The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team Author: Wayne Coffey Jim Craig | Language: English | ISBN:
B000FC2PK6 | Format: EPUB
The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team Description
Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach, and they engineered perhaps the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. It is a legacy of hope, hard work, and homegrown triumph. It is a chronicle of everyday heroes who just wanted to play hockey happily ever after. It is still unbelievable.
The Boys of Winter is an evocative account of the improbable American adventure in Lake Placid, New York. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews, Wayne Coffey explores the untold stories of the U.S. upstarts, their Soviet opponents, and the forces that brought them together.
Plagued by the Iran hostage crisis, persistent economic woes, and the ongoing Cold War, the United States battled a pervasive sense of gloom in 1980. And then came the Olympics. Traditionally a playground for the Russian hockey juggernaut and its ever-growing collection of gold medals, an Olympic ice rink seemed an unlikely setting for a Cold War upset. The Russians were experienced professional champions, state-reared and state-supported. The Americans were mostly college kids who had their majors and their stipends and their dreams, a squad that coach Herb Brooks had molded into a team in six months. It was men vs. boys, champions vs. amateurs, communism vs. capitalism.
Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event in
The Boys of Winter, crafting an intimate look at the team and giving readers an ice-level view of the boys who captivated a country. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americans—formulated by a fiercely determined Brooks—and he seamlessly weaves portraits of the players with the fluid, fast-paced action of the 1980 game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since that time, examining how the events in Lake Placid affected and directed their lives and investigating what happens after one conquers the world.
But Coffey not only reveals the anatomy of an underdog, he probes the shocked disbelief of the unlikely losers and how it felt to be taken down by such an overlooked opponent. After all, the greatest American sports moment of the century was a Russian calamity, perhaps even more unimaginable in Moscow than in Minnesota or Massachusetts. Coffey deftly balances the joyous American saga with the perspective of the astonished silver medalists.
Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail,
The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday night in Lake Placid and the enduring power of the extraordinary.
From the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 323 KB
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 140004765X
- Publisher: Broadway Books (January 11, 2005)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000FC2PK6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #54,508 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Hockey - #16
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in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Miscellaneous > Olympic Games
- #6
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Sports > Hockey - #16
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Hockey - #24
in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Miscellaneous > Olympic Games
I was 18, almost 19, years old that night in February 1980. I was a freshman in college, only a handful of years younger than the talented young men who donned the sweaters of the USA to play in the Lake Placid Olympics. It would be hard to imagine a time when morale was lower, and people felt more negatively about being an American--it was the Carter administration, interest rates were 21%, the Iranian hostage crisis was in full disaster mode, and the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan. I grew up 65 miles from Three Mile Island, and the accident there had occurred two days after my 18th birthday in March 1979, and nobody knew whether the accident there would have long-term negative effects. Relations with the Soviets were at their nadir, the Cold War was at its height, and I remembered that things in this country were at about their lowest point possible.
And then a miracle occurred.
Herb Brooks and his team of unknown college kids beat the greatest hockey team in the world, perhaps in history. I will never forget--as long as I live--hearing Al Michaels cry out, "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" as time ran out, and seeing the bedlam when the U.S. boys realized what they had accomplished. At that moment, it was okay to be an American again. I think that the resurgence of the Reagan years actually began that night in Lake Placid. It certainly marked the height of amateur hockey in the Olympics--the whole concept of "Dream Teams" was not even yet on the drawing board.
Wayne Coffey has written the definitive book on the Miracle game. It covers the action on the ice in minute detail while also telling us just who these unknown college kids--and their sphinx-like coach--were.
Given that I was born in June of 1980 - some 4 months after the greatest sports moment of the last 25 years - I have had to rely 100 percent on documentaries, articles and movies to truly understand how important this event really was. My father, who has everything from DVDs to framed artwork commemorating the game, still talks about the event today as if it just happened.
But, even the movie Miracle, which came out last year and is No. 1 on my all-time sports movie list, didn't do for me what this book does.
What history has told us again and again over the last 25 years is how special this victory was because of the fact that it was a bunch of college players who were virtually unheard of taking down a Soviet powerhouse made up of solid veterans. However, what nobody has attempted to do was tell us the story of who these 20 young men really were. Until now.
Wayne Coffey takes us through - not only the game minute-by-minute, period-by-period, but also he tells the story of the players. Who they were. Where they came from. Where they are now. He does a marvelous job of breaking down the book and weaving in and out between past and present. With such in depth analysis, you would think it would be hard to follow, but Coffey's gift for story telling makes it easy to get through. There are some books that once you finish you feel kind of dissapointed - not because you didn't enjoy the book, but because you enjoyed it so much you are going to miss it. This is true of this one.
After you're done, you feel as if you know the team personally, as if you were the 21st member in Lake Placid, along side Pavelich, O'Callahan, Harrington, Suter, Craig, Eruzione, McClanahan, Johnson and even the legendary late coach himself, Herb Brooks.
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