\u201cMiracle: The Boys of \u201980\u201d is a Netflix documentary about the U.S. hockey team conquering impossible odds to win gold at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. It brought surviving members of that team back to Lake Placid to watch highlights, talk and relive the moment. It\u2019s strong and heartfelt.<\/p>\n
The documentary is the latest in a long series of work chronicling the \u201cMiracle on Ice,\u201d the most notable being the 2004 film \u201cMiracle\u201d that starred Kurt Russell as U.S. coach Herb Brooks.<\/p>\n
If it seems like overkill, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n
What happened at Lake Placid is the biggest upset in the history of sports, the greatest story. It can never be retold too much. It was once in a lifetime, and probably much longer than that.<\/p>\n
Some foolishly tried to parallel Indiana winning the national college football championship. Not even close. Indiana would have to have beaten the \u201985 Chicago Bears.<\/p>\n
The Netflix documentary got across the enormity of the task: The Soviets of that era were the best hockey team ever. That\u2019s easy to say, hard to fathom unless you saw them.<\/p>\n
The Soviets beat the NHL All-Stars in a best-of-three series in 1979, winning the deciding game 6-0. They beat the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game just before Lake Placid. They were a precise, merciless, state-sponsored juggernaut who prepared year-round to do one thing: Win Olympic gold.<\/p>\n
But the U.S. collegians upset them 4-3 at Lake Placid, essentially beating them at their own game: Speed and conditioning.<\/p>\n
The Soviets were panicked in the last 10 minutes. That was a first, and a last.<\/p>\n
Chemistry and leadership are overrated, mostly fictional, assigned after the fact. You never hear about a good team with bad leadership and chemistry, or a bad team with good leadership and chemistry.<\/p>\n
Mark Messier is supposed to be the greatest leader in hockey history. The NHL\u2019s leadership award is named after him.<\/p>\n
Messier\u2019s teams missed the playoffs in his last seven seasons. Did he forget how to lead?<\/p>\n
But that U.S. team was an exception.<\/p>\n
A lot of it was Brooks, between his unmatchable hockey nous and psychological brilliance, galvanizing a group that initially hated each other because of collegiate rivalries by making himself the common enemy.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t just Brooks.<\/p>\n
That group was special, becoming so much greater than the sum of the parts. No team has ever come together and maximized like that one. Not in any sport, not at any time.<\/p>\n
But Brooks was a genius.<\/p>\n
He had the guts to mimic how the Soviets played, to attack instead of cringing before their might. To imbue confidence that logically shouldn\u2019t have existed. Brooks and his team twisted the Soviets into a pretzel. At the end, the Soviets didn\u2019t know what to do. They forgot to pull the goalie.<\/p>\n
What makes the Netflix documentary unique, and great, is the regrouping of the players at Lake Placid 45 years later. Witnessing their camaraderie and emotion, not least when video of their parents at the Games got shown. Seeing what the wisdom of age has added to their experience.<\/p>\n
Former Penguins GM Craig Patrick was Brooks\u2019 assistant. It was great to see Patrick interviewed by Netflix. He\u2019s occasionally been reticent about 1980: He declined to be consulted for the 2004 movie, for example.<\/p>\n
But since Brooks passed in 2003, Patrick is the only one left who can tell the story from Brooks\u2019 perspective. Brooks was isolated from that team, not at all their friend, not then and really not ever. Patrick was the bridge, the go-between. He knows what happened, and why.<\/p>\n
Patrick recently suffered a stroke. Here\u2019s praying for a full recovery. He\u2019s one of his era\u2019s most important hockey people. Irreplaceable at Lake Placid, irreplaceable in Pittsburgh. A thoroughly good man.<\/p>\n
I got to know Brooks after he became a scout for the Penguins in 1993. (As Olympian Rob McClanahan said on my radio show, \u201cYou knew nice, old Herb. You skipped the hard part.\u201d) Brooks was my coach, too. He was everybody\u2019s coach. I\u2019m honored that he was my friend, and I miss him every day.<\/p>\n
In the Netflix documentary. U.S. captain Mike Eruzione said, \u201cWe could use a 1980 now.\u201d<\/p>\n
We sure could.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s impossible.<\/p>\n
NHL players are in the Milan Winter Olympics.<\/p>\n
The Soviet hockey dynasty crumbled with the Soviet bloc. The Russians aren\u2019t in these Olympics, excluded because of the war with Ukraine. (Wrongly so. Don\u2019t mix sport and politics. Brooks didn\u2019t. To Brooks, 1980 was \u201ca hockey tournament\u201d first and foremost. Not a \u201cmorality play on ice,\u201d as was famously said.)<\/p>\n
U.S. collegians won\u2019t ever again skate against an evil empire. (If there\u2019s an evil empire now, it might be us.)<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s say the circumstances of the \u201cMiracle on Ice\u201d could be exactly duplicated now.<\/p>\n
We\u2019d screw it up.<\/p>\n
We\u2019d want to know which players were red and which were blue. The president would say something abjectly stupid. Today\u2019s America would find a way to inject hate and doubt, with the usual suspects reaping benefit. We would take something pure and make it dirty.<\/p>\n
The \u201cMiracle on Ice\u201d solved what then-president Jimmy Carter called \u201ca crisis of confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
But today, an identical \u201cMiracle\u201d would solve nothing.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re not those people anymore. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMiracle: The Boys of \u201980\u201d is a Netflix documentary about the U.S. hockey team conquering impossible odds to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-453209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}