4. Only One Miracle Per Customer

My 1984 U.S. Olympic experience was almost derailed during a train trip through Austria days before we were scheduled to arrive in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

Coach Lou Vairo’s last cut from the U.S. squad was Tim Thomas, a good friend of mine and my former Wisconsin teammate. I was ticked off by that move, believing that politics probably played a role in the decision. In those days, there seemed to be an unwritten mandate that the roster include enough guys from Minnesota and Boston.

Thomas was a Minnesota native, but he played his hockey at Wisconsin. Those kinds of things seemed to matter in national team decisions. Even if politics played no role, I could see no justification for cutting Thomas.

When I looked at our roster, I didn’t view Thomas as a guy on the bubble. He was a versatile player, someone who could play both forward and defense. Plus, he was a physical player, and I thought our young team would need some grit and toughness when we played Canada in our first game.

Thomas received the news after we had hammered the Austrian national team, and he was on the train with us before we headed home and then on to the Olympics. Crushed, he went to the bar car to drink and I went with him, in the name of being a good teammate and friend. It doesn’t help to blow off steam unless there is a friend with you to reinforce the idea that you have been wronged.

The problem was that U.S. players weren’t supposed to be in the bar car, and I was still a U.S. player.

U.S. goalie coach Dave Peterson spied me in there with Thomas. He came in and told me to leave the bar immediately and rejoin my teammates. Tim and I were getting hammered.

During my career, I made it a point never to talk back to coaches. I may have been mouthy on the ice, but I always believed I needed to be respectful at all times to coaches. That’s just my personal philosophy.

But I made an exception on this night, and I informed Peterson that I would be along shortly. He usually bullied players but I stood up to him. I didn’t curse at him but I was firm.

Clearly I stayed with Thomas longer than I should have. Peterson was furious about the incident, and he wanted me booted off the team. It wasn’t the first time he had called for my dismissal. There was another incident in Alaska earlier in the tour involving a night of drinking, and I had heard Peterson believed I should be cut that night, too.

For the second time, after discussing the situation, the coaches decided I should stay.

I’ve never known for sure who saved me, but I assume Vairo made the final decision. He always treated me as if he liked me.

The 1984 Olympic experience is not among my all-time favorite hockey memories, mostly because of how poorly we played in Sarajevo.

Because the Americans had won the gold medal in Lake Placid in 1980, we were treated like royalty in 1984 during the Olympic tour. We lived in apartments in Edina, Minnesota, and we were given the use of a new car.

Phil Verchota, a member of the 1980 team, was chosen as the 1984 captain, and he was a solid choice. We called him “Old Man.” I’ve always felt that a team needs veteran leadership, and he was 27 when we arrived in Sarajevo. He wasn’t a star player, but I never believed that a captain needed to be a team’s best player. He just needs to have a presence in the dressing room, and Phil had that. He was also a nice guy.

We also had another 1980 veteran in John “Bah” Harrington, and he was kind of the anti-Verchota. He had a lot of Herb Brooks in his leadership style. Harrington was harder on the young guys. He was always challenging guys to push their limits.

If you put Verchota and Harrington together, you had every element you want in a leader. We had a good tandem leading us.

The 65-game tour was a long grind, and in every city there was a banquet, and speeches, and more speeches. If it were left up to the players, we would have preferred just to play hockey and do without the pomp and circumstance. But the 1980 team had put the sport on the map, and many communities wanted to have a connection to the 1984 team before it left for Sarajevo.

We even went to the White House and visited President Reagan, who was quite animated and fun. “We had to win to visit the White House,” Verchota said.

On paper, we looked like we could be a quality team. Vairo had studied European hockey, and he wanted a team filled with speed.

