Remembering a true winner

By Dan Nied [send email]

Sometimes the greatest heroes hide in the background, marveling at the good they’ve served in the world.

Sometimes the names of real heroes aren’t on the tip of our tongues, begging for our approval or even the slightest bit of recognition.

Seconds after Herb Brooks coached the 1980 U.S. Hockey team to an Olympic gold medal and the greatest sports moment we’ve ever shared as a nation, he left the ice without celebrating.

He left that up to his players and his country.

When Brooks, 66, died Monday as his minivan crashed in Minnesota, we all lost a genuine American hero.

Brooks was a man who meant more to hockey in the United States than any other person. He willed that 1980 team to victory in Lake Placid, he coached the U.S. to the silver medal in the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, he captained the 1968 team, played in 1964 and was the last player cut from the 1960 gold medal squad in Squaw Valley.

When you talk about great coaches, names like Lombardi, Auerbach and Stengel come up. But those men never meant as much to their sports or their countries as Brooks did.

Brooks’ work in 1980 gave us hope in an unsettling time. Those in my generation, born in the late 1970s, were probably too young to remember the Cold War upset over the monsters of the Russian National team that propelled the U.S. to the gold medal game against Finland. No, we have had to scan ESPN Classic to see the game. We have to hear secondhand accounts of the greatest athletic moment in our history.

It is a shame that we weren’t cognizant of the greatness then, but over the course of the last 23 years we have had the good fortune, through various mediums, of watching images of captain Mike Eruzione’s game-winning goal and of goalie Jim Craig draping himself with the American flag with a proud beaming smile on his face.

We know the upset happened. But too many of us don’t know why it happened.

Brooks was a master motivator. He made believers out of a group of upstart college kids. When they took the ice in the third period against the Russians down one goal, Brooks had them certain that they could beat the greatest hockey machine ever assembled.

"You're looking for players whose name on the front of the sweater is more important than the one on the back," Brooks once said.

That quote is a testament to the kind of coach Brooks was and why he picked the team he did in 1980.

In 2002, he made NHL stars play for the “USA” on the front of their sweaters, molding the likes of Brett Hull and Mike Modano into an actual team before losing to Canada in the gold medal final. That may have been Brooks’ most telling accomplishment. The United States had a similarly skilled dream team in 1998 at Nagano but, without Brooks, it failed to make the medal round.

Brooks pulled them together in Salt Lake City.

In those 2002 games, the U.S. once again had a heated encounter with Russia, only this time the field was even and the animosity wasn’t political. The game ended in a tie.

That brings us back to 1980 and a team that believed in its coach and system so much that it knocked off a team that had trained together for years and had a slew of NHL-caliber players, including the great defenseman Slava Fetisov and the Russian Gretzky, Igor Larionov – both of whom would go on to respectable NHL careers long after their prime in Russia had passed.

But Brooks did not live in 1980 forever. Already armed with three NCAA national championships in the 1970s with the Minnesota Golden Gophers, Brooks tried his hand in the NHL, where success was more elusive. However, he was not a failure. He coached four NHL teams, most recently the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1999 and 2000. His career record was just under .500, but teams kept turning to him because they knew what kind of coach he was.

Tuesday, at the USA Hockey office in Colorado Springs, men who knew Herb Brooks mourned the passing of a legendary member of their family.

"Herb Brooks’ tremendous ability to lead was only surpassed by his brilliance as a hockey strategist,” said Lou Vairo, who coached the 1984 Olympic team, on USA Hockey’s website. “His outspoken opinions were and are of great value to the U.S. hockey family and should never be forgotten.”

Art Berglund assembled the 2002 Olympic team as director of player personnel and named Brooks coach.

“We’ve lost an Olympic hockey icon both as a player and as a coach,” Berglund said. “I’ll deeply remember him striving for the gold medal in Salt Lake City. There were many comparisons between 1980 and 2002. His comment was always, ‘that was then, this is now.'”

And, in Brooks’ words, that was then: When communism and the threat of war seemed to deter our daily lives and a group of college kids led by perhaps the greatest hockey coach of all time (certainly the most underrated) gave us something to be proud of.  

And this is now: With Brooks gone, leaving us here to celebrate his accomplishments and, more importantly, his life, without him.

Just as he did after the 1980 gold medal game.