by Al Michaels
This scenario could never take place in today’s world. Too much would be at stake. Money would win out. But in 1980, in the world of television, dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.
The Hilton was just six blocks from the arena, and Dryden and I left that Friday afternoon at about two o’clock to walk over. Yes, the Americans had become a great story. But our conversation had to be realistic. If the score can be something like 3–1 Soviets in the middle of the second period, that’s about all we can ask for. You’re just praying it’s not 7–0. If they can keep it close for a period and a half and hang in there against a bunch of NHL-caliber players, that will be more than respectable and keep the audience for a while. Remember, the Soviet team had toured North America and beaten the New York Rangers, New York Islanders, and Quebec Nordiques on an exhibition tour the previous year. The U.S. team had been wonderful to watch but again, they were still primarily a bunch of college kids.
The game took place in the Olympic Center, a 7,700-seat multipurpose field house that had been built for these Olympics. A few extra fans would get jammed in that afternoon. Still, there are college teams that play in bigger rinks. There was an intimacy in that building. Even upstairs, you were close to the ice. You could hear every sound echoing from below. You could see the players’ faces. The scoreboard was rudimentary. The sound system was simply functional.
Just before the opening faceoff, the crowd was still filing in. We were broadcasting from a makeshift platform in the first two rows of the balcony. On the platform, I was next to Dryden, along with five or six other production people—a statistician, a cameraman, a stage manager, an audio assistant, and another technician. We came on the air and did the scene set. In my on-camera welcome, I said:
The excitement, the tension building. The Olympic Center, filling to capacity. The face value of a top ticket to tonight’s game? Sixty-seven dollars, twenty cents. Outside, they’re changing hands at three times the face value . . . . I’m sure there are a lot of people in this building tonight who do not know the difference between a blue line and a clothesline. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Because what we have at hand is the rarest of sporting events. An event that needs no buildup, no superfluous adjectives. In a political or nationalistic sense, I’m sure this game is being viewed with varying perspectives. But manifestly, it is a hockey game. The United States and the Soviet Union on a sheet of ice in Lake Placid, New York.
Then I brought Dryden in for his opening remarks. Ken put it this way: “For the U.S. team, it’s really discovery time. It’s one thing to be young and promising. It’s quite another to be good. And in the next two and a half hours, the U.S. players will go through perhaps the most difficult and demanding, yet exhilarating time of their lives. They will be playing against a very good team, a team that’s better than they are. And after that time, after it’s all over, this team will find out an awful lot about themselves. They’ll simply find out how good they are.”
Early on, the Soviets, in their familiar red uniforms, controlled the tempo much as we expected they would, and they scored about halfway through the first period on a goal by Vladimir Krutov. But then the U.S. team tied it five minutes later on a goal by Buzz Schneider, only to have the Soviets jump ahead again, 2–1, on a goal by Sergei Makarov with 2:26 left in the period. Then—and you could never make enough of the importance of this—with the period coming to the end, the Soviets were putting the pressure on and had a chance to make it 3–1. Instead, the next thing you know, the puck comes out toward center ice and Mark Johnson scoops it up and beats the Soviet goalie, Vladislav Tretiak, just as the horn sounds.
For a moment, there was a question of whether the puck had crossed the goal line before time expired. It did. And now Dryden and I were thinking, What a great and lucky break. 2–2 after the first period. We’ll take it. On the broadcast, Ken was full of great insight and we felt totally in sync. Later, I’d be asked how I got all those Soviet names down. Fortunately, most of them ended in ov. It was child’s play compared to five Samoans on a fast break. My Hawaii high school basketball days were paying off in the Adirondacks.
HERE YOU HAD THE United States and the Soviet Union in the Olympics , but there was only one minimally recognizable celebrity in attendance: Jamie Farr of M*A*S*H. Apparently, there was no A-list in 1980.
