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

by Wayne Coffey

  “I can’t even imagine what that must’ve been like,” Dave Silk said.

  Eruzione ultimately survived because of his heart and leadership and his ability to get along with almost everybody. But he sweated it out to the end. He talked to Rossi after the 10–3 game in the Garden, and his angst was deep. “He thought he was gone,” Rossi said.

  Eruzione’s day job is director of athletic development for Boston University, but mostly he is Keeper of the 1980 Flame, a role he fills with a pronounced Boston accent and a natural storyteller’s flair. He comes into a room with his brisk, short-legged stride and takes control of it like a traffic cop on Commonwealth Avenue. Mike Eruzione has never seen a hand he wouldn’t shake or a speech he wouldn’t make. Listening to him is like listening to a guy on the next barstool. Rossi went with him to Hawaii for one of his first corporate appearances, at an IBM sales conference later in 1980. What Eruzione may have lacked in polish and slickness he more than made up for with his wise-cracking sincerity and regular-guy demeanor. At the team’s induction into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in the fall of 2003, Eruzione was asked about the honor and said, “I thought we were already in, to be honest with you.”

  Said Rossi, “He made people comfortable because he was very comfortable with himself.”

  Years went by, and Eruzione kept expecting his bookings to drop off and the miracle’s legs to give out. They never did. The calls kept coming, and so did the checks. His father used to ask him, “When are you going to get a real job?” The answer is probably never. When the 1980 team was selected to light the Olympic cauldron at the opening of the Salt Lake City Games in 2002, the first time the Winter Games had been back in the United States since Lake Placid, Eruzione did the honors. He took the usual grief from his teammates. “There are four billion people watching. Don’t drop it,” Mark Johnson told him.

  Eruzione knows better than anyone how improbable it is that a former Toledo Goaldigger has morphed into America’s Guest, one of the more sought-after sports celebrity speakers around. He has made a handsome living out of his captaincy, providing inspiration for hire, showing a rare ability to improvise and personalize and not just make his boilerplate speech, eat his chicken, and be on his way. “Michael’s just a natural leader, and it’s what got him to the Olympics and got him to where he is today,” Mark Wells said. Wells once was at a memorabilia signing with Eruzione in New York. Eruzione had gotten hit in the face with a puck in one of his adult hockey games at Larsen Rink and had two black eyes, but what really wowed Wells was how Eruzione cranked out his signature as if he were a one-man assembly line. “I’ve never seen a guy sign autographs so fast in my life,” Wells said. “He must’ve written his name thirty-five hundred times in six hours.”

  Fifty years old, a quarter-century beyond Lake Placid, Mike Eruzione, the captain who was almost cut, travels all over the country talking about his team, his dream, about what happened after he hopped over the boards of the Olympic Field House midway through the third period against the Russians.

  “If that’s how people want to remember me, that’s fine,” Eruzione said once. “I have no problem being remembered for one thing. Some people never even have that.”

  ____

  With just over ten minutes left in the game, Harrington dug along the boards for the puck Buzz Schneider had shot in as he ended his shift. It squirted to Pavelich a few feet up, toward the blue line. Falling down, back to center, Pavelich did a half-pivot and flicked the puck in the middle. Eruzione, who had just come on, skated after it and caught up to it. His linemates, Neal Broten and Steve Christoff, hadn’t even made it on the ice yet. Eruzione moved right. He pulled up. He had room. He let fly with a twenty-five-foot wrist shot off the wrong foot. Vasily Pervukhin, No. 5 in red, went down to block it. He didn’t get it. Myshkin hunched low in goal. The puck was coming. He didn’t get a good look because Pervukhin was screening him. The puck was getting closer. Myshkin tried desperately to pick up its flight. Then the puck was on him, flying between his right arm and his body, into the left side of the net.

  Goal.

  United States of America 4, Soviet Union 3.

