Posted on 02/22/2020 11:14:27 AM PST by Rummyfan
The 1980 United States Olympic hockey team struck gold and started a movement.
The American squad was a patchwork of college players from the Northeast and the upper Midwest under the direction of coach Herb Brooks.
They completed their improbable run to the gold medal on Sunday, Feb. 24, with a 4-2 victory over Finland at the Olympic Fieldhouse in Lake Placid, N.Y
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Eruzione mentioned what Herb Brooks said during intermission of the Finland game, when I believe the US was losing at the time:
“If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f’ing grave”.....he stepped out and came back in and said, “Your F’ing Grave!”
Yep....
Most of the guys were from Minnesota or Wisconsin, and they certainly received as heroes when they showed up in Twin Cities nightlife!
I watched this game on an early big screen TV in a German ice rink full of Germans cheering the US on. Burghausen rink in Bavaria. Also had two Russians with us. They didn’t take it too well. Germans loved it.
Best comment to date, by Scott Lincicome of the CATO Institute:
“Cannot even imagine how hard Bernie took this,” he tweeted.
LOL.
Of course, some think the Russians intentionally threw the game, because they felt it would help relations, or something like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-K-mm8Bqik
“If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your f’ing grave”.....he stepped out and came back in and said, “Your F’ing Grave!”
Gator, I’m so glad you put that quote up because it’s epic. I got to see Herb Brooks later when he coached the NY Rangers. I didn’t even care that he couldn’t win a Stanley Cup in NY because I love him more than anything.
What was even stranger back then? The game was played on a tape delay. I was a kid in a bar watching the game in a bar watching people go nuts and I already knew the score. It was the greatest but also oddest thing.
It was wonderful. A ragtag American team, college kids, put together and trained by Brooks, and they beat the almighty unbeatable Soviets. USA! USA!
:-)
I’m sure Bernie was crying in his vodka...... that commie f***er.....
A lot of the surprise at the success of the team came from the fact that there was no internet back then, and hardly anyone outside the hockey world knew much about collegiate hockey. Eruzione pointed out years later that some of the players on the U.S. team played in obscurity before Lake Placid, but then went on to have long, successful NHL careers. The most notable of these might have been defenseman Ken Morrow, who joined the New York Islanders right after the Olympics and helped them win the Stanley Cup a few months later.
Well in an exhibition a few months before the Soviets beat the US 10-3.
I remember this game. I was 10 years old and in bed with the chicken pox. The black and white TV (which got 3 channels, 4 if the leaves were off the trees) was wheeled into my room and I watched it.
Can’t believe it was 40 years ago. Yikes.
That’s true as far as it goes, but they were still a bunch of amateurs thrown together and they beat a supposed juggernaut in the Soviet team. I’m surprised Eruzione would denigrate his team’s accomplishment. I don’t care if they had Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr on the team..... it was still a huge win.
I've researched this story so much that I even recognize some of the players without their names and/or numbers.
Dave Silk is in the foreground.
Beyond him, a joyful Jack O'Callahan is straddling fellow defenseman Mike Ramsey on the ice.
Neal Broten (#9) skates in around behind the group from the left in the background.
Closest to him -- and reaching out to him with his right hand -- is the unmistakable tall, bearded figure of Ken Morrow.
Behind Morrow -- with his back to the glass -- is a guy who I'm almost certain is Bill Baker (who scored a critical game-tying goal in the final minute of the first game against Sweden).
The guy in front of Baker -- with his bare hand on another player's back -- is backup goalie Steve Janaszak. He was the only Team USA player who never played in a single game at Lake Placid.
Mike Eruzione is off to the right close to the boards, beyond the net.
The guy in front of him with his arms raised in the air is John "Bah" Harrington.
Mark Wells -- one of the more obscure players who was their fourth-line center -- is in the middle of the group there.
Yeah baby!
Part of it was that collegiate players in the U.S. were pretty much unknown even among hockey experts. A perfect example of this was Joe Mullen -- who was probably the best player in the U.S. at the time but was ineligible to play for the Olympic team because he had signed a pro contract for an NHL team before the Olympics. This was a guy who went on to score more than 500 goals in the NHL over the next 18+ years, but he signed as a free agent out of college because he was never drafted by an NHL team. That sort of thing would never happen today.
The other thing I would point out -- and I say this based on what I read in that book The Boys of Winter linked in my earlier post -- is that the 1980 Soviet team wasn't quite as dominant as their reputation indicated. They had great players on that team, but they were in an odd period during a "changing of the guard" in Soviet hockey. Many of their big-name players were either past their prime, or were very young and would become much more dominant in international hockey later in the 1980s. Their coach (Tikhonov) was relatively new, and he was in the process of purging some of their older players from the national team. He was pissing off a lot of the players on the team in the process, too.
Herb Brooks assessed them very accurately. He said they were a dominant, talented team ... but he knew they were overconfident and looked somewhat less than impressive in their preliminary round games. He really sensed that they didn't have a lot of urgency in their play, and he knew they were absolutely ripe for an upset.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.