Meanwhile, as the second period began, the Soviet coach, Viktor Tikhonov, made a stunning move, replacing his goalie, Vladislav Tretiak. Tretiak was considered by many to be the best goaltender in the world at the time, and the U.S. players would later say this had the effect of emboldening the American team. Vladimir Myshkin came in to replace Tretiak. Nonetheless, in the second period, the Soviets were completely dominant. They scored the only goal in the period two minutes in, and outshot the American team, 12–2. Jim Craig, the U.S. goalie, had to make one phenomenal save after another to keep the score close. It was 3–2, but it could have been 8–2. During the intermission, I remember thinking that we’d gotten all we could have hoped for. A one-goal game would still keep an audience. But the thought of actually winning the game? A game the Soviets were dominating despite the closeness of the score? No way.
When the third period began, the Soviets picked up where they had left off, still controlling the flow. But then eight and a half minutes in, at the end of a power play, Dave Silk got knocked off the puck, and it slid over to Mark Johnson, who poked it in behind Myshkin. It wasn’t the prettiest goal ever scored but the game was now tied with eleven and a half minutes to go. WHAT?!! This game—the fuzzy-cheeked Americans against, pardon the expression, the Big Red Machine—is tied in the third period? Because the Soviets had been so dominant for a period and a half, the crowd hadn’t had much to get excited about. But now the building was starting to come apart. Just over a minute later, Buzz Schneider tried a long slap shot from just outside the blue line, and off the save, the puck caromed toward the boards. Mark Pavelich would get to it as he was falling to the ice, and send it out to the high slot, thirty feet in front of the net, where—ERUZIONE SCORES!!! MIKE ERUZIONE!!!! USA 4, SOVIETS 3!!!!!
There were exactly ten minutes left. Now it was surreal. Our broadcast platform was starting to rock. And the rest of the game would be completely nuts. The Soviets were applying continuous pressure, but they’d abandoned their basic plan and were making desperate line changes, switching up every 20–25 seconds. It was like nothing we’d ever seen from the Soviets, who had always been so poised and clinical. Meanwhile, the U.S. team was playing with great confidence.
As the game wound down, the clock appeared to be in quicksand. The players would later say basically the same thing. You’d sneak a glance at the clock, there would be six minutes left, and then you’d look back to the game and figure a minute had elapsed. But then you’d look back at the clock and it would be, like, 5:43 remaining. Only seventeen seconds had been played?!
Finally, there were under five minutes left in the game. Then four. Now three. Then two. Now we’re in the last minute. The crowd is absolutely wild. It’s like doing a game in a thunderstorm. The noise is deafening. Chet Forte, the ABC producer, is screaming indecipherable gibberish into my headset. And I’m like a horse with blinkers. Stay in the game. Stay in the game. Just call the game. Call the game. Don’t get swept up by the emotion. The Soviets might tie the game with a goal and you have to be ready for that.
I’ve always felt that the hotter the action gets, the cooler you want to stay. You don’t want to underplay what’s going on, because it is exhilarating. But you don’t want to be over-the-top either, because when the crowd is out of its mind and the action is intense and the audience is riveted, if you’re screaming, you’re a nuisance. I want to be brief and let the drama play out. Let the pictures tell the story. Again, it’s about that beautiful melody, and not screwing it up with lyrics that don’t match.
So, I’m calling each pass and identifying who has the puck. I’m into the mechanics of the broadcast, nothing but the fundamentals. My conce
ntration level is as intense as it’s ever been in my career. Next to me, Dryden isn’t saying much because anything he’d say would have to be jammed in. I glance up at the clock and there are twenty seconds left. With ten seconds to go, the crowd begins to count the seconds down in unison.
The Soviets are pressuring in the U.S. end but the puck comes behind the net and around the boards and gets cleared out to center ice with about six seconds left.
The game at this point is all but over. Now there are a handful of seconds remaining where I don’t have to do literal play-by-play.
I’m like almost everyone in America at this point. Can you believe this?!
A word pops into my head—miraculous.
