Thirty Years Ago Today….Did You Believe In Miracles?

Team USA upset Team Canada at the Olympics yesterday afternoon, 5-3.  I am wondering if Dennis Prager watched the game.

Dennis is a huge hockey fan.  He has season tickets to the Los Angeles NHL games and on a number of occasions refers to his love for hockey on his radio show. 

I am wondering where Dennis was when Team USA defeated the USSR’s  professional   Soviet team 4-3 at Lake Placid, February 22, 1980.  I am wondering if he had become a hockey fan yet.   I am wondering if he listened to the game, THE GREATEST UPSET OF ANY GAME IN MAJOR SPORTS HISTORY!  or has seen it on television.

I have been crippled all of my cognizant life to love sports.  History, asthma,  and my difficulties lacking hand-eye cordination, exempted me from participating successfully in any of them.   

But my favorite sport of all was amateur hockey.  Asthma kept me from skating as a child so I paid little  attention  to it beyond watching the St. Paul Saints play the Kansas City Plamors and the Minneapolis Millers and such teams in the midwest professional leagues.  I bought  season tickets to Gopher hockey when I began university life at the U in 1952 and the sport took over my spectator life. 

Within a few years I wound up rating the Minnesota state public high school hockey teams for the St. Paul Pioneer Press’ Sunday sports pages.   I’d watch thirty to forty games over the winter season, most of them out doors.   St. Paul public schools played at the downtown auditorium, where the State Hockey Tournament had been played since this competition was begun in 1945.  Minneapolis teams played at the old Arena on Dupont just north of Lake Street.. That was about it for indoor ice.  All of the big power games between top teams from various conferences were played outdoors, whether the temperature was below zero or not. 

 The major powers then  were Roseau,  Warroad, and Thief River Falls from the northwest, and Eveleth, Eveleth and Eveleth for years until Grand Rapids, Coleraine, Hibbing, and Duluth East began to dominate the “Iron Range” northeast.  

In  St. Paul, Johnson High School  nearly always dominated, with Harding, Washington, and Murray occasionally causing trouble.  Roosevelt, South, and Southwest almost always battled for dominance across the river. 

I had my first dish of lutefisk in Roseau when I and Ralph Reeve, then  a sports reporter for the Pioneer Press-Dispatch traveled on  the Johnson teams’ parents’ bus to watch these two high school teams play “indoors” one evening when the temperature was at best -22 degrees Fahrenheit in the building!  

I had an opportunity to meet most of the coaches of the teams especially Bob Turner of Washington High School in St. Paul, and Bob Johnson coach of Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis. 

Johnson  moved to Madison, Wisconsin around 1966  becoming a very successful coach of the Badger hockey team.   I stopped ranking the teams around the same time, but kept contact with high school and university hockey stuff  from  a number of the old coaches, especially from Bob Turner.

Herbie Brooks played on the Johnson team which won the State Tournament in 1955 defeating Minneapolis Southwest, 3-1 in the finals.  He played for the University and in 1960 made the US Olympic team of that year, but to make room for Bob Clary,  brother of a star Harvard player Bill Clary, Brooks was dropped from the squad.  The team  went on to win the Olympic championship that year.   For the next four olympics, the US was never a threat.  The professional Russian team won every year.  Even the Canadian best amateurs faltered.

Herbie majored in psychology at the university…..Usually, in my view, psychologists aren’t very good at psychology….they may write books and advise  people from time to time,  but practicing psychology is not their bag…..But is was Herbie Brooks’ bag.   Herbie was a top notch competitor.  Bowed legs, not terribly speedy, he had many, many clever side-skills up his sleeve as a player……At the University of Minnesota where he eventually became head hockey coach, somehow his players knew how to add Herbie skills to their own special abilities…..Competitive college hockey had been improving nearly every year. 

Herbie’s Gopher teams became tough to play.  They even won the U’s first NCAA national championship.  Then Brooks was chosen to organize and coach the 1980 US Olympic team.  There was some trouble from the start.  He was a competitor.  He was going to change some things.  He didn’t want to lose. 

No one knew it at the time, but Herb Brooks was the last of the old guard gifted coaches of hockey.  He couldn’t have arrived at a better time.  A winning team was going to be created whether the players liked it or not.  He had hand-picked most of them.  Some  from his own Minnesota squad he wanted with him, but he made  them go through hoops anyway. 

He dominated the team in every possible way a coach could rule.  They learned to hate him.  He trained them to hate him more. 

Besides reading  offended writers’ reports in the newspapers about his antics as allowing them no news by  forbidding any team member from talking to the press, having tough stamina drills almost to the point where the players began to hate hockey and themselves for the pain they endured, Brooks kept a well defined distance from his players.   There would be nothing cuddly about this coach.

I got a lot of these stories from my friend, Bob Turner, almost  every day.   He  had hockey friends all over the place feeding him the inside news from Camp Terror months before the Olympic competitions began as well as prior to some of the pre competition games against lower level pro teams and then Norway and the Soviet Olympic team itself a week or so before the Tournament began. 

