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

by Wayne Coffey

  When he started coaching, Harrington spoke frequently with Brooks and had Brooks-like goals: to be a big-time NCAA coach and win a national championship. Now he is not so sure. Harrington was a finalist for three Division I jobs—at Alaska, Notre Dame, and his alma mater, Minnesota-Duluth—and was passed over each time. He went into the UMD interview thinking the job was all but his. He was crushed when he didn’t get it, and blames himself for his hubris. At St. John’s, Harrington gets great kids who are serious students, kids he can teach and whose lives he can impact. Collegeville is a wonderful community. He’s had great success—St. John’s was 22–4–1 and No. 6 in the country in 2003–2004—and he doesn’t have to sweat out whether he’s going to get fired if the team doesn’t make the NCAA tournament, and he gets to see much more of his wife and daughters, as well as many more of Chris’s games, than he would if he were in Division I. Harrington appreciates everything he has, says he’s “100 percent content,” yet there is a sense you get from him, more implicit than explicit, that there is still a yearning to test himself at the highest level of college hockey.

  “I’ve always thought that winning the gold medal was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him,” brother Tom Harrington said. “The best because he achieved the pinnacle, the worst because he climbed the mountain at twenty-two, and he’s spent the last twenty years trying to get back up there. He’s got a great gig at St. John’s, and he knows it. But when you’ve been to the mountaintop I think it’s hard not to have part of you want to get back there.”

  With Harrington’s breakaway going awry, Myshkin, behind his caged mask, had still not been tested. Harrington chased down his errant shot and swung it behind the goal, where Schneider got the carom and tried to stuff it in, switching from forehand to backhand, but he couldn’t get enough of it to angle the puck into the goal. It shot across the crease. The second period was approaching the halfway point, and so was the game. The players knew they had to forget the missed opportunities and keep skating, but it was hard. The Soviets came down and after Maltsev got bodied off the puck by Buzz Schneider, Mike Ramsey ducked an onrushing Krutov behind the net and skated out. Pressing on was the only option.

  Chapter Five

  HOLDING

  PATTERN

  Mike Ramsey had spent much of the first thirty minutes hitting all things in red, but now he was cruising, not bruising. He charged up ice, legs churning, 75 inches and 190 pounds in high gear, the son of a bread deliveryman, making a run of his own. He carried the length of the rink and looked sure and strong. Ramsey loved to put his fluid, big-shouldered body to use. He was a wonderful physical specimen, an athlete who won a state tennis title and was an all-city football player for Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School. Scotty Bowman liked him so much that he made him the Sabres’ first pick—No. 11 overall—in the 1979 NHL draft. Ramsey was the first American-born player ever to be taken on the first round. It made for a lot of headlines and an equal amount of grief from his coach. Brooks was fond of calling him “an eighteen-year-old prima donna.” When Ramsey asked him once what he would be the next year, Brooks said, “A nineteen-year-old prima donna.”

  Ramsey played in the NHL for eighteen years, a four-time All-Star and relentless hitter whose ferocity earned him the ire of the entire Edmonton Oilers organization in 1986 when he flattened Wayne Gretzky in the NHL All-Star game. Ramsey’s hockey passion ran so hot that when he finally retired, he’d look at the box scores in the morning paper and literally feel a wave of nausea come over him: his name was not in there, and it would never be again; there would be no more forwards to punish or rushes to make. Ramsey, now an assistant coach with the Minnesota Wild, wasn’t the most disciplined of the American defensemen in Lake Placid, but it was impossible not to love his energy and his attitude, a man’s body melded to a child’s enthusiasm. He never wanted to be out of the action and rarely was, even if it meant chasing Soviet forwards into corners instead of stationing himself in front of the goal.

  Fetisov, his future NHL rival, finally stopped Ramsey’s rush by tying him up along the boards. The crowd cheered Ramsey’s effort. The face-off was to the left of Myshkin, and at the other end, Craig wondered when he would be tested again. He didn’t have to wait long. The puck squirted free behind his net after the Russians carried it in, and Craig wandered perilously behind the net, trying to freeze it. Vladimir Petrov jabbed at the puck with his stick. You don’t do that to Mike Ramsey’s goalie. Ramsey cross-checked Petrov in the head, crashing him into the boards. Petrov pushed back and the sticks went up and then Ramsey dropped his, as if he were ready to go. Kaisla blew his whistle, rushed in to calm things down, and skated over to the official scorer to tell them Craig would be getting two minutes for delay of game.

