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

by Wayne Coffey

  “Every goal for Vlady was like a tragedy,” Makarov said. “If he let up bad goal, that was it. He didn’t like to be screamed at. You didn’t need to scream at him. He would slam the door. There wouldn’t be any more. He would take responsibility for his mistakes and then that would be the end of it. No more goals.”

  Tretiak in fact yielded no more goals that night, but only because his work was finished.

  Tikhonov, still irate, announced that Myshkin would be finishing the game. Myshkin had shut out the NHL All-Stars the year before, so this was no International Hockey League retread. Still, the Soviet players were stunned. It was akin to pinch-hitting for Babe Ruth in the seventh game of the World Series. Defenseman Sergei Starikov wasn’t even sure at first he heard Tikhonov correctly.

  “How do you do that?” Starikov said. He was in an upstairs room over the rink where he runs a hockey school in Union, New Jersey, a short, thick-bodied man, his voice still full of disbelief. “It’s one thing to put me on the bench, or even to put Mikhailov on the bench, but to put Tretiak on the bench? It felt like a big hole had been put in our team.”

  Said Makarov, “The whole team was not happy when Tikhonov made the switch. It was the worst moment of Vlady’s career. Tikhonov was panicking. He couldn’t control himself. That’s what it was—panic.” Bill Torrey, then general manager of the New York Islanders, was at the game with a host of other NHL executives. He went to get coffee at intermission and came back to see Tretiak sitting forlornly at the end of the bench. “I’ve known Tikhonov twenty-five or thirty years and I couldn’t believe he did that,” Torrey said. “I think Tikhonov totally wrote off the Americans after the 10–3 game. I think he thought they wouldn’t be a problem and it wouldn’t matter who was in goal. What he was trying to do was shake up his team. If he could replace the great Tretiak, that should send a message to the rest of the guys.”

  Tikhonov himself does not dispute that opinion. Years later, he sat in his office after coaching CSKA to a victory in its home arena, a boxy and indelicate place, grayish brown and hulking, on a Moscow avenue called Prospekt Leningradsky. His office was maybe three meters by four meters, a spartan space with a table, bookshelf, and pennants of all the teams he has coached on the walls. Videotapes were crammed into every available space. “The biggest mistake of my career was replacing Tretiak with Myshkin,” Tikhonov said through an interpreter. “Tretiak always played better after he gave up a goal. The decision was a result of getting caught up in emotions. After Tretiak gave up the rebound and let in the soft goal by Mark Johnson, my blood was boiling. It was my worst mistake, my biggest regret.” He paused. He smiled faintly when he was asked if he has watched a videotape of the game. “There’s no need for me to see the game. I saw it once,” he said.

  Tikhonov had a wiry physique and a brisk splay-footed walk and, with his jerky head movements and slicked-back hair, looked like a cross between a rooster and Eddie Munster all grown up. His was a taut personality, one in marked contrast to the blustering ebullience of Anatoly Tarasov, and his system of play was just as different. Tarasov encouraged his players to be creative and intuitive, to think the game on the go. As long as the team was being aggressive, he was usually content. During practices, defensemen were actually punished for sliding the puck back and forth to each other instead of pushing the attack. The autocratic Tikhonov was more conservative and controlling. His gave the players’ more criticism and less rope. He talked endlessly about the game’s geometry and knew exactly how he wanted the angles to be.

  “With Tarasov, no matter how much you worked in practice, you played,” said Lou Vairo, one of the earliest American devotees of Russian hockey. “With Tikhonov, no matter how much you played, you worked.”

  Said Starikov, “There was constant pressure, pressure, pressure—every day, every minute from Tikhonov. He was always on us: ‘Remember this, remember this, don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.’ It was always negative. The creativity was choked out of us.” Nearly everyone connected to the 1980 Soviet team considered it to be the strongest Olympic team the Russians had ever put together, yet there was a stiffness about the team’s play, a puzzling lack of fluidity. “You could feel unrest in the air,” Vladimir Lutchenko said.

