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

by Wayne Coffey

  Johnson has been the Badgers’ head women’s coach since June 2002, a career move he neither expected nor contemplated. Six weeks after the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team lit the cauldron to open the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Johnson was passed over for the Wisconsin men’s job, a position most people assumed would be his. Mark wasn’t merely Badger Bob’s son, a Madison and Olympic icon. He had paid his dues after an eleven-year NHL career, working for six years as an assistant to the outgoing coach, Jeff Sauer. But athletic director Pat Richter opted to go with Mike Eaves, Johnson’s teammate on the Badgers’ 1977 national championship team.

  Across four decades of a charmed hockey life, Mark Johnson had always been a star. He had won scoring titles, championships, and a gold medal, and nearly made the 1976 Olympic team at age 17. Rejection was something altogether new. Johnson was the captain of the Hartford Whalers when he was traded to the Blues in 1985, one year after scoring 87 points. That stung, but trades were part of NHL commerce. This was different, personal, the first time Mark Johnson had in effect been told, “We like the other guy better.” Richter delivered the news to Johnson in Sauer’s office. Later Johnson cried.

  “Did it hurt? Oh yeah, it hurt,” Johnson said. “But life teaches you that you have to move on, and you try to do it in a fashion that you can walk away with your head held high. It’s just like sports, like the final score of a game. It is what it is. It’s no use feeling sorry for yourself. We can spend energy that we get nothing out of. No matter how much you complain or how much people think it’s a wrong decision, you have to deal with it and move on. I’ve learned some things from it. I learned about the interview process, and some of the things you might do differently. As I move along, I know that I’ll be better because of it. Could I have done a good job? Absolutely. Was I ready to do it? Certainly. I don’t think the group was very big that thought I couldn’t do it. But it just didn’t work out. You just have to have confidence in what you are doing. It’s not like it was the end of the world. It’s not like I was going to have to get out of hockey.”

  In thirteen years as a pro hockey player, Mark Johnson lived in Pittsburgh and Minnesota and Hartford and St. Louis and New Jersey, and never found any place that compared to Madison. He was in no rush to go back on the road, or relocate, after he didn’t get the men’s job at Wisconsin, and neither were his wife, Leslie, his high school sweetheart, or their five children. Still, it seemed inevitable. “I didn’t know where we were going, but I was sure we were leaving,” Leslie said.

  Then the Wisconsin women’s job opened up, and Johnson applied for it. People in Madison were stunned when his name surfaced, and Johnson himself wasn’t sure if it was a good move. The women’s team was in disarray, having gone through three coaches in as many seasons. He wondered if it would stigmatize him in any way, if he would still be able to coach men if he chose to. Johnson talked with Ben Smith, coach of the U.S. women’s national team, a man who had made the successful crossover from men to women, and whose assistant, Julie Sasner, used to coach the Wisconsin women. Johnson heard nothing but positives from Smith, about the players’ passion for the game and their coachability.

  He decided to take the job, and the impact was immediate. Johnson was the co-coach of the year in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association his first year, when Wisconsin finished 22–8–5. In his second year, 2003–2004, he led the Badgers to a No. 6 national ranking and a 25–6–3 record.

  Johnson’s salary and visibility do not compare with Mike Eaves’s, but he insists it doesn’t bother him. He has never made any effort to cash in on his Olympic stature or to get preferential treatment. He went to his first Green Bay Packers game with two of his boys and close friend Pete Giacomini late in 2003. Nobody in Lambeau Field recognized him. “It’s exactly the way he likes it,” Giacomini said. The Johnsons once had a garage sale at their house, and Giacomini was shocked to see Mark’s hockey gloves from Lake Placid on a table. They were priced at $3.

  “Are you nuts?” he asked Leslie.

  “Who would want them?” she replied.

  “Your kids are going to want them,” Giacomini said. The gloves were pulled off the table. To underscore the value of such things, Giacomini got Johnson’s permission to put a pair of game-worn Olympic hockey pants on sale on eBay.

  They sold for $1,250.

