Icing
There once was a time in this country when ICE was merely “ice” and Minnesota was the center of the U.S. hockey universe, not a place where masked thugs terrorize the community in the name of “protecting America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety” while coincidentally murdering citizens exercising their God-given and Constitutional rights to protest against an unconscionable attack by their own government.
That time was 1980, and the place was Lake Placid, New York, the site of the XIII Winter Olympic Games, which will be remembered forever for the Miracle on Ice, when 20 American amateur college hockey players pulled off perhaps the biggest upset in sports history by downing the former USSR, arguably the greatest hockey team of all time, and went on to win the gold medal with a win over Finland.
With the opening of the Milano-Cortina games in Italy this week, that event is recalled in a Netflix documentary Miracle: The Boys of ’80 which reunites the surviving members of Team USA to relive and reminisce about their triumph. Even 45 years later and everyone knowing the outcome, the film is riveting in relating how their martinet coach, Herb Brooks, mercilessly molded a team of former rivals from mostly the Midwest and the Boston area into the greatest group of overachievers of all time and whose triumph will live for the ages.
Get Greg Gnall’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Just about anyone who was alive at the time will tell you how they watched every minute of the game with the Soviets, sweating the last ten minutes after the US took the lead as the clock slowed to a torturous crawl. But the truth is that, in the days before ubiquitous TV sport coverage, the game was not even broadcast live, and I distinctly recall listening to it over the radio (the device that you turned on and nothing happened).
Hockey at that time was a regional affair, before the NHL had teams in Dallas, LA and (gasp) Las Vegas, and interest was mostly concentrated in the frigid Midwest and New England. But the improbable success of the US turned an entire nation into fans at a time when America was actually united in misery: inflation of nearly 15%, the lingering Iranian hostage crisis, the Arab oil embargo and a time when the Cold War was really cold. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 eventually led to Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the Summer Games in Moscow later in 1980.
The specter of Brooks hangs over all of the players’ memories. He apparently regretted not getting close to the players but that was a strategic decision that he believed was necessary for the team’s success. Brooks’ death in a car accident in 2003 was not the only tragedy associated with the team. Not mentioned in the film was Mark Pavelich, a key player who had modest NHL success (including becoming the first US-born player to score five goals in a game, for the Rangers), who fell into years of depression and took his own life in 2021.
Maybe sports is too important in our lives and vicariously shields us from the voids in our own lives. And, with the sellout of both professional and college sports to gambling mania, it has become more than a little pregnant. But at its best it can unite a community; it can bring us unfathomable joy or bitter disappointment: just like life itself. The various crises of 1980 seem almost quaint now, as our democratic institutions are under existential threat and hate and fear dominant what passes for our national discourse today. Can an event such as the Miracle on Ice once more lift us from the depths? The odds are long but I am sure you can find a Predictions Market that will take the bet.
