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

by Wayne Coffey

  THE

  THIRD PERIOD

  Chapter Seven

  SHORT END

  OF THE SHIFT

  A few minutes before the game, Herb Brooks made a recruiting trip. He didn’t have to go far. He found Dr. George Nagobads and called him into his office and handed him a stopwatch. Nagobads had known Brooks since 1958, when Nagobads, an immigrant from Latvia, was the new team physician for the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and Brooks, a fleet forward, was an import from across the Mississippi in St. Paul. The friendship spanned three decades, hundreds of players, and three national championships, and if Nagobads had learned anything, it was to expect the unexpected from Herb Brooks.

  “Doc, we have to have our legs,” Brooks said. “We need short shifts. It’s the only way we can beat them. No shift can go more than thirty-five seconds [at least ten seconds shorter than a typical shift]. If somebody is on the ice for longer than that, I want you to tug on my sleeve.” Nagobads, a short, balding man in a brown blazer and glasses, stood behind the bench and followed orders. “I didn’t even get to see the game,” Nagobads said. “I was too busy looking at the watch.”

  Not that he minded helping the cause. He had a history with the Russians, and it wasn’t pleasant. Nagobads lost his home, his education, and very nearly his life when Joseph Stalin’s troops invaded Latvia in June 1940. He was forced to withdraw from the University of Riga and get a job loading wood at a freight station. A year later, there was a mass deportation of Latvian dissidents to Siberia; the Nagobadses were on the list because Nagobads’s father was a leader of the resistance. If George hadn’t been off playing a basketball game on the other side of Riga, the capital, he might have gone to Siberia and never come back.

  The family fled to Germany, moved to the States in 1951, and now all these years later, the Russians were coming again, in Lake Placid. “After we were ahead at the end of the second period, we were already celebrating,” Valery Vasiliev told Nagobads later. “Nobody can skate with us in the third period.” That had long been accepted as hockey gospel. With Nagobads on the watch, the American players went all-out for their 35 seconds, sometimes 40, then hopped off. On one comparatively long Russian shift, center Vladimir Petrov had a face-off with Johnson, another with Broten, and a third with Pavelich. He knew Nagobads from various international competitions. He caught the doctor’s eye and asked in Russian, “Shto ta koy?” What is going on?

  “Sprashike washe treneru,” Nagobads replied. Ask your coach.

  In the opening minutes of the period, Ken Morrow made a rare end-to-end rush, carrying the puck to the right of Vladimir Myshkin, but could find nobody in front to connect with. The Soviets broke out but couldn’t build a threat either, and soon defenseman Dave Christian was controlling the puck directly behind Jim Craig, starting up ice, a sure-handed breakout up the middle. Of all the personnel decisions Brooks made, none was more inspired than switching Dave Christian from forward to defense. Brooks initially made the move in December, after Bobby Suter broke his ankle and they needed another defenseman. Christian had played some defense in high school, when he would go back to the blue line to take a break, then would play 40 or 42 minutes of a 45-minute game. He had never played defense at this level—and never would again. He was probably the only player on the team capable of making such a switch, and he did it with no perceptible angst. If it was good for the team, it was a no-brainer as far as Dave Christian was concerned. “I would’ve thought it would be totally scary,” said Neal Broten, his roommate and best friend on the team and fellow northwestern Minnesotan. “But he never said a word about it. Dave was the ultimate team player.”

  Suter was the same way. The only Wisconsin Badger on the team other than Mark Johnson, Suter eventually made it back from his injury, but wasn’t near full strength. A pugnacious defender who played beneath a thatch of wayward, straw-colored hair, Suter had fast skates and a feisty temperament and, at five feet ten inches and 170 pounds, relished taking on bigger guys. He specialized in mayhem, which explains how he came to leave Wisconsin as the school’s all-time leader in penalty minutes. Suter would whack you when the officials weren’t looking, kick your skates out, yap nonstop. His little brother, Gary, followed him to Wisconsin and became an NHL All-Star, and his son, Ryan, is a rookie millionaire, having left Wisconsin after his freshman year and signing with the Nashville Predators, the club that made him the top defenseman selected in the 2003 NHL draft. Bob had his own modus operandi, a guy who was equal parts red-faced puck rusher and blue-line troublemaker. “He was an abrasive little son of a bitch,” Gary Suter said. “He always had people chasing him around the ice. He was the sort of guy you hated playing against and loved having him on your team.”

