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

by Wayne Coffey

  Brooks’s attack provoked the desired outrage and a win, but wrought questions along with it. In the service of motivation, is any tactic fair game for a coach to invoke? Does the end always justify the means? Depending on your viewpoint, Brooks was either a genius for finding the right button yet again, or he was heading toward diabolical for calling out an injured player who gave as much as anyone on the team—and deserved better than to be used like a rat in a laboratory experiment. There is no record of Brooks ever apologiz-ing, or even explaining himself to McClanahan. McClanahan, for his part, has publicly never strayed from the high road, even before Brooks’s death, saying to anyone who asked that Brooks was able to get more out of his players than anyone he has ever seen. Still, McClanahan’s friends said that it took years before he could forgive Brooks for what he did, that the wound was agonizingly slow to heal. He would sometimes joke to people that they should set him straight if they ever heard him waxing on romantically about the joy of playing for Herb Brooks. One of Rob McClanahan’s enduring regrets is that he never really got closure on the incident before Brooks died, never sat down with him and officially forgave him and told him that he understood what his purpose was, even if McClanahan didn’t like it.

  “It cut very deep with Robbie for a long time,” Don Micheletti said.

  Brooks was a complicated man, one who teemed with contradictions, beginning with the way he braided new-age ideas with an old-school demeanor. He was iron-fisted yet gave his players as much freedom—and room to create—as any coach in the country. He pounded them into shape but left them on their own, with no curfew, in their downtime. He was an unrepentant taskmaster yet was profoundly intuitive in his judgments of people, character, and competitive makeup. Many NHL scouts were not completely sold on Jim Craig—one general manager said he had a half-dozen other college goaltenders rated ahead of him—but after getting to know Craig and seeing him rise to the moment in the world championships in Moscow in 1979, Brooks was convinced he had that skill and swagger and resilience to give him his best shot at a medal. The same snarling man who would regularly demean his players could be one of the funniest people around. On his flight to Nagano, Japan, in the winter of 1998, when he coached the French Olympic team, Brooks was seated next to a woman with a baby. At one point she began to breast-feed the infant.

  “I hope you’re not offended, sir, but it’s the only thing that will stop his ears from popping,” the woman said.

  “I’m not offended, but all these years I’ve just been chewing gum,” Brooks replied.

  Brooks had lots of friends, yet he could sometimes be elusive to even those closest to him, as if he were afraid to be pinned down, to get too close. His mind moved fast, and his body followed suit. “I sometimes got the feeling that Herbie was never comfortable in his own skin,” said one old friend. “He was a great guy, but it was as if he wasn’t always present when you were with him.”

  For all his planning, Brooks could be as impulsive as a preschooler. He once had a beautiful home overlooking Turtle Lake, north of the Twin Cities; Brooks sold it because he didn’t like a new neighbor—or the monstrous house he was building. Stopping back in Minnesota from a West Coast trip while he was coaching the Rangers, he found a frozen pipe, immediately brought out a torch to thaw it, and wound up burning down the entire kitchen. The family had to move out while the damage was repaired.

  Brooks would routinely treat the players as if they were German shepherds, then would turn around and bring sandwiches and express his thanks to behind-the-scenes people like equipment manager Buddy Kessel and trainer Gary Smith. During the second period of the Soviet game, Neal Broten was hopping over the boards for his shift, unaware that Ken Morrow had just come out of the penalty box. Noticing the United States had six skaters, Smith reached out and grabbed Broten, sparing the United States a possible two-minute penalty.

  “Way to stay in the game, Smitty,” Brooks said. It was more of a compliment than he gave any of his players that night.

