Hockey teams love being underdogs. I can’t speak with much authority about other sports, but in hockey, feeling like the odds are against you creates a kind of confidence. When no one expects you to win, you’re loose. And a loose hockey team is dangerous.
In 1981, the Oilers faced the heavily favored Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs. They were the Wales Conference and Adams Division champions and had finished twenty-nine points ahead of us in the standings. No one gave us a chance. And for good reason. They were the better team, hands down.
The first round was best of five back then, and the first two games were in Montreal. We won the first game 6–3. We had no business winning Game Two, but Andy Moog stood on his head and stopped forty shots. We won that one 3–1. When we got back to Edmonton, we were a different team. Still loose, but now we knew what we were capable of. We swept the series with a 6–2 win.
I sometimes think the American victory at Squaw Valley was a little like that.
The eighth Winter Games, held in 1960 at a pretty little ski resort in Squaw Valley, close to Los Angeles, marked the beginning of the Olympics’ modern era. Scoring was computerized, and for the first time at the Games, a snow-scraping, ice-flooding machine called a Zamboni was used. It was the first time the Games were televised. CBS was the host broadcaster, with Walter Cronkite at the anchor desk. Walt Disney had designed cartoon-like statues of athletes representing the various sports, and Hollywood stars mixed with the athletes and the public.
The 1960 U.S. Olympic hockey team was made up of the very best college players from across the country—players like Bill and Bob Cleary, John Mayasich, Paul Johnson, Jack McCartan in net, and two brothers with one of the most famous names in American hockey: Bill and Roger Christian. But the American media, which didn’t pay much attention to hockey in those days, didn’t see them as contenders. No one gave them much of a chance.
The team’s new head coach was Jack Riley from West Point. Riley named Jack Kirrane, a tough, stay-at-home defenseman, as his captain. Kirrane brought a veteran presence. He was a thirty-one-year-old firefighter and had played all the way back in the 1948 Olympics.
The opening ceremonies lasted only an hour, compared with at least four hours today. Vice President Richard Nixon welcomed 740 athletes from thirty countries. Nine of those nations had brought a hockey team. The Americans were predicted to place no higher than fifth, behind Canada, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia.
To everyone’s surprise, the Americans went undefeated in their first four games. But they had yet to play Canada. The sportswriters gave them no chance, predicting a blowout that Canada might win by seven goals. The Canadians had been playing NHL teams as a warm-up to the Olympics (and some of them would go on to great careers in the NHL).
In those days, there was no distinct Team Canada. The team that had won the previous year’s Allan Cup—awarded to the top senior league in the country—simply pulled on the maple leaf sweater and headed to the Olympics. The winners in 1959 were the Whitby Dunlops. They declined and were replaced by the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen, coached by Bobby Bauer. Bauer, of course, was a future Hall of Famer. He’d played right wing on the Boston Bruins’ Kraut Line with Woody Dumart and Milt Schmidt. The Dutchmen, with Bauer behind the bench, had also represented Canada at the 1956 Olympics, so they were clearly a pretty special team.
Defenseman Harry Sinden would serve as the Bruins’ coach or general manager over twenty-eight seasons and would win a Stanley Cup when Bobby Orr scored his famous overtime goal in 1970. He was also behind the bench for Team Canada in 1972. Bobby Rousseau would go on to score 245 NHL goals and win four Cups, and backup goalie Cesare Maniago would join the Leafs the next year and then go on to play nine seasons for the Minnesota North Stars. Defenseman Darryl Sly would see three seasons of NHL action, and so would forward Cliff Pennington. So the Canadians were solid.
The Americans, meanwhile, had played college teams across the country—and lost to half of them.
The Americans knew that their only chance against Canada was to get ahead early. So they attacked hard in the first period. Bob Cleary batted in a rebound while Harry Sinden knocked him down in front of the net. In the second period, Paul Johnson intercepted a pass and raced down the ice on a clear breakaway. When he got to the blue line he let go a perfect slap shot that beat Canada’s goalie, future Boston Bruin Don Head, over his shoulder into the top corner.