  Tikhonov took over CSKA and the national team in 1977 and was making his Olympic debut in Lake Placid. Lutchenko wasn’t the last of Tarasov’s former players to be weeded out. Tarasov hadn’t been at the helm since 1972, but he remained a towering figure—Lombardi by Red Square. “Tikhonov wanted to get rid of older guys,” said Makarov, who went on to star on the celebrated KLM line on the Soviet national team in the 1980s. “The older guys were more powerful. They had been professionals for ten years. He was young coach. Nobody knew him. He wanted young guys so he could do what he wanted. He wanted Play-Doh players.”

  Tikhonov came to the Soviet national team from Dynamo Riga and had long since established a reputation for fanatical attention to detail. As an assistant to Tarasov in the 1968 Olympics in Grenoble, France, he was one of about twenty people in the stands for a game between Japan and Bulgaria. While other Soviet officials were hunting for a party with free food and drink, Tikhonov was dissecting Bulgarian breakouts. He had a little pocket notebook that he always carried with him. His wife, Tatiana, often woke up in the middle of the night to find Viktor sitting up in bed with the light on, jotting notes and thoughts into the book.

  “Sometimes when you are sleeping you get great ideas that will not be there when you wake up,” he explained once. “So I put it down in my notebook.” Even when the Tikhonovs had company for dinner, he would have the book at the table. The joke among his players was that Tikhonov’s job was hockey and his hobby was hockey. It wasn’t easy when the national team would be holed up in its training camp in Novogorsk, about a half-hour out of Moscow. “You have breakfast with Tikhonov, lunch with Tikhonov, dinner with Tikhonov,” Makarov said. “It could be too much. Guys would be relaxing at night watching television and when Tikhonov would come in, a couple of guys would slowly get up and leave. Then a few more would leave, and then a few more. Pretty soon Tikhonov would be watching TV by himself.”

  Viktor Tikhonov did not have an easy life growing up. His father died in World War II, and the family lived in a hardscrabble Moscow neighborhood. Viktor went to work as a bus mechanic to help bring in money. He became enamored of hockey and had a staunch backer in his mother, who viewed it as a way to help her son avoid the trouble other neighborhood boys were getting into. He was always playing, studying, and watching; being sociable or communicative did not come as easily. All through the 1980 Games he had a bout with the flu, his temperature spiking and then sinking, the team doctor finally hospitalizing him for observation a day before the game against the United States. Tikhonov never talked about it, and he never took antibiotics because he didn’t believe in them. His mother was gravely ill during the 1994 Olympics in Norway. He visited her immediately before leaving but again shared nothing about it except to his closest friends. He doesn’t talk about his successes much, either. Few of his honors or awards are on display in his Moscow apartment or in his windowless office in the CSKA Arena. Tikhonov grants no special treatment to himself or to any of his players.

  Tikhonov left the Soviet national team in 1994 but was brought back in 2003 at the age of 73, his mission to restore Russian hockey to prominence. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, state support of the sports system crumbled and so did the staggering run of prosperity that had yielded twenty-three world championships between 1954 and 1993. His return came just six weeks before the death of Herb Brooks. Late one autumn night at the CSKA Arena, after his team had won an early-season game, Tikhonov was preparing to leave the arena when someone told him his appearance had changed little over the decades. “My wife says that when women want to keep meat fresh for a long time, they put it in the refrigerator,” Tikhonov said. He pointed in the direction of the rink, about fifty yards away. “I have spent my whole life
in the refrigerator.” The coach smiled.

  His spirits were not so buoyant at the end of twenty minutes in his first Olympic semifinal, as he stood and watched Mark Johnson tie the score while his cavalcade of hockey stars watched along with him. On the opposite bench, Herb Brooks smiled tightly, pumped his fist, and looked as if he’d gotten away with something. The horn sounded, and the ending was just the beginning.

