The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team

by Wayne Coffey

  “He’s one of those kids whose life was almost a storybook,” said Mike Sertich, who coached Baker under Hendrickson. “He was destined to succeed, and he did.”

  ____

  Not long after Tretiak thwarted Verchota and Baker, the Soviet charge resumed. Petrov had the puck inside the blue line, saw an opening, and seized it, skating in and ripping a 25-foot shot just wide. Moments later, Mikhailov got caught hooking Rob McClanahan and was sent off for two minutes, the game’s first power play. The crowd roared and did so again as Mark Johnson skated in on Tretiak, but Johnson couldn’t get a shot off as the defense squeezed in on him. The Americans couldn’t sustain the attack, the power play passing uneventfully.

  After Craig made a splendid kick stop of a blue-line drive by Viacheslav Fetisov, the heralded young Russian defenseman, Tretiak turned away a wicked turnaround slap shot from U.S. left wing Buzz Schneider. The fleet-skating, hard-shooting Schneider had been superb throughout the Olympics and was on the go again, carrying down the left side and centering to Mark Pavelich, twenty feet in front of the net. Pavelich’s wrist shot was blocked, and his rebound shot was deflected wide. With a bit over nine minutes gone, Schneider was behind his own net, looking to start up ice. Just as he got going, Soviet forward Vladimir Krutov whacked at his stick and sent the puck skidding ahead, right to defenseman Alexei Kasatonov at the point, a seemingly innocuous change of possession. Kasatonov let go with a shot and Krutov, about eight feet in front of Craig, extended his stick and got a piece of it, deflecting it downward, low on the glove side. The puck skittered under Craig’s glove, into the net.

  The crowd booed. One to nothing, Soviet Union.

  The Americans had started slowly in just about every game they had played, but it was one thing to spot West Germany a lead and quite another to do it with the Soviets. The United States was a beat behind, giving the Soviets too much room to set up. Krutov briefly raised his arms. At 19, he was the youngest Soviet player and the most relentless, a five-foot nine-inch 195-pounder who was nicknamed Tank and would skate by you or through you—whichever was necessary. He got a quick pat on the helmet from forward Yuri Lebedev, and then it was off to the bench for more perfunctory congratulation. When the U.S. team scored, they looked like kids at recess, running toward each other, exulting, a group hug waiting to happen. The Soviets had emotions; they just didn’t believe in displaying them. You didn’t see them haranguing officials, reacting to fans, taking exception to every hard hit. They were artists on skates, with the demeanor of accountants. Celebrations were not their thing.

  The crowd was similarly restrained. Even before Krutov’s goal, the mood in the Field House seemed oddly detached, more tense than excited. This game had been more hyped than any Olympic event ever held in the United States. Out on the street, top-priced tickets were trading at four and five times the $67.20 printed price. Tickets were so in demand that to safeguard the distribution of media tickets, organizers needed six state police officers and a private security detail. Yet there was almost a sense that people were wary of rooting too hard, bracing for a blowout.

  The mood around the offices of ABC late that week was not appreciably better. The network had paid $15.5 million for the right to televise the Games, a hefty investment at the time (though a broadcasting bargain by current standards: in 2002, the next time the Winter Games were held in the United States, the TV rights fee was $545 million). ABC desperately wanted to televise the U.S.–Soviet Union game live in prime time. Jim Spence, the network’s senior vice president and the No. 2 man behind Roone Arledge, said that he had reached an oral agreement months ahead of time with Bob Allen, the chief of competition for the hockey tournament, stipulating that if the United States should make it to the medal round and play the Soviet Union, the network could move the game to prime time. Allen recalls no such agreement. “I didn’t have the authority to change the time of the game,” he said. Once the semifinal pairings were set, Spence reminded Allen of the conversation and said ABC definitely wanted to move the game. Allen said he didn’t know if he could do that. Spence turned to Peter Spurney, head of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee. Spurney wanted no part of changing the game time. The local organizers had already been taking huge public-relations hits for the transportation fiasco at the start of the Games, when an acute bus shortage left people stranded all over the Adirondacks and very nearly forced the postponement of Opening Ceremonies. All they needed was for thousands of outraged fans who had tickets for the United States and the Soviet Union to show up at the arena and get Finland and Sweden instead.

