Herb Brooks and his Gold Medal Team
Grit, 10,000 Hours, and Extraordinary Opportunity.
By Susan Roberts | Chemistry and Secondary Education Major at Bethel University (St. Paul, Minnesota)
Herb Brooks walked into the locker room where the sounds of tape ripping echoed through the silent room of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. The players had made it to the medal round and were about to play the undefeated Soviets for a shot at gold. Brooks starts with, “Great moments are born from great opportunity, and that’s what you have here tonight, boys,” and finishes with, “This is your time. Now go out there and take it!” (Brooks). They pulled off the greatest sports upset in all of history that night beating the first seeded Soviets 4–3 in a game they never should have won (Onion).
Brooks might have been best known for his 1980 gold medal as a coach, but, as a player, he won the 1955 Minnesota state hockey championship when he went to St. Paul Johnson High School. He also played for the Minnesota Gophers, made the 1964 and ’68 Olympic teams, and was the last man cut from the 1960 team. As a coach, before 1980, he took the Gophers to three NCAA championships, and after the Olympics, he coached in the NHL with four teams. Herb Brooks was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2006 for his coaching career (Herb Brooks).
Brooks accomplished many things in his life and was a coach who changed the game of hockey. He had a legacy unmatched by any other coach, but as Outliers: The Story of Success author Malcolm Gladwell says, “Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities” (155). People don’t succeed without help. Herb Brooks and the 1980 Olympic hockey team showed the ideas of grit, 10,000 hours, and the Extraordinary opportunities from Outliers, on their way to gold.
Herb Brooks had put in the same amount of work as any other man out on that ice in Squaw Valley, California on February 27, 1960. But instead, he sat on the couch, listening to the cheers of the crowd, watching the team he almost made win gold in the 1960 Olympics. They needed to cut one more man and he was it. His father joked that “They’d obviously cut the right man” (Swift). Brooks did not let that stop him; he came back to make the 1964 and ’68 Olympic teams.
Herb Brooks’ grit pushed him as a player and as a coach to reach new heights including three NCAA national championships with the Gophers. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells a story about Martia, a 12-year-old girl who lived with her single mother in the Bronx. She went to KIPP Academy, a free charter school for kids in low-income communities. Because of her grit, she succeeded in her education when the odds were stacked against her. Gladwell writes “ She had the hours of a lawyer trying to make partner, or of a medical resident” (265). Martia put in more time and energy than an average twelve-year-old would. She was getting up at 5:45 in the morning to go to school and wasn’t coming home till 5:30 at night. Gladwell states, “We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. But that’s the wrong lesson” (268). Gladwell understands that it takes work and grit to become an outlier and Martia put in that time to do just that. Brooks showed the very same grit Martia did and he used it to become an outlier in his sport.
Billy Beane was the general manager for the Oakland A’s in 2002 and was faced with one of the worst budgets in the MLB. He needed to build a winning team but didn’t know how to do it until he met Peter Brand. Brand was a Yale economics graduate who saw the game differently than most people would. Throughout the story, Billy, with help from Peter, worked to change the game of baseball. Though many people stood in his way, he pushed through them to get where he wanted to be. Michael Lewis wrote the story of Billy Beane in his book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. In his book, he writes “It was hard to know which of Billy’s qualities was most important to his team’s success: his energy, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, or his ability to scare the living shit out of even very large professional baseball players” (153). Because of Billy’s grit, he made the hard cuts to his team that needed to be made and changed the entire game of baseball. Herb Brooks used his grit to change the way U.S. hockey was being played, he picked players for the ’80 team that were open-minded and willing to adapt to the new way of play. Brooks was not the most friendly coach and would rather have the mutual hate of the players against him to bond his team together. “He had wanted them to be more afraid of him than they were of the Soviets” (Swift). Brooks was not looking to be their friend; he wanted the respect of his team so he could push them to succeed (Brown). He used his grit to push his team like Martia used her grit to push herself.
