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 never understood why the Soviets never pulled their goalie in that game. They also never did it in the 1984 and 1987 Canada Cup series....odd.
Some of those European coaches also did detailed statistical analyses of hockey games to see if the odds really changed in their favor under different scenarios. I remember reading an article in Hockey Digest magazine in the early 1990s where the author suggested that pulling the goalie late in the game was NOT an effective strategy -- based on his analysis that said a team in that scenario is more likely to give up an empty-net goal than score the tying goal.
There's one hockey coach in recent years -- it may have been the German or Austrian coach at the 2018 Winter Olympics -- who would pull the goalie and put a sixth skater on the ice whenever his team had a two-man advantage with two opposing players in the penalty box. I think it usually worked out for him, as it is damn near impossible for the defending team to clear the puck out of their zone when they have three skaters playing against six.
Best underdog victory in all sports. I wish they would go back to just amateurs playing in the Olympics
I enjoyed the movie with Kurt Russell.
I hear ya.
I’ve seen it about 25 times. LOL.
AGAIN
That’s a great book. I’ve read it twice.
I got to wear the 1980 Olympic ring of assistant coach Craig Patrick one time. This guy had a bunch of hardware from his hockey days, including a couple of Stanley Cup rings, but he said the Olympic ring was has favorite.
Those Russians were no amateurs. They were as professional as any NHL team in fact they could beat any NHL team. That’s what made a bunch of college kids beating them in the Olympics a miracle on ice.
Kurt Russel version
Saw it yesterday. Just great
1. That U.S. team was better than anyone realized at the time. Some of those players had long, solid NHL careers after that.
2. The Soviet team wasn’t as good as people think they were. They look great on paper even now, but most of their top players were either past their prime or very young and not yet at the top of their game (and would later become stars of the USSR national team from 1984 through the late 1980s).
3. The Soviets simply took the Americans lightly, and were caught completely unprepared to play a young, talented, energetic team that had been built specifically to beat them.
I think the U.S. team was trailing at some point of every game in the tournament. They were built for endurance over a full game, and never panicked when they were behind.
I think by winning they would too. :)
Just before the Olympics started, the Soviets beat the USA 10-3 — TEN TO THREE, in a hockey game! — in an exhibition at Madison Square Garden. I think they had every right to be overconfident.
Years later, Soviet players said in interviews that the first five minutes of the Olympic game was a real learning experience for them. They thought the U.S. brought different players to Lake Placid than the ones they played against at MSG … because they were so much better and more energetic.
It is an odd coincidence of history that another event that helped recharge American patriotism in the 1980s happened only 24 hours after the Miracle on Ice, and only a couple hundred miles from Lake Placid: Reagan’s demolition of Bush at the Nashua debate, which flipped the NH primary and the Republican campaign. “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!!”
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