  Spence called Ray Pratt, sports director of the Games, and Pratt, heeding Spurney’s orders, did all he could to stall him. At Spence’s urging, Allen reached out to Dr. Gunther Sabetzki, president of the International Ice Hockey Federation, who said that if the network would pony up $125,000, the IIHF would switch the game time. Arledge and Spence weren’t happy about a payment they considered extortion, but they agreed to pay it. In the meantime, Sabetzki checked with the four teams and apparently offered each $12,500 to agree to the switch. Three of the four teams agreed; the Soviets did not, not wanting to have the game start at four a.m. Moscow time, which is when it would have gone off with an eight p.m. start in Lake Placid. Spence was stymied. The game stayed at five p.m., as scheduled. ABC opted to televise it on tape delay; Al Michaels and Ken Dryden, the broadcasters, came on in their blue-knit shirts at eight p.m. EST. “It still bothers me that the game was not live when we had a commitment to do it live,” Spence said.

  ____

  After Krutov’s goal, the anxiety in the building was almost palpable. The whole place seemed tight, American players and fans alike. Not even a minute later, Pavelich skated behind Tretiak and backhanded a pass in front, but nobody was there to do anything with it. The Soviets controlled, and controlled, the Americans going close to a half-minute without touching the puck. A shot by Valery Vasiliev went wide, and then Craig stopped a rebound shot by Alexander Golikov, who had scored seven goals already in Lake Placid, the most of any Soviet. The Americans had a fleeting chance when Neal Broten sped down the left side and centered to linemate Steve Christoff, but the long-legged Zhluktov, with a bushy brown mustache and a glowering countenance, caught Christoff from behind and poked the puck away.

  Then Soviet defenseman Vasily Pervukhin launched a shot wide, and Craig briefly lost his footing and reeled backward, bumping into the goal. That was how most of the U.S. team looked, on its heels, reactive more than pro-active, the Soviets’ increasingly dictating the pace and the play. With just under eight minutes left in the period, Krutov nudged a pass to Alexander Maltsev along the boards and Maltsev flicked it right back, Krutov alone on Craig, just missing from close range. The Soviets maintained the pressure. Vladimir Golikov, playing on the same line with his brother Alexander, carried toward the U.S. blue line, into traffic, then got stripped by Mark Pavelich.

  At five feet seven inches, Mark Pavelich was the shortest player on the team, but he had legs as strong as a locomotive. Pavelich was a player that even his teammates loved to watch skate, and here he came, accelerating swiftly, veering right, into open space, tugging two defensemen toward him. Pavelich never said much, but if his hockey instincts could’ve talked, he would’ve been Churchill. Just a stride before he crossed center ice, he slid the puck across ice to the left wing, on to Schneider’s stick. Schneider took it cleanly and skated a few hard strides, inside the blue line. He had room. Defenseman Zinetula Bilyaletdinov tried to close in on him, get a piece, but Buzz Schneider still had space. He was about forty feet out.

  The best goal scorers are hard-wired with a sense of when it’s time to shoot. Buzz Schneider was no different. He was at a sharp angle, but he’d gotten a perfect setup and could feel the Russians had not quite recovered. He let it fly. As he shot, Tretiak was still moving to his right. Schneider decided to direct his missile behind him, to the place the goaltender had just vacated. The puck rocketed over Tretiak’s glove, int
o the upper right-hand corner.

  The red light glowed.

  Chapter Two

  STIRRINGS

  OF BELIEF

  Five minutes after his giveaway had put his team down a goal, Buzz Schneider evened it up, and there was a full-throated roar in the building to prove it. It was a nice time to continue his uncanny success against Tretiak. Schneider had scored a hat trick on him in the 1975 world championships, a claim few forwards in the world could make. “Buzzy owned Tretiak,” Rob McClanahan joked.

  After a tentative start, the U.S. players were skating with more conviction. They were tied with the greatest team on earth, and with the way the period had begun, that was not a bad thing.