  There were just under ten minutes remaining in the period. As the Soviets tried to set up their power play, Johnson took the puck away from Fetisov at the blue line and raced down the right side, faked a shot to freeze defenseman Valery Vasiliev and Myshkin, then slid a pass over to a wide-open Schneider. He fired wide to the left, another big chance gone. Johnson was everywhere on the penalty kill. Fetisov took a slap shot, and Johnson blocked it. Petrov got a superb feed from Kharlamov and blasted at Craig from ten feet out, and there was Johnson again, anticipating the play brilliantly, dropping to his knees and extending his stick, getting a piece. The Soviets had still another scoring chance from close range as Johnson lay on the ice, but Petrov shot it wide.

  After a harrowing two minutes had been survived and the teams were back at even strength, Ramsey and Krutov exchanged a couple more hits deep in the U.S. end. Then, with under seven minutes to play, the Americans settled down. Starting out from behind the U.S. goal, Jack O’Callahan snapped a pass up the middle to Eruzione but it was intercepted by the mustachioed Zhluktov. Eruzione swung his stick to spring the puck free once more, nudging it ahead to Christoff. Here came the Americans, passing, moving, the puck zipping around as if it were on a string, as if they were Soviets: Christoff to O’Callahan, back to Christoff, over to Broten, out to O’Callahan, back to Broten. Broten slid the puck to a pirouetting Christoff, an artful pass into the slot. Not unlike Pavelich, his fellow north-country centerman, Broten lived to set people up. He had broken John Mayasich’s assist record when he registered 50 as a Gopher freshman. This was precisely how.

  ____

  Eight miles from the Canadian border in northwest Minnesota, the manufacturing hub of Polaris Industries sprawls over 24,000-square feet on the west side of Highway 89, not even a half-mile from the heart of Roseau, Minnesota. The plant produces thousands of snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles annually, employing 2,400 people in a community of 2,700, and is such a vital economic engine in the area that when the worst flood in 100 years deluged the town in the summer of 2002, the school and Polaris were the first two places rescue workers tried to spare. Polaris snowmobiles are the city’s second most well-known export. The first, of course, is hockey players.

  As the Ice Age ended and the glaciers receded a few million years ago, melted water filled 15,000 lakes inside the borders of Minnesota, a name deriving from the Native American words Minne and Sota, or “Land of Sky-Blue Waters.” Ultimately a new ice age took form, one marked not by glacial expanses but by kids with sticks. Minnesota has produced more Olympic and professional hockey players than any other state, and Roseau has provided its share. It has been a hockey hotbed ever since the game was introduced 100 years ago by two brothers from nearby Hallock, Art and Arch Alley, who fashioned sticks from tree branches and watched a game break out on the Roseau River. By 1920, the city had a lighted rink. Another rink went up not long after, and when it blew down in a terrific windstorm in the early 1940s, Roseau Memorial Arena was built, a wooden hockey barn with the smell of history and old beams, and a roof that looks a bit like an upside-down canoe. Memorial is still the home of the Roseau High School Rams, who have been to twenty-nine Minnesota state tournaments and won six of them. Roseau has produced seven NHL p
layers, among them Brian Erickson, who used to be a Washington Capital and now owns a used-car lot. He still answers to the nickname Butsy. His father, the former mayor of Roseau, goes by Binky.

  “Usually if you play in the National Hockey League you are the best player in your town, your region, or maybe even in your state,” Butsy Erickson said. “I was only the third-best player on my block.”

