike Eruzione calling everybody up to join him on the platform. The Schneiders got home to Babbitt, Minnesota, on the eastern edge of the Iron Range, at midnight. Bill Schneider, an industrial engineer, was at work at seven a.m. It was about the time that Buzz and his teammates were boarding Air Force One and flying to the White House to meet President Carter, most of them not having had the benefit of sleep and thankful no Breathalyzer tests would be administered. Somewhere over upstate New York, Neal Broten phoned home and reached his father. “Guess what, Dad? I’m calling from the president’s plane.” By early that afternoon, the players on the U.S. Olympic hockey team were hugging and saying goodbye, their time as a team complete. The parting felt sudden and wrong. Soon the Midwestern guys were flying in one direction, the Eastern guys in another. On the flight back to Logan Airport in Boston, Eruzione, Dave Silk, and Jack O’Callahan got one more rousing cheer after the captain announced their presence. As the plane descended and Winthrop and Charlestown and the city of Boston came into view, Eruzione looked over at Silk. Silk had tears in his eyes. “It’s over,” he said.
Years passed, and the impact of what happened in Lake Placid seemed only to grow. On the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet game, Makarov was in San Jose when Eruzione was introduced before a Sharks’ game and got a prolonged standing ovation. “I played twenty-four years of professional hockey and I never hear noise like he hears twenty years after one game,” Makarov said, more in wonder than resentment.
The legacy of the game went far beyond clapping hands. In the seventeen years of the NHL draft to that point, there had been 1,780 players selected and not one was an American high school player. Two years later, 47 of 252—nearly one in five—was an American high schooler. Just like that, the old Canadian guard in the NHL, a group that tended to change its thinking every lunar eclipse or so, started to realize there were some players south of the border who might be worth looking at. “Those U.S. players really changed the view that NHL people had of U.S. players,” Michael Smith, general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks, said.
A whole generation of young American players suddenly had heroes and role models, and new heights to aspire to. Pat LaFontaine celebrated his fifteenth birthday the night the United States beat the Russians. Four years later, he’d emerge as the brightest young U.S. star in the 1984 Games in Sarajevo, beginning a career that culminated with his enshrinement in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame—on the same day the 1980 team went in.
“They blew the doors wide open and made it possible for guys like me to get a chance to play in the NHL,” LaFontaine said.
Thirteen players from the U.S. team—Ken Morrow, Neal Broten, Mike Ramsey, Dave Christian, Mark Johnson, Mark Pavelich, Rob McClanahan, Jack O’Callahan, Steve Christoff, Dave Silk, Bill Baker, Jim Craig, Steve Janaszak—went on to play in the NHL. One of them was not Eruzione, whose last competitive goal was the wrong-footed wrist shot that beat the Russians. Eruzione retired a week after the Games, having no notion that he’d still be talking about them twenty-five years later.
In time, almost all the players came to appreciate that all Herb Brooks wanted was their best, and he simply had his own way of getting it. He was 42 in Lake Placid. He was a week past his sixty-sixth birthday when he died; friends said that he seemed to be lightening up a little, a bit less inclined to do the windmill-tilting, more inclined to enjoy himself. “I’m just a guy from the East Side,” he’d always say, and those who knew him best agreed with the simple self-assessment of a complex man.
“He led a far greater life, with far greater impact, than one Friday night in Lake Placid,” said David Conti, the director of scouting for the New Jersey Devils. “That may have been his defining moment, but that was just one game. He coached a lot of games—and meant so much to so many people.”
Four months after the Friday night in Lake Placid, Herb Brooks wrote every player on the team a personal, eight-paragraph letter. It read:
Under separate cover, you will be receiving a laminated team picture from Craig and myself. This reflects our complete respect we have for you as an athlete and as a person.
I feel respect is the greatest reward in the world of sport. You have earned that from the coaching staff.
Personally, this year was not only my most enjoyable year in coaching, but also my toughest. Toughest because it involved making so many difficult decisions regarding the makeup of our final team.
Because of that, and because I wanted to be as objective as possible, I stayed away from close personal contacts with you. I did not want the U.S. Hockey Community to say that regionalism and/or favoritism entered into my final selections.
