Miracle
By Trent Campbell
The Addison Independent, 12.21.06

HBO has been airing repeats this month of their documentary commemorating the anniversary of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold-medal win at Lake Placid. We are coming up on the 27th anniversary of the “miracle on ice,” but HBO must be desperate for some seasonally appropriate programming.

It hardly seems like winter here yet, but I watched the documentary last week and loved it. I loved it just as much as I did the last four times I watched it. I might be somewhat obsessed by that Olympic moment, because I’ve also watched the recent Disney movie with Kurt Russell as coach Herb Brooks three times. I’ve seen the 1981 TV movie with Karl Malden as Brooks... once, anyway. I even sat, twenty years ago, in a tiny darkened room and watched the last two periods of the U.S. team’s victory over Russia that was playing on a video loop at the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth, Minn. And every time I see those young men celebrating gold, whether it be real or fictionalized, whether it be last week or twenty years ago, I can’t help the tears from flowing.

The HBO documentary and the Disney movie go to great lengths to put those hockey games in the context of the Cold War and Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan and long lines at the gas pumps and Americans held hostage in Iran. As a nation we were certainly looking for something to feel good about, but when I hear Al Michaels ask, “Do you believe in miracles?” and I watch those players toss their sticks in the air, I don’t think about Afghanistan or Iran or high gas prices, even though 27 years later they are still subjects to worry about. Something else is going on.

For starters, I’m from Minnesota, where hockey is king and we have a
selfish sense of ownership of the 1980 team. Our esteemed sports reporter here at the Independent, Andy Kirkaldy, has pointed out to me that his fellow Massachusetts natives Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione played crucial roles in the tournament, but if ever a team came together to become more than the sum of their individual abilities, this team was it. And 16 of the 20 young men on that squad were from the upper Midwest, 12 of those 16 from Minnesota. And coach Brooks grew up in St. Paul and was coaching at the University of Minnesota before he signed on with the Olympic team.

Brooks was sadly missing from the HBO program. He died in a car accident a year and a half before reaching the 25th anniversary. The more I watch those highlights from 27 years ago the more I appreciate Brooks’ role in the victory. I also see more and more how Brooks affects my reaction to the “miracle” because the moment that really turns on the waterworks for me, more than Al Michaels’ beautiful call, more than the players’ leaps into the air, even more than Jim Craig calling for his father, is the tiny glimpse we get of Brooks after the win over Russia. In the joyful pandemonium of that moment, in the middle of the electric pulse flowing through that arena, Brooks can be seen walking alone, away from the bench and away from the ice and away from the adulation. Brooks took those young men to the top of the world and he left them there to enjoy it. It was like the perfect final sentence of a favorite short story.

And that, finally, is the source of my tears. That team, those 20 young men and that coach, told us a beautiful story. Every sentence was perfect. So as the holidays approach, here’s hoping that all of our lives tell beautiful stories and that when we read them later we don’t
feel the need to change too many words.