Miracle on Ice
So the other day, in the midst of my dad and I chilling for a week while my mom and Keyur are in India, we decided to bro out and watch a movie and drink some fancy wine. This was already after my dad, Davis, and I inhaled some grilled meat and sashimi at a Japanese place, so it capped off a pretty excellent day. We had recently seen an Indian movie about wrestling and I was reminded about how much my dad loves feel-good sports movies (The Fighter, Remember the Titans, etc.). I soon found out, however, that he hadn’t seen Miracle… what. So, of course, we rectified this by watching it immediately. (Spoiler Alert: Don’t read on if you haven’t seen Miracle. And if you haven’t seen it, take a good hard look in the mirror and ask yourself what is wrong with you.)
As I’m sure you all know, the movie is amazing and has a bunch of storylines that are so cool they feel too good to be true. I was intrigued by this, and set out to research how factually correct the movie really was (as well as getting sucked into a rabbit hole of cool trivia). Below, I’ll relay what I found as to the accuracy of the movie (spoiler: they did an awesome job making the movie true to form), as well as the interesting tidbits I found out along the way.
As was presented in the movie, the 1980 Soviet team was unbelievably good. They were all seasoned professionals, and had won gold at 6 of the 7 previous Winter Olympics, a similar run of dominance to the current US Men’s Basketball team. On the other hand, the US hockey team hadn’t won gold in 20 years, and was the youngest team in the tournament and US national team history. Since the last time the Soviet team had lost (the 1960 Olympics), they had gone 27–1–1 in international play, and had a collective point differential of 28–7 against the US in that time. In those 29 matches since 1960 overall, they had a point differential of 175–44, averaging a score of 6 to 1.5 in that time. All of this was conveyed appropriately in the film.
The Soviet team was not only the best in Olympic competition, they also were quite clearly the best team/players in the world, including the NHL. In a game against the NHL All-Stars leading up to the 1980 Olympics, the Soviets won by an astounding 6–0 margin. This was also a part of the film.
Another interesting tidbit was the test that Herb Brooks (the coach) sent the players home with after he had selected the team. In reality, this was a 300-question psychological test that Brooks used to understand how each player would react under stress, and the players’ performance on this test was actually a significant part of the evaluation process Brooks used in selecting the team.
I’m sure you all remember the iconic scene of the team doing suicide sprints on the ice for hours after they tied Norway 3–3 in an exhibition game. It’s an iconic scene that ends with Mike Eruzione claiming, for the first time, that he played for the United States of America, not his college team. The core of this scene actually happened — frustrated by the team’s lackluster play, Brooks had them doing sprints in the dark at the arena after the game, as the rink manager had left long ago and turned off all the lights. There is no historical mention of the Mike Eruzione speech, but there’s also nothing that says it didn’t happen, so I’m going to choose to believe it did.
In the first game of the Olympic tournament (fresh off a 10–3 defeat to the Soviet team in an exhibition game), the USA was playing Sweden, widely considered the second or third best team in the world. You may remember the sequence in the movie where the US, down 2–1 in the final period, pulls the goalie to send another player out there and scores a dramatic goal with seconds left. This actually happened exactly like this, and played an extremely important role in the eventual gold medal win (will come back to this later).
The team then went on to stun Czechoslovakia, a favorite for the silver or bronze medal, 7–3. This game is pretty much skipped over in the movie, but it was a thrashing that let people know the USA was actually legit. The team then won their next three games 5–1, 7–2, and 4–2. Seems like they were crushing teams, huh? Not compared to the Soviet juggernaut. They cruised through their group play games, going 5–0–0, winning the games 16–0, 17–4, 8–1, 4–2, and 6–4.