  The pants had been in the corner of the garage with a bicycle on top of them. That’s how the Johnson home is, a bustling place thick with entropy, hockey gear strewn about, kids coming and going, plans made on the fly, with minimal worry and a conviction that things will work out. Leslie has about a thousand things going at once and balances them with joyful frenzy. “It’s an interesting marriage,” Giacomini said. “Mark’s introverted, and he married a cruise director.” Mark used two-by-twelves to build a backyard rink at the new house, thirty-two feet wide by fifty-five feet long. He’s out there with the kids all the time. “There’s not anything more pure than skating on a sheet of ice under the stars,” Johnson said. “When I die and get to heaven, that’s what it’s going to be: skating all day and all night, just a pickup game forever.”

  If Johnson had initial doubts about coaching women, the feeling was mutual. Sis Paulsen was the Badgers captain in Johnson’s first year. She played for a boys’ team in high school in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and used to watch footage of the U.S.–Soviet Union game in Lake Placid for inspiration. Paulsen didn’t know what to expect from Johnson. The concern melted away in about the time it takes to resurface a rink, Johnson’s first practice unfolding with briskness and creativity. “You can’t make conditioning drills fun. And he made it fun,” Paulsen said. “I learned so much from him in one year—more than I learned in my hockey career.”

  Johnson is much more teacher than screamer, and it has long been thus. His first head coaching job was in 1995–1996, when he coached the Madison Monsters in the Colonial Hockey League. The joke was that when Johnson finally got angry at the team and kicked a water bottle in the locker room, he made sure it was empty. The Wisconsin women had their own jokes and appreciated how Johnson—male coach surrounded by twenty-four young women—would take them and banter back. One sunny morning early in the 2003–2004 season, forward Jackie Friesen knocked on his office door and asked if she could get a copy of a tape from a game against Maine a few days earlier.

  “You want to watch yourself score that goal again?” Johnson teased.

  Johnson assured his team when he took over that this was not just a stopover until he could get a men’s job. Six months later, his words were put to the test. Tony Granato, Johnson’s friend, fellow Badger alum, and coach of the Colorado Avalanche, asked Johnson if he would be interested in joining his staff as an assistant. What would be a more ideal destination than Colorado, where his mother and two sisters live and where Johnson runs a summer camp? Who better to coach with than Granato? Johnson talked to Leslie, his family, a few friends. His kids wanted to go. After a few days, Johnson called Granato, expressed his gratitude, and said no thanks.

  “I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to walk into the locker room and tell these players I was leaving,” Johnson said. “I’ve got signs on the wall that say, ‘Commitment, Passion, Integrity.’ If I am going to be a good coach and people are going to listen and respect me, I have to walk the walk, as they say.

  “There was another, underlying part of it, too. I’ve coached two of the last four [men’s] world championship teams, and NHL players. When a guy is making six, seven, eight million dollars a year, you can coach him, but are you teaching him, influencing him? On the men’s side, if you’re dealing with football, basketball, hockey, in the back of those kids’ minds, they want to play for money one day. And that changes the parameters of a lot of things that we deal with, especially with the money that’s out there now. On the women’s side, their dreams are playing on the national team, in the Olympics. They’re here for the right reasons. It’s like when we played. Their dreams are similar to what ours w
ere.”

  Johnson’s 1980 teammates called him Magic for the things he could do with the puck. “He was our Gretzky, without the protection,” Jim Craig said. Like his basketball counterpart, this Magic Johnson was utterly unselfish and made everyone around him better, an athlete whose eyes and hands moved in lockstep, with speed and unerring dexterity. When his father considered choosing him for the 1976 Olympic team, there were whispered objections of nepotism, much as there were later that year when Mark joined the Badgers as a highly touted freshman. Mark got pounded by upperclassmen during preseason, daily intrasquad gut checks. He never backed down, never stopped working. Soon he won them over. The coach’s kid could play. “He was just one of those athletes who could do anything,” Jeff Sauer said. “You put a golf club in his hand, and he could play golf well. Put a racquetball racquet in his hand, and he could play racquetball well. He wasn’t a big, strong guy, but he could play anything.”