The Soviets were touring America beating a couple NHL teams for their warmups….They beat Herb Brooks’ very  USA Olympic team 10-3 at Madison Square Garden just a week before Lake Placid the site for the Olympics that year.   

Professional hockey players, except for those playing professionally for the Soviet Union, were not allowed to compete in the Olympics in 1980.  None of the American players could be called professional although a few had played semipro after college competition.  But the team Herb Brooks picked was talented, skilled, and very fast skating….still, they  really were kids compared to the Soviet juggernaut. 

Brooks changed the manner of the American offensive attack and made certain his players would be in the best physical condition possible…whether anyone liked it or not.  If there would be any hope to compete in the Olympics that year, team speed would have to be accompanied  by maximum physical endurance.

Bob Johnson’s son, Mark, a star player who had played  for his dad at the University of Wisconsin, I think  was 22.  Neal Broten from Roseau was 20.   Twelve of the 20 players were from Minnesota, but Bob’s son, Mark, was also a Minnesotan in his younger life.  Mike Ramsey was picked off of Brooks’ own Minnesota team was only 19.

The Soviets averaged seven years of top professional hockey experience.  They had defeated teams in the NHL the best competitions in the world.   The Russians were heavily favored, with the Canadians, Swedes, Czechs, and Finns picked to compete for the silver medal.  The Americans were enigmatic as Brooks had made them be.  The press had no idea where they might wind up……

I think Brooks knew the squad he had very well.  No one in the world could have brought that team together to do what they did.  No one.  Brooks had a tongue to go with his hate for losing.  He didn’t spare it with  his players.  He also had a tongue that channeled these players’ drive. 

Every day the reports Bob was passing on to me suggested the team was plagued with turmoil and rebellions.

Then, too, there was the politics of the day.   The Vietnam War had finally come to an end.  However, the humiliation of the war especially its last months was overwhelming.  The country was facing economic ruin.   The nation seemed crippled and beaten.  We were instructed to wear sweaters to save on home heat.  Some folks stopped  driving due to no gas.  With the capture of the Americans in its embassy in Tehran, the country seemed incompitent.  Confidence wasn’t on the horizon, either.  But the winter Olympics were being held at Lake Placid, New York.  That was a break of light through  a very dark sky. 

Friday, Febrary 22, 1980 arrived.  The Soviets were undefeated.  Team USA had a tie with Sweden, on a goal by Mike Ramsey with 22 seconds left in the game.  Both teams would have one more  game yet to play, but there was no question today’s match was more than a game. 

I was just praying we wouldn’t get swamped.  The Soviets from the start were  playing their typical superior, methodical confident control game.  Winning had become a habit.   Until trouble came in a flash one second before the end of the first period, when seemingly out of nowhere, Mark Johnson having raced past a too casual a defenseman, shot at the goalie who made a too casual a save,  shot from the rebound into the net to tie the score at 2-2.  

I had been sitting paralyzed in my car parked in deep  snow listening to the game on radio.  The televised replay of the game was scheduled for that evening, but the radio broadcast was live.    I had never been so riled over a sports event before.

Soviets scored in the second period for a 3-2 lead.  I had my wish served.  The game was close.  I left the car a wrecked man as the third period began. I thought it best to take a walk, but turned instead into the  house and found the entire family was within a foot of the radio, riveted.  Hockey is painful enough watching your team play on television.  On radio one can only hear words….The game is so fast words barely matter. 

With  ten minutes to go in the game, Mike Eruzione scored for a 4-3 USA lead..  We were all screaming in front of the radio.  Three minutes left….we could understand that.  The puck is here, now it’s there…..a shot is blocked, the puck is cleared…another drive on goal…. another  shot there ….great chunks of  more  time were chewed up  without a whistle.  The Soviets had no time to pull their goalie in the last three minutes.  Team USA was keeping pace, defending wisely, yet threatening with their speed.   The shots for the period were even.  The crowd was hysterical.

A minute left.  We couldn’t see where the puck was…..thirty seconds……twenty seconds……fifteen seconds…constant play   ten, nine eight……”Do You Believe In Miracles?” Al Michaels yelled!

Two days later, on Sunday morning, Team USA fell behind Finland in the first period and again in the second period.  If the team lost, the Soviets would win the Olympic Goal medal. 

Half of all Team USA goals scored in the 1980 Olympics were scored in the third period.  As in the Soviet game, the American ‘kids’ rallied to beat Finland  with three goals in the third period to win the gold medal.   Herb Brooks’ grueling workouts had paid a huge  dividend. 

He had accomplished the improbable…the impossible….a miracle!  It was the sports achievement of his life, perhaps of the century.  And he paid a price for it.  Many, perhaps most of the players hated him for years afterward, even though they  knew they could not have won the gold without Herb Brooks.  As they aged and kept savoring the sweet taste of victory, they softened and relented some. 

Brooks had sacrificed himself to be their hate figure in order to hasten their togetherness as a team.  Their suffering would bond them together……against Brooks, but they would take it out on their opponents by playing as a unit with intensity…..They did just that.