10

My Miracle on Ice

“I Still Believe in Miracles” (PCN Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)

The greatest and most inspiring of all American sports stories took place in a setting that was almost comical in its inadequacy.

The 1980 Winter Olympics had been awarded to the tiny village of Lake Placid, New York, because after a 48-year absence, it was time for the Winter Games to return to America. The 1932 event had been situated there in the Adirondacks, and most critically, among all the winter resorts in the United States to that moment, only a couple of them had a world-class bobsled and luge track. Squaw Valley was the site of the Winter Games in 1960, so it was Lake Placid’s turn, and there wasn’t much more to it than that.

But the Olympics had changed dramatically since 1932. Television had vastly expanded the audience, and the increasingly dramatic interplay of flags and anthems at their core had amplified their sociopolitical impact. So the TV promotional phrase ABC used to prepare viewers for immersion, “The world comes to Lake Placid,” was but a thin veil over the immense challenge the residents and organizers there were facing.

There weren’t enough hotel rooms. There weren’t enough buses and trains. There weren’t enough restaurants and convenience stores. There weren’t enough portable toilets. There wasn’t enough anything, and many observers with deep Olympics experience, especially producers and executives at ABC Sports, could see problems arising. The city manager from New Orleans, whom the local organizers had brought in to troubleshoot, held daily fantasy-based news briefings at which a story of complex preparedness was fronted, and penetrating questions were ignored.

As I wrote on a UNC website in April 2020, a bigger story was brewing, a front-page blockbuster involving Soviet tanks on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan. The Jimmy Carter administration was urged to push back against that, and the degree to which the 1980 Summer Games, scheduled for later that year in Moscow, might become a bargaining chip in that confrontation.

This came at a time when 52 Americans were being held hostage by Iranian students at the American embassy in Tehran, and a complicated patchwork of global oil politics had conspired to create desperate shortages of gasoline and oil in the United States in recent months. A presidential election loomed in November. Carter needed a win. Some kind of a win.

The hostage crisis was humiliating, the Soviet tanks in Afghanistan were humiliating, and for average Americans nothing was more humiliating than rising in darkness at 3:30 or 4 AM for an interminable wait somewhere to buy a tank of gas. So it wasn’t just the president who was desperate. The whole country was looking for a proverbial shot in the arm, similar to what happened in the COVID pandemic.

Lake Placid was my third Olympics with ABC Sports. Right up until two weeks before the opening ceremony, my assignment was to handle play-by-play for the bobsled and luge competitions. But as the picture came into focus, it became clear these games would be a political event. Significant stories emerged on two fronts: On the local level, there was the obvious inability of local organizers to accommodate large numbers of people coming from all over the globe into a tiny town with little infrastructure, as well as a complex makeshift transportation scenario that was untested and highly questionable on its face. That was the micro front, and alongside it emerged the macro: the sudden desire of the Carter administration to move, delay, or cancel the Moscow Summer Games scheduled for five months later, as a political protest of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

With only a few days to go, my Lake Placid assignment was switched, and now I would be the designated political reporter covering those stories for ABC Sports and ABC News.

As the games got underway, I was busy: sometimes racing out to the local airport to interview Assistant Secretary of State Hodding Carter or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance as they landed to negotiate with the International Olympic Committee; sometimes covering news conferences at which local organizing committee executive Petr Spurney spewed falsehoods about his busing system or ticket distribution. Meanwhile, reports rolled in about thousands of ticket holders freezing in remote parking lots waiting for buses that never arrived.

In the games themselves, there was one early medal hope dashed: a groin injury during a warm-up debilitated pairs figure skater Randy Gardner, reducing him and his skilled and glamorous partner Tai Babilonia to spectator status. America’s most heavily favored competitor, speed skater Eric Heiden, began grinding out his dominant gold performances, setting four Olympic records en route to fulfilling his destiny as the greatest champion ever in his sport. But speed skating was too esoteric for most American TV viewers to bond with emotionally. What made it interesting: the night before the opening ceremony, a lightly regarded American hockey team got a slap-shot goal in the final 30 seconds to tie heavily favored Sweden.

The gold medalist in hockey was a foregone conclusion. The Soviet national team was the most impregnable juggernaut in international team sports, gold medalist in five of the last six Olympics and 14 of the last 17 World Championships. The previous year the Soviets had won two of three games against a team of NHL All-Stars in the Challenge Cup.