Our most skilled players—Eddie Olczyk, Pat LaFontaine, and David A. Jensen—were all teenagers. Olczyk, 17, was a fellow Chicago product, and he was expected to be selected early in the 1984 draft. LaFontaine, 19, was picked No. 3 overall by the New York Islanders in the 1983 draft, and Jensen, 18, was still a high school senior but was the fastest skater on our team. The Hartford Whalers had drafted him in the first round.

Defenseman Al Iafrate from the Detroit area was another 17-year-old on our team. Our average age was about 21.

When Iafrate was established as an NHL player, he was considered a flamboyant player. But he was a quiet kid when he played on the 1984 Olympic team. LaFontaine was a very clean-cut kid who didn’t drink. I liked him. I remember going bowling with Pat and our girlfriends and having a good time.

Eddie was picked on because he was a pretty confident youngster. He had a high opinion of himself, and older players used to take him to task for that.

Our defense was solid. Tom Hirsch and Gary Haight were probably our two most prominent defensemen. Hirsch played at the University of Minnesota and was a second-round draft pick of the Minnesota North Stars. Haight played for Michigan State.

Using our speed and skill, we blitzed a good Harvard team 11–2, and afterward Harvard coach Bill Cleary told E.M. Swift of Sports Illustrated, “We [also] played the 1980 team and this one is quicker.”

We were beating some NHL teams, too. After we beat the Washington Capitals, Caps general manager David Poile told Sports Illustrated, “They’re every bit as good as the 1980 team. We played our whole lineup, and territorially they controlled the play. They’re well coached, the system they’re playing is similar to the one [Herb] Brooks used, they’re quicker than pro teams, and in LaFontaine they have a player who is probably better than any individual who played in 1980.”

Given how well we were playing and how much fun we were having, it never occurred to any of us that we were on an impossible mission.

Because of what the 1980 team had accomplished, the expectations for us were three stories above realistic. To make matters worse, we would never be able to replicate the magic of the 1980 Lake Placid moments, no matter what we did.

We were tasked to supply the encore for a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Maybe the most memorable win in the tour came in December, when we downed the Soviet Selects 5–4 on the same Lake Placid ice where Mike Eruzione had scored to down the Soviet Union in 1980.

The entire town of Lake Placid was fired up for the game. People in cars were honking their horns. Everyone had their American flags out. People wanted to relive the 1980 moment. It seemed more like a Stanley Cup Final game than an exhibition game. It was a storybook kind of night.

The game was tied 2–2 at one point, and then Scott Bjugstad stuffed home his own rebound to give us our first lead of the game. Then I knocked in a loose puck to make it a 4–2 game with 5:09 remaining. The crowd erupted.

We believed the game was ours then but that was not the case. The Soviets scored 48 seconds after my goal and then tied it on a goal by their captain, Mikhail Varnakov, with 1:39 remaining.

In the closing minutes, I had noticed that the Soviet defensemen were aggressively pinching up into our zone, trying to make something happen offensively. Instinctually, I yelled for Verchota to look for the home run pass. He had noticed the Soviets creeping up as well.

When the puck was dropped, he was flying up the ice. The puck came back to me, and in an instant I fired a 60-foot pass that hit him in stride as he was churning over the Soviet blue line.

On a breakaway, Verchota skated in and beat the Soviet goalie on the stick side. Bedlam ensued. Fans acted as if we had captured an Olympic medal, and we hadn’t won anything.

These were good players, but none of them would be on the Olympic team. We had beaten the Soviet JV team. Still, it was the most exciting win over a JV squad I’d ever experienced.

Vairo was only 38 when he coached us, and he wasn’t like most coaches most of us had known. He owned a memorable Brooklyn accent and a penchant for butchering the English language now and then. He liked to play trivia on the bus with his players.

“Hey, Chelios, you went to Wisconsin,” he once said to me. “Who is the governor of Wisconsin?”

“Who cares?” was my reply.

Vairo also enjoyed making speeches to his players, and when he would start offering his pearls of wisdom, I would turn on this tape recorder I had.