  Suter played a solid game in the rout of the Czechs, but his gimpy ankle curtailed his mobility enough that Brooks did not use him against the Russians. Suter spent the game at the end of the bench, in a snit, but kept it to himself for the good of the team. Toughing things out was nothing new to him. Once, after a morning skate during his Badger career, Peter Johnson accidentally sliced Suter’s toe with his skate blade amid some locker-room hijinks. The toe was partly detached. Suter told the team doctor to stitch it up. He did. Suter didn’t miss a game. “No big deal,” Suter said, before getting on a Zamboni to resurface Capitol Ice Arena, the rink he owns just outside Madison, Wisconsin. In the arena lobby is a store called Gold Medal Sports. For some two decades Suter has coached youth teams with the Madison Capitols, a program started by his father. The mayhem has stopped, but Suter still lives a rink-centered life.

  ____

  Lou Vairo likened Christian to a “Picasso on ice,” and it was a widely shared opinion. Christian didn’t just have speed. He had the ability to accelerate, to create space, to read the flow of a game before almost anyone else. He was a defenseman with a centerman’s psyche, a playmaker whose offensive skills put enormous pressure on defenses. In the upset of the Czechs, he saved a goal by clearing a puck that had trickled through Jim Craig’s pads. Then he set the tone for the third period with an early rush, splitting two defenders, going in on goal, getting off a shot even as he got hooked and slammed into the goaltender. Phil Verchota knocked in the rebound, and the rout was on.

  If anybody on the U.S. team had an Olympic pedigree, it was Christian, of Warroad, Minnesota, in the state’s northwest corner, six miles of forest and field from the Manitoba border. When one of his uncles was giving directions to a visitor, he said, “Come down from Canada and make your first left.”

  Christian was born on May 12, 1959, which made him nine months old when his father, Bill, scored two goals, including the game-winner, the last time the Americans beat the Soviets in the Olympics, in another semifinal in Squaw Valley, California, in 1960. Bill’s linemate and brother, Roger, took it from there, scoring four goals against the Czechs the following morning. Another brother, Gordon, competed for the 1956 U.S. team that won the silver medal in Italy.

  Bill and Roger Christian were Olympians again in 1964 in Innsbruck, where they teamed with Herb Brooks in a tournament that wasn’t so inspired; the United States went 2–5 and lost to the Russians and Czechs by an aggregate score of 12–2. When they returned to Warroad and their lives as carpenters, Roger’s brother-in-law, Hal Bakke, suggested the idea of a company selling “hockey sticks by hockey players.” And so Christian Brothers, Inc., was born. Dave Christian played fifteen solid years in the NHL—he scored seven seconds into his first shift with the Winnipeg Jets—and was the only player in the game that whole time with his own brand of stick. “I get pretty good service,” Christian liked to say. At their peak in the mid-1980s, Christian Brothers was turning out 500,000 sticks a year. The company fell on hard times when mega-manufacturers such as Easton began marketing graphite and composite sticks, and it closed shop briefly in 2003 before getting bought out and reopening. Even now when you call their 800 number, you don’t hear the Captain and Tennille when you’re on hold; you hear a piece of the audiota
pe from the 1960 gold-medal game. Marvin Windows is the big employer in town, but in a place that calls itself Hockeytown, U.S.A. (and is the proud home of the Warroad Lakers, a well-known senior amateur team), Christian Brothers is the business that speaks the language of the locals.

  Warroad (pop. 1,722) is 358 miles from the Twin Cities but only 88 miles from Thief River Falls. Sited on the shore of Lake of the Woods, a wannabe Great Lake with 65,000 miles of shoreline, 14,000 islands, and a width that stretches to 55 miles at one point, Warroad is a place with seven police officers (offering twenty-four-hour service, according to the Chamber of Commerce), terrific fishing, and sufficient ornithological interest to warrant a weekly birder update on the area website. If birds don’t do it for you, maybe the aurora borealis (northern lights) will. Originally a Chippewa Indian settlement, Warroad for years was subject to attack from the nearby Sioux, who coveted the Chippewa’s rice fields and invaded by canoe on the Red and Roseau rivers so often that their route (and the village) became known as the war road.