The American team couldn’t have been more opposite, a hand-tomouth aggregate of college players and minor leaguers with no perceived chance at competing for a medal. A few days before the opening ceremony, the Americans finished up a 61-game pre-Olympic prep schedule with a marquee matchup against the Soviets at Madison Square Garden. The final score was 10–3, and in retrospect it seemed clear the Russians had gone easy on their outmanned opponent. Many media types observed it could easily have been 20–3.

So there was no overwhelming public notice on the first night of competition when the Americans got what amounted to an upset draw with Sweden on Bill Baker’s blue line slap shot. Nor were there blaring headlines two nights later when they stunned powerful Czechoslovakia with a seven-goal outburst. Then there were wins over Norway, Romania, and West Germany, and surprisingly, in week two of the Olympics, the Americans were headed toward the four-team medal round. But cold reality stared them in the face: a semifinal matchup with Russia’s big red machine, scheduled for 5 pm Friday afternoon.

Now that the American team had become a story in an Olympics largely devoid of noteworthy American headlines, ABC and Team USA approached the event authorities about moving the game to prime time. But the Soviets refused, and ABC was reduced to telegraphing to the audience that USA vs. Russia hockey would be tape-recorded and broadcast in prime time, in effect a three-hour delay.

It was February 22, 1980. At five o’clock I was seated in a videotape edit bay in the ABC broadcast center, supervising the composition of a compendium feature that would tie together my two weeks of stories, scheduled for airing on the Sunday afternoon closing ceremony show.

As my producer and an editor worked through the material, we all glanced from time to time at a tiny monitor mounted above the side of the edit bay, a four-by-six-inch screen on which the hockey game was airing live. A frenetic first period was winding down, and in the closing seconds we were watching out of the corners of our eyes as American star Mark Johnson chased a loose puck inside the Soviet blue line just in time to wrist-roll it into a corner of the net. Officials had to check a replay to be certain Johnson’s last stab had beaten the clock. It had. Amazingly, the game was tied 2–2 with two periods to go.

At that time, every ABC Sports facility, whether an office or a control room or a technical facility, was equipped with a red telephone. Years before I had been instructed to understand the red phone was called the “Roone phone,” and if it ever rang, the voice at the other end would be the legendary chief executive of the sports division, the executive producer of every sports program the network produced, Roone Arledge. Ten seconds after Mark Johnson’s goal, the red phone rang, an event I had never witnessed in six years at ABC. A quick assessment of the personnel in the edit bay established that I was the senior participant, so I picked up the receiver and instantly recognized Roone’s voice.

“Is Jim Lampley there?”

“Yes, Roone, it’s me.”

“What are you doing?” I ran it down for him.

“Drop that right now. If something unusual happens in the hockey game, we are going to need an interview to button it up before we go off the air. Get over to that arena and make sure you can give us what we need. You just became our most important asset tonight.”

Arledge was legendary in television for his golden gut, the inexplicable ability to sense that something dramatic was about to happen before it happened. As events played out, never had that gut been more golden. Before I hung up the phone, I pointed out one possible obstacle.

“Roone, I don’t have the right credential to get into hockey.”

“You’ll get in.” He hung up.

Getting into Olympic events without the right credential was well known to be borderline impossible, just two Olympics removed from the Munich kidnapping of Israeli athletes. But now I had no choice. My colleagues were smiling at my predicament as I bolted out the door.

Some things happen just because they are supposed to. When I reached the Lake Placid High School hockey rink, the person who greeted me at the door was the venue manager, whom I happened randomly to have met just a few days before. He let me in. The next challenge was to find a logical place to watch where I wouldn’t be removed by ushers. I climbed onto a camera platform about 40 feet behind the announcer table where Al Michaels and Ken Dryden were calling the game.

As the second period progressed, I struggled to stand still so as not to interfere with the work of two operators who were manning the primary game coverage cameras. There was another man on the platform who also didn’t belong there, and I recognized him: a famous Long Island folk-rocker named Harry Chapin, who had performed in a concert in the Olympic Village the night before. While I was a fan, it was no time for greetings. But Chapin was distracting enough that I failed to notice at first a striking event that had taken place in the Soviet net. Apparently infuriated by the Johnson goal, Russian coach Viktor Tikhonov had yanked the undisputed world’s greatest goalie, Vladislav Tretiak, and replaced him with lesser regarded backup Anatoly Myshkin.

