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The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team

von Wayne Coffey

Weitere Autoren: Jim Craig (Vorwort)

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3201380,910 (4.16)5
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. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lake Placid Olympics, an award-winning sportwriter looks back at what has been called the greatest moment of twentieth-century sports history, the victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviet Union, assessing the meaning of the triumph in terms of the events of the time and the paths of the players and coaches on both sides since 1980.… (mehr)
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I grew up an avid hockey fan and occasional player. I don’t remember a time before I could skate and my fondest childhood memories are flying across the ice and knocking the puck around on the frozen lake on the edge of the backyard of my dad’s house. I’d curse the toe picks I was stuck with on the goofy figure skates and longed for a real pair of hockey skates to live out my goalie dreams. On non-frozen-water, I was a goalie in floor hockey, and later, with the right skates, on ice. And in college I taught my cat how to shoot a street hockey puck on a net. It’s my long time sporting love.

Which meant, every time an new hockey book is published, I read it. Especially in the summer during the agonizing wait between the end of the Stanley Cup finals and the start of pre-season on or around my September birthday. (For years I really thought hockey season was my own personal birthday present.) The more hockey, the better. And a few days ago I finished A Team of Their Own about the Korean women’s team at the 2018 Olympics, and almost swapped it this week for this one, but I couldn’t let the 40th anniversary pass unmarked. The Boys of Winter is my first hockey book love.

I read it in college during a rare semester not full of assigned reading. When it first published I was in high school and hockey or not, I wasn’t a big nonfiction reader. It was while I was in high school that the movie of the team and game, Miracle, was released. It was my comfort movie when I missed home, and the ice, while at the University of Pittsburgh (the only school of the 10 I applied to not to have an NCAA ice hockey team… but how I ended up at Pitt is a whole other story).

I remember finding The Boys of Winter on the shelf of the Barnes & Noble on the Waterfront (the only bookstore I knew the bus route for) with a blurb marking that it was the 30th anniversary of the game. I could already recite all of the players by name and thought I understood Herb Brooks’ coaching philosophy, but I realized I really didn’t have a great understanding of what went through everyone’s heads leading up to the game. Miracle‘s a great movie, but it’s only a two hour window into a very busy and crazy cross-section of recent world history.

In 1960, Herb Brooks was cut from the Olympic hockey team and sent home (he played on the ’64 and ’68 teams). Twenty years later, in 1980 when he returned to the world stage as its coach, the world had changed significantly in terms of technology (we landed on the moon and had early computers) but very little in geopolitical terms. The Cold War was still in full swing. The 1980 Winter Olympics were set to be a peaceful battleground to assert dominance on the global scale. And the ice hockey game between the USSR and the USA was to be the greatest sporting showdown of the century. If the Americans could make it that far.

The team Brooks assembled was a microcosm of the US hockey world at the time, which reflected various cultural differences around the country. The boys from the midwest and the boys from the northeast had to not only put their college rivalries aside, but learn how to play and get along with people who had different values and personalities off the ice as well. Craig and Eruzione, goalie and captain and lifelong New Englanders, have parlayed their roles in the game into lengthy public speaking and income-generating careers long after their retirement as players, where many of the midwestern players went home after their hockey careers to quiet lives in the woods.

And yet. These twenty young men fresh out of college put their personal differences aside to play hockey for a stormy and impassioned coach, and for the opportunity to beat the USSR. While The Boys of Winter is not overly political, it’s impossible to ignore the giant Cold War sized elephant in the room. The match up between the USA and the USSR was never going to be “just a game,” Olympics level pressures aside.

Wayne Coffey’s book is a chronological account of the game, with player bios and world events sprinkled in along the way. Even for those who think they know the game, the players, and the coach, it’s a great read and a wonderful collection of interviews with the players after the fact. (And up next on my hockey TBR list is Mike Eruzione’s The Making of a Miracle.) ( )
  smorton11 | Oct 29, 2022 |
Good book, certainly a great story. I didn't care for the way the author mixed action from the game with flashbacks to tell the personal stories of the players. Thought it made for kind of disjointed reading. But the stories were worth the telling. I also liked the way the author told the stories of the Soviets alongside the Americans. ( )
  Jeff.Rosendahl | Sep 21, 2021 |
[The Boys of Winter] by [Wayne Coffey] tells of one of the greatest sporting events ever (I will not say THE greatest since the US Women's Soccer team did pretty well this year.) For those of you who think you know everything there is to know about the 1980 Gold Medal 'Miracle' team, trust me you don't and should read this book.