  Eruzione threw up his arms and ran along the boards, a joyous, leg-pumping jig, and the crowd erupted right along with him, even louder. Behind the ABC microphone, Al Michaels said, “Now we have bedlam!” For the entire Olympics, the whole U.S. team had been racing on the ice when the Americans scored. They were not going to start holding back now. Brooks half-coiled his body and again thrust both arms overhead, this time even more emphatically. A tight-lipped smile began to form until he suppressed it. The coach hitched up his plaid pants. He exhaled. The United States had its first lead of the night, its first lead against the Russians in an Olympic game in twenty years. There were exactly ten minutes to play. The building throbbed. Ken Morrow, a defensive stalwart the whole night, readied for the face-off and the onslaught he knew was coming. These are going to be the longest ten minutes of my life, he thought.

  Chapter Nine

  DREAM

  WEAVERS

  Before Eruzione was even done with his dance, Jim Craig was looking at the scoreboard, doing math that required no computation. They’ve got to get two to win, he thought. There were two five-minute periods left to play. His job was to keep the puck out of his net. On the bench, as the head rubbing and merriment subsided, Eruzione had a minor panic attack: What if my stick has too big a curve on it? What if the referee checks it and disallows the goal? What if it costs us the victory? There was no reason to think the stick was illegal. Kaisla, the referee, had made a visual inspection of the players’ sticks on both teams before the game and detected nothing objectionable. It still made Eruzione uneasy. He called over general manager Ralph Jasinski, a 225-pound man in a pen at the corner of the bench, told him about his concern, and handed him the stick. The general manager did the only thing he could think of: he laid the stick out flat and stood on the blade, trying to flatten it.

  “It probably bounced right back, but it’s a good story,” Jasinski said.

  Behind for the first time, the Soviets began to play with an urgency they hadn’t shown all night. Twenty-two seconds after Eruzione’s goal, Lebedev centered to Krutov, who redirected the puck beautifully to Maltsev, who swept in on goal from the right, hitting the outside of the right post with a flick of a shot, then leaping across the goal-mouth to avoid Craig. The goaltender immediately looked over his left shoulder to make sure the puck wasn’t in the net. Craig was fiercely territorial and sometimes nasty when an opponent got anywhere near his crease. In the game against Sweden, he whacked forward Per Lundqvist in the face with his stick. In the game against the Soviets at the Garden, Kharlamov’s face also got in the way of Craig’s stick, resulting in a gash that required stitches. “If you were in the neighborhood, you were going to feel Jimmy’s stick around your ankles,” said Gerard Linehan, his high school coach at Oliver Ames. And sometimes well above the ankles. Craig didn’t have time to administer frontier justice this time. The Americans were scrambling in their zone and Krutov found Maltsev again, alone by the left post, a half-open net in front of him. Maltsev, the man who scored the most astonishing goal the U.S. players had ever seen in Madison Square Garden, shot wide. Maltsev looked to center the puck but as Krutov cruised in front, Ramsey tackled him as if he were a linebacker taking down a ballcarrier.

  Finally, the Americans cleared the zone, but the respite was brief. Vladimir Golikov raced in on the left and backhanded a shot to the near side. Craig blocked it. Alexander Golikov fought for his brother’s rebound and crunched Buzz Schneider into the boards. They got tangled in the corner and Schneider ended up with Golikov’s stick, the puck frozen, play whistled dead. The Russian held out his hand to get his stick back. The normally good-natured Schneider tossed it on the ice and skated away.

  “That was my Kodak moment,” Schneider said. “Maybe all those years of getting pounded by those guys finally took its toll.”

  Just under eig
ht minutes remained. The U.S. defensemen were dropping to the ice at every chance to stop the puck from even getting to Craig. Ramsey met Kharlamov along the boards and flattened him, the Russian’s red helmet slamming into the ice, maybe the hardest hit of the night. Fetisov teed up from the left point, but Morrow went down and smothered the shot. Alexander Golikov sped in on the left side and fired from the top of the left circle, way wide. Kasatonov launched another shot from the point, and Craig gloved it. Petrov came down, saw a lineup of four white shirts at the blue line, and cranked a slap shot from sixty-five feet. Craig kicked it away with his right skate.

