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

by Wayne Coffey

  Nobody on the 1980 team was more familiar with Brooks than Steve Janaszak, who was the goalie on two NCAA title teams for Brooks and MVP of the 1979 tournament, and who once went three months without hearing so much as a hello from Brooks. And he wasn’t even in the doghouse. “Traumatic is the best way to describe playing for him,” Janaszak said. Other players at the U took to calling Brooks “the Mute” for the way he’d wordlessly walk by them in the hallway. Dave Silk got on a hotel elevator on the thirty-fourth floor one morning in Finland, early in the European swing in the fall of 1979. On the twenty-fifth floor, the elevator stopped and in walked Brooks. The coach looked away, said nothing. Silk didn’t know what to say or do. He stared straight ahead and watched the floor numbers go down. Finally they got to the lobby. “It was the longest elevator ride of my life,” Silk said.

  Restlessness came easily to Herb Brooks. Rest and relaxation did not. Meals were not something to savor; they were an annoying necessity, like putting gas in the car. “Eating wastes so much time,” he used to tell his wife, Patti. His idea of downtime was spending a day planting around the house. Patti and the kids gave him a hammock one Father’s Day, and they were all amazed when they actually caught him in it one day.

  Brooks also could be maddeningly obstinate. When he was coaching the Gopher freshmen, the varsity made the Frozen Four in Boston and the Minnesota athletic director told Brooks that there wasn’t enough money in the budget for him to make the trip. Brooks thought that was wrong, so he quit. Minnesota North Stars GM Lou Nanne and a host of others tried to smooth over Brooks’s long-running rift with Wisconsin coach Bob Johnson but never got anywhere. Brooks would sometimes have spats with friends—Nanne among them—and not talk to them for a year or two. In the late summer of 1983, the next edition of the U.S. Olympic hockey team was in Lake Placid, training for the Sarajevo Games, at the same time that Brooks’s New York Rangers were in town. Lou Vairo, who succeeded Brooks as Olympic coach, asked him if he would speak to the players. Brooks was at odds with USA Hockey—he usually was, often over player-development matters—and declined the offer, no matter that the roster included 1980 veterans John Harrington and Phil Verchota. In 1988, before the Calgary Games, he did the same thing, declining to say so much as “Good luck” to coach Dave Peterson’s team.

  “I’ve never seen anyone carry things as far as he would for a principle,” said Glen Sonmor, a friend who was Brooks’s freshman coach at the U in 1955. Sonmor knew Brooks for nearly five decades and still had a hard time figuring him out. “I used to say to Herb, ‘Why do you always have to tilt at windmills?’ He was always taking people on. Whatever I thought he wouldn’t do, he would do. Whatever I thought he would do, he wouldn’t do.”

  Sonmor wondered sometimes if Herb Brooks just couldn’t stand prosperity. Nanne offered Brooks the North Stars job in 1978. Brooks would’ve been working for an old friend in his home city in the NHL, but he torpedoed it by demanding a three-year contract.

  “Even I have a two-year contract,” Nanne told him. “The owners don’t want to go longer than that.”

  “I’m not doing it,” Brooks said. Seven years later, Nanne was negotiating with Brooks again to coach the North Stars. A deal was reached, a flight booked to meet owner Gordon Gund, a press conference called. The night before the meeting with Gund, Art Kaminsky called Nanne and said Brooks wanted a $250,000 bonus if he were ever fired.

  “Art, I can’t pay a guy more to fail than to succeed,” Nanne said.

  “Call him. You know how he is,” Kaminsky said. Nanne called Brooks, who would not back off—and wasn’t hired. Two years later, Brooks and Nanne finally did reach a deal, but then Nanne left to accept an offer in the financial-services sector. In the throes of a horrible season, Brooks basically demanded a five-year contract from the new general manager—and was sent packing again.

  In the summer of 2002, some six months after Brooks returned to coach the U.S. Olympic team to a silver medal in Salt Lake City (a team of NHL stars, not little-known collegians), Glen Sather, general manager of the Rangers, wanted Brooks to come back to New York to coach the Rangers. After much back-and-forth, Nanne—now working as Brooks’s agent—struck a multimillion-dollar deal. He, Brooks, and their friend and player agent Neil Sheehy opened a bottle of wine to celebrate at a St. Paul restaurant. The next morning, Brooks said he wanted stock options from the Garden’s parent company, Cablevision. The deal fell through.

