News & Articles

Where were you on February 22, 1980? Or on February 24, for that matter?

 I was in the small town in northern New York, called Lake Placid, scrambling from the apartment I was sharing with Joe Soucheray and Jon Roe, two associates from the Minneapolis Tribune, as we covered the Winter Olympics. Jon was covering the biggest events in all sports, Sooch was writing his “light and breezy” sports columns, and I? I was in heaven. 

 My assignment was to cover the Olympic hockey tournament, mainly because our hometown guys were dominating the team. Coach Herb Brooks, St. Paul’s finest, had taken a leave of absence from the University of Minnesota, and brought a dozen of his players along from his 1979 championship Gopher team. Nobody expected these college kids to do much against the world’s superpowers, but I was to keep telling stories about their performances.

 Nobody expected the U.S. to do much, but we got lucky from the start. Our sports editor had overlooked the detail of finding us lodging, and was so pitiful in his final attempt to prevent us from having a 100-mile busride every day, the woman coordinating the lodging took pity on him, and opened her basement apartment to these three intrepid waifs. The apartment was located across from the high school, which may not sound too lucrative, until you realize that the high school was the nerve center of the media, and its auditorium was the location for all the post-game interviews, because it was across a small driveway from the arena where the main games were all played. If there was a game at 10 a.m., I could sleep until 9, jump up, shower and grab some form of breakfast, and be at my seat in the arena press box by 9:45.

 The fantastic fortnight of course was highlighted by Team USA’s “Upset Heard Round the World” --  a 4-3 triumph over the invincible Soviet Union. After all the tributes, and the wonderful movie Miracle as well as this year’s incredibly in-depth special films on the formation of the USSR dynasty, there are still some fantastic little side stories overlooked by most. Even those who were there. For example:

 • The Soviet Union team had won all the gold medals since an upstart U.S. team had shocked them in 1960 at Squaw Valley, California. That means 1964, ’68, ’72, and ’76. The Soviet machine had not lost so much as an Olympic game since the 1968 Olympics.

•  Anatoly Tarasov, the wonderful man who created Soviet hockey out of cleverness and creative inventiveness in training and tactics -- building his program on the belief that copying Canada and NHL hockey would doom his teams to never be better than second -- had been deposed as coach of the team. Politics appeared to have taken over a decade before Lake Placid, and instead of the much-loved Tarasov, the coach of the USSR was a tall, thin man named Viktor Tikhonov -- a KGB officer, intent on changing Russian hockey and putting his own stamp on it.

•  The Red Army team was so good that it came over to face the mightiest NHL all-star team ever assembled to that point. Scotty Bowman was the coach, and after the teams each won a game in the best-of-three, they met in Madison Square Garden to decide which was the greatest team in the world. The NHL had Ken Dryden, Guy Lafleur, Phil Esposito, Bobby Orr, Bryan Trottier, Mike Bossy, and a dozen others. The USSR won, 6-0. One year later, the USSR strengthened itself by adding Helmut Balderis, and the youthful Vladimir Krutov and Sergei Makarov. That was the team Herbie’s guys beat!

•  The popular misconception is that the U.S. beat the Soviets in the semifinal game, but there was no semifinal game. The tournament was broken into two pools, with the U.S., Sweden, West Germany, Norway, Romania and Czechoslovakia in one pool, while the Soviet Union, Canada, Finland, Poland, Japan, and Holland were in the other. After playing a full round within both pools, the top two teams advanced to the medal round, where they would both count the game they played against each other in pool play, then face the two from the other pool to complete an extended round-robin. Sweden and the U.S. tied Sweden at 4-0-1 atop the Blue pool, while in the Red,  the USSR was 5-0, and Finland and Canada were tied for second at 3-2, with Finland holding the tie-breaker. So in the Blue, Sweden was No. 1 and the U.S. No. 2 based on goal differential; in the Red, the USSR was No. 1 and Finland No. 2, so they played crossover games, 1 vs. 2 and 2 vs. 1, setting up the final day, where it would be 2 vs. 2 and the climactic 1 vs. 1.

•  The U.S. fouled up the anticipated scene by shocking the USSR in the 4-3 game, while Sweden and Finland battled to a tie. On the final day, the U.S.-Finland game had been programmed to be for the bronze, the appetizer before the top two seeds, the USSR and Sweden, were supposed to meet for the gold and silver. But Team USA beat Finland to finish 2-0-1 (counting the tie with Sweden), while Finland wound up 0-2-1. The USSR crushed Sweden for the silver, finishing 2-1 against medal-round foes, while Sweden got the bronze at 0-1-2.

•  The often-told drama of the U.S.-USSR game generally leaves out all the colorful details of the U.S.-Finland final-day classic. Finland had led the Soviets 2-1 in their medal round game, but tried to ice the puck for the whole third period, and ultimately lost 4-2 when Vladimir Kriutov, Alexander Maltsev and Boris Mikhailov scored three goals in a 1:19 span. Having watched Finland more than once, I realized that winger Reijo Leppanen was perhaps the best forward in the tournament, with 5 goals, 4 assists in seven games, and Tapio Levo was as good a defenseman as there was in the whole event. I repeatedly warned Brooks and the U.S. players about those two, but they seemed unconcerned, still filled to the brim with the victory over the USSR. As Finland and the U.S. players lined up for introductions, the public address announcer said: “From the Finland lineup, please scratch No. 22, Reijo Leppanen and No. 8, Tapio Levo.” Leppanen had suffered a pulled groin against Sweden in the first medal round game, and Levo tore knee ligaments and was sent home for surgery.

•  Finland led 1-0 after one period, and 2-1 after two, but Phil Verchota, Rob McClanahan and Mark Johnson scored in the third period to lift the U.S. to a 4-2 victory. The U.S. players, to this day, never heard of Leppanen or Levo, and didn’t realize how fortunate they were that the best two players in Finland’s lineup were sidelined in the biggest game of their lives. Finland had a talented  19-year-old in their lineup, a forward named Yari Kurri who later gained fame as the NHL’s top goal-scorer playing for Edmonton, at wing with a center named Wayne Gretzky.

 It was an amazing thing to have witnessed, first hand. All the retrospectives and features recreating the scene of that tiny little village in 1980 are thrilling to watch, although for the real thrill, as they say...you had to be there.