Lake Placid

Thirty years ago today the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid, NY took place when the United States defeated the Soviets in hockey at the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Like many people my memory gets a little clouded over the years. Until just a day or so ago I thought that I had heard the game on the radio and watched the gold medal game on TV. But I realized that it was the other way around. It’s strange how memories can come back because I distinctly remember listening to the US score two goals while walking outside in the sunlight. The gold medal game took place during the day.

I watched the US team beat the Soviets on the 13 inch black and white TV in my apartment in Minneapolis. Two days later I listened to the USA defeated Finland in the gold medal match over a battery powered transistor radio while I was in the library at the University of Minnesota studying for one of the few times in my undergraduate college life.

Maybe it is growing up at the edge of hockey country in western Minnesota that let the game have such an impact on me. I remember going down to the rink at the end of block when it was still half flooded and skating in the dark with no nets, just hacking away at the puck. And just how bad the warming house smelled at the end of the season. And guys coming to school on a Monday with frostbit ears from long, cold weekends spent skating outside. And playing street hockey in a friend’s driveway during the summer with no pads to cushion the falls to the concrete.

It hard for many people today to realize just what a momentous game that was for the country. The United States was in the depths of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe which they had essentially occupied since the end of World War 2.

Nuclear war was a real possibility as two massive armies faced off nervously in Europe. Military doctrine at the time was one of massive tank armies battling to see which one could survive long enough to be the winner.

In Iran, a bunch of “students” had taken over the United States Embassy and held the staff and Marine Security detail hostage for several months. The father of one of the guys in my ROTC unit was one of the hostages.

And a lot of people were talking about appeasement with the Soviets.

The Olympics were for amateurs, no professionals were allowed. The Soviet hockey team was almost entirely made up of the Red Army team and all the players were in the Soviet Army. Their duties were to play hockey.

The United States team was made up of a bunch of college students coached by Herb Brooks after he quit coaching the University of Minnesota team. A bunch of amateurs against a bunch of pros. There was a sense of magic about the team. It had been 20 years since the US team had won at the Olympics in another improbable set of circumstances. Those games were also held in Lake Placid.

The game showed us one thing: the Soviets were not unbeatable.

In one way, the victory in Lake Placid marks for me the beginning of the end of an era.

Two years later I stood on the deck of an LHA, the Belleau Wood, in the middle of the Indian Ocean watching two Soviet Bear long range bombers fly overhead and take pictures of the Amphibious Task Force. Less than ten years later, the wall fell in Berlin and the Soviet behemoth cracked, fractured and splintered and I held my infant son in my arms and cried as I told him maybe he wouldn’t have to go and serve.

The world changes and other boogey men and bad guys come and go and in many ways the world is a much more complicated place than it was thirty years ago.

But I still believe in miracles...