A split second later, it gets morphed into a question and answer:
Do you believe in miracles? Yes!
Six words. Through the years I’ve been asked thousands of times when I came up with the line? That morning? Sometime in the third period? Back in December? When February 22 dawned, in my mind, the United States had no chance to win this game. None. Zero. And even if they somehow did, how would it happen? Would it end with a shot on goal? A flurry outside the net? The line was completely spontaneous and totally in the moment. I had no idea of the impact the words would end up having. This was a time when no one had a home VCR, much less a DVR. No broadcaster made a call thinking, Oh, they’re going to play this back for years. It bore no semblance to today’s world, when anything and everything can be played back through eternity.
Reflecting back, that line came from my heart. This was a unique situation when, as a broadcaster, you could be openly biased: 99.9 percent of the audience is 100 percent with you. I know there’s supposed to be “no rooting in the press box,” but this was the exception. I didn’t think about it until much later but it enabled me to say words that were unrestrained and partisan. It was from my inner being. Period. It was written once that this was the nine-year-old boy emerging from somewhere within me. I’ll buy that.
Meanwhile, over the following ninety seconds, a million thoughts were racing through my head. How incredible was this! Where does this rank as a sports upset? What did this mean in the midst of a Cold War? There was still another game to come Sunday against Finland. But the best thing I could say was nothing. Just let the audience absorb and enjoy the moment. Don’t try to tell them what they should be thinking. There’d be plenty of time down the line to examine all the elements. Stay in the moment—just let the scenes play out and allow the audience to form its own thoughts.
The crowd was still going berserk, standing up and cleaving the air with their American flags. The U.S. team had piled on top of each other and on Jim Craig, who was still wearing his mask. The Soviet team stood at its own blue line waiting for the ceremonial handshake. They had a collective look not of shock but of bemusement mixed with envy.
When I finally did speak, all I could say was “No words necessary. Just pictures.”
AFTER THE GAME, IT was a scramble. Jim Lampley got an interview with Herb Brooks. The production people had to start editing for a late-night highlight show that would air after the tape of the entire game would run from 8–11 Eastern. And in the arena, they were clearing out the building because the teams from Sweden and Finland were getting ready to warm up for their eight o’clock game and a new crowd, those with tickets for the second game, would be coming in. There was no time for me to reflect. In a few more minutes, I’d be going back to work.
It might seem nutty now but in the television world of 1980, you lived in fear of a technical problem or tape issue or transmission snafu that could become disastrous in a worst-case scenario. Roone Arledge could never have enough backup material as insurance. We’d call it “filling Roone’s saddlebags.” And on this night, “filling Roone’s saddlebags,” meant that immediately after this incredible, historic upset, Ken Dryden and I remained in place to announce on tape the entire Sweden-Finland game for the next two and half hours. That’s right—while the entire country watched the U.S.-USSR game on tape delay, starting roughly forty-five minutes after it had ended—we were back up on that rickety platform, trying to concentrate on a game that was going to nobody. We called it as if it were live, but it was going nowhere but to a tape machine—unless along the way somehow there would be a technical problem with the airing of the U.S.-Soviet tape.
During the game, I was thinking that a lot of people had kept from finding out the final score of the U.S. game and boy, are they in for a treat. It wasn’t that hard to keep from finding out the result beforehand. Remember, it was 1980. There was no Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook. ESPN just had started, but it was available in just a small slice of the country. Plus, we had passed the window for the evening news on the networks. Here’s how Jim McKay put it that night on the air as he introduced the game: “If there’s only one person in this country who doesn’t know how this event will turn out, I’m not going to be the one to tell it to him. We’ve had mail and phone calls from you telling us that’s the way you want it.” And that’s the way they got it.
When the Sweden-Finland game ended, I walked back to the Hilton, alternately exhilarated and exhausted. The first person I ran into was Linda, who was standing with a producer. “Fantastic line at the end,” the producer said. “Perfect, just perfect!”
