27 years ago today, the US Olympic hockey team beat the “unbeatable” Russian hockey team at Lake Placid. The Miracle on Ice.
That famous photograph of the team FREAKING OUT features, in the foreground, defenseman Jack O’Callahan, straddling defenseman Mike Ramsey (in the HBO documentary Do You Believe In Miracles? – Ramsey says, with this look on his face which brings a lump to my throat just mentioning it: “I’ll take that picture ……. to my grave with me.”) … with absolute MAYHEM behind them. I’ve looked at that photo so many times and yet – it still seems fresh to me. Their joy is still infectious, so many years later.
Like most of us who were alive at that time, and at all aware of anything, I have vivid memories of the 1980 Winter Olympics, and of these college kids who came along and slayed the Russian dragon. I was particularly into the whole thing because of the Boston presence on the team. My family’s from Boston. There was a regional component to our triumph, as well as a national component.
However, it is only in retrospect that I realize just how HUGE the whole thing actually was. I didn’t really get the context of it while it was happening – the Cold War context, and also the hockey context – just how huge a dynasty the Russians had, in terms of how they played the game, how they dominated international hockey, etc.
I must say to EVERYONE out there who has televisions (speaking as a chick who had no TV for 2 years, I totally understand – and as someone who no longer has a TV, I get it) …Keep an eye open for the documentary I mentioned: “Do You Believe in Miracles” – or perhaps it’s on Netflix. I own it, naturally, but I’m sure it is available otherwise. Even without the topic, which I love – it is one of my favorite documentaries ever made. I watch it so often that it’s embarrassing. But it NEVER. gets old.
Narrated beautifully and simply by Liev Schrieber – with interviews with Jim Craig, Herb Brooks, Jack O’Callahan, Craig Whitney, Eric Strobel, Dave Silk (who was my personal favorite, I admit it) – and many others – the documentary just GETS the big-ness of the event. It GETS the magnitude. I get goose-bumps watching it.
I remember having a discussion here on this blog about the greatest moment in sports history. The general consensus was that the miracle on ice HAD to be # 1. There were no other contenders, really.
Al Michaels, the dude who made the famous “Do you believe in miracles?” call (which – when you listen to it – in the moment – AS the game is going on – you just can FEEL the emotion, the amazement – the guy is absolutely flipping his lid – it’s awesome). But anyway, he is also interviewed quite a bit in the documentary – and he said at one point, in terms of how the game happened at 5 pm on a Friday night – and the network made the unprecedented decision to tape it and then re-play it that night at 8 pm – because by that point, everybody wanted to see this match-up – He said, “And so on Friday, you had this bizarre circumstance of people filing into the arena for what was, essentially, a matinee. Little did any of those people know that they were about to witness one of the greatest sporting events of their lives.”
I’ve posted a bunch of stuff on the miracle on ice – mainly as a lead-up to the film coming out – which I was excited and anxious over … The story means so much to me, and I was terrified they would mess it up (I don’t feel they did – by the way – loved the movie – but it can’t hold a candle to that documentary, and seeing the real thing. MAN.)
Aw, when you put those old posts up, there’s always a comment by Big Dan and I get all choked up again.
I miss him.
I know. What a nice nice man. :(
I stumbled across your blog while searching for pictures of Herbie to post on my Virtual High School course homepage- instruct America’s youth; that sort of thing….I was living in the Twin Cities at the time and the Olympic team had played a home schedule in Minneapolis, so I’d seen them play many times. We figured that they were a good team- and that they were medal contenders- we began to get pretty excited after the Czech game. I recall leaving work early that day to listen to the tilt(apologies to Bill Klement) at 4:00 CST; there was no live TV of the game. I remember standing in our living room listening to some crackly radio feed out of Canada somewhere- too excited to sit down; jumping up and down during the course of perhaps the most exciting sporting event I’ve ever (sort of) witnessed. We always considered it ‘our’ team as Herbie and 12 of the players were Minnesotans (most of them Golden Gophers.) What a day that was!
PS. I’ve loved (and used) the term jag-off ever since I lived in Chicago in the late ’70’s
ganderson – Oh, I love love love hearing personal stories of how people saw (or, in your case, heard) that game. Thank you for sharing that!
And “jagoff” is the best. I am quite partial to it. :)
I was a tot when this happened, but interestingly enough a few years ago I met a gal whose birthday was that date. How do you compete with that?
Well, also the fact that they did this on Washington’s birthday. I mean, come ON!!
On Sunday as you may all recall,the lads played the Finns- and they were down after two periods- Herb came into the dressing room, looked at the team and said “if you lose this game, you’ll remember it for the rest of your *&%$#@ lives..” He then turned and began walking out of the room , stopped, turned around and said ” your *&%$#@ lives!”. You all know the rest.
One cinematic note: in Miracle, (which I enjoyed a lot) in the scene in the locker room between periods of the Sweden game Herbie/Kurt Russell calls Rob McClanahan a “candy ass”. The reality was much worse- in fact he called him a “cake-eater”. Herb was from the blue collar East Side of St. Paul, McClanahan was from rather rarified air of Mounds View, MN. To be called a cake-eater meant that one was lacking in heart and guts. Other cake-eater towns that I’m familiar with are Edina, MN, Longmeadow and Lincoln, MA (many cake-eater towns in MA, where I live) and perhaps Winnetka and Glen Ellyn, IL.