  ____

  Not even two minutes into the period, the Americans were effectively killing the clock. Dave Christian controlled the puck through center ice and passed back to Baker, who started out, skating on the left side. He passed to Broten in the middle, but the puck hit a Soviet stick and deflected to Vladimir Krutov, who took it in the midsection and quickly dropped it to the ice and flicked a pass to an onrushing Alexander Maltsev. Christian, skating backwards, couldn’t hope to stay with him, and Baker had no shot, either. One of the things Brooks admired most about the Russians was their ability to play at an elevated pace and sustain it for an entire game. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, that pace would cause opponents to break down, shredding their comfort zone as if it had gone through the Zamboni. To compete with them, Brooks knew his team couldn’t merely move fast. It had to think fast. The way he wanted to play the Russians put tremendous demand on players to read plays, anticipate, move without the puck. One of Tarasov’s favorite sayings was “Speed of hand, speed of foot, speed of mind. The most important of these is speed of mind. Teach it.” Brooks taught it, and he had “Cardiac” Jack Blatherwick, sports physiologist and his strength and conditioning coach at the U, to help him. Brooks and Blatherwick were hockey soulmates, spending countless hours studying Russians on film, constructing drills, creating practice plans that were scripted to the minute, the pace fast, the emphasis on quick movement and quick reaction. Games had a clock, but hockey brainstorming sessions rarely did for Brooks. When Warren Strelow was coaching goaltenders with Brooks for the Utica Devils in the American Hockey League in upstate New York, his hotel phone rang at 2:30 one morning. It was Herb Brooks, genius and insomniac.

  “What are you doing?” Brooks asked.

  “I’m sleeping.”

  “Got a pencil?”

  “Why?”

  “Write down these line combinations and let me know what you think,” Brooks said. Brooks was no different with old friend Lou Nanne. “When Herb wanted to talk hockey, it would go on forever,” Nanne said. “He would talk to the door if he thought the door would talk back to him.”

  Joe Devaney is the visiting locker-room attendant for the Rangers, in his fourth decade of working Garden hockey games. He became close to Brooks during the coach’s tenure in New York. After Ranger defeats, Brooks would hunker down in the locker room for hours, stewing about what went wrong, replaying the game in his head. Devaney and a colleague would go in to clean up, and Brooks would invariably go over to the chalkboard to give them a richly detailed, X-and-O breakdown of where the Rangers had fallen short. “We wouldn’t have a clue what he was talking about,” Devaney said. “We’d just stand there and nod our heads.”

  Now Maltsev was in alone on Craig, and nobody was going to come close to catching up to him. He swept left and clanged a low shot off the post, into the net, a hard metallic sound followed by a hush, a power-play score that came with 40 seconds left in John Harrington’s penalty and just over two minutes gone in the period. Baker disdainfully cleared the puck out of the net while Craig was still sprawled on the ice. Maltsev stayed stone-faced as he accepted a few helmet taps.

  Three to two, Soviet Union.

  Craig got up and shook his head. Despite all he’d done the Soviets were on an eight-goal pace and pushing for more. After Helmut Balderis barreled down the left wing, into the American end, Ken Morrow did a superb job riding him off and poking the puck away. Eric Strobel recovered it behind the net and started to stickhandle out to Craig’s left, a risky play that got much riskier when Alexander Skvortsov deflected the puck away, and Balderis—Eliktritchka, the Electric Train—gathered it and swung behind the cage and tried to center it through the back door, Craig stopping it with his stick. Zhluktov tried for the rebound but got sandwiched by Phil Verchota and Mark Wells. With the scare survived, Dave Christian, in front of the U.S. net, batted down a pass from the point with his left glove and spotted Rob McClanahan streaking up the middle. Christian threaded a perfect pass straig
ht ahead, on to McClanahan’s stick. McClanahan sped in on goaltender Myshkin, but Valery Vasiliev hustled back to check him and Myshkin steered aside a tepid backhand.

  Moments later, the United States controlled off the face-off in the neutral zone, and the puck went to Mike Ramsey, at 19 the youngest American player. Ramsey was hounded by Maltsev and lost the puck to Yuri Lebedev, who flicked it across ice to Krutov, at 19 the youngest Soviet player, who already had a goal and an assist in the game. The first generation of Soviet players typically were dazzling artists and playmakers who tended not to be very physical. Krutov, a man his teammates later said should’ve gotten significantly more ice time than he did, was an altogether different breed, a barrel-shaped body who was equal parts artist and bull-rusher. At the blue line, Krutov was about to surge into the U.S. zone when Morrow skated up and crunched him, a clean open-ice check that stopped Krutov cold. The hit knocked Morrow down but extinguished the threat. This was Kenny Morrow’s specialty.

