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

by Wayne Coffey

  The Soviets controlled again after O’Callahan’s centering pass in the Soviet zone was blocked by Starikov, who looked up and found Balderis cruising through center. There were under two minutes to play. Brooks had been keeping the shifts short the whole game to keep his players fresh, and was still at it, Pavelich, Schneider, and Harrington coming on, Schneider immediately making a fine hustle play, catching Balderis from behind with a lunging poke-check that loosened the puck over to Ramsey. It was a simple play in the fast flow of the action, but it was just what Makarov was talking about when he said the Americans’ eyes were burning. Their offense in the game was sporadic, but the effort was consistently full-bore. The U.S. players were contesting everything, making it difficult for the Soviets to sustain their attack. Now if they could only find a goal somewhere.

  Chapter Six

  STICKING

  AROUND

  Hemmed in by the sideboards and with Helmut Balderis all over him, Mike Ramsey cleared the puck out of his zone. The teams would be back at full strength in a half-minute. Vasiliev fed Balderis as he circled back in the neutral zone. Balderis pivoted to go on the attack, but just as he did, Mark Pavelich dropped low to the ice and stripped him at the Soviet blue line and Buzz Schneider reacted instantly, filling his wing with a few explosive strides. Without even appearing to look, Pavelich passed the puck behind him, dropping it for Schneider, the pair of them reading each other superbly just as they had in the first period, and indeed, through the entire Olympics. If you got to an open patch of ice, Mark Pavelich would find you. He never wanted the fuss and the spotlight that came when he scored himself; when he did, his revelry was invariably brief and self-conscious. He almost never raised his stick, the way most other hockey players did. Pavelich probably spent as much time on ice in his life as the rest of the team put together, and it showed, not only in his skating but in his instincts. If you didn’t find him on a lake back home in Eveleth, it was usually because he was up the hill at the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame, watching videotape of Bobby Orr.

  “That was his hero,” John Harrington, linemate and fellow Iron Ranger, said. “Even though Orr was on defense, that’s what he wanted to do, how he wanted to play, the spin-a-ramas, coming down on the defense, playing a game of chicken, daring them to stop him. Pav was spectacular.”

  Long after the 1980 Olympics, someone asked Herb Brooks how to locate Pavelich, his undersized, underrated, and overwhelmingly gifted center. Brooks suggested heading for the north shore of Lake Superior, in the northeast corner of Minnesota.

  “You’ll need some luck, and some good snow tires,” the coach said.

  Pavelich had a game all his own, and a style all his own, too, forged through all those hours on Ely Lake out the back door of his little brown house. He wasn’t much good at any other sport but was like a windup toy on skates; you put him on the ice and watched him go. Pavelich could change direction and create at full speed, a dynamic talent who made more impact with less acclaim than anyone else in the locker room. It was the way Pavelich preferred it. The people of Eveleth honored him with his own float on the Fourth of July parade five months after the Olympics, a festive occasion except that Pavelich didn’t show. He was the only 1980 player who didn’t go to Salt Lake City for the 2002 Olympics and the cauldron-lighting. He had thick lips and straight brown hair that flopped on his forehead, and he was maddeningly elusive on the ice—“He’s by far the best skater I’ve ever seen,” said longtime friend, teammate, and current Eveleth High School coach Craig Homola—and the same way off it. Pavelich would rather have root canal than do an interview. He’d rather play than deal with the repetition and dissection of practice. He’d rather hunt and fish more than anything that didn’t involve a stick and a puck. Outdoors was his favored environment, and when he retired after six-plus seasons in the NHL, he lived without electricity and plumbing while he and his wife, Kara, built their house. The night he scored five goals for the New York Rangers on Winston Hat Night was Pavelich’s worst nightmare—thousands of hats on the Garden ice and no place to hide. His Ranger teammates joked that the only way you’d ever get him to agree to being on the postgame show was if you promised him a fishing pole as the payoff.