Later, when we were traveling on the bus, I would replay the speech and everyone would make editorial comments. The boys always enjoyed my Vairo replays.

One of my favorite recordings was of Vairo reaming me out for my conduct during a college game at New Hampshire.

During the first period, I was high-sticked above my eye and the referee missed it. I confronted him and screamed, “How the hell did you miss that?”

His response was to assess me a 10-minute misconduct penalty.

Dr. George Nagobads, a U.S. Hockey Hall of Famer, was our team doctor, and I remember it took him a long time to stitch me up.

When we got back to the dressing room between periods, Vairo told me to remove my gear. I was done for the night. He made me stand on the bench and watch the rest of the game.

When the game was over, he told me he was going to walk me over to the referee so I could apologize. I did approach the referee, but I just told him again that he was incompetent for missing such a blatant penalty.

Knowing I was going to be the target of a Vairo explosion, I clicked on my tape recorder and stuck it into my front pocket.

An angry Vairo did chew me out, and I had every word on tape. Guys on the bus loved that one.

Despite the occasional diatribe, we were not without our share of fun times during the pre-Olympic tour.

Some of my 1984 U.S. Olympic teammates like to tell the story of my coming face-to-face with a seven-foot-tall bear on a team-bonding trip to Alaska.

My U.S. teammate Eddie Lee and I first spotted the bear as we were fishing from a peninsula. We watched him as he poked around, seemingly in search of food. It was like we were in the middle of a National Geographic special observing a bear in his natural habitat. The bear didn’t seem all that threatening as we hid in the weeds and watched him meander around for a while.

Then Lee and I both realized simultaneously that the bear had wandered quite close to us, and panic set in. We dropped our fishing poles and started fleeing through the water. A park ranger was nearby, and he was strongly urging us not to run and draw the bear’s attention. We responded to that by yelling at him to shoot the bear.

The truth is the bear was never really chasing us. He entered the water only because he was looking to dine on some fish.

It was a comical scene for my teammates, because it looked as if Eddie and I were sprinting through a foot of water trying to escape a large bear. We were scared, but when we finally stopped running we realized we had never been in any true danger. The bear had no interest in the two crazy humans in the water.

Everyone gave us grief for running even though the ranger had said not to. But one of my personal rules is that when I see a bear, I run.

Olczyk said that if I had an encounter with a bear, he might put his money on me. I don’t believe I have the same confidence in my bear-fighting skills that Eddie does.

The other memorable event from that trip to Alaska was Tom Barrasso leaving the team to sign with the Buffalo Sabres. He had been the Sabres’ first-round pick, No. 5 overall, but he originally agreed to play for the U.S. Olympic team. Although Barrasso was only 18, he was expected to compete against Minnesota-Duluth goalie Bob Mason and my former Wisconsin teammate Marc Behrend for the No. 1 job.

Buffalo owner Seymour Knox flew in and told Vairo that he just wanted to meet Barrasso. He did so—and then flew him back to Buffalo to sign a new contact.

When we finally arrived in Sarajevo, we were a confident group. Our first game, played before the opening ceremony, was against Canada, a team we had defeated 8–2 the last time we met, in Milwaukee.

The Canadians were not playing that well, having won only two of their last 19 exhibition games.

But Canadian officials received good news before our game when the International Olympic Committee ruled that goalie Mario Gosselin and forward Dan Wood were eligible to play for Canada, even though Gosselin had signed with the Quebec Nordiques and Wood had signed with the St. Louis Blues.

Finland had protested that those players were among 10 spread over five countries who should be expelled for being professionals. But the IOC sided with the Canadians.

Before the first puck was dropped, we started to experience bad breaks. Pat LaFontaine fell ill and was nursing a 103-degree temperature. Then the bus driver taking us to the Zetra Arena got lost and then ensnarled in traffic caused by the Olympic torch run. We showed up to the rink much later than anticipated.

Vairo was a very likable man who treated us well, but he was new to dealing with the big stage as a head coach.