  William “Buzz” Schneider got his nickname from an aunt when he was a little boy. He had been getting up and down his wing for almost as long, skating as if he were turbo-powered. Schneider shot harder than anyone on the team. He needed a little room to get the shot off, but once he did, it was no fun for the goalies. Some guys drive their slap shot and the puck arrives light and unmenacing. When Schneider shot, the puck felt like an anvil. “It hurt to catch it,” said Lefty Curran, the star goaltender of the U.S. Olympic team that won a silver medal in Japan in 1972 and Schneider’s friend and former boss for Great Dane, a tractor-trailer company. “It was all in his timing. He’s got a terrible golf swing, and I’ve seen him hit golf balls miles.”

  Without the overt edginess of a Dave Silk or the Olympic genes of a Dave Christian, Schneider was far from the biggest name on the team, but he was a superb athlete who may well have been a better baseball player than a hockey player. His other nickname was the Babbitt Rabbit, derived from his speed and his hometown on the eastern end of Minnesota’s Iron Range, just down Route 21 from Embarrass. Home to 685 people, Embarrass proudly calls itself “The Nation’s Cold Spot,” a quirk of airflow making it a few degrees colder than neighboring towns. The official record low for Embarrass is -57, on January 20, 1996. It barely broke -50 in Babbitt that day. “In spite of our cold temperatures,” Embarrassites like to say, “we are known for our warm hearts.”

  Buzz Schneider would pass through Embarrass on his trips to Eveleth, where his wife, Gayle, grew up. He was an out-of-towner, but everybody liked Buzz Schneider. He may have been the most popular and industrious player on the team; some guys were sure he would’ve been captain if the election had been decided by a truly democratic vote. The team did vote for captain, but Brooks wanted Mike Eruzione and nobody was sure how accurate the ballot count was. This was no knock on Eruzione, who turned into a terrific captain. It was just a testament to Schneider’s immense likeability.

  When Brooks was at the U, he was harder on Schneider than on anybody else. If practice wasn’t going well and Brooks felt a rant coming on, he’d blow the whistle and call everyone in and then look disapprovingly at Schneider. Brooks had a lead vest he used as a discipline device. Buzz Schneider believes he wore it more than anyone.

  “Buzzy, I don’t know. You’ve got million-dollar legs and a nickel brain. You’ve got to think the game,” Brooks would say. Or: “If this place didn’t have boards, you’d end up out on the street.” The quality that made Buzz Schneider attractive for singling out was that he could take it.

  “To this day, Buzzy Schneider is one of the nicest people I’ve ever known,” said Joe Micheletti, a Gopher teammate and former NHL defenseman who is now a broadcaster with the New York Islanders. “He always had a smile on his face. Herbie knew the strength of his personality, and knew that he could use that strength to get to the rest of the team and teach us about the game. It was tough to knock Buzzy off his stool.”

  Schneider played with his fellow Iron Rangers, Mark Pavelich of Eveleth and John Harrington of Virginia, all of them from the ore-laden precincts of northeast Minnesota, where lives and livelihoods were built around mines before the earth’s bounty began to give out and foreign competition began to rise up. Their self-appointed title was the Conehead Line, named for the old Saturday Night Live skit featuring aliens who had heads the shape of construction cones and spoke in flat, mechanical cadence. The Iron Rangers often were spectators when Brooks was working on the power play, and during one such stretch Pavelich mentioned that the three of them were no more vital to the proceedings than the orange cones Brooks set up during practice. Brooks put them on a line together, reasoning that only wingers who grew up playing Iron Range shinny hockey—the Midwestern term for pickup games on lakes and ponds—could know what the freewheeling Pavelich might do next. Harrington once asked Pavelich what their breakout pattern was going to be.

  “We’re going to start at one end of the ice and finish on the other,” Pavelich replied.

  They had their own style of hockey—intuitive and organic and grinding—on the Range, and their own way of life, too. Before Play Stations and play dates and ultra-organized youth hockey, there was hunting season and fishing season and hockey season. Kids played on frozen lakes or makeshift rinks, eight to a side or ten a side or however many showed up a side. Goalie pads were more likely to be fashioned out of beefy magazines and rubber bands than anything you’d find in a store. Ron Castellano, a 32-year coaching veteran and the only coach Babbitt High School ever had (“People say I was the winningest coach in school history, but I remind them I was the losingest, too,” Castellano said), played goal with a stick his father whittled from a hunk of wood. You learned to handle the puck and skate in traffic, and to find an open teammate, away from the posse chasing the puck. You would play for hours after school and all day on the weekends, and if you couldn’t get to the lake or the rink, you’d do what John Harrington did—play road hockey in front of the house, the plows supplying snow chunks for the goals, and the walls of snow the au naturel sideboards. People on the Range are nice, so when they’d come by in the car, they’d slow down and maneuver around the goals. Why would anybody run over a kid’s snow chunks?