  Erickson grew up on Third Avenue, one house down from the Broten residence, home to a family of 100 percent Norwegian stock and three future NHLers: Neal, Aaron, and Paul. Newell and Carol Broten and their five children lived in a tight, three-bedroom house. Neal and Paul slept in the same bed for years. One year Newell grossed $4,400 driving a propane truck. Later he worked for the Roseau department of public works. He’d take a five-minute lunch hour and get back in his truck. You made do with what you had and dealt with what was. Having one bathroom tended to make for a morning logjam, so Neal would often go off to school and shower in the locker room. As a kid he would use one of his mother’s old girdles and garter belts to hold up his hockey socks, with no apparent self-consciousness. In first grade he was already so polished as a hockey player that he regularly played with fourth-graders, with the understanding that there would be no whining about aches and pains. “If you get hurt, don’t start crying, unless you broke your arm,” his father would tell him. Neither Newell nor Carol made the trip to Lake Placid. It was going to cost $2,500, and besides, Aaron was playing for the U, Paul for the Roseau Rams. Newell Broten says if he’d known what was going to happen he would’ve quit his job and scraped together the money, but he says it more for a chuckle than anything. He likes to be amused. He loved the story Herb Brooks told about the time he asked Neal what he’d had for dinner the night before.

  “Pizza,” Neal replied.

  “Anchovies?” Brooks asked.

  “No, I think it was Domino’s,” Neal said. Newell Broten laughed. “We’ve had a good life,” he said.

  “I was brought up right,” Neal said.

  He was wearing faded blue carpenter jeans and a fraying, gray NHL Players Association shirt, and was sitting at a rustic kitchen farm table, overlooking the back of the seventy-five-acre horse farm in River Falls, Wisconsin, he shares with his wife, Sally, and their two daughters. The land has a benign roll and deep quiet. A rusty iron horse welcomes you near the start of the driveway, before you pass a stand of pines and wind up at a modest brown house that seems almost at one with the land, earthy and open. Way out back there’s a Native American sweat lodge, an igloo-shaped, back-to-earth sauna where you can heat up stones and bask in warmth all year-round. The horses that Sally raises are in the barn next to the house. Inside, the decor is early-American horsey, with tack hooks and hardware in the bathroom, and antiques and Native American rugs throughout.

  “This is a comfort house,” Neal said. “If you have mud on your boots, it’s no big deal. If something spills, you wipe it up. I love it out here. It’s nice and private. No one ever bugs you. We don’t get reporters or people who write books, and if one comes, you just beat them away with a stick.” He smiled. His face is still cherubic in his forties, and his perpetually tousled hair makes him look younger still.

  Understatement is Broten’s way. When he and Sally got engaged in February 1981, a year after the Olympics, there were no rhetorical flourishes or bent-knee entreaties. “Maybe we should get married. I’m going to go buy a ring,” he said to 18-year-old Sally. She met Neal in the Roseau school parking lot. She had pulled up in a horse trailer to pick up her little sister at a softball tournament. Black flies had the horses making a twitching, kicking racket.

  “Need any help?” asked Neal, standing nearby.

  Sally Miller knew who was making the offer. Everyone in town knew Neal Broten. He had just finished his freshman year at the University of Minnesota, a five-foot nine-inch, 155-pound prodigy who had helped the Gophers to the 1979 NCAA championship, giving Brooks the perfect sendoff before he went off to the Olympics. Brooks would later call Broten the finest player he ever coached at the U.

  Hockey was a way of life for Neal Broten almost from the start. Games would break out on the kitchen floor, three brothers batting around a rolled-up pair of socks. Out front on the street they’d play boot hockey, using two snow chunks for goalposts and walls of plowed snow as sideboards, the same as kids would on the Range and all over northern Minnesota. Most of the games, though, were on North Rink, an oversized metal shed with ice that the kids’ fathers would take turns staying up all night to make. If it was 30 below outside, it was 20 below in North Rink. Kids would play for four or five hours after school, and maybe twice as long on weekends, days starting with hot chocolate and Cream of Wheat and lunch usually being skipped, and sometimes dinner, too. Newell Broten was in the house one night around 8:30 and realized Neal, eight at the time, hadn’t come back yet. It was clear and brutally cold, maybe 25 below, the kind of night when sounds were unmuffled and seemed to travel for miles. Newell could hear the faint cry of a child coming from the far side of a nearby field. He found Neal in the middle of it, almost chest deep in snow. He’d taken the shortest route home and run out of gas. His overalls were as stiff as planks. Newell lifted his boy out of the snow and carried him home. “To this day I don’t know if he would’ve froze to death if I hadn’t heard him crying,” Newell Broten said.

