My Father the Miracle Worker
Herb Brooks
Herb Brooks was a professional hockey coach, born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1937. In 1980, the United States men’s national hockey team, under Brooks’s leadership, shocked the world by defeating the four-time defending gold medalist Soviet national hockey team in the semifinals of the Olympic Games at Lake Placid, New York. Dubbed the “Miracle on Ice,” the game became a defining moment in the history of American sports. After the Olympics, Brooks continued coaching, notably with the New York Rangers. He and his wife, Patti, had two children, Daniel and Kelly. He died in 2003 at age sixty-six.
my favorite times with my dad always revolved around hockey. My fondest memories from when I was a kid are of when he would bring me on the road with him, all across the country, to watch high school recruits play. It was great getting to be there and spend those hours with my dad. And when he coached the New York Rangers when I was a teen, I would go with him to the team’s home games at Madison Square Garden. Since we lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the time, we would have the car ride together before and after each game. We would talk about hockey, life, or whatever else came up. Those were the best times.
But in truth, my father was gone a lot. Being a coach meant he was on the road constantly, and often he couldn’t take me with him. He worked tirelessly and put in long hours. In 1972, he was hired to turn around Minnesota’s hockey program, so from that point on, whether it was recruiting players or studying tape, he always had something going on.
To be clear, he wasn’t an absentee father. It was just the nature of the job—his profession demanded an extraordinary level of dedication, and from a young age, I understood that. Unlike a lot of kids with busy parents, I was lucky because it was always clear to me what my father was doing. And getting to cheer him on, whether watching from the stands or on TV when he was away, was huge for me. I was so proud of him.
My dad’s defining moment came in 1980, when I was twelve years old. It was the semifinal hockey game of the Lake Placid Olympics: the United States versus the Soviet Union. I was there, sitting in the stands, with the rest of the world behind me. It really was like being in a movie, as this legendary game played out before our eyes. Here was our Cold War foe, whose athletes had been groomed nearly from birth, up against our scrappy all-amateur US team. It was more than a sporting event. It was a contest between cultures. We all knew immediately we were witnessing something important. It was one of the biggest moments—if not the biggest moment—in US sports history. It was the “Miracle on Ice.” People still remember where they were during the game. And my dad wasn’t simply a minor footnote in the story: he was the coach.
Dad knew how significant the game was as soon as it happened, and he predicted that its magnitude would only grow with time. He was right. When the movie Miracle came out in 2004, it reminded people of this incredible story and also introduced younger people to it for the first time. Even today, the Miracle on Ice stirs up emotion in people all around the country.
Before I headed off to the University of Denver to play hockey, my dad gave me some advice from the perspective of a coach: “Be the first one on the ice and the last one to leave, and keep your mouth shut.” He was big on peace of mind and always insisted that no trophy or amount of money could ever be as rewarding as knowing that I’d done my best.
My dad was on the road too much to get involved with my amateur hockey career, but it was always special when he got to see me play. In my junior and senior years of college, he finally had some downtime because he was between coaching jobs. I loved that he was able to watch me play at an elite level—it was special for both of us. He came to every game.
Kelly, Patti, Daniel, and Herb at their home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, circa 1980