  When he was at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, Pavelich and a teammate decided to go hunting before practice one day. They moved their rifles from one car to another in the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center parking lot and set off about twenty miles up the road. Trouble was that Vice President Walter Mondale was in town to give a speech at the Convention Center and Secret Service men on the rooftops had seen the two young men with the guns. Soon there was an all-points-bulletin out for Pavelich and his friend, and the highway patrol, two county sheriffs, and federal agents were combing northern Minnesota. The manhunt lasted most of the day.

  “They were all searching for a guy who was going to assassinate the vice president,” said Gus Hendrickson, the UMD coach. “They didn’t know it was just Pav out partridge hunting.”

  When Pavelich reported for practice, he was apprehended by authorities, who took him into a room and interrogated him. When he came out, assistant coach Mike Sertich asked him if everything was okay.

  “I didn’t even know the governor was in town,” Pavelich said, in complete innocence.

  Pavelich’s taciturn ways were almost as legendary as his playmaking, and he would often drive Brooks mad. Brooks’s psychological wheels never stopped turning, and he loved the challenge of concocting ways of pushing players to get better. He’d been doing it successfully for years at the U. Phil Verchota heard nonstop about a hotshot high school winger the coach was supposedly recruiting. “He’s six-four and 220 and can shoot the puck through the boards,” Brooks would say and then skate away. The recruit never materialized, but the message did: Verchota had better bring his A game or his spot on the wing might belong to someone else. Before a big game against highly regarded Bowling Green in the national championship year of 1979, Brooks pulled aside Verchota and Don Micheletti, two of his biggest and best forwards. “When [Ken] Morrow gets the puck, I want you guys to stay away from him. Just back off. I don’t want either of you guys getting hurt.” Brooks, of course, wanted Verchota and Micheletti to be all over Morrow. And they were. Brooks hated it when his tactics did not work, and they did not work on Pavelich. When the Olympic team played an exhibition game in Hibbing, Minnesota, eight miles from Eveleth, Brooks made a point to track down Gus Hendrickson.

  “I need you to go talk Iron Range to Pavelich, because he won’t listen to me,” Brooks said. Hendrickson found Pavelich and told him Brooks was upset and that he needed to start listening to him.

  “Oh.”

  “He’s really getting mad.”

  “Oh.”

  “He says if you don’t start doing what he wants, you won’t play hockey again in the world because he’ll blackball you.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Said Hendrickson, “It wasn’t insubordination. He would never do anything intentionally to be a smart-ass. That’s just the way he was.”

  Before a road game against Michigan Tech, Minnesota-Duluth coach Hendrickson stopped in a Houghton, Michigan, diner for a cup of coffee, and there was Pavelich, his star center, eating a couple of pasties. Game time was about an hour and a half away.

  “What are you doing, Pav?” Hendrickson asked.

  “I’m eating.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “The game is in ninety minutes.”

  “OK,” said Pavelich. He kept eating, and had a hat trick that night.

  Pavelich had a simple, well-defined universe—and didn’t much care about anything that was beyond it. Symbols? He donated his gold medal and Olympic warm-up suit to the Hockey Hall of Fame. “It’s better off here than in the back of my closet someplace,” he said. Reporters were nothing but people you don’t know asking about things they don’
t know, resulting in exposure he didn’t care about. Clothes were a complete afterthought. A friend from Eveleth visited Pavelich in New York when he was playing for the Rangers. After the game there was a celebrity-laden party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Ron Duguay was there with a couple of models. So was All-Star defenseman Barry Beck, lots of pretty people. Pavelich showed up in jeans and a flannel shirt with holes in it. During one college road trip to Notre Dame, Hendrickson mandated that everyone have a jacket and suitcase. Pavelich wore a hunting jacket. Somebody opened his suitcase to find a toothbrush and a pair of underwear and nothing more. Nick Fotiu, a Rangers teammate, once took him out shopping to get some decent clothes so he wouldn’t be in such flagrant violation of Brooks’s Rangers dress code.

  “He dressed like a mountain man from the backwoods of Minnesota,” Fotiu said. “Then he would come out on the ice and play his heart out. He was an unbelievable player.”

