With a new goalie in the net for the Russians, Herb didn’t want his team to adjust. He wanted them to play with the same intensity, the same way they’d been playing from the start, so he went up and down the bench saying, “Don’t change a thing. Don’t change a thing because they changed goalies. Don’t change a thing. Play the same way.”
In the third period, the Soviets looked dominant again. Then on a rush, a shot from Dave Silk slipped through a Soviet defenseman’s skate right onto Mark Johnson’s stick. Before Myshkin could move, it was in the net and the score was tied. A minute later, the American captain, Mike Eruzione, scored.
Now the Americans were leading, just ten minutes away from a shot at a gold medal. Brooks kept walking up and down the bench saying, “Play your game. Play your game.” He repeated it a thousand times at least.
Jimmy Craig was in the zone. He wasn’t going to get scored on. When a goalie is in that kind of zone, especially in playoffs, his ability to anticipate the shot is as good as the rest of his skill set. And Craig wasn’t alone—the whole team was flying out there. When you go into a series without the sense of entitlement the Russians had, it gives you the intensity you need to get to that extra level.
The game ended 4–3 for the U.S. The Americans swarmed the ice. They could hardly believe it—they had to keep telling themselves, “We beat them. We. Beat. Them.” It was the first time the Russians had lost an Olympic game in twelve years. The celebration spread right across the country. No sporting event had ever stirred that much emotion from coast to coast.
• • •
But the Americans still had to beat Finland for the gold. Brooks came into the dressing room before the game with a very short speech. “If you lose this game, you will take it to your effing grave.” He took a couple of steps, turned around, and said, “Your effing grave.”
In the second period in the game against the Finns, the U.S. was down 2–1 and Brooks was so angry he didn’t want to go into the dressing room. He said, “Craig, you go in there and you get them going.” But when Patrick went in he discovered he didn’t have to say anything, since all the guys were already saying it. “Don’t worry, Craig, we’re not going to let this one go.” And so Craig turned around, walked out, and said to Brooks, “Don’t worry. We’re not going to lose.” They were all winners, they all knew how to win. The final score was U.S. 4, Finland 2.
As Jimmy Craig stood in his crease looking for his dad in the crowd, an American from Syracuse named Peter Cappuccilli Jr. jumped over the glass with the U.S. flag in his hands and draped it over Jimmy’s shoulders. Jimmy held it tight around him because it would be disrespectful to let it fall to the ground. Once he made eye contact with his dad, then he would celebrate.
• • •
There are so many intangibles in the game of hockey. Skill will get you only so far. Strength and speed get you only so far. In some sports, the player can focus on one job, and put everything into going out there and executing. But in hockey, there is so much going on, so fast, that even the most skilled player is going on instinct. Ever notice that a guy on a breakaway almost always scores, but the same guy will be shut down over half of the time in the shootout? When you’re on a breakaway, all you see is net. When you’re in a shootout, you’re thinking about the goalie. That’s because when you’re in the flow of the game, you are fueled by desire. You are running on instinct. Without that passion, you’re not really in a hockey game.
There is no denying that the 1980 Soviet team had as much skill as anyone could handle. They had dominated international play for years heading into the Olympics, and they continued to dominate in the years ahead. They took the gold medals in 1984 and 1988. And in 1981 they got their revenge on Team USA with a 4–1 win in the Canada Cup. Then they absolutely smoked the very best players Canada could assemble in the final. That team included guys like Ray Bourque, Mike Bossy, Marcel Dionne, Denis Potvin, Larry Robinson, Bryan Trottier, and many other future Hall of Famers, myself included—and we were thrashed 8–1 by the Russians.
The Big Red Machine, as Soviet hockey was known back then, was truly intimidating. They had one five-man line known as the Green Unit. Sergei Makarov, Igor Larionov, and Vladimir Krutov were the forwards, and Alexei Kasatonov and Viacheslav Fetisov were on the blue line. They were always on the ice together, and when they were, pretty much no one else in the world could touch the puck. It took us years to figure out how to defend against them.