  Said John Harrington, “It was almost like he was having a midlife crisis for the last twenty years. It was like he wanted to be doing something, but he didn’t know what it was. He was searching for something, but didn’t know what it should be.”

  Brooks and the Rangers talked again in the summer of 2003, but nothing worked out. Nanne said Brooks knew for sure that he wanted to get back in the league this time and was energized by the challenge of showing what his free-flowing style of play could do in an era when goals sometimes seem to come only a little more often than presidential pardons. “I think he was beginning to realize his own mortality and see that it was time to start enjoying things more,” Nanne said. A day after their last conversation, Herb Brooks was gone.

  ____

  Lake Placid organizers didn’t have to deal with Brooks’s sometimes mysterious ways, and it was a good thing; they had an abundance of international tension to occupy them. It was something that they had not bargained for when they won the right to host the 1980 Games. They were just looking to promote their hometown, a village of 2,800 people in the town of North Elba, which is 30 miles from the nearest interstate highway and more than 100 miles from the nearest domestic airport of any significance. As George and Stephen Ortloff note in their comprehensive Olympic history of the region, Lake Placid: The Olympic Years, it’s possible to head southwest into the woods across from the village elementary school and hike 90 miles before you see another person—lots of deer and maybe a bear, but no people. Along the way, you would encounter a total of five roads, three of them paved.

  Hugging the shoreline of two lakes, set among the High Peaks, the village is located in the middle of six and a half million acres known as the Adirondack Park, in a county (Essex) that is the second largest in New York State but the second smallest in population, with an estimated 35,000 residents. The first people to settle in Lake Placid were Mohawk Indians. In the early nineteenth century a loose procession of New England farmers headed west from Vermont, over Lake Champlain, traveling a rough wagon track called the Northwest Bay–Hopkinton Road. The farmers found land that was stunningly beautiful but hospitable to only those with the hardiest of constitutions. Indeed, the first recorded fatality in the area—a man named Arunah Taylor—died “by cold in the woods,” according to records. The year 1816, the “Year without a Summer” in the Northern Hemisphere, brought more fierce cold, destroying crops and causing widespread starvation, prompting a mass exodus from the region. The town of North Elba remained almost completely unpopulated until the 1840s, when Gerrit Smith, a wealthy landowner and prominent abolitionist, began making land parcels available. Seeking to help black families gain a financial foothold, Smith gave away over 400 plots of 40 acres each to black residents of New York State. While not many black families availed themselves of the opportunity, Smith’s generosity made the area well known among abolitionists, including John Brown, who settled a few miles outside the village of Lake Placid in 1849. Brown’s slavery-fighting work took him to the South and Midwest and ultimately to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where he was hung. He was brought home to his final resting place, and both his grave and his farmhouse in Lake Placid are among the area’s most renowned historical attractions.

  Perhaps no aspect of the XIII Winter Olympics spoke to Lake Placid’s remoteness more than the Olympic Village, an eleven-building brick campus sited on thirty-six rolling acres eight miles out of town in the hamlet of Ray Brook. After the games, it was converted to—and remains—a federal minimum-security prison. Located in a forest, the Village was ho
me to more than 2,000 athletes, a self-contained community complete with a chapel, post office, movie theater, game room, and discotheque, all of it guarded by double barbed-wired fences and a small militia of police. The rooms were slender little boxes with bunk beds and puny windows. The Russians took to calling it “Lake Placid Jail,” and Tretiak, the goalie, was particularly appalled by the conditions and the isolation.

  “The walls weren’t exactly soundproof,” he wrote in his autobiography. “When Petrov sneezed in the next room, my roommate, Krutov, would reply, ‘Bless you,’ without raising his voice. The nights were awfully cold, we had to sleep under three blankets, and the annoying howl of the ceiling fan kept us awake. To me, it all looked like torture.” The Americans had it a bit better: they were housed in double-wide trailers that Lake Placid organizers had to bring in to supplement the permanent rooms, and the accommodations were well appointed by comparison, with bigger rooms and less austere décor.