  Undrafted out of college, Pavelich became one of the elite centers in the NHL. He loved the fraternity of the locker room and was a complete rascal when he was in it. He once put a grouse in Mike Sertich’s pants leg. He’d routinely saw guys’ sticks in half, then retape them and watch for the reaction when the bottom went flying. In New York, a fellow Minnesotan named Tom Younghans was excited about his Rangers debut and his first home game in the Garden. “You’ve got to lead us out there tonight,” Pavelich told him. Younghans was honored. Pavelich went off and put Scotch tape on his blades. Younghans indeed led the Rangers onto the Madison Square Garden ice—and fell on his face.

  Even with his antics, Pavelich’s teammates loved him everywhere he played. Not only was he absolutely unselfish and wanted no credit, he made everyone around him better, a full-speed freelancer in a five-foot seven-inch body with steel-cabled wrists and forearms that made him as strong a 160-pounder as you will find. He was the guy who set up Baker for the huge goal in the final half-minute against Sweden; who might’ve been the best player on the ice against Czechoslovakia; who had two more assists against the Soviets. He never got tired and still doesn’t. Joe Devaney, the visiting locker-room supervisor at Madison Square Garden, is a close friend of Pavelich’s. Devaney has seen Pavelich paddle a canoe an entire day without letting up. Teammates swore they never saw him take a deep breath.

  “As a wing, all you had to do was get open, and the puck would be there,” said Bob Hallstrom, who teamed with Pavelich at Eveleth High School before going on to play for Cornell.

  The son of a carpenter, Pavelich was never much for the books or formal functions. Even when he was around his closest friends, he was quiet. He was like that even before the tragedy that happened the summer before he enrolled at UMD. Pavelich was out hunting with friends in the woods not far from his house. The guys fanned out, Pavelich fired his gun at a bird, and the next thing anyone knew, Pavelich’s neighbor and best friend, Ricky Holger, was dead. The funeral was at a church in Eveleth, and the whole town turned out. The boys’ parents didn’t blame Pavelich; they knew it was a terrible mistake. Pav’s friends were there for him, their support and compassion strong but unspoken.

  “I think we all tried to treat him the same, because we were kind of nervous about not wanting to say the wrong thing,” Hallstrom said. “We didn’t really want to bring it up. We were pretty scared that he would do something to himself. I guess we were too dumb to intervene, or talk to him.” Friends said the loss made him even quieter and more reclusive. Each year around the time of the accident, Pavelich often would withdraw even more.

  Hallstrom paused. “Pav would never hurt a soul,” he said. “Never.” People closest to him know the immense burden of guilt he felt, and they have great admiration that he could get through it and carry on and give himself a splendid hockey career and a fulfilling life. John Rothstein roomed with Pavelich for a time at UMD. “He is as wonderful as wonderful can be,” Rothstein said.

  Pavelich has a teenage daughter and still lives in the handsome, woodsy home he and Kara built, with windows on a lake in Lutsen, Minnesota, a couple of hours east of Eveleth. It takes a lot to get him out of the woods. He shocked his teammates by showing up for the reunion game they had in Los Angeles before the 2002 Olympics, driving out from Minnesota. He camped on his way home, took his time, stopped and bought fishing lures. Pavelich surprised everyone again by driving out for the Hollywood premiere of the 2004 film Miracle. Soon it was back to his life in the woods, to his land and his backhoe and bulldozer, and to the privacy he cherishes.

  “Not too many people in life can say they are doing exactly what they want, and Pav is,” Devaney said. “He’s completely happy and content with what he does. He marches to his own drum, and it’s a great drum.”

  ____

  With the period and the twin penalties winding down, Schneider took the feed from Pavelich and was deep on the left wing without much net to shoot for. He ripped a shot that went through the crease. The puck shot along the boards to the point and Jack O’Callahan shot it back in. Schneider fought for it behind the net, but the Soviets got control and Balderis backhanded it up the wing to Makarov, who charged through center into the American zone and centered to Vasiliev, who tried to backhand a shot on Craig but was foiled by O’Callahan.

