The story of the victory by the U.S. men's hockey team over the vaunted Soviets in the 1980 Winter Olympics is still as luminous and improbable as it was nearly 25 years ago: a group of plucky but not overwhelmingly gifted young amateurs, whose style of play is overhauled by their mercurial but visionary coach Herb Brooks, taking on the virtually unbeatable Soviet pros on their way to a gold medal. In his unintended but effective companion to Disney's 2004 movie Miracle, sportswriter Coffey details, period by period, the events of that historic game. In doing so, he also tells the individual stories, past and present, of the team and offers a sympathetic view of the Soviet side as well. All 20 U.S. players could be forgiven if, over the past 25 years, they found it impossible to top their Olympic victory. But as player Eric Strobel, embracing the essence of that remarkable team, told Coffey recently, "It was a great moment, but where is it going to get you? You just get on with your life." Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A wonderfully detailed enrichment of the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Wayne Coffey’s fresh perspective artfully takes a twenty-five-year-old story and advances it to the present with an enhanced appreciation of that stunning, breathtaking, still too-amazing-to-believe accomplishment.” —Al Michaels
“The 1980 U.S. hockey team has been mythologized in print and on screen for almost twenty-five years. Wayne Coffey’s The Boys of Winter goes much deeper than that and, for the first time, gives us a clear picture of who these remarkable boys—and men—were . . . and are. It is a very fine book.” —John Feinstein
“I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on the very day that the ‘Boys of Winter’ beat the Russians in Lake Placid. Wayne Coffey brilliantly weaves the behind-the-scenes story that amplifies how improbable this ‘miracle’ really was.” —Pat LaFontaine, NHL Hall of Famer
“The great stories can always be retold, but when they are retold with the emotion, the muscular prose, the freshness that Coffey brings to the Miracle on Ice, they seem new.” —Robert Lipsyte, New York Times, and author of The Contender
“No matter how many times I hear the story of the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s heroics in Lake Placid in 1980, I want to hear it again. It is allegory, fable, wonderful drama. Now Wayne Coffey comes to the campfire to tell the tale again, raising the requisite lumps in the requisite throats, adding new details to the familiar pictures. Very nice work. Very nice, indeed.” —Leigh Montville, author of Ted Williams
“First came the Hollywood version of the Miracle on Ice. Now comes the real story, rich in context and texture, as only a journalist and author like Wayne Coffey can report it and tell it.” —Harvey Araton, New York Times...
About the Author
Kirby Heyborne is an accomplished actor, musician, and comedian who has received a number of AudioFile Earphones Awards for his audiobook narrations. He has had starring roles in over a dozen features and many short films. Kirby is also a cofounder and director of the Los Angeles-based improv comedy group The Society.
Wayne Coffey is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Daily News and the author of Winning Sounds Like This, among other books.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
WEEDING THE GARDEN
Vladimir Petrov was skating in loose figure eights near center ice, his pace slow, his stick still and horizontal, a predator in wait. He edged in for the opening face-off. His two famous wings, Boris Mikhailov and Valery Kharlamov, were on his flanks. Petrov, No. 16, was perhaps the strongest player on the Soviet national team, with blacksmith arms and a bulging neck, a 200-pound slab of muscle who was possessed of the rarest of Russian weapons: a nasty slap shot. Historically, not many Russian players had one because for years not very many practiced slap shots, sticks being both in short supply and of inferior quality. If you wound up and cranked a slap shot, you stood a good chance of getting a splinter and having no stick to play with. “So we never slap puck,” defenseman Sergei Starikov said. “We make good wrist shot instead.” Petrov was 32, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and nine-time world champion. He didn’t know much of anything about Mark Johnson, the U.S. center whom he was about to face off against, except that he wore No. 10 and he looked small and ridiculously young.
It was 5:06 p.m. in Lake Placid, and 1:06 a.m. in Moscow. Bill Cleary, star of the 1960 gold-medal team that had been the last U.S. team to beat the Soviets, had just finished a brief talk in the locker room. “There’s no doubt in my mind–nor in the minds of all the guys on the ’60 team–that you are going to win this game. You are a better team than we were,” Cleary said. Herb Brooks followed him, standing at one end of Locker Room 5 in the new Olympic Field House, wearing a camel-hair sports coat and plaid pants that would’ve looked at home on the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever. The room was a cramped, unadorned rectangle with a rubber-mat floor and a steeply pitched ceiling, situated directly beneath the stands. You could hear stomping and chanting and feel the anticipatory buzz that was all over the Adirondacks. There was a small chalkboard to Brooks’s right and a tiny shower area behind him, the players on the wood benches rimming the room all around him. On the ride to the arena, Brooks sat with assistant Craig Patrick and they talked about what Brooks was going to say to the team. Brooks loved intrigue, the element of surprise. His whole style of play was constructed on it, moving players around, changing breakout patterns, keeping people guessing about everything. Just when his players were sure he was completely inhumane, he’d throw a tennis ball on the ice for a diversion, or have guys play opposite-handed or in different positions, lifting morale and breaking the routine. “You’re going to like it,” Brooks said to Patrick of his talk. The locker room was intense and quiet. Defenseman Bill Baker caught the eye of backup goaltender Steve Janaszak, his former teammate at the University of Minnesota. “What do we do now?” Baker mouthed.
“Pray,” Janaszak mouthed back.