  The strong likelihood is that no Olympics will ever be staged in such a remote place again. Four years after the Lake Placid Games were contested on a budget of $200 million, the Summer Games in Los Angeles had a profit of $268 million. Between worldwide corporate sponsorships and global television rights, the Olympics have become a billion-dollar business, a five-ring brand that is purportedly built on the purity of international competition and stirred by patriotic fervor but is as driven by economic imperatives as Microsoft or General Motors.

  The first winter resort in the nation, Lake Placid had successfully hosted the 1932 Games, but the scale was so much smaller then—17 countries and just over 300 athletes—that it hardly qualified as a reliable indicator that the community could do it again. Local leaders were unfazed, and starting in 1949, they bid for every set of Winter Games, beginning with the 1956 Games, which would go to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Despite earnest and at times far-sighted efforts, the Lake Placid group, led by postmaster Ron MacKenzie, might never have succeeded were it not for a rabid band of environmentalists in Colorado.

  Denver had won the right to hold the 1976 Winter Olympics but had neglected to consult its citizens, who were growing increasingly concerned about the clear-cutting that would have to be done to prepare for the Games. On Election Day 1972, as President Richard Nixon was being voted in to a second term, the Denver Games were voted down, the environmentalists persuading Colorado voters to say no to a referendum on whether to finance the Olympics. Denver had to back out, and though Lake Placid was spurned in its pitch to pinch-hit for Denver, the village’s perseverance was finally rewarded in Vienna in October 1974, when the IOC executive board awarded it the 1980 Games. A victory party was held that night with the day’s other big celebrant, the winner of the 1980 Summer Games: the city of Moscow.

  Even with the Cold War pall that shrouded the Games and in spite of the nasty transportation snafus that gridlocked the village over much of the first week, these Olympics had an endearing, small-scale quality. The Opening Ceremonies were held on the Lake Placid Horse Grounds, with a ring of temporary bleachers and a thoroughly low-tech production. The press center was in the high school, and the greatest speed-skating performance of all time was produced by Eric Heiden on a simple outdoor oval right in front of the school. A friend and former youth hockey teammate of Mark Johnson’s from Madison, Wisconsin, Heiden swept every event in his sport, from 500 meters to 10,000, capturing an unprecedented five gold medals. Figure-skating pair Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia provided their own poignant drama, hinging on whether Gardner’s bad hamstring would hold up long enough for them to compete for the gold. (It wouldn’t.) Ed Lewi, the press officer for the Games, would drive reporters to venues if they couldn’t find a shuttle bus. “It was the last of the small games,” said Mike Moran, who spent a quarter-century as the press chief for the U.S. Olympic Committee. “We’ll never see a Games like that again. It was almost like elementary school compared with the way the Olympics are now.”

  There were no cell phones or beepers or Palm Pilots in Lake Placid, no doping scandals, and not even live television for what turned out to be the greatest sports moment of the century. There weren’t entourages the size of small armies around the biggest stars. Dream Teams were still a pipe dream. In Lake Placid, you didn’t have athletes looking for their sponsor or chemist. You had Jim Craig looking for his father. You had twenty players who were the youngest Olympic hockey team the United States has ever put together, eighteen of them still in college, kids who maybe were known in Williams Arena in Minneapolis or Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin, or Walter Brown Arena, just off Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, but scarcely anyplace else. You had kids who put their lives and hockey careers and studies on hold for six months for the opportunity to get tormented and tongue-lashed and improved by a hard-ass coach; who were playing for their country and couldn’t imagine anything better, except when they wanted to kill him. To the U.S. players, Lake Placid was neither too remote nor too small, and the sharp words from Cyrus Vance and the hide-and-seek games played by FBI and KGB agents were not a factor, either. Lake Placid, New York, was exactly where they wanted to be.

  THE SECOND

  PERIOD

  Chapter Four

  “IT WAS TEAM”

  If you were a hockey player anywhere in the world, you knew about the legend of Vladislav Tretiak. He was the sort of goaltender who made you look at the net and wonder how you were ever going to get the puck past him. Maybe he hadn’t been in peak form in Lake Placid, but he was still Tretiak, tall and regal looking even in the tired red sweater. The Americans were shocked when they came out to see Myshkin scuffing up the ice in front of his goal, and Tretiak, No. 20, parked at the end of the bench.

