You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (16 page)

Meanwhile, the Soviet “amateur” hockey players were mostly in their late twenties. I’d always laugh when I saw that their biographies would list them as either students or soldiers. In the Soviet Union, that was an alias for professional hockey player. And this would become all the more apparent in the late eighties, when the Soviets began playing in the National Hockey League and we got to see just how great these players were. Now heading into the Olympics, our relations with the Soviets on the global political stage were tense. They had invaded Afghanistan a few months earlier and we were threatening to boycott the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow (which we wound up doing). But no one was sensing that ice hockey would offer any symbolic battle between the two countries. We just weren’t in their league.

The hockey tournament in Lake Placid actually began the night before the Opening Ceremony, with the United States taking on Sweden. The American team was trailing, 2–1, when, with the clock winding down in the third period, Brooks pulled Jim Craig for the extra attacker and Bill Baker scored the tying goal with twenty-seven seconds remaining. There was no overtime, so that was that. The Americans—an underdog in that game—had earned a tie, and gotten a point in the standings. Already we’d had a dose of drama.

What’s more, it had already become apparent that because Herb Brooks knew and respected Dryden, we were going to have special access. Brooks had cut off most of the rest of the media to build a wall around his players. His thinking
: If I’m going to deal with one media entity, it’ll be the national television broadcaster.
Which, of course, was fine by us. Ken and I had four or five private sessions with Brooks over the course of the Games. Invaluable.

During the Opening Ceremony show, hosted by Jim McKay the next day, I joined Jim to narrate an extensive recap of the action from the night before. I was already getting more airtime than originally thought.

The next night, a Thursday, the U.S. team played its second game. Czechoslovakia, easily the second-best team in the world and likely to win the silver medal, was the opponent. Stunningly, it was the Americans who dominated from start to finish, winning 7–3. And now it was like—
whoa,
what’s happening here? A last-minute tie against favored Sweden and a rout of heavily favored Czechoslovakia? And late in the game, there was a moment that epitomized the team and its coach as much as anything. A Czech player leveled Mark Johnson in the open ice, nowhere near the puck, forcing a stoppage as Johnson was attended to. As our camera focused in on Brooks, a microphone picked up Herb’s voice. “We’ll bury that goddamn shit right in your throat, [Number] Three,” he barked. “You’re gonna eat that goddamn Koho [hockey stick], Three!” Today, as the saying goes, Twitter would have blown up and the network would conceivably get a fine or at least a scolding from the Federal Communications Commission. That night, though, it just served to paint to the country the quintessential portrait of this intense, no-nonsense coach who was convincing his players that they were as good—and tough—as any hockey team in the world.

Also at that game, a group of fans began to chant
U-S-A, U-S-A
. Years later, I received a letter from a man claiming that he and his friends were in Lake Placid, and that they were the first ones to ever start that mantra. This might sound like one of those unverifiable claims on the order of “I started the wave.” But let the record reflect—the USA-Czechoslovakia game
was
the first time I’d ever heard it. And it would become ubiquitous by the end of the Games.

FROM THE START, KEN
Dryden and I had a good thing going. It was a very comfortable blend—and Ken had quickly found a way to make relevant, incisive points in eight seconds or less. In football, the analyst can speak for thirty seconds after the play-by-play announcer finishes calling a play in four or five. In hockey, the action is so continuous, it’s the reverse. The analyst has to speak in quick bites, get in, and get out, because of the nonstop action that has to be covered. And Ken Dryden understood that immediately.

By the first Saturday of the Games, everything was heating up. Eric Heiden had won his first gold medal. Alpine skiing and figure skating were under way. And hockey was generating this buzz. That afternoon, the United States took on Norway at the field house adjacent to the main arena that had been built for the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics. The venue had the feeling of a high school rink. But it was the Olympics, and in front of a capacity crowd of about two thousand fans (not a misprint), the United States won again, 5–1. And two days after that, they won again, 7–2, over Romania. The Americans were 3-0-1 and in good position to reach the medal round, which would include the top two teams from each six-team bracket.