From that point, the Canadians got desperate. They took thirty-one shots on McCartan in the last two periods, and pulled within one about halfway through the third. Sinden remembers that they had scoring chance after scoring chance but were getting nowhere. Afterward a newspaper reporter wrote that Jack McCartan had been “operating with radar.” The Americans hung on for a 2–1 win and rushed off the bench to grab McCartan, throwing gloves and sticks in the air as though they’d just won the Stanley Cup.
Suddenly, the dream of a home-ice gold medal seemed possible for the Americans. But they still had to get by the Soviets. They’d never beaten them. Before the tournament one reporter had called the U.S. team a “ragtag crew of insurance salesmen and carpenters,” but after the win over the Canadians, American fans suddenly discovered hockey. Ten thousand people were packed into a stadium built for eighty-five hundred. The American trainer even had to kick California governor Pat Brown off the bench.
As the clock ticked down to the end of the second period with the score tied at two, American winger Roger Christian got a penalty for slashing. In those days you had to serve the full two minutes regardless of whether your opponent scored on the power play, and you weren’t allowed to ice the puck. But the Americans killed it off without allowing a single shot on goal.
In the third period, the U.S. started to take the play to the Russians. The Christian brothers, Roger and Bill, put the U.S. up 3–2. The Russians retaliated by pressing hard, peppering McCartan, but he kept everything out, even a shot on a clear breakaway. The Russians had never trailed so late in a game. It was also the first time they’d ever pulled their goalie—Nikolai Puchkov didn’t even know to go to the bench for an extra attacker. He simply skated over to the side of the rink and sat on the boards. And suddenly it was over. The American team was on its way to making history.
They’d beaten Czechoslovakia three times in the past couple of weeks and now they were set to take them on with a gold medal on the line. The game started at eight a.m. There were only a thousand fans in the stands. The ref dropped the puck. The Czechs skated it into the American zone, took a shot, and scored. Not the way you want to open a gold-medal game.
But the Americans came back in a seesaw battle through the period. The score was tied 3–3 after the first. The Czechs notched the only goal in the second to lead 4–3 and went into the break just twenty minutes away from the win.
In the second-period intermission, a strange thing happened. The captain of the Russian team, Nikolai Sologubov, came into the U.S. dressing room. This was just never done. He couldn’t speak English, but he kept putting his hand over his mouth. American captain Jack Kirrane figured out what he was saying. He was telling them to take some oxygen to combat the sixty-two-hundred-foot altitude at Squaw Valley. As a firefighter, it made sense to Kirrane. He said, “Okay, Solly, bring it in.” Sologubov rolled a tank into the room and a few of the players tried it.
The Russian wasn’t acting out of the goodness of his heart. If the Czechs won, the Soviets would be out of the medals. The way it was set up, if Czechoslovakia lost the game against the U.S., they would finish fourth with a 2–3 medal-round record, which meant the Soviets would win bronze with a 2–2–1 record. But if the Czechs won, the Canadians would win gold, the Americans silver, and the Czechs bronze.
Whether it was the oxygen or something else, the U.S. was a different team in the third period. They threw everything they had at the Czechs. Roger Christian moved in and tied the score. They kept shooting from the point and deflecting in the shots. Then Bill Cleary skated through the entire Czech team and deked the goalie. They scored six in the third and won 9–4. Christian played the game of his life, scoring four goals.
Even though this was the first U.S. gold medal in hockey, there weren’t any celebrations. Only captain Jack Kirrane was handed a medal—the rest of the team found them on their bunks in their rooms. Hockey wasn’t an American sport yet. Outside a few hockey communities like Minnesota and Michigan, there wasn’t much interest. The team won the gold on Sunday and most of the guys simply went back to work on Monday.
One interesting sidenote to the tournament is the battle of future equipment moguls. The famous Bauer company was run by Bobby Bauer’s father-in-law. And on the American team, Bill and Roger Christian went on to found the Christian stick company. In fact, Roger’s nephew Dave used a Christian stick in Lake Placid. But more on that later.
Much more importantly, the American victory in Squaw Valley started to make hockey an American game. In 1981, when the Oilers hit the ice for Game Three in Edmonton, we got a ten-minute standing ovation. Before 1979, people in Edmonton were either Leafs fans or Canadiens fans. When we came back from Montreal, everyone in Edmonton was an Oilers fan. I think American fans started to feel something like that in 1960. Hockey was their game too. And that made the game better.