99

by Wayne Gretzky

  All four games in Moscow were played at the Luzhniki Palace of Sports, which of course had the wider European ice surface. That would put the Canadians at a disadvantage against the puck-moving Russians.

  In Game Five, when the players were introduced, Phil Esposito stepped out and fell down on his backside, feet sticking straight up in the air. His skates had caught on the stem of one of the flowers strewn on the ice. It could have been embarrassing, but Phil got up on one knee, bowed deeply, and blew a kiss into the stands. Though the stands were packed with Red Army officers in uniform and government officials (as well as the three thousand Canadians who had made the trip), he won the crowd over in that moment.

  Canada jumped out to a 3–0 lead, but the Russians came back and won 5–4. Now there was no margin for error. To win the series, Canada would have to sweep the last three games.

  In Game Six, the Canadians chased Russia’s star forward Valeri Kharlamov all over the ice and took the body at every opportunity. Brad Park stepped into him a few times, and a number of other Canadians took a run at him. Kharlamov didn’t shrink from it at all—in fact his temper seemed to rise throughout the game and he dumped a couple of Canadians to the ice, including Bobby Clarke. Clarke chased him down the ice and caught him with a hard two-hander across the ankle. But it wasn’t exactly retaliation. Assistant coach John Ferguson admits he leaned over to Clarke and said, “I think he needs a tap on the ankle.” And Clarke had some expertise in slashing. He did it so much that Serge Savard remembers wearing ankle guards whenever they played the Flyers. Bobby always said that if he hadn’t learned to lay on a two-hander once in a while, he’d never have left Flin Flon. He got a two-minute penalty for the slash, and the Soviets scored on the power play, but Kharlamov was gone from the game. He missed Game Seven as well. He played in the final game, but he was not the same, and neither were the Russians.

  • • •

  The Russians had their way of doing things too. Canadians who played in ’72 and ’74 felt that while the media and the fans had branded them as mean and dirty, the Russians were probably worse. They weren’t seen that way, though, because they didn’t fight. The Russians were really good with their sticks. They were tough and they were mean and they wanted to win just as badly or worse than we did.

  For them it was survival. Today we have a better sense of the life they lived back then under communism. In order to get ahead players had to be part of a successful team. If the team won championships or Olympic gold, they’d be rewarded with new cars or better apartments for their families, maybe even an extra week off during the season. Whether it was ice hockey, track and field, or soccer, they had to be successful as a group and make their nation proud.

  Gordie Howe hated the Russians. Phil Esposito, too, has talked passionately about how he hated the Russians back then. Yet, when we went to Russia five years ago for a charity event with the ’87 and ’72 teams, you could see the bond that Esposito, Tretiak, and Alexander Yakushev had developed over the last forty years. It’s pretty special.

  • • •

  Paul Henderson scored the Game Six winner with a slap shot from the slot. In Game Seven he skated through the entire Russian team, beat both defensemen, and whipped the puck past Tretiak with just over two minutes left. He was quickly becoming a Canadian hero, and left-winger Alexander Yakushev was doing the same for the Soviets.

  At over 6’3” and 200 pounds, Yakushev was the biggest Russian—the Soviets’ answer to Phil Esposito. He finished the series only two points behind Phil. When I was with the Oilers, if a guy scored a really pretty goal we’d say, “That was very Yakushevian.” (A couple of years ago, Mark Messier and I had a chance to have lunch with Yakushev in Moscow and tell him how both of us—me from Ontario, and Mark from out west—were so taken with him back in ’72. He got a real laugh out of it.)

  The series came down to the final, Game Eight. The Canadians got into penalty trouble early in the final and they fell behind. Phil Esposito tied the game, the Soviets went ahead, and Brad Park scored to make it 2–2 after the first. The Soviets scored early in the second, Bill White tied it midway in the period, but they scored two more, and now the Canadians were behind 5–3 going into the third period.