That didn’t matter at first as the drama ratcheted up. The Soviets were controlling play in the second period, but they struggled to score. As the period ended, they led 3–2, so numerically the scrappy Americans still had a chance. There were 20 minutes to go. Chapin and I still hadn’t shared a word, and he disappeared into a restroom. I spent the intermission chatting with the cameramen and doubling down on a promise to stay still and protect their camera shots.

As the third period began, the Russians resumed their tactical command on the ice, but American goalie Jim Craig, a college player from the Boston area, was now a different person than at any previous time in his life. In hockey it is called “standing on your head”—that experience when suddenly no shot is good enough to pierce a goalie’s wall, no matter who is firing the puck and from where. The high school arena crowd began to sound like a full stadium. The faces of the Russian veterans began to clench up in frustration. With just under 12 minutes to go, diminutive Mark Johnson, who for two weeks had suddenly been the hottest goal scorer in the world, slipped the puck under Myshkin’s mitt and it was tied, 3–3.

That arena was huge for high school hockey. It seated 8,500 people, and the spontaneous roar that greeted Johnson’s second goal of the game made them sound like 85,000. Harry Chapin and I hadn’t yet exchanged a word, but simultaneously we leaped into each other’s arms and began jumping up and down, prompting both camera operators to turn and shout at us to calm down. From the beginning there had been a smattering of American flags visible in the crowd, but suddenly it was as though someone had passed out another 6,000 of them. That crowd was now a rocking ocean of red, white, and blue. And as play began again, the Soviet players looked mystified, as though they had been dropped off in a world they had never seen.

If you know anything at all about this story, you know that fewer than two minutes later a minor league journeyman named Mike Eruzione scored the most famous single goal in the history of hockey. You know that in the closing four minutes, Jim Craig stood on his head like no other goalie at any level ever has, and you know that despite a relentless escalating assault from the greatest hockey team in the world, the Americans held on for the 4–3 win. You can imagine that Harry Chapin and I shared one more bouncing celebratory hug, then we bolted off the camera platform and never said a word to each other. Not one. And you realize that I was there with an assignment, and my work was just beginning.

I raced downstairs to the hallway outside the American locker room, where player after player stepped wet from the shower out the door into the media crush and amid the noise and chaos turned away from my frenzied shouting and disappeared into the opposite hallway. The last face to appear was that of Mike Eruzione. We had the same agent, and he was the only player on the team I had actually met. He knew my voice.

To this day millions of Americans believe, or want to believe, that they watched a live telecast of the game, climaxing with Al Michaels’s legendary play-by-play call as the clock dwindled: “Do you BELIEVE in miracles?” It’s somehow too incongruous for the majority of viewers to place in their mind’s eyes and ears that the game began at 5 pm, most of the true hockey fans in the audience were still at work, and millions more fans watched it on videotape and thought they had seen it live.

While most of America watched the game that night, I stashed Eruzione, Craig, and Craig’s dad at one of the few real restaurants in Lake Placid. Their dinner was a blur. It was nearly impossible to have a conversation as the tiny Italian restaurant adjusted to the realization of who was sitting there at our table.

It became a near-deafening pep rally, with seemingly everyone in the room continuously shouting the new theme of those Olympics: “USA! USA! USA!”

At 10:45 I led Mike and Jimmy to a spot in the middle of the main drag to face a camera, and as we waited for host Jim McKay to toss it to me for the interview, a large crowd assembled behind and around us. Eruzione, who was clever, leaned over and whispered, “Lamps, if we had come out and stood here at this point last night?” I got it. “No one would have noticed.”

In the 40 years since that night, I have run into Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione a handful of times at Olympics-related events. Whenever it happens, I find a moment to lean into Mike and whisper to him, “Mike, through the miracle of videotape you are now the leading goal scorer in the history of hockey,” and every time, properly cued, he answers, “Lamps, it keeps going in, doesn’t it?” And it does. And it is still a miracle.

Two days later, before noon on a Sunday morning, a frenzied three-goal third-period rally brought them from behind to beat Finland for the gold medal. Another incongruity almost impossible to believe in retrospect: had they lost to Finland there would have been no medal at all, not even bronze.