We were staying at the newly opened Lake Placid Hilton. Dryden had the room next to mine and the late Art Kaminsky, his agent, a terrific guy but a man who took the term
penurious
to new heights (depths?), moved in as his roommate. Art never wanted to look a hotel bill in the eye if it wasn’t necessary.

Kaminsky had brought with him one of those push-and-pull table hockey games. You controlled the forwards and defensemen with rods that would go in and out and the goalie with a lever that would move side to side. It was similar to foosball. We played the game for close to an hour every day—Dryden, Kaminsky, and yours truly, as well as anyone else who would wander in. It felt like a college frat house. This entire time—starting with that first night we met in Moscow—Dryden had been schooling me on the wonders of international hockey and its beautiful, elegant cross-ice passing. Now facing me on the other side of the table, with his oversize glasses and looking like a college professor from central casting, all he was doing was jamming the rods in as hard as he could, trying to knock my players off their springs. I was stupefied. “Hey, Kenny, you’ve taught me this beautiful form of hockey and now you’re playing this muck-muck crap. When did you turn into a goon? You’ve become a goon!”

He just laughed.

On Wednesday, February 20, the U.S. team took on West Germany. At the start of the tournament, it appeared the two teams were evenly matched. As they had in every game apart from the one against Romania, the Americans fell behind early and trailed, 2–0, before scoring four unanswered goals over the last two periods to win, 4–2, and clinch a berth in the medal round. It would be the United States and Sweden from the Blue Division, and the Soviet Union and Finland from the Red Division advancing to medal round over the weekend. The Soviets wound up undefeated in group play with a 51–11 goal differential.

But first, Dryden had some business to take care of. Right after the conclusion of the West Germany game, he got into a car and was driven across the Canadian border to Ottawa, three hundred miles from Lake Placid. Why? He had to take his
bar exam
the next morning. He would pass with flying colors. That was Dryden. In between the game against West Germany and the Friday contest with the Soviets, he passed the bar. I began to think this guy could rescue people from a burning building for three straight days on his lunch break.

WHILE DRYDEN WAS IN
Ottawa, a controversy developed over the starting time of Friday’s game between the United States and the USSR. The U.S. team would meet the Soviets, and Finland would face Sweden on Friday, the twenty-second, and then on Sunday, the twenty-fourth, the United States would conclude play against Finland with the Soviets matched up with Sweden. The team that accumulated the most points (including those already earned against teams that had qualified for the medal round) would win the gold medal. According to the schedule that was released before the Olympics, the 5
P
.
M
. game on February 22 would match up the second-place team from the Blue Group (which turned out to be the United States) against the first-place team from the Red Group (the Soviets). There would then be an 8
P
.
M
. game that would feature the Blue Group winner (which turned out to be Sweden) against the Red Group runner-up (Finland).

Now what? Clearly, Roone Arledge and ABC obviously preferred that the U.S.-Soviet game be played in prime time in the Eastern Time Zone, 8
P
.
M
., with the Sweden-Finland game then moved back to 5
P
.
M
. So Roone and one of his top deputies, John Martin, along with a young programming executive named Bob Iger, worked to get the games switched. Roone had a lot of juice with the International Olympic Committee and the Lake Placid organizers and just about every other Olympic muckety-muck, but this was a change that would have to be approved by the Soviet Hockey Federation. And even though remuneration was put on the table, the Soviets put up a stone wall and refused. Time was of the essence and the negotiations ended.

So the marquee matchup of the Olympics would start at 5
P
.
M
. on a Friday afternoon. Arledge made the decision to tape-delay the game until eight o’clock.

This scenario could never take place in today’s world. Too much would be at stake. Money would win out. But in 1980, in the world of television, dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.

The Hilton was just six blocks from the arena, and Dryden and I left that Friday afternoon at about two o’clock to walk over. Yes, the Americans had become a great story. But our conversation had to be realistic.
If the score can be something like 3–1 Soviets in the middle of the second period, that’s about all we can ask for. You’re just praying it’s not 7–0. If they can keep it close for a period and a half and hang in there against a bunch of NHL-caliber players, that will be more than respectable and keep the audience for a while.
Remember, the Soviet team had toured North America and beaten the New York Rangers, New York Islanders, and Quebec Nordiques on an exhibition tour the previous year. The U.S. team had been wonderful to watch but again, they were still primarily a bunch of college kids.