  Phil Esposito was having an amazing game. In the second period, when Ken Dryden got caught way out of his net, Phil had dived across the crease to block a shot. Then, in the third, he caught a puck deflected out of the corner, knocked it down to the ice, and swatted it past Tretiak. Yvan Cournoyer picked up Phil’s rebound, and on a second rebound he tied the game 5–5.

  The Soviets wanted a tie. They’d scored two more goals in the series up to that point and felt they could claim victory. With less than a minute left, Cournoyer intercepted a clearing pass and sent it over to Paul Henderson, who was tripped and crashed into the boards. He jumped up just as Phil slapped a shot at Tretiak. Henderson whacked at the rebound. Tretiak made the save again. The puck popped out in front and Henderson was there. He found a hole and slipped it in.

  Tretiak said later that Henderson must have gotten that puck from God himself.

  Bobby Clarke’s take on the ’72 Summit Series was that it turned out to be one of those special moments in a hockey player’s life that you don’t plan for or anticipate—you just stumble in on it. Obviously the Russians wanted to win and obviously they tried very hard to win. But Bobby said that because Canada was desperate, they played a more physical, more aggressive, and nastier game than they’d ever played in their lives, and it paid off.

  He thought the Russians learned from that. He also thought Canada had learned from the Russians that passing the puck was critical. Canada would shoot it in and go chase it and then try to pound the Russians, but they learned the hard way that this wouldn’t work against a team that could pass like the Soviets. Canada knew they’d have to change their game. The grinding game that we’d played for so long and that we excelled at was ending.

  • • •

  That was it. That was the Summit Series. When it was all over the team went back to the hotel. There was a knock on Bobby Clarke’s door. When he opened it, there stood Valeri Vasiliev, the Soviets’ most punishing defenseman. The Russian said, “Come on.” So Clarke followed Vasiliev into his room, where the future Soviet captain pulled out a big bottle of vodka, filled two water glasses, and handed him one. Bobby took a little sip. Vasiliev laughed and said, “Nah!” Then they both tipped back and shot eight ounces. It was a pretty neat way of showing good sportsmanship.

  Twenty-Six

  INSIDE THE MIRACLE

  One of the greatest stories in sports history almost never happened. When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, U.S. president Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics in protest. A lot of people expected the U.S.S.R. to pull out of the Lake Placid Olympics in response. But the Russians were probably just like anyone else. They had put too much work into preparing for the Games to pull out at the last minute. (They boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles games instead.)

  Nowadays, the Olympics is a huge production, but back then Lake Placid was just a small ski town of twenty-five hundred people.

  The Americans had won gold at the Squaw Valley Olympics in 1960, but the team hadn’t been very successful since then. They’d placed only fifth in the 1976 games. Meanwhile, the Soviets had won twelve of the previous fifteen world championships and four Olympic gold medals in a row. In 1979, instead of an All-Star game, the NHL invited the Soviets to play a three-game series to be called the Challenge Cup. In the deciding game, the U.S.S.R. crushed the best players in the NHL 6–0. So they looked like a good bet to beat a bunch of amateurs at Lake Placid.

  To fall within Olympic rules, the Soviets were called amateurs, but in reality they were beyond professional, paid to train and play year-round. Their record since Squaw Valley was 27–1–1. When the U.S.S.R. collapsed in 1991, one of the most incredible streaks in ho
ckey history came to an end. The Soviets had won a medal at every single International Ice Hockey Federation tournament they had ever entered. Not exactly what you would expect from a bunch of amateurs.

  There were only two countries in the world that had true amateurs, Canada and the U.S. Everyone knew that. The Europeans were pretty much all getting paid to play, whether it was Sweden, Finland, or Czechoslovakia. At world championships, people would see European players with fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills after big wins.

  In the United States, the goal was to build a team that, while not having much chance of winning, would at least not embarrass the country.