  Morrow was a man of few words and no wasted motion, a back-line Hemingway with a darker beard. He had a great ability to read plays as they unfolded, to know where he should be. It didn’t look hard until you tried to do it yourself. Bill Torrey of the Islanders, the general manager who drafted Morrow out of Bowling Green, watched the game next to Al Arbour, who would be the next man to coach Morrow after Herb Brooks. Near the end of the game, Torrey turned to Arbour and said, “We got ourselves a defenseman.”

  ____

  Don Morrow was a six-foot five-inch shortstop, long-limbed and low-key, Cal Ripken before Cal Ripken. He got to everything without even seeming to be in motion and threw just as deceptively. “I was 212 pounds and he could turn me upside down when he threw a baseball,” said Gale Cronk, an old friend. Don Morrow played against Hank Aaron in the minor leagues once. He was one of the best athletes in Flint, Michigan, and probably would’ve made the Detroit Tigers but for the baseball mindset of the 1950s, when clubs weren’t much more inclined to embrace six-foot five-inch middle infielders than they were to hire players who did not have white skin.

  Don Morrow went to work at an automobile parts plant, just as his father and brother did, on the line for Chevrolet. He passed on his size and athletic ability and disposition to his younger son, who never heard his father talk about his playing career or complain. “He did what most people in Flint did then,” Ken Morrow said, sitting in a suite high above the Arena at Harbor Yard in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Islanders were playing the Boston Bruins in a preseason game, and Morrow, the team’s director of pro scouting, was watching alongside general manager Mike Milbury and other club executives. The suite cleared out after the game, and Morrow had the faux leather couch to himself. His trademark beard has been trimmed back to a mustache, his hair short and spiky and retreating, his body as straight and strong as a lumberjack’s. He had olive slacks and a dark double-breasted blazer and print tie, creased and color-coordinated. “You went to high school and hoped to get a job in the factory and then twenty-five years later, you would be counting down the days to retirement.”

  Morrow lived the factory life himself, once. For a few summers in college he punched out dashboards and bumpers, making good money but learning quickly that the line wasn’t for him. He found the sameness stultifying. Ken Morrow made his office the blue line, and maybe it wasn’t surprising that he patrolled it with a clock-puncher’s reliability and shift worker’s anonymity, no fuss, no theatrics, just results. Gale Cronk, who was a major force in junior hockey in Michigan, used to joke that Morrow’s slap shot was so slow you could read “made in Canada” on the puck as it went, but darned if a big percentage of his goals seemed to come at critical moments. He was a player Brooks knew he had to have. Just to make sure his no-beards rule didn’t get in the way, Brooks made an exception for preexisting beards, like Morrow’s. When a game was spiraling out of control, Ken Morrow could always be counted on to restore order. Brooks almost never got on him; there was never a reason to. “If you had twenty-two guys like him, you’d never hear about general managers or coaches getting fired,” Torrey said.

  “If you were going to build a prototypical defenseman, it would be Kenny Morrow,” said Gordon Lane, Morrow’s longtime defensive partner with the Islanders. “You never noticed him, but he was always there.”

  Blending in was always Morrow’s specialty. He won four straight Stanley Cups with the Islanders, the first of them coming four months after Lake Placid, making him the first man to capture Olympic and NHL titles in the same year. Yet he always kept the profile of a fifth defenseman on a minor-league team. He doesn’t wear a Stanley Cup ring or any other ring. As Lake Placid was convulsing in patriotic merriment that Friday night, Morrow iced his shoulder and slipped out the back door of the arena. “I wasn’t trying to shun anything. I didn’t even know all that celebration was going on,” Morrow said. When the Islanders would go out after games, Morrow would be the quiet one in the corner, enjoying a beer, not shy, not antisocial, just content to take it all in with his low-volt steadiness.

  “He’s always been really comfortable with who he is,” said Greg Morrow, Ken’s older brother, a part-time scout for the Islanders and former player for Ohio State.