It was September 17th, 1979 when the U.S. team had tied Norway’s national team in an exhibition game to prepare for the Olympics. Brooks believed every single one of the sixty-three exhibition games was to be played as hard as possible or there was no chance at taking down the almighty Soviets. The team was tired and not playing their best and Brooks saw it. After the game was over Brooks walked into the locker room and said “Don’t take anything off!” and walked out. He waited for the fans to leave the rink then told the players to get back on the ice. He skated the team to exhaustion, from one end of the rink to the other. Goal-line, then blue line and back, then red line and back, then blue line and back, then goal line to goal line. Those drills are now known as Herbies and are dreaded among all hockey players. Assistant coach Craig Patrick was convincing the rink manager to keep the lights on. The lights went out on the rink and they thought they were done but Brooks had a different plan, they skated in the dark for another hour till the team’s trainer convinced Brooks to stop before someone was injured (Mizutani). Brooks pushed his team to their 10,000 hours so they would have the skills they needed to beat the Soviets.
Andre Agassi was a great tennis player but it didn’t come without time and hard work. As soon as Andre could walk his father had him out on the tennis courts. Andre’s father would pull him out of school a half-hour early every day with thirty-two garbage cans filled with three hundred balls. He would hit thousands of balls every day all year, even on Christmas day. At age thirteen he was sent to Bollettieri Academy in Bradenton, Florida, it was a huge training camp with the main focus of building world-class tennis players, and it did. At age twenty-nine Andre won all four Grand Slam singles titles. Andre got in his 10,000 hours at a young age and it paid off (Smith 315–324). Very much like Andre, Brooks put in his hours from a young age playing throughout high school, then for the Minnesota Gophers, and onto multiple national teams before making it to the Olympic teams. He understood Gladwell’s idea of the 10,000-hour rule before it was even officially written and he applied it to his teams. Brooks once said, “I learned early on that you do not put greatness into people… but somehow try to pull it out” (Brooks Foundation). He pulled the greatness out of his player by getting in their 10,000 hours.
Herb Brooks was coaching the Minnesota Gophers when Lou Nanne, General Manager for the Minnesota North Stars, reached out to him about coaching for the North Stars. Lou had played with Brooks on the 1968 Olympic team and liked the new European style he was coaching. Brooks embarrassed the passing game as well as not dumping the puck because you needed the puck to score. Rob McClanahan said this about Brooks’s style of play in an interview with The Rink Live, “Herbie embarrassed all five players playing together” (Hatten 1:40). If a defenseman came down into the play an offense man went back to cover. They talked for a couple of weeks about it but Brooks told Nanne that he really wanted to coach the Olympic team and asked if there was any way he could help him get the job as the Olympic coach (Witnify). So Lou called up the chairman, Walter Bush, and made it happen (Witnify). Brooks was given an extraordinary opportunity.
Eight months later, in the 1980s game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov benched one of the world’s top goaltenders of that era, Vladislav Tretiak, after Mark Johnson scored and tied the game 2–2. The Soviet team was not happy at this point, one of the players said “It was the worst moment of Vlady’s career. Tikhonov was panicking. He couldn’t control himself. That’s what it was — panic” (Anderson). This was an extraordinary opportunity for Brooks and his team; he had them panicked because the Soviets thought it was going to be another blow out like the game two weeks before. Brooks used that and pushed his team harder.
Bill Gates, a software developer and co-founder of Microsoft put in his time to get where he is now. However, he didn’t get there only by his own work he had many extraordinary opportunities that gave him leads to his success. As a child, he was pulled from public school and placed in a private school for Seattle’s elite families. This school had a computer and a learning system different from most colleges, they had more hands-on time with the computer than other schools. Gates was doing real-time programming as an eighth-grader in 1968. Later on, Gates and some of his friends began hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington. After a while, an outfit called Information Sciences Inc. agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for a piece of software that could be used for payroll. Gates and his friends ran up to 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe. One of the founders of ISI got a call from a company that just signed a big contract and were looking for programmers that were familiar with their system and the founder of ISI knew exactly who to talk to. Gates was in his senior year of high school at this point, and that spring he spent writing code under the supervision of a man named John Norton. Gates said that he learned more about programming from Norton than another person (Gladwell 50–54). Throughout Brooks’ life, he had many extraordinary opportunities. First of all, he was born in the state of hockey and was raised in the sport. Being able to play on an Olympic team is a great opportunity but being able to coach it was even better it opened many doors for him in the NHL afterward.