  • • •

  Herb Brooks was hired as coach. If there was one guy in the program who wasn’t playing to avoid embarrassment, it was Brooks. Twenty years earlier, Herb thought he’d made the national team as a player. He was even in the team picture. But he was cut just one day before the team left for Squaw Valley. He missed out on one gold medal, and he had no interest in letting another slip away.

  Herb Brooks was an innovator. He studied offensive hockey and was always trying something different. On the power play, for example, he tried putting two players behind the goal line rather than out on the blue line in order to flip the rink into two. He had a lot of ideas that worked, and some that didn’t. Brooks had played on the Minnesota Golden Gophers men’s hockey team from 1955 to 1959 and then coached the team from 1972–73 to 1978–79. College teams play only on the weekends, Friday and Saturday, and practice Monday right through to Thursday, making college hockey the ideal place to try new ideas. In fact, some players specifically go to college to develop because they practice so much. Others go to junior, where they play twice as many games and where it’s a lot more like the NHL.

  Centerman Craig Patrick—the son of Bruins GM Lynn Patrick and grandson of hockey innovator Lester Patrick—figured his playing career was coming to an end, and he was looking around for work. He’d played with Brooks in the early 1970s on the U.S. teams. And when Brooks was coaching in Moscow at the world championships, he’d made Craig captain. One day Brooks said, “I offered the assistant coaching job for the Olympic team next year to somebody else, but I don’t think they’re going to take it. Would you be interested if he turns it down?” Craig said, “Sure.” Two weeks after they got home, Herb called and said, “Are you still interested?”

  Craig’s grandfather Lester had died of a heart attack on June 1, 1960, just after Craig had turned fourteen and moved from his home in Massachusetts to Montreal and would eventually play junior hockey for the Montreal Junior Canadiens in the OHA. Frank Selke Sr., the Canadiens’ GM at the time, gave Craig a set of equipment and told him that he could skate at the Forum any day he wanted. So after school Craig would take the bus to the Forum and practice by himself on the ice. One afternoon he was skating toward the net, and as he was about to shoot he looked up and saw his grandfather sitting in the stands, just watching him. Craig shot the puck, and when he looked up again Lester was gone. Craig circled the net and skated back, trying the same move again and again, hoping his grandfather would return, but he never did.

  Craig played for the Pioneers at the University of Denver, where they won two NCAA championships in 1968 and 1969, and then on the U.S. national team in 1969–70 and 1970–71. He was up and down in the NHL on a few different teams until he retired at thirty-three and joined Herb to put together the U.S. Olympic team.

  Eighty of the best college players from across the country were invited to Colorado Springs in July 1979 to be evaluated for the team, but Brooks had already pretty much decided on the twenty-three guys he was going to take. He’d won three NCAA championships coaching Minnesota, so he knew all the college players.

  He took Craig aside and said, “A lot of these guys hate each other, and the only way I can think to make them a team is for all of them to hate me. You’re going to have to keep all the pieces together and be the guy they can lean on, because they’re not going to be able to lean on me. I’m going to be the same to all of them, and I’m going to be tough on them all.” That was his game plan.

  • • •

  Training camp started in August 1979 with an intense program of team-building exercises, strength and conditioning sessions, and on-ice practices. Herb worked the guys hard. Craig had never seen a coach teach so many different systems, and each guy knew each one intimately. Herb would change the system right on the bench, saying, “Okay guys, we’re going to play it this way now,” and they’d change their game. Next to the Soviets, they were by far the best-conditioned team in the Olympics that year.

  Just before Herb recruited their goalie, Jimmy Craig, Jimmy’s mother passed away. She’d been his biggest supporter. When she was dying of cancer she told Jimmy that when you die your strength isn’t lost forever. It just goes to others. Jimmy felt that he’d picked up some of her strength and took it with him to the Olympics.

  Herb talked a lot about puck possession. He’d tell the guys, “Don’t dump the puck in. That went out with short pants.” His philosophy was more European—when the opposition had the puck everyone on the team was a defenseman, and when Team USA had the puck everyone was a forward. He didn’t believe in two-on-ones, either. He called them two-on-twos since the goalie is a player too.

