Posted on 02/22/2025 12:58:58 PM PST by Alberta's Child
Years before I ever heard of Lake Placid or the Olympics, before I knew the name of a single Russian hockey player, I was a kid in Massachusetts who wanted to be the next Bobby Orr. I grew up skating on Holmes' Pond, which took its name from our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Holmes, who owned it. A man named Phil Thompson, our postman, was the person who told me I should try organized hockey in the Easton Junior Hockey League. He had already been working on it with my mother. He was a fine postman and an even better salesman.
The game we played against the Russians in Lake Placid twenty-five years ago has been acclaimed and saluted in every way possible, but for me, it has always felt like a passage on ice, the attainment of a dream that started on Mrs. Holmes' pond.
It's impossible for me to separate the miracle that we achieved as a team with the memories and gratitude I have for all the people who helped me get there, from my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, to ten years' worth of coaches and friends and teammates. You don't make a journey like that alone. You make it with a lot of love and sacrifice. That's probably why I was searching the stands for my father after we won the gold medal against Finland. It was a moment that was begging to be shared.
I don't believe those Winter Games in Lake Placid will ever be duplicated. I don't say that because we beat maybe the greatest Soviet hockey team ever assembled, or even because Eric Heiden won five gold medals, a performance that I honestly think dwarfs what we did. I say it because there weren't doping scandals or judging scandals or an Olympic Village that was overrun with millionaires and professionals in Lake Placid. Herb Brooks, God rest his soul, wasn't coaching a Dream Team. He was coaching a team full of dreamers. There is a big difference. In Lake Placid, it didn't feel as if the Games were being run by corporations. It felt as if at the heart of them was a brotherhood of athletes, the best in the world, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.
I've visited quite a few places that have hosted the Olympics in the past, and you almost can’t tell that the Games were ever there. You aren't in Lake Placid for more than a minute before you are flooded with Olympic memories, whether it's from seeing the Olympic Arena at the top of the hill, or the oval next door where Heiden skated into immortality. Whenever I'm in town, I like to go out at night when it's dark and quiet and the shops are closed, and stand in the middle of Main Street. I close my eyes and in an instant it takes me back to that magical Friday night of February 22, 1980 -- to the memory of walking down that same Main Street with Mike Eruzione and our fathers and other family members, and ABC's Jim Lampley interviewing us as we went. Snow was falling, and everywhere you looked people were waving flags and chanting, "U-S-A, U-S-A." We were in our primes, athletically and physically. We were surrounded by people we loved, getting loved some more by people we didn't even know. We had just done the impossible, and we were happy to be alive and thrilled to be Americans and thrilled to think that Herb was right: maybe we were meant to be here. It's a feeling you wish everybody could have at one point in their lives.
Being in that goal on that Friday night was the pinnacle of my athletic life, the greatest joy I have ever known as a hockey player. It was the culmination of a journey, and then other journeys followed, for all of us; that is what this book is really all about—the journeys that brought us to that semifinal game against the Soviet Union, and those we’ve taken since. Sometimes people ask me if I wish I could go back and do it again, if some part of me is sad that I will never experience that pinnacle again. You can't look back. You can’t dial up euphoria on demand, or try to re-create what happened a quarter century ago. You move forward and you live your life and try to be a better person every day than you were the day before. You take each day as a new journey, even as you are grateful for the ones you have already had.
I remember that day. I was a college freshman. We were at happy hour. They announced over the PA the the USA had just beaten the USSR in hockey. The place went nuts: USA USA USA. We all danced to Prince’s Party like it’s 1999.
Once we heard that the game would be replayed that evening, we all piled back to the dorms.
This is one of my favorite memories. USA USA
It was great, but it’s really fun to see the documentary with Herb Brooks, if you can find it. I’ve seen it a time or two before we had streaming BS.
Needless to say, Russell did a great job portraying Brooks.
When Herb Brooks died, I shed a few tears.
“To your F—-ing graves!”
“To your F—-ing graves!”
This might be the one I’m talking about.
https://www.amazon.com/Believe-Miracles-Story-1980-Hockey/dp/B00005TPC7
If was so sad that he passed just before the movie came out.
I can’t remember if he consulted.
Thanks
I think he had. Yeah, we own the Disney one and watched it the other night. Never gets old.
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