Posted on 02/21/2020 7:09:25 PM PST by Alberta's Child
Years before I ever heard of Lake Placid or the Olympics, before I knew the name of a single Russian hockey player, I was a kid in Massachusetts who wanted to be the next Bobby Orr. I grew up skating on Holmes' Pond, which took its name from our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Holmes, who owned it. A man named Phil Thompson, our postman, was the person who told me I should try organized hockey in the Easton Junior Hockey League. He had already been working on it with my mother. He was a fine postman and an even better salesman.
The game we played against the Russians in Lake Placid twenty-five years ago has been acclaimed and saluted in every way possible, but for me, it has always felt like a passage on ice, the attainment of a dream that started on Mrs. Holmes' pond.
It's impossible for me to separate the miracle that we achieved as a team with the memories and gratitude I have for all the people who helped me get there, from my mother and father, my sisters and brothers, to ten years' worth of coaches and friends and teammates. You don't make a journey like that alone. You make it with a lot of love and sacrifice. That's probably why I was searching the stands for my father after we won the gold medal against Finland. It was a moment that was begging to be shared.
I don’t believe those Winter Games in Lake Placid will ever be duplicated. I don't say that because we beat maybe the greatest Soviet hockey team ever assembled, or even because Eric Heiden won five gold medals, a performance that I honestly think dwarfs what we did. I say it because there weren't doping scandals or judging scandals or an Olympic Village that was overrun with millionaires and professionals in Lake Placid. Herb Brooks, God rest his soul, wasn't coaching a Dream Team. He was coaching a team full of dreamers. There is a big difference. In Lake Placid, it didn't feel as if the Games were being run by corporations. It felt as if at the heart of them was a brotherhood of athletes, the best in the world, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.
I've visited quite a few places that have hosted the Olympics in the past, and you almost can’t tell that the Games were ever there. You aren't in Lake Placid for more than a minute before you are flooded with Olympic memories, whether it's from seeing the Olympic Arena at the top of the hill, or the oval next door where Heiden skated into immortality. Whenever I'm in town, I like to go out at night when it's dark and quiet and the shops are closed, and stand in the middle of Main Street. I close my eyes and in an instant it takes me back to that magical Friday night of February 22, 1980 -- to the memory of walking down that same Main Street with Mike Eruzione and our fathers and other family members, and ABC's Jim Lampley interviewing us as we went. Snow was falling, and everywhere you looked people were waving flags and chanting, "U-S-A, U-S-A." We were in our primes, athletically and physically. We were surrounded by people we loved, getting loved some more by people we didn't even know. We had just done the impossible, and we were happy to be alive and thrilled to be Americans and thrilled to think that Herb was right: maybe we were meant to be here. It's a feeling you wish everybody could have at one point in their lives.
Being in that goal on that Friday night was the pinnacle of my athletic life, the greatest joy I have ever known as a hockey player. It was the culmination of a journey, and then other journeys followed, for all of us; that is what this book is really all about—the journeys that brought us to that semifinal game against the Soviet Union, and those we’ve taken since. Sometimes people ask me if I wish I could go back and do it again, if some part of me is sad that I will never experience that pinnacle again. You can't look back. You can’t dial up euphoria on demand, or try to re-create what happened a quarter century ago. You move forward and you live your life and try to be a better person every day than you were the day before. You take each day as a new journey, even as you are grateful for the ones you have already had.
Maybe the defining point in American sports history for a passionate hockey fan who remembers that era well as it fades into the past. May the memories live forever, boys.
I’m hearing glowing reviews of this book.
There are only memories left. Gone are the days of amateur athletics. I suppose all good things come to an end. I won’t even watch pro hockey anymore since Philadelphia tore down Kate Smith’s statue. F’n liberals ruin everything.
As a kid I watched Bobby Orr with my Dad.
One day I brought home a bad note from school. I waited until AFTER the hockey game to show Dad. haha
Phila. is a DISGRACE.
The only city in the NHL that DOES NOT PLAY THE ANTHEM before a game. Curse that city.
I was in Austria, and watched the game live, it started at ~1am.
So glad I stayed up.
Greatest game ever played.
Some readers give it a poor rating online because they find it hard to follow, but that's a deliberate result of the book's layout. The author goes through almost a moment-by-moment review of the USA-USSR game sequentially, and then intersperses sections of varying lengths that are profiles of the players and coaches, a history of the months leading up to the game, etc. It's very well researched, and I learned quite a few things about the game and that group of players and coaches that I had never known before.
What an amazing piece. It made my heart swell. Thank you.
You’re very welcome. I get chills reading it — especially the paragraph I highlighted. It’s the sentimental old hockey player in me. :-)
When I was a kid, Kate Smith would sing God Bless America before some games, and then in the '74 playoffs she became a lucky charm of sorts, with the Flyers winning when she sang. I distinctly remember being disappointed when she was not available to sing, and those times the national anthem was sung. God Bless America is plenty patriotic, and honestly a hell of a lot easier to sing than the anthem.
The really isn't a long history of the Anthem being sung at sporting events or anywhere. The United States didn't have an Anthem until 1931. It took sports to make the anthem popular, but that happened much later than 1931. There's plenty of people around that recall going to sporting events and there was no anthem played. I'm not that old, but I recognize history before me. Pro football is celebrating 100 years and college football 150. I'm not going to call either a disgrace because they didn't play the anthem until relatively recently. However, there's plenty of real reasons to curse both.
I’d never heard of this book until today. The author was on the local sports talker.
I’m going to find it tomorrow.
That was such a great time. We almost all got caught up in the moment and viewed it as the thrashing we had wanted to give Russia for so long. It was a great time.
It’s been out for years. The 2005 publication date tells me it was done for the 25th anniversary of the 1980 Olympics.
That's the Jim Craig from the Disney movie "Miracle."
It's the scene after they clinched the gold medal on February 24th against Finland. I only know that because they're wearing blue jerseys, not white. :-)
I was 17 years old at that time. I lived near Winthrop, MA at the time and went to see the victory parade for Mike Eruzione. Even though Ronald Reagan’s election was still months away, this was the moment that it became acceptable to be patriotic again and put American flags outside your front door. Prior to that time, the liberals had control and they made it so toxic to be patriotic that members of the active military were actually ordered to wear civilian clothing when out in public.
I just watched the team with Trump on stage in Las Vegas today. It was great and the players chanted “four more years”. Herb ‘s daughter Kelly said you just knew her dad would have been a Trump supporter. Trump talked to Mike E. about playing golf with him,
Damn. Fooled by Disney!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.