But in 1980, the American team brought something to that game that the Russians didn’t. They were so focused, so passionate, that they weren’t thinking about the Russians. They were just playing their game. And when you play that way, most of the time the puck bounces your way.
If it hadn’t been for the U.S. beating Russia and winning gold on home ice, you have to ask yourself, Would there be hockey in Dallas? Would there be hockey in Florida and in L.A.? Because that win was a defining moment for hockey. It was the moment the game started to grow in the United States. The sport wasn’t big in the United States at that time. It had its cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia—but there was very little interest in the South, for example. The realization that Americans could be the best in the world inspired young people across the country. They wanted to be one of those players who achieved a miracle.
Twenty-Seven
THE 1984 CANADA CUP
We had a lot on the line going into the Canada Cup in 1984.
We were a mix of older and younger guys, but one thing a lot of us had in common was that we were looking for revenge for the beating the Russians had given us in 1981. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Canada’s weakness in 1972 was overconfidence, but we certainly weren’t suffering from that in 1981. We had six weeks of training camp before the 1984 Cup. That meant a two-hour skate in the morning, a two-hour skate in the afternoon, and then on the bike for five miles. Every guy did this every day for four weeks. The theory was that because the Russians took no time off, and we took June and July off, we had to catch up in August.
I knew personally how tough it was going to be. My first experience with them one-on-one was at the 1977–78 world juniors. We had a really good team—all twenty guys on our team went on to play in the NHL. But I remember watching the Russians in warm-up and thinking, “Wow. These guys are going to be tough.” I was sixteen, and in particular I was watching Sergei Makarov and defenseman Viacheslav Fetisov. The way they skated put them in a whole different league from us. It was a great game, but we lost 3–2. They won gold.
By 1981, most of their national team veterans—Mikhailov, Petrov, Kharlamov—were gone. The Soviets had a new regime: Fetisov, Krutov, Larionov, Shepelev, Khomutov. It’s easier to intimidate younger guys, so we felt it was important to put a lot of pressure on them to try to get them back on their heels. We thought that was the key. If they were coming at you brimming with confidence they were going to make you look bad, so the only way to beat them, we thought, was to dent their armor and push forward with physical play and offensive pressure. It didn’t exactly work out that way.
Their goalie, Vladislav Tretiak, was one of the greatest goaltenders ever. People in North America didn’t get to see him very often. He was way ahead of his time, a hybrid butterfly and stand-up goaltender. A big, big man and stick strong, similar to today’s NHL goalies. He had a training workout that was unheard of back then, and he had an outstanding read of the game. Back in the 1970s and 80s goaltenders worked off pure talent and a lack of fear. I’d love to see guys like Glenn Hall or Tretiak playing today in the bigger, lighter goaltenders’ equipment. They’d be unbeatable.
One of the biggest thrills for me back in 1981 was playing on a line not only with Guy Lafleur but also with Gilbert Perreault. When I was a kid back in Brantford, skating on our backyard ice, I was Gordie Howe for a number of years, and then, because we got a lot of Buffalo Sabre games on TV—every second week or so there’d be a midweek game�
�I was Perreault for a while. I loved how he handled the puck, but I couldn’t skate as well as he could, and so at some point I decided that maybe I wasn’t Perreault after all.
Gilbert broke his ankle four games into the tournament, so Marcel Dionne replaced him on the line. Marcel was so hungry around the net. Nothing came between him and a loose puck. He was absolutely tenacious about it.
• • •
We felt confident in the first few games, but the Russians cured us of that. We just unraveled. We simply had no answers for the Soviets’ talent. We were outshooting them for a while, but that didn’t mean a lot against the Big Red Machine, because they didn’t take a lot of shots. Or they didn’t take a lot of shots that missed. They just moved the puck around until they saw the shot they wanted, and then the red light was on.