  Broten learned the game playing shinny hockey, with as many guys per team as would show up. You learned to stickhandle and control the puck, because you might not touch it again for twenty minutes if you lost it. He had quick feet and hands and extraordinary balance and could maneuver the puck with alarming agility. Passing was the essence of Roseau hockey. Always, the puck moved. When your best player is as eager to move it as everyone else, something special happens. The whole team feels included and good. Even as a kid that was Broten’s style of leadership. There were not many words. A pregame speech? Butsy Erickson never heard one. He never heard Broten get on someone who was less gifted, either. He made everyone feel important. By his demeanor you couldn’t tell whether he’d scored six goals or gotten shut out. His teammates liked him so much that they wanted to make him happy. As much as Broten revered Herb Brooks—he would get goose bumps when he would see him even two decades after Lake Placid—Broten much preferred the carrot to Brooks’s oft-used stick. He was generous without thinking about it. After the Olympics Neal went back to the U and won the first Hobey Baker Award as the nation’s top collegiate player. Neal’s first comment was that his brother Aaron should’ve won it because Aaron had had a better year. A year behind Neal at the U, Aaron nearly went to Lake Placid himself; he was one of the forwards—along with fellow Gopher freshman Tim Harrer—whom Brooks brought in for a look in January. The team was incensed at Brooks for toying with them this way, and if Broten hadn’t been so well liked and laid-back, it could’ve been an impossible spot, being torn between wanting his brother to play with him and not wanting to see a teammate get screwed. Neal kept quiet and kept skating.

  “He was just a guy who brought everybody along,” Erickson said. “Instinctively, he needed and wanted other people around him.”

  Said Neal, “I loved going to the rink. I loved practicing, passing the puck. The most fun thing about hockey is when you get a group of guys and you play as a team and everyone works in the same direction and you get your goals done. That’s what it’s about. It feels good to do that.”

  Roseau youth teams won three state championships when Neal was coming up. One of their biggest games as peewees was in Grand Rapids, on the western edge of the Iron Range, another community with deep hockey roots. The buzz beforehand was that there was no way the Roseau boys would be able to compete. Roseau won, 14–0. Neal had nine goals and five assists. “It was just one of those amazing, magical nights,” Erickson said. Broten had a lot of those, in a career straight out of a border-town storybook. About the only thing Brooks would ever say to Broten was, “How do you feel?” or “Do you have your legs?
”

  Broten played thirteen seasons for his home-state team, the Minnesota North Stars, becoming as much of an icon downstate as he’d been in Roseau. In 1985–1986 he became the first American-born player to have a 100-point season in the NHL. He made four NHL All-Star teams. He had his No. 7 jersey retired and he got to hold up the Stanley Cup—huge highlights, even if neither happened where he wanted it to. The Stars moved to Dallas and Broten was traded to New Jersey and won the Cup as a Devil, in 1995. He’d just been named captain before the trade. Broten felt completely out of place in his new environs, a country kid dropped amid the tangle of highways and refineries that clog north Jersey, but he was a two-way force on the ice, playing as unselfishly and creatively as ever. He had 8 goals and 20 assists and was plus-9 in 30 regular-season games. He had 19 more points—7 goals and 12 assists in 20 playoff games. He followed Ken Morrow as the only 1980 Olympian to have his name on the Stanley Cup. “The Devils don’t win that Cup without him,” USA Hockey executive Lou Vairo said.

  Broten retired from the NHL after seventeen years in 1997, the end more bitter than sweet. He got hurt early in the 1996–1997 season and wound up being sent to Albany in the AHL by the Devils. He was traded to the Los Angeles Kings, finished up back with the Stars. He felt jerked around, was sure he could still play, but decided it was time to go home to Wisconsin and help Sally with the horses, even as he was honored with the NHL’s Lester Patrick Award for his contributions to American hockey.