And in the locker room afterward, I had the duty of taking a hard line phone call from the White House and with Vice President Walter Mondale passing the receiver around to coach Herb Brooks and the players so President Carter could distribute congratulations to the newly minted and never to be forgotten American heroes. It wasn’t Carter’s win, but he would have been crazy not to take the opportunity to share in it.

And at this moment, it’s encouraging to note: It didn’t end the Cold War. It didn’t free the hostages in Tehran. It didn’t lower the price of gas. The United States DID go forward with the boycott of Moscow, and hundreds of Summer Olympics athletes lost their precious chance to compete before the eyes of the world. But the “Miracle on Ice” did provide one of countless examples of how the affairs of the playing field can heighten and enlighten the state of the world with the definitive rationality of the scoreboard, borne aloft by the irrationality of hope.

“Never say die” was conceived as a metaphor, but sometimes impossible dreams do in fact come true.

Storytelling is about editing. What to leave in, what to leave out. Some of this you may know, some you probably don’t. So in the interest of maximum information, here are the footnotes:

It was probably because a loss to that American team was inconceivable that Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov, infuriated by Johnson’s goal that tied it at 2–2 at the first-period buzzer, yanked the greatest goalie alive, Vladislav Tretiak, and replaced him with less capable backup Vladimir Myshkin. In the wake of the loss, the reaction of the Soviet power structure focused on the impact of that impulse: Tikhonov disappeared. Eruzione and Craig told me at dinner they and their teammates were shocked and encouraged to see Myshkin between the posts as period two began. They had every reason to believe they could never beat Tretiak, but Myshkin was a different story.

From the category of “statistics are for losers,” the Soviets amassed 39 shots on goal, 18 of them in the third period hailstorm Craig stared down. The United States got its four goals on a total of 16 shots.

After months of having purposely alienated every player on the team with vicious tirades and relentless criticism, all part of a preconceived strategy to get them to go onto the ice and play against him instead of the opposition, coach Herb Brooks saw his dream reach fruition in the stupefying takedown of the Soviets. He stood at the edge of the ice and watched the most ecstatic celebration in American sports history unfold. He even momentarily put his right foot onto the ice, a sure sign he wanted to join them. Then he pivoted and escaped through the tunnel behind the bench. Unfinished business. There was one more game to play.

When less than 44 hours later the team skated lethargically through the first two periods of the gold medal game vs. Finland and trailed 2–1 going to the third, the players sat terrified in their tiny locker room waiting for Brooks to enter, bracing for the most fire-breathing tirade of all.

Eruzione told me later he was literally trembling, and he was the oldest, most experienced player in the room. With nine minutes of the ten-minute intermission having gone by, assistant coach Craig Patrick stuck his head into the room and said, “Lace ’em up.” They looked at each other in astonishment. Thirty seconds later the heavy metal door swung open and slammed noisily against the wall. With the door framing his rigid body and his face flaming red, Brooks shouted, “If you lose this game, you will take it to your graves!!! TO YOUR FUCKING GRAVES!!!” And the door slammed again. Greatest locker room pep talk in the history of sports.

Just as there is a great hockey phrase for what Jimmy Craig did on Friday night, there is also a classic description for what happened next. “Feeding frenzy.” Two goals in fewer than five minutes and a third later on, and the job was done.

Seventeen months later, Harry Chapin died in a fiery car-truck collision en route to a concert on the Long Island Expressway. I never formally met him.

One year after the miracle I traveled with Herb Brooks to do a retrospective feature piece for ABC at the Lake Placid High arena. Coming back to New York in a small chartered plane, we got caught up in a wildly violent thunderstorm, with winds so overwhelming it seemed impossible for the pilot to keep control. We even laughed together at the thought that if it happened, he would get the headline and I would be a secondary footnote. We were diverted from the intended landing in Westchester and sent to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. The following morning on the front page of the New York Times was a story that seven business execs had died in a small plane crash at Westchester within a few minutes of our plea to controllers to let us land there. The number was revised to eight dead—six execs, two pilots—the day after that.

Twenty-two years later, Herb Brooks was returning from a fundraiser in northeastern Minnesota when his car ran off an interstate highway and rolled over. He died without wearing his seat belt.

I’m still here. And yes, I DO believe in miracles.