  You learned to be resourceful and self-reliant on the Range, and to stick together. Life was hard, money was scarce, and the cold was brutal. The average high temperature in January was 16 degrees. Entire towns would be picked up and moved if they happened to be sitting on a good-sized ore deposit. Warmth and community were virtues to be prized. When Eveleth Methodist Church was built in 1950, the funds that bought the bricks and mortar and everything else came from the $50,000 that was raised selling pasties, the hearty meat-and-potato pies that are as much a Range staple as bratwurst is in Milwaukee. When a man in Babbitt was stricken by a brain tumor, the fund-raisers and the church suppers came nonstop. The generosity isn’t taken for granted in towns where, early in the twentieth century, a man wouldn’t make much more than $1.50 for a full day of digging in the earth, about a third of what the average American laborer made at the time. “If somebody has a problem, everyone will stop and do whatever they can to help,” said Matt Banovetz, a retired mineworker who spent thirty-five years working for Reserve Mining, until it went bankrupt in 1986. Banovetz’s starting wage in 1951 was $1.19 an hour. He often worked sixteen-hour days. His wife had a big celebration the first time he earned $100 per month.

  Time hasn’t stood still on the Iron Range, but it has moved slowly, which is what being four hours from the Twin Cities and even 100 miles from Duluth will do for you. A season of youth hockey at Eveleth’s historic Hippodrome—all fees included—costs $80. Two blocks away the Roosevelt Bar serves $1 drafts beneath a tin ceiling. In Hibbing, driving by Bob Dylan’s childhood home doesn’t cost a thing, and neither does traveling down the very Highway 61 that he sang about. You can play eighteen holes of golf in Babbitt for $18, and stay at the Red Carpet Inn for $25. After Reserve Mining shut down, you could buy a house for $10,000.

  The Iron Range stretches for 110 miles, bordered by Grand Rapids on the west and Babbitt on the east. It actually comprises three separate ranges (Mesabi, Vermilion, and Cuyuna), the landscape pocked by open pits, huge and abandoned, and by scarred red hills built from the tons of rock and dirt that were ext
racted to get to the ore. The towns go by the names of Biwabik and Coleraine, Mountain Iron and Gilbert, and they all call themselves cities, even the places with only a few thousand residents. You know you’re in the next town when you see its name on the water tower on the horizon. Most of the communities were built by the mining companies that set up shop there. Babbitt—all 108 square miles of it—was created from scratch by Reserve Mining in the early 1950s, from streetlamp to schoolhouse to the alphabetically ordered streets named for trees (Ash, Birch, Cypress, and so forth). It is a frontier fabrication that did not look kindly on any sort of interference or regulation. A sign near the edge of Babbitt said, “This town exists in spite of the following organizations: Sierra Club, Izaak Walton League, Friends of the Wilderness, Minnesota Public Interest Group and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.” The Schneider home on Birch Boulevard was a three-bedroom box that was more bungalow than house, with a tin detached garage. It was so indistinguishable from hundreds of other houses built by Reserve that it wasn’t unheard-of for people to come home at night and walk in the wrong house.

  The culture of mining courses through the Range like the ubiquitous train tracks that used to take hopper cars down to the Lake Superior ore docks. At the main intersection in Eveleth, Miners National Bank is on one corner and a steelworkers union storefront is across the way. On Central Boulevard in Babbitt is a nine-foot-high slab of gray-black taconite dedicated to Peter Mitchell, a prospector who discovered the ore deposits in the region. Every community has its ways, and each attracted its own subset of immigrant dreamers. There were a preponderance of Slovenians and Italians in Eveleth, Finns and Italians in Virginia, Croatians and Irish and Norwegians sprinkled here and there. All of them learned to deal with the vicissitudes of mining, the work hard but steady in good times, nonexistent in bad times. In the woeful economy of the early 1980s, unemployment exceeded 80 percent in more than a few Iron Range communities.