This year was a challenge for all of us.
A challenge to:
Live and work as a unit.
Play a positive game—a creative way.
Make the most out of our dreams.
You met those challenges and conquered them.
If there was any team I ever wanted to identify with on a personal basis, this was the team. Hopefully that day will come.
Respectfully,
Herb Brooks
BOX SCORE
U.S.A. VS. SOVIET UNION,
February 22, 1980, Olympic Field House
U.S.A. 2 0 2—4
Soviet Union 2 1 0—3
FIRST PERIOD
U.S.S.R.—Vladimir Krutov (Alexei Kasatonov), 9:12
U.S.A.—Buzz Schneider (Mark Pavelich), 14:03
U.S.S.R.—Sergei Makarov (Alexander Golikov), 17:34
U.S.A.—Mark Johnson (Dave Christian, Dave Silk), 19:59
SECOND PERIOD
U.S.S.R.—Alexander Maltsev (Krutov), 2:18
THIRD PERIOD
U.S.A.—Mark Johnson (Silk), 8:39
U.S.A.—Mark Eruzione (Pavelich, John Harrington), 10:00
SHOTS ON GOAL
U.S.A. 8 2 6—16
U.S.S.R. 18 12 9—39
GOALTENDERS: Jim Craig, Vladislav Tretiak, Vladimir Myshkin (1)
PENALTIES
First period: U.S.S.R., Boris Mikhailov, 3:25, hooking.
Second period: U.S.A., John Harrington, 0:58, holding;
U.S.A., Jim Craig, 9:50, delay;
U.S.S.R., Yuri Lebedev, 17:08, unsportsmanlike conduct;
U.S.A., Ken Morrow, 17:08, unsportsmanlike conduct.
Third period: U.S.S.R., Vladimir Krutov, 6:47, high sticking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I spent the night of February 22, 1980, in the basement of a friend’s house, alone with the images of a taped-delay hockey game, the voices of Al Michaels and Ken Dryden and an old dog named Fang. I was allergic to Fang, so I sneezed a lot. Otherwise I was as mesmerized as most every other American at the game between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Fang has passed on, and so have my allergies. The marvel of what happened in Lake Placid has not. Two years of work have gone into this book, and it’s no reach to say there is someone to thank for every single day. Liz DeFazio, Steve Vassar, and Sean Ayers, the staff of the Winter Olympic Museum in Lake Placid, housed a slap shot away from where the miracle occurred, threw open their files and archives and had the courtesy not to laugh when I asked if they could help me find the guy who drove the Olympic Zamboni. Ted Blazer, head of the Olympic Regional Development Authority in Lake Placid, was a staunch ally, as was Sandy Caligiore, his aide-de-camp and PR man extraordinaire. Jim McKenna of the Essex County Visitors and Convention Bureau and his staff provided valuable information. Virtually everyone who was involved in the organization of the Lake Placid Olympics who is still
around was a big help, too, especially Bob Allen, Phil Wolff, Jim Rogers, Jim Shea, Ray Pratt, Chris Ortloff, Ed Lewi, and Ed Stransenbach. Thanks, too, to Tom Sersha, executive director of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame.
A trip to Moscow was a highlight of the research, for reasons far beyond the exposure it gave me to new flavors of vodka and one of the world’s great subway systems. Robert Edelman, Russian scholar and professor at the University of California–San Diego, pointed me in the right direction, read the manuscript, and had dozens of suggestions, all of them valuable. Steve Warshaw of Universal Sports Marketing has done a great deal of business in Russia, and it shows. Igor Rabiner, a widely respected columnist for Sport Express, a Russian sports newspaper, was tour guide, translator, interview facilitator, and colleague. Venerable journalist Seva Kukushkin, who knows Russian sports as well as anyone, was a key conduit and cordial company besides. Special thanks to Sergei Makarov, Vladimir Lutchenko, Zinetula Bilyaletdinov, Sergei Starikov, and Viktor Tikhonov. John Sanful, seasoned hockey journalist, was a valuable eleventh-hour sounding board, and Igor Kuperman of the Phoenix Coyotes, expert on all things pertaining to Russian hockey, shared his knowledge generously.