When we got down 4–1, we had to open up to get back in the game and the Russians just fed on that. They capitalized on every mistake we made. I think we fell into a real trap with them. Tretiak was standing on his head. And we were running around, while the Soviets’ positioning seemed to be perfect. The moment when we knew we were beaten came when we were on the power play. We got the puck deep and were trying to get set up down low when the puck squirted out to the high slot—right onto the stick of Vladimir Krutov, of all people, who was already moving up-ice. It was turning into a one-on-two, and he had his choice of Denis Potvin and Guy Lafleur, who was playing the point on the power play. He wisely came in on the left, where he froze Lafleur with a fake windup, then stepped around him and picked the corner on Mike Liut. At that point Liut kind of gave up. You could just see it.
We lost to the Russians 8–1. Mike Liut wears it, but it certainly wasn’t his fault. We had only four shots in the third period. No goalie in the world is going to save you if you can’t get shots on net. We could have had Jacques Plante in net and they would have won. I say this sincerely—they were so much better than we were that night. It was devastating. We felt that we’d let people down and let the country down.
• • •
So now the stage was set for the ’84 Canada Cup. This time we were a lot less confident.
Glen Sather was coaching. But we were really bad. I mean, just awful. The best players on the team, guys like Mike Bossy, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, and Brent Sutter, were a little bit physically and mentally tired. The Oilers had been in the Stanley Cup final two years in a row and the Islanders had been to five finals in a row. We’d played a lot of hockey. On top of that, there were twelve guys from the Islanders and the Oilers on that team. So although it was born out of respect, there was friction. We’d spent two years at war with each other, and here we were sitting side by side in the locker room. Some guys were understandably gun-shy about the prospect of gelling together.
We lost a few games at the start. We got booed too. On September 6 we were playing against Sweden in Vancouver at the Pacific Coliseum. It wasn’t a sellout crowd—just nine thousand fans in a building that holds sixteen thousand. Not only that, Sweden had a couple of guys playing for Vancouver, Patrik Sundstrom and Thomas Gradin, so it’s likely that more than half of the fans were cheering for the Swedes. But we needed to win that particular game. Coff made an unbelievable defensive play on a two-on-one and then turned it back up-ice, brought it into the zone, and got a shot on goal. Bossy just tipped it in. They won 4–2, but I think it was one of the key moments in that series because it showed what we were capable of.
On September 7, we were in Calgary for a game against the Czechs the next day and had a team meeting at Yosemite Sam’s restaurant. Bob Bourne, John Tonelli, and Mark Messier—two guys from the Islanders and one from the Oilers—stood up and basically got everybody on the same page. We were at risk of bombing out of the tournament altogether. After that, we pulled it together.
After we were smoked in 1981, Alan Eagleson, who was running the Canada Cups, came up with a plan to protect Team Canada from the kind of meltdown we had against the U.S.S.R. in 1981. After the round robin, the teams that placed first and fourth would play in one semifinal while the second- and third-place teams would play each other in another. The winner of the semis would meet in the final in a best-of-three series. Eagleson thought Canada might play one bad game, but no way could the Soviets beat us twice.
We finished fourth, with a record of 2–2–1. And who finishes number one, with a record of 5–0? The Russians, who had beaten us 6–3 in the round robin. It was going to come down to a single-game knockout after all.
• • •
There were probably only twelve or thirteen thousand fans at Calgary’s Olympic Saddledome. I think it was a late afternoon game, so the timing wasn’t perfect. Plus, tickets weren’t cheap and we hadn’t been playing well. I hadn’t had a great tournament in ’84. I just played okay. And I understood that because I wasn’t playing great, my role had changed. I was on the third line. Brent Sutter’s line with Bossy and Tonelli was playing really well, so Glen Sather was double-shifting them. (That’s where your responsibility as a player comes in. In ’84, the third line was where I fit during that game. And the only reason I bring this up is that when I was executive director for the Olympic team in 2002, I sat down with one of the players who was concerned about his ice time. Guys who make the Olympic team are used to playing their twenty-two to twenty-three minutes a night. I said, “Listen, it’s not about how much ice time you get. Nobody remembers how much I played or didn’t play. What they remember is that we won.”)