Oops- I guess tht story’s been told already… sorry.
Brooks was a madman and a tyrant, but it was all calculated to get them on board with the system. I was just reading E.M. Swift’s Sportsmen of the Year essay on the ’80 US team and it’s full of amazing stuff – there were some good players on that team who would eventually go on to successful NHL careers (not that anyone knew that when Swift was writing) – Mark Pavelich, Neal Broten, Mark Johnson, and Kenny Morrow were all on that team – and some of them had either already been drafted or were looking ahead to the next draft. Brooks had to convince them to unite in a cause rather than look to showcase their own skills for their future employers, a distraction that the Russians never had to deal with until the defections started in the mid-80’s. (Viacheslav Fetisov, for example, was on the Russian team and eventually played in the NHL.) He also had to convince them to match the fitness levels of their more-practiced opponents, going to conditioning experts from all sorts of sports to learn about lactic acid buildup, anaerobic capacity – all the stuff every serious athlete hears about now in high school, he had to basically discover and apply for the first time to a hockey team. As Swift points out, for the tournament they were outscored 9-6 in the first period, but outscored their opponents 16-3 in the third. (This started with tying the opener against Sweden with 25 seconds left, and ended 2-0 against the Russians and 3-0 against the Finns in the medal rounds.)
Nightfly –
Bill Baker’s goal against Sweden was really almost the biggest goal of the entire Olympics – when you look at it in the perspective of the whole event, and how without that goal … hmmm, they might not have even gone on to the medal round.
Do you have a link to that Swift essay?
Nightfly – Never mind – I got it.
Nightfly is correct about the conditioning aspect of that team- for Brooks that philosophy began at the U of M in the ’70’s. Jack Blatherwick- former coach at the Breck School in Minneapolis was the conditioning guru who contributed much to the success of the ’80 team. Also, Herbie was one of the first, if not the first North American coach to stress skating. As Nightfly says, a number of the players on that team went on to have good NHL careers- particularly Ramsey, Broten, Morrow and Johnson and Christian. (Contrast that with the ’60 Gold Medal winners who had a number of NHL caliber players- Billy Cleary, Jack McCartan and John Mayasich, just to name three; yet only Tommy Williams had any sort of NHL career. The ’80 guys opened up the league for American players.) Another sort of interesting tidbit was the fact that there was absolutely no love lost between Badger Bob Johnson and Brooks, nor between BU coach Jackie Parker and Brooks; yet the BU players and the UW players were key contributors to that gold medal. Thanks to you all for allowing me a morning’s distraction from my work. :)
“Cake-eater”, haha. That may not mean much to most people, but for some that will leave a mark.
I heard interviews with other players who described that confrontation in the locker room in vivid detail 25 years later. Hard to forget, obviously.
Sheila – sorry for the late reply; glad you found it. Lunch hour is only so long. =) I actually have Swift’s essay reprinted in a book of the best hockey writing: there’s an excerpt of Plimpton’s book about the exhibition game where he played goal for the Bruins; a hunk of the screenplay from Slap Shot (which is awesome); stuff about Gretzky and other great players, stuff from the New Yorker… very enjoyable and I’m still going through it all.
My most vivid quote from the Swift article is Brooks punishing the kids by having them do wind sprints after a game, until the workers finally shut the lights on them. Infuriated, Johnson cracked his stick over the boards as he finally went off – and Brooks snarled, “If one more kid breaks his stick over the boards, I’ll skate you till you die!” He probably meant it, too.
Nightfly – ha. In the DVD extras for the movie Miracle – there’s a long uncut video tape of Kurt Russell and the film director sitting around a table interviewing Herb Brooks, in preparation for the movie – it’s fascinating – Brooks is a great storyteller (I loved one thing he said: “I never gave the team a curfew because it was always the best players who broke curfews.”) But anyway Brooks mentioned that moment you refer to – turning the lights off – and shouting that, etc. – and Brooks said, “If I could have a do-over in life … I would do over that moment.”
If you’re into hockey – like I am – it’s a really fascinating interview, even though it’s rough video-tape footage, no sound, no lights, etc. But some really great stuff there.
Fear can be a powerful motivator, but it has its limitations. Brooks was tyrannical, but there was also the element of being part of something bigger than yourself. Fear wasn’t Brooks’ only tool – he managed to find a delicate balance that worked…
I don’t know if I’ll ever really “get” the importance of this game. I mean… I understand the whole cold war thing, but I wasn’t coherent for really any of it. But the picture of the team celebrating are embedded in my mind. The sheer joy on their faces is incredible and almost indescribable. Almost makes me jealous that I don’t “get it’.
I just get chills thinking about this. The whole thing was just stupendous. My family was into hockey, too. We went to lots of the San Diego Gulls games (hahaha) when I was a kid. And this game just … I don’t know. It was galvanizing, a kind of rallying point. I watched my usually undemonstrative dad FREAK out at this and I just wept these tears of joy — over both of those things. Amazing. I’ll never forget it. Thanks for the remembrance, Sheila!
I’d like to see the documentary, but what I’d really like is to get a video of the televised game.