  Dave Christian learned to skate on a frozen river, and learned well. He starred on the high school team, regularly dueling with his buddy, Neal Broten, the star of Roseau High School, down Highway 11. The two parted ways in college, Christian going off to North Dakota, after Brooks offered him only three-quarters of a scholarship. By his sophomore year, he was good enough to get drafted in the second round by Winnipeg, and to score two goals to push North Dakota past Brooks’s Gophers in the WCHA final. The second goal was an open-netter. Christian came down one-on-nobody, stopped in front of the goal, and wound up and blasted a slap shot into the empty goal. It was at least partly for Herb Brooks’s benefit.

  Some of Christian’s Olympic teammates kiddingly nicknamed him Koho, after the rival Finnish stick company. Christian was quiet, but he played along. Before the Czech game, he arrived in Locker Room 5 early and made wings for his helmet using cardboard, tape, and a clothes hanger. Then he went out and flew around the ice. On another game day a few years earlier, in Houghton, Michigan, North Dakota coach Gino Gasparini was out for a walk when he saw a couple of police cars with lights flashing in front of the team’s hotel. A few stories above, Christian and a couple of teammates were leaning out the window firing snowballs, provoking a call to the law.

  Christian seemed most content hanging around Broten, his northwest connection, two prodigious talents with undersized egos. They roomed together in the Olympic Village, played video games together, and made runs to McDonald’s together. Christian isn’t in Warroad anymore, having moved to Moorhead, near the North Dakota border, but he’s still a Warroad kid at heart and still spends his summers at the family cabin, amid the pines and birches of northern Minnesota, on Upper Bottle Lake.

  Bill Christian was in Lake Placid with a stock of extra sticks, never knowing if there might be some business to drum up. “It was as good as anything there is in my life,” he said once in describing the thrill of seeing his son carry on the Christian Olympic torch. “I just don’t have the words to explain it.”

  Dave Christian used to read his father’s scrapbook as a kid and dream about being in the Olympics himself. He doesn’t really have words for it, either. “To have that come true, to be in that position, playing against Russia, with my father and my uncle in the stands . . . for me it was as impossible and far-fetched a dream as you could have.”

  ____

  Christian came up ice smoothly, into the neutral zone, where he saw Pavelich darting toward the Soviet blue line on his left. Christian put the puck on his stick and Pavelich slipped through two Russians and skated in deep, momentarily losing control when Sergei Makarov took a whack at his stick and the puck skipped ahead into the endboards. Pavelich got it back and hit Harrington behind the net, but neither a shot nor a real threat came of it and soon Vladimir Golikov was carrying it out.

  The pace of the game seemed to be slowing, the action disjointed. With just over four minutes gone, robust forechecking by the United States had throttled the Russian attack, and O’Callahan took the puck behind the U.S. net. He slipped a pass by Valery Kharlamov to Strobel on the right side. Out the Americans came, Strobel centering to Wells, who pushed it over to Verchota on the left. Verchota, a former state discus champion at Duluth East High School, was a powerful physical presence, broad-faced and broad-shouldered, a six-foot two-inch, 195-pound winger who could pound opponents and the books with equal facility. At the U, he was a decorated student who was twice the recipient of the John Mayasich Award, presented to the team’s top student-athlete. He’d grow a bushy beard as soon as hockey season was over and take on a mountain man look, Grizzly Adams with a bandana, and was regularly mistaken for being the team’s goon, which he definitely was not. During the Herbies-in-the-dark game in Norway, Brooks sent Verchota out to get physical with a Norwegian player who the coach thought was cheap-shotting people. Verchota fought the guy but forgot to drop his gloves.

  “Way to dust his clock, Phil,” the guys teased.

  Strobel went hard to the net and Verchota slid a cross-ice pass in front. Sergei Starikov, a thick-bodied defenseman, skated back with the swift Strobel and was able to get his stick on the puck and break up the play. The Soviets controlled and Petrov, the 32-year-old center, carried up ice, Wells hounding him and prodding him with the stick the whole way, rarely more than the width of a puck away. If Herb Brooks wanted him to check, Wells was going to check, with vigor.