  • • •

  Team USA’s first game against the full Olympic Russian team was at Madison Square Garden just before the Olympics. The Russians beat them 10–3. The U.S. players were in awe of them. Craig said his players didn’t play that game, they watched it.

  Brooks had spent a lot of time in Russia learning some of their systems. (He studied a lot of systems elsewhere in the world as well.) Herb discovered that when the Russians played hockey, they didn’t shoot the puck unless they thought they could score, and so although it might look as if they had fewer than ten shots on goal, they were shots that counted. Jimmy Craig referred to their play as “poetry”—totally selfless and completely in tune with one another.

  Again, it was all about puck possession. The Russian team didn’t have to work as hard in defense because they had the puck so often. When a lot of people watch hockey, they don’t think to focus on that. A big part of my game was the forecheck—chasing a defenseman down, lifting his stick, and taking the puck. If you take the puck off a defenseman or a player in his own end, you don’t have as many players to beat in order to score or to make a play.

  I remember Scotty Bowman once telling me that when we were playing any of his teams, he’d continually harp at his defensemen, “Get away from Gretzky. Don’t be trying to beat him individually.” Pavel Datsyuk was a player who could steal pucks—in 2010 he had 54 percent more takeaways than anyone else in the NHL. Detroit’s Nick Lidstrom was another perfect example, even though he was a defenseman. When Lidstrom got the puck, the team usually kept it on the next play. And that’s the difference.

  Herb thought his players had too much respect for the Soviets. He started to chip that away. He’d tell his players over and over that someone was going to beat those guys, that they thought they were better than they were. He started joking about the Soviet captain, Boris Mikhailov, saying that he looked like Stan Laurel from the old Laurel and Hardy movies.

  Jimmy Craig came up with a strategy to play the Russians. For him, playing one period against them was equal to playing a whole game against anybody else. So he decided to break each period into four five-minute segments. After each segment he’d start all over again. And at the end of each period he’d go to the locker room to get completely undressed so that he could mentally and physically prepare for the second “game.” That way, if he was playing great he wouldn’t get too comfortable and if he was playing badly he wouldn’t carry that into the next period.

  • • •

  The first medal-round game had been scheduled months before for Friday, February 22, at five p.m. At that time no one had expected that it would match up the wo
rld’s two superpowers. American television asked to have it moved into primetime, but the Soviets refused. So ABC taped the game at five p.m. and broadcast it at eight. One of the most memorable moments in American sports history would be watched by most Americans three hours after it happened.

  In the locker room just ahead of the game, Herb Brooks gave the most inspirational speech of his life. He told the guys, “You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”

  The players skated onto the ice and looked up. The arena was packed. People were waving American flags everywhere. In the first minutes, the Americans surprised the Soviets with how fast and emotionally they played. Still, the Soviets scored first. Then the unexpected happened. Buzz Schneider raced down the left wing, took a slap shot just over the blue line, and beat goaltender Vladislav Tretiak, tying the game. The Soviets scored again, and it looked as if the period would end 2–1.

  Then, with only five seconds left in the first, Dave Christian picked up the puck in his own zone and shot it up the ice. The Soviets had already let up, thinking the period was basically over. But Mark Johnson chased that puck down, deked Tretiak, and slipped it in with one second left. The period ended 2–2.

  In the second period, Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov pulled a surprise move. He replaced Tretiak—a guy known as one of the best goalies of all time—with his backup, Vladimir Myshkin. I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with Tretiak and hear his opinion about it. Tretiak was the biggest star in Russia—and maybe still is, thanks to what he did in ’72 as a twenty-year-old goalie–—and I think it used to drive Tikhonov crazy. Tretiak was also a huge star in Canada. Tikhonov was very egotistical. He wanted to show everyone that his coaching was the reason they were winning the Olympics, not Tretiak’s goaltending. And to this day, Tretiak thinks that’s why he was pulled.