  ________________________

  FIRST INTERMISSION

  INTRIGUE IN

  THE WOODS

  The mood in Lake Placid was not very placid at all as the Games began. On Saturday evening, February 9, hours after the Soviet Union trounced the United States in Madison Square Garden, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance addressed the eighty-second session of the International Olympic Committee at a reception at the Lake Placid Club. He warmly welcomed committee members and the world’s athletes, then ended the feel-good portion of his presentation faster than you can say “boycott.” This wasn’t merely an Olympic year. It was an election year, and the Games offered President Jimmy Carter a chance—maybe his last chance—to stop his freefall in the polls. Traditionally, the opening of the IOC meeting is a politics-free forum, conflicts swept under the rings. It was the equivalent of dropping the gloves and yanking the sweater over the head as Vance, representing the president, addressed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the upcoming Summer Games in Moscow:

  From their beginnings in ancient Greece, the Olympics have symbolized some of humanity’s noblest principles. Foremost among these is peace. . . . In the view of my government, it would be a violation of this fundamental Olympic principle to conduct or attend Olympics Games in a nation which is currently engaging in an aggressive war and has refused to comply with the world community’s demand to halt its aggression and withdraw its forces. . . . To hold the Olympics in any nation that is warring on another is to lend the Olympic mantle to that nation’s actions.

  The United States’ position on the Soviets’ actions had already been emphatically staked out with a grain and trade embargo and U.S. support of the United Nations resolution condemning the invasion. Still, Lord Michael Killanin of Ireland, the IOC president, received an unwelcome surprise when he reviewed an advance copy of Vance’s remarks. Killanin found them so offensive that he called the Soviet delegation and suggested they skip the affair. The Soviets, who had briefly considered a boycott of their own in Lake Placid, did just that. Amid the crackling of the fireplace and the tinkling of cocktail glasses, the tension in the room was thicker than a North Country snowbank.

  Let the Games begin, and get ready to duck the rhetoric.

  “That night was the only time in my life I’ve been embarrassed to be an American,” said Phil Wolff, the chief of staff for the Lake Placid Games. “I spent three years fighting in World War II. Nobody has a deeper love of this country than I do, but that was not right to be so derogatory and political when we’re supposed to be welcoming all our guests from around the world.”

  The Olympics had become vastly more security-conscious following the tragic massacre of Israeli athletes in the Munich Games in 1972, and the political climate added another level of vigilance. There were so many intelligence and counterintelligence personnel in town that at times the village looked like the set of a James Bond movie, with more pine trees. Top Lake Placid security officials went to an FBI training school prior to the Games and had briefings with the agency each morning. The Olympic security force numbered about 1,000, not including undercover federal agents. With surveillance cameras in the woods surrounding the Olympic Village, along with officers with guns, leisurely strolls were not advisable.

  “There was a very strong FBI presence, that’s for sure,” said Mike Down, a retired sergeant with the New York State Police, the lead security agency for the Games. The same was true for the KGB. Steve Yianoukos, one of the Zamboni drivers for the Olympic Arena, recalled how a squadron of KGB men would materialize during Soviet practice sessions. On the Saturday morning after the U.S. game, Yianoukos saw a state trooper motioning to Tretiak. A look of panic crossed Tretiak’s face; he apparently thought the officer’s gesture was a suggestion that he defect. “All the guy wanted was to take a picture,” Yianoukos said.

  Soviet officials were sufficiently worried about the heightened tensions that they urged their athletes to stay close to the Village. When the Soviets were in New York City, there was a similar warning to avoid walking around. “They weren’t so afraid of us defecting. They were afraid that someone would do something to us,” said Sergei Makarov. “Before 1980 when we traveled we had maybe one KGB guy with us. When we went to America the KGB guys were everywhere.”

  You never knew where the undercover officers would turn up. The mayor of Moscow was provided a car and driver during his stay—a driver whose day job was as a federal agent, according to Wolff, the chairman of security for the organizing committee. Wolff didn’t know whether the driver was FBI or CIA or who got him behind the wheel, but he did know that the mayor knew exactly what was up. One day early in the second week of the Olympics the mayor and a group of Soviet officials stopped by Wolff’s office early in the afternoon. They brought out a bottle of vodka, as was customary; Wolff had his shot glass handy. “I want to thank you again for our driver,” the mayor said with a twinkle. “He is doing an excellent job and we appreciate so much how he is helping us.”