  Johnson’s Olympic year did not begin auspiciously. He got food poisoning during the 1979 Sports Festival. Bob Suter, his roommate and Badger teammate, tried to nurse him back to health. George Nagobads, the team doctor, insisted it was nothing serious, but Martha Johnson wasn’t convinced, and she brought Mark to the hotel where she was staying, feeding him clear liquids and Jell-O, working up to toast. Brooks didn’t have a problem with the maternal interference. If there was any player who didn’t need to audition, it was Mark Johnson. Brooks had seen plenty of him over the previous three years of Gopher-Badger games and knew all about his slick-skating, quick-thinking game, the way he braided creativity with a grit far greater than his five feet nine inches and 160 pounds would suggest. In the closing minutes of the 7–3 demolition of Czechoslovakia, Johnson suffered an injured shoulder when Czech defenseman Jan Neliba whacked him with a late hit, a play that sent Brooks into a rage. “You’re going to eat that goddamn Koho,” the coach shouted, referring to the Finnish stick that Neliba brandished. Brooks couldn’t imagine life without Mark Johnson anchoring his No. 1 line. It didn’t matter whose son he was.

  Herb Brooks and Bob Johnson, the two most decorated college hockey coaches the United States has ever had, were not just fierce rivals. They were all but sworn enemies, the WCHA version of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, minus the pistols. When Johnson was assembling the 1976 Olympic team, two prime candidates for it were Reed Larson and Tom Vanelli, stars for Brooks’s team at the U. Larson could well have been the top collegiate defenseman in the country. The pair never even tried out. Vanelli said he didn’t know the team was interested in him and Larson said the first time he was approached was on Christmas in 1975, about six weeks before the Olympics. Some people around the Olympic team believed that Brooks held the players back because he was more interested in winning a national championship than helping Bob Johnson win an Olympic medal. “Herb didn’t want [Vanelli and Larson] leaving,” said Art Berglund, the general manager of the 1976 team. “Certainly those guys were not encouraged to try out for the team.” But people close to Brooks insist the coach would never do such a thing, that he would’ve let the players go if they’d been asked. Whatever happened, Buzz Schneider and Rob Harris were the lone Gophers on the team. When he was putting together his own team before 1980, Brooks was deeply worried that Bob Johnson might withhold Mark, an option that Mark Johnson himself says was never considered.

  Part of the distaste between Brooks and Johnson was rooted in nothing more complicated than geography, two ferociously competitive men, each with his own hockey fiefdom, 300 miles apart on Interstate 94. Johnson grew up in south Minneapolis, Brooks in east St. Paul. Both were hard-driving but achieved their ends through vastly different means, Johnson gregarious and sunny, a master of positive reinforcement, Brooks remote and sometimes frosty, a master of motivating through fear.

  Brooks may have been headstrong, but he was also pragmatic. He couldn’t stand Badger Bob, but he needed Badger Mark. Ten days into the fall trip to Europe, Brooks called Johnson into his hotel room and basically told him that it was his team and that United States would go as far as Johnson could take it. Johnson was flabbergasted.

  “If you looked at that whole group of players and looked at the coach and asked yourself, ‘Who is going to have the toughest time?,’ I would’ve been the one you would’ve picked,” Johnson said. “But with all great coaches, they have a certain vision. It’s just a matter of becoming a salesman and selling the player you’re working with on what your vision is, and Herb was able to do that.”

  Brooks’s words of confidence were empowering and liberating for Mark Johnson. He could play his game and enjoy the journey, the way his father always had. His memories of the road to Lake Placid are as vivid as his memories of the Games themselves: playing pond hockey with the guys in Burnsville, Minnesota; running the hill next to the Olympic arena in full gear, before and after practice; sitting by the campfire in the woods of Oolu, Finland, about 100 miles from the Arctic Circle. That was in September, and it was quiet and peaceful, and as the flames flickered, the U.S. Olympic team sat together and joked and told stories and drank some beer, a spontaneous gathering in the north woods, on the way to history.

  Mark Johnson felt blessed. It made him wonder again why blessings aren’t more evenly distributed.