The USA and Soviets met in the first semifinal game, scheduled for 5PM eastern time. However, because the US team had become such a wonderful underdog story, ABC tried to switch the game to an 8PM prime time slot. The Russians wouldn’t allow this, however. So ABC yolo’d, and decided that they wanted it in prime time anyway. They recorded the game in live time at 5PM, and then played it on tape-delay at 8PM. Millions of Americans thought they were watching the greatest sports moment of their lives, live at 8PM, but the game had actually ended 10 minutes before the broadcast even started. They even edited portions of the game out to make sure it fit into the prime-time slot.
Brooks’ famous speech before the game wasn’t re-created word for word — in fact, the original speech may have been even better. One of the snippets I loved: “You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours. The Russians are ready to cut their own throats. But we have to get to the point to be ready to pick up the knife and hand it to them. It’s meant to be. This is your moment and it’s going to happen.”
The part of this whole exercise that made me most happy was learning that the live game action that they show in the movie was nearly exactly the same as the real result — down to the specific details like the deflected first goal for the Soviets, the Mark Johnson goal off a rebound to tie the game 2–2 literally right at the buzzer at the end of the first, and the Soviet coach deciding to bench the goalie (considered by far the best goalie in the world at the time) after he gave up two goals in the first period. The coach later said that benching that goalie was “the biggest mistake of his career.” Idiot. Years later, when Fetisov, one of the best Soviet players, was asked about the benching, he responded “Coach crazy”.
Another amazing piece of the story is in the final minutes of the third period. After Eruzione scored a stunner with 10 minutes left to put the US up 4–3, the Soviets relentlessly attacked and were stymied time and again by Jim Craig, the heroic USA goalie. As time started to run out, conventional wisdom would say that the Soviets should pull their goalie to try and score a desperation goal. However, the Soviets never did this. After the game, when asked, the players admitted they had never practiced this scenario, because they couldn’t fathom being down by a goal at the end of the game. Amazing.
As time ran out on the game, the US cleared the puck to the opposite end of the ice with around 10 seconds to go. Al Michaels, who had done the commentary during the actual game, had re-created almost all of his commentary for the movie, but refused to re-do his iconic final line. Instead, they used the audio from the original broadcast for the best sports-call of all time — “11 seconds, you’ve got 10 seconds, the countdown going on right now! Morrow, up to Silk. Five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles? YES!”
The end of the game was also perfect. As his team ran all over the ice in celebration, Herb Brooks actually sprinted back to the locker room and cried, as depicted in the movie. In the locker room afterwards, players spontaneously broke into a chorus of “God Bless America.” During the broadcast wrap-up after the game, ABC Olympic sports anchor Jim McKay compared the American victory over the Soviets to a group of Canadian college football players defeating the recent Super Bowl champs, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Interestingly enough, the “medal round” in hockey at the time wasn’t a single elimination type set-up like it is now. Instead, it was again a points-based round, with 2 points for a win and 1 point for a tie. So after the game against the Soviets, the USA had Finland in a game that it obviously had to win. They were again down 2–1 in the third period, but came back to win 4–2. According to Mike Eruzione, coming into the dressing room in the second intermission during the Finland game, Brooks turned to his players, looked at them and said, “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your fucking graves.” The Soviets beat the Czechs, meaning they had 2 points in the medal round, and the US had 4. However, for some reason, at the time, the game you played against the other team from your group that advanced to the medal round also counted for points. So the USA-Sweden and Russia-Finland games also counted, leaving the USA with 5 points (2 wins and a draw), and the Russians with 4 (2 wins and a loss). However, if the USA hadn’t have scored that dramatic goal at the end of the Sweden game to tie it 2–2, the USA would have ended with 4 points in the medal round, same as Russia. It would have then gone to goal differential, which the Soviets would have won. So without that amazing goal in the first game, the USA would have only won silver, even though they beat Russia.
Sports Illustrated later voted that this moment was the greatest sports moment of the 20th century. Finally, my personal favorite part of all this, the next Sports Illustrated cover was a unique one — it ran with absolutely no accompanying captions or headlines, a total departure from the norm. As the photographer put it, “It didn’t need it. Everyone in America knew what happened.”