  Sergei Makarov sensed his team was dealing with another big change as well. The last time he’d seen the Americans in New York, they weren’t much more engaged than window shoppers across the street at Macy’s, the world’s largest store. What is going on with these American guys? he thought. How can they be so different from games in Madison Square Garden? Said Makarov, “Their eyes were bright. Their eyes were burning. It was team.”

  Flying into the U.S. zone in the opening minute of the second period, Valery Kharlamov didn’t like what he saw and circled back to center to regroup. Harrington circled with him but wound up hooking him, the two of them spilling to the ice, the whistle coming seconds later. The Soviets had their first power play. Brooks sent out Mark Johnson, Ken Morrow, Mike Ramsey, and Rob McClanahan, who was considered the best two-way college hockey player in the country. After Craig stopped a high drive from the left side by Vladimir Golikov, McClanahan blocked a shot by Bilyaletdinov at the point and then froze the puck along the boards. The guys on the team liked to tease McClanahan about his upper-crust background, his chiseled looks, the fastidious manner in which he prepared his sticks, folded his clothes, put his false front tooth in a Tupperware container. He may have been from North Oaks, a tony St. Paul suburb, and may have had more eclectic intellectual interests than some of his rink-rat teammates, but he skated hard and fast and had as much appetite for grunt work as for glory, his style much more proletarian than patrician. There was a lot that was deceptive about McClanahan. He had an unimposing upper body, and his shot didn’t scare much of anyone, but you underestimated him at your own peril. He was a beautiful skater and he never stopped, his legs as thick as his arms were thin, getting him around the ice as fast as just about anyone. “Sometimes when people first met him they’d think he was a cocky, snooty guy, but when you get to know him you realize he’s totally the opposite,” said Don Micheletti, who lockered alongside McClanahan at the U. “He’s a guy who would do anything for you, always pumping you up, picking you up if you had a bad shift. He was definitely a player any coach would want to have on his team.” He was also tightly wound and unrelentingly intense. When he was with the New York Rangers, McClanahan participated in a charity tennis tournament with players from the Islanders and Devils, among them Barry Beck, Steve Janaszak, an
d Chico Resch. A decorated high school tennis player, McClanahan played it as if it were the Wimbledon finals, not a hit-and-giggle exhibition. One night at the U, he and some friends—among them a laid-back Gopher football player—went out drinking. Loosened by a few brews, McClanahan began to tease the football player about his mellowness, daring him to take a swing at him. McClanahan did not let up; he never let up, in anything. Before the night was over, he had a shiner as a souvenir of his persistence.

  “Mac was the kind of guy who would go 110 percent brushing his teeth in the morning,” Janaszak said.

  That was why it was such a jolt to the players when Brooks went at him in the locker room after the first period against Sweden. McClanahan had suffered a deep thigh bruise in the period and was in considerable pain. He had removed his equipment and was getting an ice treatment from Smith, the trainer. Brooks checked with Doc Nagobads and found out McClanahan couldn’t harm himself if he played on it, though it would be acutely painful. Then out of nowhere Brooks started to spew, berating his first-line winger for being a candy-ass and a pretty boy, a white-collar coward. McClanahan lashed right back and stepped toward Brooks as Brooks stepped toward him, his ice pack flying, tears coming down his face, people shouting, mayhem and bad feelings spilling everywhere, out into the hallway. A few players wanted to rip Brooks’s head off. Mike Eruzione, the captain, jumped in to get the coach out of the room. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Twenty minutes into the Olympics, and we’ve already imploded,’ ” Ken Morrow said. “Herb’s lost it.” McClanahan wound up getting dressed and playing with his injury. The players on the U.S. team barreled out of the locker room, incensed that Brooks would make such a cheap-shot attack. It felt like a violation, a verbal sucker punch. McClanahan stood between shifts for the rest of the game because the leg hurt more when he sat. “Herb knew exactly what that would look like, singling out Robbie that way,” Janaszak said.