  Diane Johnson is 40 years old, the youngest of Bob and Martha Johnson’s five children. She spent almost twenty-five years living in the Southern Wisconsin Center in Union Grove, Wisconsin, before moving to a small group home in Madison several years ago. She likes to go out to McDonald’s and make crafts in her workshops. She is a happy person with a pleasant disposition. She does not use words. Diane Johnson has the functioning of an 18-month-old.

  “It’s part of the perspective we have as a family about fame and fortune,” said brother Peter Johnson, a former scout for the Toronto Maple Leafs who now runs the rink in the town of Verona, outside Madison. “Maybe that’s why our dad was so positive. Because he saw the other side of life, he took every day as a gift.”

  Jeff Sauer, who has known the Johnson family for most of his life, used to babysit for Diane. “It took a long, long time for Bob to accept it. I don’t know if he ever did,” Sauer said.

  Diane was a beautiful baby, pink and perfect. There were no signs of anything being wrong until she was 14 months old and Martha noticed that she kept on trying to grasp things, not with her fingers but with the back of her hand. Again and again the baby tried to pick things up that way, even after her mother showed her how to open her hand. One day Diane got into the bathtub and turned on the hot water and let it run, burning herself so severely she needed to be hospitalized. It became increasingly difficult to care for her, especially with the needs of four other children to balance. She needed constant supervision. She needed to be in a safer place. When Diane was seven, Bob and Martha Johnson placed their youngest child in the Southern Wisconsin Center.

  “I can’t imagine how difficult it was for my parents to make that decision,” Mark said.

  He was 12 when Diane moved out. His mother doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence that around that time Mark was acting up in school, a high-energy, smart-alecky kid, more mischievous than naughty, a boy trying to find his way.

  “Mark was one of the ones most affected when Diane left,” Martha Johnson said. “He had a hard time understanding why we couldn’t keep her. She was there and then suddenly she was gone. It was almost like someone died.”

  Diane was 16 years old when the U.S. hockey team became famous in 1980. She knew nothing about the specifics, of course, about her brother’s starring role. Mark Johnson, a devout Christian, has long wondered why it was Diane who was different, why her world was so limited and tightly drawn while his has been so global and challenging; why a sister and brother from an identical gene pool can face such different fates, one life built around finger paints and Golden Arches, the other around international acclaim and Olympic glory.

  “Sometimes you can’t answer the why questions,” Mark Johnson said. �
�You just have to trust God and be faithful. You have to be thankful and try to lead your life in a way that people can look to it as an example.”

  ____

  Thinking the first period was over after Johnson’s goal, the Soviets retired to their dressing room, to drink their hot tea and lemon and brace for a certain reaming out from Tikhonov. When they were summoned back out by Kaisla to play the final second of the period, the only skaters for the Soviets at first were Mikhailov and Krutov. O’Callahan urged Kaisla to drop the puck and give the United States a chance for an empty-net goal. Then Makarov came out, the third and last skater. Not many people in the building noticed that No. 1 in red, backup goaltender Vladimir Myshkin, was skating toward the goal. The Field House rocked with the most raucous “U-S-A, U-S-A” chant yet as Kaisla dropped the puck for the face-off that restarted the game and ended the period. There was a huge cheer when the horn sounded. The U.S. team headed back to Locker Room 5. They had been outplayed, but the score was tied, the charge of Johnson’s goal flowing through them like a current. “I’ve never, ever experienced that kind of emotion and the kind of adrenaline rush that I felt in that room after the first period,” forward Eric Strobel said. “It was like your skates weren’t even touching the ground. It was almost as if everyone was starting to believe, ‘Hey, we can skate with these guys.’ ”

  In the other locker room, Tikhonov was directing most of his tirade at Tretiak, the most famous goaltender in the world and owner of two Olympic gold medals. Tretiak certainly had not been at his best in these Games, and he had let in a couple of soft goals against Canada, and now he had wobbled in the first period against the Americans. But none of the Soviet players were worried about it. Tretiak’s history and temperament made it a moot issue.