February 22, 1980, Lake Placid NY. Herb Brooks had pushed his team to the medal round of the Olympics. They were about to face the Soviet Union who was known as the finest in the world, winning gold in the past four Olympics and not losing an Olympic game since 1968. No one had high hopes for the seventh-seeded U.S. team made up of college players who had almost no professional experience. The first period started out with a goal from the Soviets, which was later answered by Buzz Schneider, the only one on the team who had previously been an Olympian. The Soviets answered back leaving the score at 2–1. In a desperate act to tie it back up, Dave Christian shot the puck down the ice to Mark Johnson who picked it up and sent it into the Soviet goal with one second remaining, leaving the score 2–2 at the end of the first period. Nine minutes into the second period the Soviets took the lead at 3–2 and held it into the third. The Soviets believed they had won the game at this point because no one had ever been able to skate with them in the third, but that was about to change. Almost ten minutes into the third period, Mark Johnson took advantage of the U.S. power play and tied the game up 3–3. A minute and a half later, Mike Eruzione put in a twenty-five foot wrist shot taking the U.S. ahead for the first time in the game. With ten minutes remaining in the game, Jim Craig made some fabulous saves holding the score, with five seconds remaining in the game the U.S. got a hold of the puck and the crowd counted down to the biggest upset in sports history (Onion).
Gladwell wrote in his book, “It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t” (19). Looking at Brooks’s past one can see how he used his grit and extraordinary opportunities to work his way into coaching the 1980 Olympic men’s hockey team. With that team, he took advantage of many more opportunities and applied the idea of 10,000 hours to his players. “You don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.” (Brooks Foundation). Herb Brooks understood Gladwell’s idea of success before Gladwell had even written it, he lived out the ideas of grit, 10,000 hours, and extraordinary opportunities.
WORKS CITED
Anderson, Dave. “The Other Side of the Miracle on Ice.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Feb. 2005.
Brown, Jerry. “‘Miracle’ Players Recall Herb Brooks as Gruff, Great.” NHL.com, NHL.com, 7 Feb. 2014, Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little Brown.
Hatten, Mick, director. “Rob McClanahan Talks about Playing for Herb Brooks, How Accurate a Key Scene in ‘Miracle’ Is.” Duluth News Tribune, 19 Feb. 2020. Web.
“Herb Brooks.” Vintage Minnesota Hockey. Web.
Brooks, Herb. “Herb Brooks Speech — Heros and the History of Sports.” Google Sites. Web.
Mizutani, Dane, and John Shipley. “‘Again!’ An Oral History of Herb Brooks’ (in)Famous Bag Skate in Norway.” St. PaulPioneer Press, 20 Feb. 2020. Web. 30 Apr. 2020. Web.
Pitt, B (Producer), & Miller, B (Director). (2011). Moneyball [Motion Picture]. United States: Sony.
Smith, Gary. (2018). Going Deep: 20 Classic Sports Stories. New York, NY: Sports Illustrated Books.
Swift, E.M., (2004 Feb, 9) “Miracle, The Sequel.” Sports Illustrated, Vol. 100, Issue 5
Onion, Amanda. “U.S. Hockey Team Beats the Soviets in the ‘Miracle on Ice.’” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 24 Nov. 2009. Web.
Weinman, Sam. “The Last Guy Cut from 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team.” Sports Illustrated, 21 Dec. 2016. Web.
Witnify. “Herb Brooks’ Coaching Style Won The Miracle On Ice.” Youtube, Feb 13, 2014. Web.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Roberts, a freshman from Grantsburg, Wisc., seeks Secondary Education and Chemistry majors from Bethel University. She hopes to become a high school chemistry teacher and teach back in her home town. She loves to play softball with her family all summer, go camping, travel all over the country, and watch the stars over her small little town.
WHAT I’VE LEARNED
Running up four flights of stairs to get to class will make anyone tired.
Recording a speech instead of giving it in front of a class is a lot easier on the nerves.
Writing is not all bad as long as you stay on schedule.
Online class is great. No one knows you haven’t left your pajama pants all day.
It’s always good to end where you started when writing a story.
When taking a selfie, the top of your forehead still counts as being in it.
Always bring extra notecards and highlighters; you never know who might need one.
I can read a book — Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers — for a class and actually not dread having to read every night.
Studying for an exam is a lot easier when it’s open notes and open book.
Anyone can be a good writer as long as you put in the time and effort, even if you can’t spell to save your life.
We left our papers until the very last day and then complained about having to write until 2-o’clock in the morning to get them in on time.