  Bow-legged and thick-chested, Mark Wells looked a little like a barrel on skates when he headed down ice, low to the ground, accelerating fast, his stride a muscular, stick-swinging roll. At five feet eight inches and 175 pounds, he was sturdy in body and stout in disposition, a kid with Chippewa ancestry who played with no reservation and was almost impossible to knock off his skates. Wells was a good enough scorer to pile up 83 points in 45 games in his senior year at Bowling Green, but Brooks already had Mark Johnson, Neal Broten, and Mark Pavelich playing center, each of them a mite-sized maestro. Brooks put Wells on the fourth line of the Olympic team, and as much as Wells wanted to prove to Brooks that he could be as dynamic as the others, he knew this wasn’t the time to engage him in debate. “I don’t care if you don’t score one goal,” Brooks told Wells. “I need you to be my defensive center man. I need you to shut people down.”

  Wells, in truth, was very nearly not on the team at all. Four months before Lake Placid, he suffered a hairline fracture in his ankle after stepping in a hole at the end of a training run in Norway with Craig Patrick. Brooks doubted that Wells could make it back and that he was the ideal fit for the team, besides. Wells had his headstrong moments and could get easily frustrated. On a train ride during the autumn swing through Europe, he got into a spirited wrestling match with roommates Jim Craig and Ken Morrow, because Wells insisted on having the bottom bunk. He was a kid who seemed to have an answer for most everything, clinging to a sometimes unbending conviction that his hockey ideas were right. His stubbornness served him well in his year with the Junior Red Wings in 1975, a season spent fending off derision, and worse, from Canadian teams and fans. One night two opponents mugged Wells—then five feet six and about 140 pounds—and beat him up so badly he wound up in the hospital and had to wear a face shield for weeks afterward. Brooks loved Wells’s grit and there was no question that his squatty bursts of acceleration made him perfectly suited for the coach’s system, but was it worth the maintenance, dealing with Wells’s retorts and overzealous desire to prove he belonged? “He wasn’t the easiest guy to coach,” said Glen Mason, Wells’s coach at Bowling Green. “He had his own way of doing things. He was hard to get through to sometimes.” There were other forwards—Ralph Cox of the University of New Hampshire and Dave Delich of Colorado College were two of them—who were more natural goal scorers. During one game on the tour, Brooks tapped Wells’s shoulder and told him to play right wing. Wells informed the coach he was a center, not a wing. Brooks shot him a cold stare and was of a mind to ship him out right there. “Mark Wells
was a super-duper hockey player and one of the nicest kids you could ever meet, but sometimes he was his own worst enemy,” said Gale Cronk, the co-founder, along with Don (father of Ken) Morrow, of the Eastern Michigan Hockey Association and a longtime mentor for Wells. “He could’ve been in the NHL for a long time, he was that good. He just had a knack for ticking people off. When you played on a Herbie Brooks team, you played what position he told you. Mark thought he was right, but I told him, ‘Mark, that don’t mean nothing, because you are not the coach.’ ”

  Wells was raised in St. Claire Shores, Michigan, thirty-five miles northeast of Detroit, in a 900-square-foot home that was scarcely different from all the other 900-square-foot homes in town, boxy and brick. It was a working-class town and the Wellses were working-class folk. His paternal grandmother worked as a riveter at the bomber plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, during World War II, one of the few women around to take on such an occupation. After the war she worked on the line for General Motors, making sideboards and earning $41 a week. Mark’s father, Ron, would make $6 for a few hours of dusting off seats at Detroit Tiger games in Briggs Stadium, and couldn’t understand how his mother could work so long and hard for so little.

  Like a lot of undersized athletes, Wells felt that he was habitually underestimated, that every coach he met was another coach he had to prove himself to. It happened in squirts and peewees and bantams, and even at Bowling Green, Wells beginning his freshman year without a full scholarship and finishing it as the team’s rookie of the year. As a 10-year-old Little Leaguer, Wells entered a national Pitch, Hit, and Run competition. Other kids snickered at the sight of him, chest-high to his rivals. He wound up second in the nation, making it to the final round in Yankee Stadium, finishing right behind a kid from southern New Jersey—future Los Angeles Dodger Orel Hershiser.