  Agents on both sides were disguised in an assortment of ways. They might be interpreters or valets or delegation officials with a suspiciously fuzzy scope of responsibility. Sergeant Mike Down said that one of the most popular pastimes among top security officials in both camps at the Games was trying to figure out who the undercover officers were. It was usually easy enough to do. You told a joke and then you watched the faces for a reaction. If the guy smiled, you could pretty much know he was an undercover agent, because agents were the ones who knew English.

  While the turbulence surrounding the Games had no direct bearing on the hockey tournament—Brooks never talked to his players about the Cold War or winning it for capitalism—the coach was completely comfortable with the notion of building a team into the enemy. He would regularly cultivate us-vs.-them scenarios to motivate his players, taking slights, real or imagined, and skating with them. His 1973–1974 Gophers—a team of American kids from Minnesota—heard Brooks constantly spouting about how nobody believed an American team could compete against Canadians (nearly all college hockey teams had sizable contingents of Canadian imports). “It was a steady drip on us all year: ‘You guys are going to prove something to people,’ ” Don Micheletti, a standout forward on the team, said. “By the time the playoffs came around we were convinced we weren’t going to lose.” When the Gophers played Boston University in the NCAA tournament, the opponent wasn’t just a school from the East; it was an arrogant bunch of Canucks and Preppies who thought you were lucky to be on the ice with them. Of the epic Minnesota-Wisconsin battles, Gary Smith said, “Herb had me so brainwashed about Bob Johnson that I thought he was the biggest ass on earth, and I never even met the man.” Brooks always had a destination in mind, and if he needed to create bumps or ill-feeling to get there, it was no big deal. The coach was skewered in Lake Placid for ignoring Olympic protocol and not making his players available to the press after games, the suggestion being that he wanted all the attention on himself. The truth was that Brooks had spent months building the spirit and substance of a team, and he didn’t want its bond getting loosened by having Jim Craig and Mark Johnson commanding all the headlines and everyone else getting ignored.

  Brooks relished stirring things up and rarely had trouble finding targets for criticism. Few got more of it over the years than the powers-that-be at AHAUS, now USA Hockey. “There are a bunch of big, fat, cigar-smoking people running hockey in this country,” Brooks would say, a depiction that Walter Bush, the USA Hockey executive who gave him a shot at interviewing for the Olympic job, didn’t care for: “I told him, ‘Herb, I may be big and I
may be fat, but I don’t smoke cigars.’ ” Days before the Americans left Minnesota for their training camp and their pre-Olympic exhibition schedule in the late summer of 1979—an international itinerary that had been planned more than a year—Brooks told general manager Ken Johannson he wanted to chuck it all because it didn’t give his players enough competition on the larger European-style rinks that they would play on in the Olympics. By the fall of 1979, it was Johannson who decided to chuck it, stepping down as general manager and being replaced by Ralph Jasinski. At almost every coaching stop Brooks made, he took on management and sometimes players and wasn’t shy about going public, explaining in large measure why a coaching genius could have seven jobs in a ten-year span after the 1980 Olympics. When he was with the Rangers, Brooks called team captain Barry Beck a coward in the New York Times.

  “Herb always loved a good scrap,” Tim Taylor said.

  ____

  The oldest of three children of Herb and Pauline Brooks, Herbert Paul Brooks grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the east side of St. Paul. His mother, by all accounts, was a stern and tough-minded woman who tolerated little nonsense from her three children. Even as a young man, friends said, Herb had a striking intensity about him, a quality that was in marked contrast to the way of his younger brother, David, who followed Herb to the University of Minnesota and was his 1964 Olympic teammate, an affable, life-of-the-party sort. Herb was an accomplished student and fine athlete, a left-handed kid who played a good first base and was a sweet-skating forward on St. Paul’s Johnson High School team that won the Minnesota state title in 1955. He went on to study psychology and star in hockey at the U, where he played for John Mariucci, a pioneering force in hockey throughout the state, a man who was one of the few Americans to play in the National Hockey League in the 1940s and became one of the earliest champions of American players. It would be a cause that his pupil Brooks would devote his rinkside life to, though the devotion could manifest itself in peculiar ways.