“Uh, thanks.” I had no idea what I’d said. At the end of the game, the only thing I had been concentrating on was getting the play-by-play perfect.
That night in the Olympic Village, there was at least one American athlete so pumped up from the win that he couldn’t get to sleep for hours afterward. Then he overslept the next morning—and nearly missed his event. Fortunately, Eric Heiden got to the speed skating track just in time to warm up and go on to his fifth gold medal of the Lake Placid Olympics, the 10,000 meters.
As far as the team was concerned, the guys went back to the Olympic Village that night. How was this getting played back to them? What was the feedback? Maybe a few phone calls, but again, there was no Internet, no cell phones, and a finite number of pay phones. What was the early overall perspective? There was no cable TV. Television coverage was from local affiliates in Burlington, Vermont, or Plattsburgh, New York. If it was possible for an Olympic Games to be relatively isolated, this was the one.
The enormity and the magnitude of what the American team did would be borne out two decades later when Sports Illustrated called this game “The Top Sports Moment of the 20th Century.” It took time for it all to register. But in Lake Placid, there was more work to be done. The upset of the Soviets has often been referred to as the “gold medal game”—it wasn’t. The United States still had a game to play forty hours later on Sunday morning against Finland. And because of the system in which teams carried points earned from the preliminary round into the medal round, if the Soviets had beaten Sweden and the United States had lost to Finland, it was possible that the Soviets could still win the gold, and the Americans would be relegated to the silver or bronze. I remember thinking that if the Americans lost on Sunday, the bloom would not only be off the rose, the rose might as well be in a weed patch.
And in fact, the United States would trail Finland that Sunday morning, 2–1, at the end of the second period. The third period was just a couple of minutes away when just before the team headed back to the ice, Herb Brooks looked at his players and delivered a line for the ages: “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your fucking grave.” For my money, the greatest pep talk ever. Truer words could not have been spoken.
The team began the third period with a great burst of energy and tied it, 2–2, on a goal by Phil Verchota two minutes, twenty-five seconds in. A little more than three minutes later, Rob McClanahan would score to give the U.S. team its first lead of the game. Five minutes from the gold medal, Verchota would be sent to the penalty box. The Finns had a great opportunity to tie up. But with 3:35 to go, Mark Johnson scored a shorthanded goal to make it 4–2.
As the horn sounded. I exclaimed, “This im
possible dream comes true!”
On the prime-time Olympic wrap-up show that night, Jim McKay asked me, “How do you think what we’ve witnessed here will be looked upon down the road?”
I responded, “Whenever something out of the ordinary happens, there’s always this immediacy. There’s a part of you that wants to say, ‘It’s tremendous! It’s the greatest! We’ll never again see anything like this!’ You can’t say that right now. We need some time. But I have a feeling this is going to wear pretty well down the line.” In my heart, I was certain it was going to wear really well.
For years after those Olympics, I would receive letters from people telling me how much the hockey team’s exploits had meant to them. At first, I thought, Why are you telling this to me? I didn’t play. Then it occurred to me: these folks couldn’t write to the team. People could figure out where to write to me. The team had no such address. When it all ended, the Olympic team disbanded, and the players and coaches went in different directions. (In this case, some to the NHL and professional hockey, others back to school or into the workplace.) So there was no way to reach out to them collectively. They had no single mailbox. I was a conduit, a link to that link—and my address at ABC Sports was easy to find. I still have many of those letters and relish reading them from time to time.
Here we are more than thirty years later and Lake Placid still resonates. Americans of a certain age can recall where they were on December 7, 1941, or when President Kennedy was assassinated, or when the Challenger exploded, or certainly September 11, 2001. And those of a certain age also remember where they were when the U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets in 1980. One huge difference, of course, is that this is a happy memory. Ed Swift covered the Miracle on Ice for Sports Illustrated and wrote in his end-of-year piece when SI named the team “Sportsmen of the Year”—“It made you want to hug your television set.” Perfectly put.