He had the impossible task of trying to follow up what Herb Brooks had done in 1980. I’m sure he thought long and hard about what he should say to us before the game. But it wasn’t exactly an inspiring speech.

“Millions of people are going to be watching,” he told us. “Don’t fuck up.”

I will never forget those words as long as I live. I looked at my teammates, and we all had the same expression of disbelief etched on our faces. I think we understood at that moment that we were under enormous pressure to win.

Once the game against Canada started, our luck didn’t improve.

In the opening 27 seconds of the game, Carey Wilson, who would go on to play 552 NHL games, took a shot toward the net, and Behrend looked like he was in position to make the save. But my former Wisconsin teammate Pat Flatley tipped the shot past Behrend to give Canada a 1–0 lead.

To say we were stunned would be an understatement.

Things weren’t going great for me personally either. Sometime early in that game, I blocked a shot. I couldn’t even tell you who fired the puck. It wasn’t a dangerous shot but the puck hit me in the wrong spot and cracked a bone in my foot. I kept playing but I knew it was trouble.

I didn’t hurt our team, but I no longer had the skating ability to play as aggressively as I needed in order to be a difference-making defenseman. I no longer had the jump.

Wilson ended up with a hat trick in that game and we lost 4–2. Gosselin made 37 saves.

Did the pressure get to us? Were we too nervous? Who knows. But we didn’t have it that day, and we let that loss overwhelm us.

I didn’t have X-rays taken of my foot until after the tournament. We just operated as if it was a bad bruise. I used a walking cast between games. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t take any painkillers because they were on the banned-substance list for Olympic athletes.

I didn’t miss any shifts in the tournament but I had to endure a lot of pain to keep playing.

Despite our loss to Canada, we could have salvaged our tournament if we had defeated a talented Czech team in the second game. But we took too many penalties, gave up a pair of power play goals, and lost 4–1. I was in the penalty box for cross-checking when the Czechs netted one of those power play goals.

With two losses against key teams in our first two games, we were essentially out of the medal hunt.

After we tied Norway 3–3, journalists took out their long knives and carved us up.

In hindsight, the only exceptional memory of that first Olympic experience was walking in the opening ceremony. It was spectacular to be surrounded by the greatest athletes in the world. NHL players don’t get to walk in the ceremony because they have league games to play.

I know we should have beaten Canada. The Czechs were a better team, but then we almost certainly would have defeated Norway. After all, Norway had lost 16–2 to Finland, a team we had tied.

A lot has been made of Barrasso’s decision to leave the U.S. team and its effect on our performance. But it was not a given that he was going to be the starting goalie anyway. Mason and Behrend were in the mix to be our top goalie. I know Barrasso went on that season to win the Calder and Vezina trophies. But at his age, it’s impossible to know whether he would have been given the No. 1 job in Sarajevo. Remember, Behrend was older and a two-time NCAA tournament MVP.

Behrend ended up playing for us, and I didn’t believe he was at fault for our Sarajevo failures. I thought we were all at fault. We didn’t measure up against that level of competition.

When that Olympic tournament was over, I was already starting to look at the Montreal roster and wondering where I might fit in. I had played two seasons of Tier II Canadian junior hockey, two seasons of college hockey, and one season of U.S. national team hockey. I felt ready to turn pro. I still wasn’t sure whether I would have an NHL career, but I had played enough hockey to believe I deserved my chance.

Right after the Olympics, I signed with the Canadiens. I received a three-year deal for $110,000 per year and a $100,000 signing bonus. I bought a Ford Bronco with my signing bonus, because that’s all I could afford.

The problem was my contract was in Canadian dollars, and the difference was about 40 cents on a dollar. Plus, Uncle Sam and the Canadian government each wanted their piece.

When I received my bonus check, the take-home pay was $28,000.

I went to general manager Serge Savard’s office and pointed to the check.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s called taxes,” he said.