  “Play your game. Play your game,” Brooks kept telling his players as he paced behind them on the bench. He said the words from the side of his mouth. For all his demands on the players for all those months, he was a different person when he managed a game behind the bench, a thin-lipped general who exuded confidence and control and rarely lost his cool. The Finns and especially the Canadians had gone up on the Russians, then retreated into a defensive shell and gotten pummeled for their trouble. The Soviets scored four times in fifteen minutes in the third period against the Canadians, Mikhailov and Vladimir Golikov getting two goals apiece. The Russians won, 6–4. Letting them break out, conceding center ice, was a recipe for disaster. “Play your game,” Brooks said. The “U-S-A, U-S-A” chants filled the Field House, over and over. Nagobads kept close track of the stopwatch and the Americans kept to their short shifts. Kaisla was struck by the results. “The U.S. team skated the whole time, the same speed from the beginning to the end,” he said. “They never slowed down.”

  Five minutes remained.

  Heeding Eruzione’s caution, Schneider switched to a straighter stick and took his shift. “You don’t want to take any chances,” he said. He carried the puck through center, Krutov hounding him. Schneider shot it into the Soviet zone. Lebedev controlled the puck, but his cross-ice pass bounced off the boards and Pavelich picked it up, skated in a tight circle as if he were back on Ely Lake, and snapped a pass to Schneider in front. It didn’t connect, but the United States was doing what Brooks had urged them to do. They were not sitting back. After Harrington scrambled with Vasiliev along the boards and the puck popped over the glass, Vladimir Golikov won the draw and Makarov came down the right side and backhanded it right through the crease. At the U.S. blue line, Harrington settled a bouncing puck with his left hand, squeezed between two red sweaters, swept down the left side into the middle, and wristed a shot on goal, Pavelich and Schneider circling behind him, Coneheads in motion, just as their coach had taught them. Myshkin juggled it but held on. The U.S. players tried to heed Brooks’s words and think only about playing, not the clock, but at times it felt almost impossible. This wasn’t baseball, a competition beyond the boundaries of time. Every tick was their ally. Eruzione had seen enough of the Russians to know they were completely capable of a three- or four-goal binge. Let’s get this game over with, he thought. In goal Craig was yapping more than ever. For most of the game, he was catching the puck, covering up, stopping play to give his defense time to get settled, get a breather. Now he was catching and releasing like a fisherman, holding on to nothing, shouting to the defense to keep the puck alive, keep the clock ticking, keep the Russians from having a chance to regroup. Like a quarterback or a point-guard, he was managing the clock from his crease. Three minutes, 23 seconds remained.

  Petrov and Kharlamov worked a give-and-go in the U.S. zone, but Petrov lost the puck off his skate. As Mikhailov tried to center it, Baker stole the puck and skated away from him, up ice. The Soviets themselves were scattered now, and time was getting short. Tikhonov stayed with his No. 1 line for 60 seconds, 75—the shift from hell. The U.S. bench started to keep an eye on Myshkin, wondering when he would vacate the cage to give the Soviets six skaters.

  The clock moved under two minutes. The Soviets iced the puck twice, trying to hit Makarov and Golikov as they circled in center ice. Petrov flipped the puck harmlessly in on Craig with 80 seconds to play, but the Soviets couldn’t keep it in the U.S. zone. The symphonic passing game was nowhere to be seen. There was no buildup, no tic-tac-toe attack. The Russians were taking wild home-run swings. “We were panicking. We were stiff,” Starikov said. On a face-off just outside the U.S. blue line, Johnson beat Petrov and got the puck to Ramsey, who shot it in the Soviet zone. The noise was deafening.

  One minute remained. In the U.S. goal, Craig kept talking, imploring his defense: “Push the puck. Don’t freeze it up. Keep the clock moving.”

  Breaking out of his zone, Petrov backhanded a pass along the boards to a streaking Kharlamov, who lost control as he crossed center ice, the puck skidding ahead. Ramsey tried to clear but Mikhailov recovered and carried behind the net, Silk diving headlong to try to block his passing lane, and Ramsey doing likewise not even ten feet away. No effort was being spared. Mikhailov found a clear lane amid the sprawling bodies and centered to Petrov, but his backhand was wide.