I thought we played great that game. It was a very physical game, and very emotional. John Tonelli was a bulldozer along the boards all night, and he scored the first goal on the power play. But the Soviets scored to tie it up again, then Makarov went end-to-end, split the defense, and buried a backhand to take the lead. Vladimir Myshkin was standing on his head. But late in the third I found Doug Wilson drifting in from the left point and he sent it to overtime.
Paul Coffey and Doug Wilson were out on defense. Vladimir Kovin was coming in on a two-on-one with Mikhail Varnakov. It looked dangerous for Canada. But when Paul saw Kovin dip his shoulder, he knew the pass to Varnakov was coming. What followed was probably the most famous poke check in history. Paul snagged the puck and went racing back the other way. He shot, and the puck went into the corner, where Tonelli and Mike Bossy were scrumming with the Soviets. Tonelli would not be denied. He came out with the puck, fed Paul Coffey at the right point, who uncorked the shot. Mike Bossy tipped it in. So it was an Islander to an Oiler to an Islander. But in that particular game, we were all Team Canada.
During the handshake after the game, Igor Larionov quietly asked me to meet him back at his hotel. So a bunch of us tracked him and Vladimir Kovin down in the lobby and snuck them out to a restaurant on Calgary’s Electric Avenue to talk about hockey and life in general. I was struck by how intelligent Larionov was—he lived his life the way he played the game. That is, he saw the big picture. He had long-term plans to come to the NHL, as long as he could do it properly. But what impressed me was how much English he understood. (As I was talking to him I kept thinking, “So when our guys talked to each other about where to stand and what to do on the faceoff, he understood us all along . . .”) That’s one of the amazing things about sports, that players from opposite sides of the deepest rivalry in the game could come together and talk about all the things they have in common. That is something I will always remember about that tournament.
• • •
We met Kent Nilsson and the Swedes in the best-of-three final after they surprised the Americans 9–2 in the semis. But we had shaken the monkey off our backs by then, and there was no way Sweden was going to slow us down. We swept them pretty decisively. It was great to be back on top, but we knew that the Russians had given us all we could handle. We had to dig pretty deep to come out with that overtime win. And there was more white-knuckled hockey still to come.
Twenty-Eight
THE 1987 CANA
DA CUP
A lot of people think the 1976 edition of Team Canada was the best ever. And it was an absolutely incredible roster. In fact, just about every guy on that team ended up in the Hall of Fame. Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, Bobby Clarke, for starters. Guy Lafleur, Larry Robinson, Phil Esposito, and on and on.
I don’t want to say that the 1987 Canada Cup team was better than those guys. But I think the best-of-three series for the championship was some of the best hockey ever played. For one thing, the Soviets were stacked. They were always good, of course. They were always skilled and disciplined, and ruthless. But the 1987 squad may have been their best ever. Certainly the famous KLM Line of Krutov, Larionov, and Makarov has been called the most dangerous line of all time. But so many of those guys were just so good, and so strong. Viacheslav Fetisov, Valeri Kamensky, Alexei Kasatonov—they were all incredible players individually, and they played even better together. There is no doubt in my mind that they were the best team in the world in September 1987. Just looking at the roster, they were better than Team Canada.
During an exhibition game in the pre-tournament I asked Igor Larionov whether he’d like to bring some of the guys over for a barbecue at my dad’s place. They were staying near Hamilton, about half an hour away. He said they’d love to, but that his coach, Viktor Tikhonov, and about three KGB guys had to come too. When they got there, Tikhonov wouldn’t allow any of them to have a cold beer, and so I took them downstairs to show them the hockey memorabilia my dad had in the basement. While my dad’s friend Charlie Henry guarded the door at the top of the stairs, we passed around some beers. Today it sounds kind of silly, but they weren’t allowed to drink at all.
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