Herb Brooks stood before his twenty players. The quiet got deeper. The coach pulled out a yellow scrap of paper and said, “You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”
Neal Broten, 20-year-old center, second youngest player on the youngest Olympic hockey team the United States had ever fielded, looked down at his skates. “I didn’t know what he was talking about,” Broten said. Broten was nervous, very nervous. He knew he could handle the skating, playing the game. The Russians’ strength he wasn’t so sure about. Don’t make any glaring mistakes, he told himself.
Led by goaltender Jim Craig, the players charged out of the locker room, turned right and then right again. At the threshold of the ice, Craig paused and looked up for a second. The building was shaking from the cheers. He took it in and it felt great. Ten days earlier, the players hadn’t been much less anonymous than the Lake Placid goal judges. Now that they’d gone undefeated in five games and come from behind in four of them, they were Olympic darlings. Somebody rang a cowbell, a tinny touch of the Alps in the Adirondacks. “C’mon, Magic!” winger John “Bah” Harrington shouted to Mark Johnson from the end of the American bench. Magic was Johnson’s nickname. If you ever saw him play you know why.
The last time the U.S. players had seen Petrov and his teammates was thirteen days earlier, in Madison Square Garden, where the Americans didn’t lose so much as get annihilated. That day began with the crowd jeering the Soviet national anthem and cheering every solid American check, and it ended with the fans in numbed silence, even before Soviet winger Alexander Maltsev put a red-coated exclamation point on things. Maltsev was 30 years old and would become the Soviet Union’s all-time leading goal scorer in international competition. Speeding across the U.S. blue line in the third period, defenseman Dave Christian in front of him, Maltsev cruised left by the top of the circle and then began to spin, 360 degrees in a blur, the puck on his stick as if it were glued. When he was done spinning he started snapping, a backhand, inside the far post. In the U.S. goal, Steve Janaszak looked at Christian in disbelief and then laughed inside his mask.
“They were gods,” Janaszak said. On the U.S. bench, trainer Gary Smith walked over to Brooks. “We don’t have a chance against these guys,” Smith said.
“No shit,” the coach replied.
Brooks had spent months trying to debunk the aura surrounding the Soviets. He would talk about how Mikhailov, the fabled captain, looked like Stan Laurel, with his long face and jutting chin. He would tell his players that the team was getting old, that the Russians’ time was past. It was a hard sell on a wintry Saturday in New York City, the U.S. players taking the ice with a bit of trepidation and a lot of awe. “It was hard to even warm up,” Harrington said. “We looked down at the other end of the ice and there they were: Kharlamov, Petrov, Mikhailov. And I’m thinking, ‘Holy smokes, there are the guys I saw beating the NHL All-Stars on TV.’ We weren’t just playing when the game started. We were watching them play, and by the time we felt like we belonged on the ice with them, it was 8—0.”
The final score was 10—3 and merely confirmed what the hockey world already knew: there were the Russians, and then there was everybody else. Virtually everyone expected a similar result in the Olympics. As Harrington knew, the Russians had drubbed the best of the NHL, 6—0, on the same Garden ice the year before, and with their backup goaltender, a guy named Myshkin, no less. “What can change in two weeks?” asked Sergei Makarov, the young Russian star who would go on to a long NHL career. “You can’t get whole new team.” Even Mark Johnson said, “If you asked anyone on our team and they told you we could beat the Russians, they would’ve been lying.”
Publicly, Brooks did nothing to discourage such thinking, saying the United States should forget the Russians and worry about sneaking away with a silver or bronze medal. Privately, he was not so convinced. In the Olympic format you didn’t have to beat a team best-of-seven, or even best-of-five. You had to beat a team only once. The Americans were in superb shape and had a sturdy emotional makeup, honed from months of fending off their coach’s verbal floggings. They could skate completely unburdened by expectation, just as their coach had scripted it. Before the game in Madison Square Garden, Brooks told the players to go out and have fun. He had never said anything close to that in the previous sixty pre-Olympic games. Have fun? Brooks had followed Warren Strelow’s suggestion to let goaltenders Jim Craig and Steve Janaszak share time in the Garden goal, limiting the Soviet preview of Craig and sparing the No. 1 goalie any unnecessary angst. For the first half of that game, especially, the Americans weren’t skating, attacking. Part of it was awe, but part of it was Brooks playing at least a little bit of possum. Even Viktor Tikhonov, the Soviet Olympic coach, said that the U.S. team seemed to be holding something back. Brooks himself later described the Garden game as “a ploy.” What could possibly be gained by playing the Russians tough, waking them up? Brooks was beginning to believe that if everything fell together, the United States could take the Russians into the the third period in a tight game. That’s all you could ask for. You get into that position, and you take your chances.
Six weeks after the death of Herb Brooks, Viktor Tikhonov stood in a barren room inside the arena that is home to the Central Sports Club of the Soviet Army (CSKA). He was 73 years old and surrounded by drab white walls. He had a gray tweed jacket and flat face and slicked-back hair, and the vaguely beleaguered aura of a man who is the most decorated international coach in hockey history but may be most remembered for a game his team did not win.
“No matter what we tried we could not get that 10—3 game out of the players’ minds,” Tikhonov said. “The players told me it would be no problem. It turned out to be a very big problem.”
Across the ice from the American amateurs was not simply a staggering assemblage of hockey talent but the end product of one of the most astonishing sporting dynasties ever developed. The Soviets did not look like much, at first glance, in their well-worn red sweaters and matching red helmets, their chunky skates that looked like Sputnik-era hand-me-downs. They would march into the arena in their long fur coats and fur hats, with strong Slavic faces and impassive expressions, the thick-bodied KGB guy never far away. Then it was into the locker room, int...