The game took place in the Olympic Center, a 7,700-seat multipurpose field house that had been built for these Olympics. A few extra fans would get jammed in that afternoon. Still, there are college teams that play in bigger rinks. There was an intimacy in that building. Even upstairs, you were close to the ice. You could hear every sound echoing from below. You could see the players’ faces. The scoreboard was rudimentary. The sound system was simply functional.

Just before the opening faceoff, the crowd was still filing in. We were broadcasting from a makeshift platform in the first two rows of the balcony. On the platform, I was next to Dryden, along with five or six other production people—a statistician, a cameraman, a stage manager, an audio assistant, and another technician. We came on the air and did the scene set. In my on-camera welcome, I said:

The excitement, the tension building. The Olympic Center, filling to capacity. The face value of a top ticket to tonight’s game? Sixty-seven dollars, twenty cents. Outside, they’re changing hands at three times the face value . . . . I’m sure there are a lot of people in this building tonight who do not know the difference between a blue line and a clothesline. It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Because what we have at hand is the rarest of sporting events. An event that needs no buildup, no superfluous adjectives. In a political or nationalistic sense, I’m sure this game is being viewed with varying perspectives. But manifestly, it is a hockey game. The United States and the Soviet Union on a sheet of ice in Lake Placid, New York.

Then I brought Dryden in for his opening remarks. Ken put it this way: “For the U.S. team, it’s really discovery time. It’s one thing to be young and promising. It’s quite another to be good. And in the next two and a half hours, the U.S. players will go through perhaps the most difficult and demanding, yet exhilarating time of their lives. They will be playing against a very good team, a team that’s better than they are. And after that time, after it’s all over, this team will find out an awful lot about themselves. They’ll simply find out how good they are.”

Early on, the Soviets, in their familiar red uniforms, controlled the tempo much as we expected they would, and they scored about halfway through the first period on a goal by Vladimir Krutov. But then the U.S. team tied it five minutes later on a goal by Buzz Schneider, only to have the Soviets jump ahead again, 2–1, on a goal by Sergei Makarov with 2:26 left in the period. Then—and you could never make enough of the importance of this—with the period coming to the end, the Soviets were putting the pressure on and had a chance to make it 3–1. Instead, the next thing you know, the puck comes out toward center ice and Mark Johnson scoops it up and beats the Soviet goalie, Vladislav Tretiak, just as the horn sounds.

For a moment, there was a question of whether the puck had crossed the goal line before time expired. It did. And now Dryden and I were thinking,
What a great and lucky break. 2–2 after the first period. We’ll take it.
On the broadcast, Ken was full of great insight and we felt totally in sync. Later, I’d be asked how I got all those Soviet names down. Fortunately, most of them ended in
ov
. It was child’s play compared to five Samoans on a fast break. My Hawaii high school basketball days were paying off in the Adirondacks.

HERE YOU HAD THE
United States and the Soviet Union in the Olympics , but there was only one minimally recognizable celebrity in attendance: Jamie Farr of
M*A*S*H.
Apparently, there was no A-list in 1980.

Meanwhile, as the second period began, the Soviet coach, Viktor Tikhonov, made a stunning move, replacing his goalie, Vladislav Tretiak. Tretiak was considered by many to be the best goaltender in the world at the time, and the U.S. players would later say this had the effect of emboldening the American team. Vladimir Myshkin came in to replace Tretiak. Nonetheless, in the second period, the Soviets were completely dominant. They scored the only goal in the period two minutes in, and outshot the American team, 12–2. Jim Craig, the U.S. goalie, had to make one phenomenal save after another to keep the score close. It was 3–2, but it could have been 8–2. During the intermission, I remember thinking that we’d gotten all we could have hoped for. A one-goal game would still keep an audience. But the thought of actually
winning
the game? A game the Soviets were dominating despite the closeness of the score? No way.