  At six feet four inches and 210 pounds, Morrow may have been the strongest player on the U.S. team, but he was as understated about that as about everything else. He had long arms and legs of granite and knew how to use his stick to thwart attacks, how to position himself to ride guys off the puck. Greg Morrow knocked Ken out cold once during an Ohio State–Bowling Green game but never had to worry about retribution. If guys wanted to fight, Ken would just clinch up. He was plenty tough but never mean.

  “You got the feeling that when he took you into the corner he wanted to say he was sorry,” Neal Broten said. “He’d never give you the extra elbow the way a lot of guys would.”

  Morrow isn’t much for off-ice confrontation, either. Sometimes his wife, Barbara, will gear up for an argument and get even more worked up because her husband will refuse to engage. They got married in August 1979, and there was no time for a honeymoon, Ken having to go off to Europe with the team. Barbara went to Disney World with her sister. They’ll get to the honeymoon one of these years.

  Morrow’s meticulousness and his fondness for routine were as much his signature as his beard. In the pros, every night on the road he would call room service at 10:30 to get apple pie with vanilla ice cream. “Rooming with him probably cost me twenty pounds over my career,” Gordon Lane said. Morrow’s Christmas tree has to be perfectly symmetrical, with no gaps or wayward branches. He has his way of loading the dishwasher, and if someone loads it differently, he’ll unload it and do it again. When he’s home he vacuums every day. In the locker room, game after game, year after year, he would methodically tape his socks and his stick, each row of tape overlapping by the same width, and it might take fifteen more minutes to tie up his skates because he wouldn’t think of having laces that were not taut and perfectly straight. He’s the same way now when he helps his son, Evan, put his skates on. Someday Barbara Morrow figures she may see her husband get flustered or impatient, but it will take some doing. After the gold-medal game, Ken Morrow passed four sticks around the locker room and had the guys sign all of them. He put them under the bus as the team left to board Air Force One to fly to see President Carter in Washington. When the bus arrived at the airport, the sticks were gone. Even being a crime victim didn’t really faze him. Lane laughed when he heard the suggestion that a video of Morrow’s life be shown to young NHL players as a model for how to conduct themselves. “People would fall asleep halfway through it,” Lane said.

  The Islanders are the only NHL organization Ken Morrow has ever worked for. Drafted on the fourth round in 1976, he stayed in Bowling Green and didn’t even consider signing until 1979, when the Islanders offered him a $35,000 contract. He had a 1972 Camaro and was tired of having no money. Signing, of course, would mean no Olympics. Brooks quietly lobbied Cronk to persu
ade Morrow to hold off. “We’ll fix the car up and keep it going,” Cronk said. “One more year is not going to make or break you.”

  Long before the team ever got to Lake Placid, Brooks took steps to ensure that the top players—all of whom had been drafted by the NHL—would not be lured into turning pro before the Games. In those days, once a player signed and took NHL money, he was done as an Olympian. By contrast, players in the IHL, such as Mike Eruzione, could retain their eligibility because the IHL was technically classified as an amateur league, though players received small salaries for playing. AHAUS officials worked to convince NHL clubs that the pre-Olympic schedule under Brooks would be so rigorous that, far from losing a year of development, the players’ games would prosper. Players were persuaded that the Olympics not only offered a chance to represent their country but would improve their games and raise their visibility along the way—and that their tax-free stipend of $1,100 per month wasn’t much different from what they’d make in the minors. Art Kaminsky, a lawyer who would ultimately represent most of the players on the team, worked closely with Bill Torrey, among others, to facilitate an arrangement whereby NHL clubs and AHAUS shared the cost for a player’s insurance coverage. Morrow was perhaps the closest to turning pro; his father had died in his freshman year at Bowling Green, and he was about to be married. But with a $250,000 insurance policy in place, Morrow opted to hold off joining the Islanders, and other top players—Dave Christian, Mark Johnson, Rob McClanahan, Jim Craig, and Mike Ramsey—followed suit. The only player whom Brooks really wanted who didn’t play was Joe Mullen, the Boston College star and former street hockey player from New York City, and the top scorer for the United States in the world championships in 1979. Joe’s father was ill and the family needed the money, so he signed with the St. Louis Blues.