  Myshkin was still in his net. The American players were shocked. You have to go with the extra skater. The tactic was why the Americans were even in this position; when Baker scored to tie Sweden, there were six U.S. skaters and no goaltender.

  “We never did six-on-five. We never even had that situation in practice,” Starikov said. “Tikhonov just didn’t believe in it.” Mikhailov dug the puck out of the corner and pushed it to Bilyaletdinov at the point. He shot it back down, and Morrow and Silk nudged it along the boards, out of the zone. With 33 seconds left, a stride outside the blue line, Petrov drove another slap shot, Craig kicking it out with his right skate, stumbling a bit as he went. It came out, and Kharlamov flipped the puck back in with 19 seconds remaining. Johnson got to it by the end line. He passed it behind the net toward Ramsey, who crashed into Bilyaletdinov, who had charged in from the point. McClanahan hustled into the corner, beat Kharlamov to the puck, backhanded it along the endboards to Johnson, who beat Mikhailov to it and slid it behind the net to Morrow.

  When the Soviets needed the puck more than they had ever needed it, they couldn’t get it. There was no question which team had the freshest legs. With under 10 seconds to play, Morrow lofted the puck along the sideboards to clear it. It hit Silk in the arm about fifteen feet up ice.

  The countdown began. “Five . . . four . . . three.” Silk, who was out there just as Jack Parker had predicted, took a swipe at clearing the puck and then Johnson dug in and pushed it out of the U.S. zone. In the ABC booth, Ken Dryden said, “It’s over,” just a second before Al Michaels was shouting, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

  The horn sounded.

  Pandemonium followed, the entire bench running, dancing, jumping, an almost comical conga line of jubilation, the destination Jim Craig. Dave Christian with his Christian Brothers stick held aloft was near the head of the line, and Buzz Schneider, arms and legs spread as if he were in mid–jumping jack, was right behind. In an instant Craig disappeared beneath a patriotic scrum of teammates, about five feet from the left post. Flags were waving everywhere and the roar wouldn’t stop. People in the building said it was the loudest and most joyful sports sound they had ever heard. Jack O’Callahan sat atop a prone Mike Ramsey, arms overhead and a toothless grin for the world to see, even as Ramsey flailed deliriously at his stomach and chest. The four BU players on the team—Craig, Eruzione, O’Callahan, and Silk—had an unscripted reunion near the bench, a Terrier group hug. The players kept looking for teammates they hadn’t embraced yet, the configurations of ecstasy shifting over and over. Assistant coach Craig Patrick was out there in the middle of it, and so were Doc Nagobads and general manager Ralph Jasinski. The head coach was not. He was gone within seconds of the sounding of the horn. After throwing both arms overhead and doing a tiny pirouette and punching the air with an emphatic left fist, Brooks walked straight off the bench, turned right into the runway, got patted on the back by weepy state troopers, and went back into Locker Room 5. Ten feet from where he had stood two and a half hours earlier an
d told his team they were meant to be there, Herb Brooks locked himself inside an orange toilet stall and cried.

  On their own blue line, a cluster of Russians stood and took in the spectacle at the other end of the ice, a mixture of amusement and disbelief on their faces. Alexander Golikov was smiling. His brother Vladimir, chin propped on his stick, wasn’t. Viacheslav Fetisov, future NHL star, looked as stone-faced as a Kremlin guard. “I just watched how they were, young guys, smiling over what they do on the ice,” Makarov, another future NHLer, said. “We won lots of tournaments all over the world, and we never do that. It was more than hockey for those guys. We were happy for them.” In his own way, Makarov’s reaction brought to mind the actions of Soviet captain Nikolai Sologubov twenty years earlier in Squaw Valley. After losing to the United States in the semifinals, Sologubov made an impromptu visit to the U.S. team between the second and third periods of the gold-medal game against the Czechs and broke into a locker-room pantomime, telling the Americans they needed to take oxygen. It was a sporting gesture and dovetailed nicely with the Soviets’ own agenda, since any result was preferable to a victory by their bitter rivals from Czechoslovakia. Six third-period goals later, the Americans had their first hockey gold medal. And now they were one victory away from their second.