  The teams were back at full strength as the clock went under the one-minute mark. Nearing the Soviet blue line, Christoff tried to stickhandle in when Krutov stole the puck off his stick and was off with startling speed, bearing down on Craig, a two-on-one with Yuri Lebedev, a sandy-haired forward with No. 11 on his back and the dashing looks of a TV anchorman. There were thirty seconds remaining in the second period. A foreboding quiet filled the building as Krutov and Lebedev came in on Craig. A two-goal deficit would probably be too much to come back from against this team. Krutov came down on the right and then pulled up slightly, preparing to pass; he had a good piece of the near side to shoot for and probably should’ve taken the shot himself. Krutov centered the puck for Lebedev. O’Callahan hustled back and dove at Krutov to try to break up the pass, and then Ramsey was diving, too, extending his stick, impeding Lebedev’s path, and preventing him from getting off a shot.

  The puck skidded all the way across the ice. Nobody in the building was more relieved than Steve Christoff.

  It had not been an easy go of it in Lake Placid for Christoff. He had been the leading goal scorer in the pre-Olympic season, with 35 goals in 56 games, but had scored just once—late in a 7–2 trouncing of Romania—through the first six games. He had had chances but wasn’t converting them, and that was never easy for someone as accustomed to scoring as Christoff, who had averaged almost two points per game in his sophomore and junior years with the U—and was named the team’s MVP as a sophomore.

  Christoff was raised in Richfield, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, an All-American center of few words and many goals (he was only the third thirty-goal scorer the Gophers had ever had) who would achieve his own sort of renown quite independent of the Lake Placid miracle, having served as the model for the Hobey Baker Memorial Award. Every year, the top male college hockey player in the country gets a 40-pound sixteen-inch-high bronze and acrylic likeness of Steve Christoff, who shot hard and skated fast; a forward who had size and agility and eyebrows that looked like a hedge. For all his gifts, Christoff also had a penchant for self-criticism, his face turning into a glower when things weren’t going right. “Steve could have a great game, but if he wasn’t scoring, if he wasn’t getting goals or assists, he was real hard on himself,” said Don Micheletti, a Minnesota teammate. “That was how he measured his success.”

  Hockey, for a long time, was Christoff’s life. When he was in ninth grade, he interviewed the president of the Minnesota North Stars, Walter Bush, for a school report. The report had nothing to do with the North Stars’ decision to draft him on the second round after his sophomore year at Minnesota, in 1978. Christoff signed with the North Stars after the Olympics and was a major factor in the club’s run to the semifinals of the NHL playoffs in t
he spring of 1980, scoring eight goals—a rookie record for the postseason. When a reporter remarked on how grounded and single-minded he seemed barely two months past the Olympics, Christoff said, “You can’t live your life on what was in yesterday’s newspaper.”

  At six feet one inch and more than 200 pounds, Christoff had perhaps the quickest release on the team, a snap shot more than a slap shot. It was his greatest weapon, and when a debilitating shoulder injury early in his pro career robbed him of some of the snap, the goals slowed dramatically. “It was like a great pitcher who suddenly loses his fastball,” said Glen Sonmor, Christoff’s coach with the North Stars. “It was a sad case after he got hurt, because he could really rifle the thing. He had this great, great asset, and then it was gone.”

  Christoff had 55 goals in the 1981–1982 and 1982–1983 seasons and a total of 17 goals the next two years, making an almost instantaneous transformation into journeyman, getting traded three times in five NHL seasons. He got tired of moving around, and then decided to enroll in flight school and move around for a living. He is a pilot for Mesaba Airlines, flying short hops around the Midwest, apparently suffering no permanent psychic scars from the night the team’s pre-Olympic trip to Warroad, Minnesota, featured not one but two takeoffs aborted when the pilot taxied into a light pole. Christoff has successfully avoided all light poles as a pilot, and done likewise with the celebrity that comes to 1980 Olympians, content to let others be the more visible team representatives. These days he gets his sporting kicks vicariously, through his wife, Anna, one of the elite female handball players in the world.