[Coffey] does a great job in telling what made the players and coach tick. The unknown backstory. The flips in the story from telling of the players history or interviews interspersed with telling of the game works very well in this book. ( )
  MsHooker | Nov 26, 2015 |
This was both an enjoyable book to read while being simultaneously frustrating as well. It was enjoyable because it gave the story of the miracle on ice, the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team's triumph over the big, bad USSR team which always won gold medals and which had just crushed the US 10-3 10 days before the game. You also get to read about the coaches and players and that's cool. However, it's frustrating because of the way the author chose to construct the book. I realize I'm in the minority here, as many reviewers have expressed admiration for this style, but it annoyed the hell out of me. He starts with the game. People are skating, the puck is being passed. Several minutes into it, a particular US player gets the puck and then you immediately are torn from the game and given a lengthy story on the player, beginning with his birth, his upbringing playing hockey, his pee wee days, his middle school days, his high school playing, his college playing and stats, his status on the Olympic team, who he married, how many kids he had, what career he had after the Olympics were over, and everything up to the present, which is 2005, when the book was published. These breaks last probably 10 pages or more and break up the continuity of the game endlessly. It happens all the time. It's so damned annoying. Just as you're about to get into a rush to the goal by the US, the author breaks away for one of these long profiles and you forget about the game. Or not. But by the time you return to the game, you're so ticked, you no longer care. I have no idea why he chose to do it this way. If I had been writing it, I would have had profiles of all the players in one location, either in the front, the middle, or at the end, and then the game in its entirety.

So the Russians score first, of course. A lot of attention is given to goalie Jim Craig in this book, but deservedly so, because in my opinion, he single handedly won the game for the Americans. He stopped dozens of shots. He had an amazing night. We tied the game. They scored again. We tied it again. Then in the third period, another tie -- 3-3. With 10 minutes left in the game, US captain Mike Eruzione, a household name back then, came down the ice and got one past Russia's world class goalie to put the US up 4-3 and all the US had to do was hang on. And they did. Game over, America wins, stuns the world. And this was a semi-final. We still had to win the gold medal, which we did against Finland a couple of days later. Our coach, Herb Brooks, was a royal jerk to his guys, but he motivated them to win. The Soviets were stunned, but many drank congratulatory cocktails to the Americans later that night, which was classy of them.

It's kind of funny how the day after I finished reading this book, I read how Jim Craig is putting all of his Olympic stuff up for auction for about $6 million. Weird how things work out. Brooks died in a car crash a few years ago. The team was at the funeral. It was good to catch up on guys whose names I had forgotten and to relive an event I watched on TV so long ago. It has a special memory for me. Aside from my criticism, this is a good book and the author is a good writer, so it's recommended. ( )
  scottcholstad | Jul 30, 2015 |
Winter Olympics, 1980. The games were held at Lake Placid, NY, a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. The hockey team was made up of amateurs, college kids who hadn't yet played pro, and wasn't expected to go far. But the pivotal game against the Soviet Union captured everyone's attention on the world stage. Starting with the first puck drop to the end of the third period, journalist Wayne Coffey gives a play-by-play account of the game known as the "Miracle on Ice," interspersed with short biographies of players and coaches loaded with interviews with the players and their families and friends.

I've read a few sports books in this format of play-by-play mixed with interviews and history. It gives a sort of edge-of-your-seat feel, and this book has this in spades, not only for where Coffey chooses to jump from one to the other but also in the way he chooses to end each paragraph with cliffhangers that rival fast-paced fiction reads. It's also very tough to "pause" a hockey game, which by its very nature has few natural stopping points. In this case, since I hadn't seen the game itself I found it very difficult to visualize and stop and start, so it had mixed results for me. I did enjoy getting the information about the players, some of whom went on to play for the pros with mixed results, and get a "where are they now" kind of update (at least as far as when the book was written in 2004). Recommended for hockey fans and anyone who enjoys this type of sports writing. ( )
  bell7 | Jan 21, 2015 |
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Wayne CoffeyHauptautoralle Ausgabenberechnet
Craig, JimVorwortCo-Autoralle Ausgabenbestätigt
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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. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lake Placid Olympics, an award-winning sportwriter looks back at what has been called the greatest moment of twentieth-century sports history, the victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviet Union, assessing the meaning of the triumph in terms of the events of the time and the paths of the players and coaches on both sides since 1980.

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