FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

Throwback Thursday: The Original Miracle on Ice

How America won gold in 1960 and changed the course of hockey forever.
Library of Congress

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

If you're not deaf, and if you're even remotely familiar with popular American culture, then you've probably heard the ebullient cry of Al Michaels from the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. As the clock wound down in the semi-final matchup between the United States and the Soviet Union—the U.S. seconds from securing a 4-3 victory and a prodigious upset—Michaels shrieked the most iconic five words ever shrieked in American sports history: Do you believe in miracles!?

Advertisement

The Americans completed their miracle, downing Finland 4-2 in a gold-medal game that was, by comparison, pedestrian. (The Soviets, with a bee in their fire-red bonnets, went on to eviscerate a Swedish team that included future NHL great Mats Näslund by a margin of 9-2.) But no one talks about the medal round, because the medal round doesn't play to the convenient political narrative. The win against the Soviets was about more than hockey; it was a big middle finger in the form of a souvenir foam hand, a definitive Cold War victory on the world stage, a "fuck you for beating us to space," a precursor to the myth of American exceptionalism that would dominate a decade of excess presided over by a well-coiffed actor in the Oval Office.

Read More: When American Hockey Players Destroyed the Olympic Village in Nagano

The thing everyone should have been excited about—a gold medal!—was mostly ignored because we were, and continue to be, a profoundly Russophobic nation. Instead of celebrating our national team's ultimate triumph (which from a strictly hockey perspective was impressive given that a group of ragtag college kids—including Mike Eruzione, who hasn't paid for a drink in Boston in the 36 years since capturing gold—beat what was essentially a military unit), we instead chose (and continue to choose) to indulge in the splendor of victory over the big bad commies. The gold medal didn't affirm our nation's claim to hockey ascendancy; it affirmed our nation's spurious claim to unequivocal cultural and political superiority.

Advertisement

Another event obscured by the Miracle on Ice was the original miracle on ice, which took place twenty years earlier in Squaw Valley, California, when a different group of underdog Americans knocked off a different group of heavily favored Soviets. The Soviets had outscored their opponents 40-9 and were unbeaten en route to the gold in the 1956 Winter Games. They entered the the 1960 Olympics poised to defend their title and therefore their place atop hockey's Mount Olympus. (They also won a world championship in 1954, and grabbed four silver medals between 1955 and 1959. These guys could play a little bit.)

Along with the feared Soviets came the Canadians, the Swedes, and the Czechs, each team considered, at least by the oddsmakers, among the safest bets for gold. The Americans? Well, not so much.

This makes sense when you consider the time period. While the past twenty-five years have yielded some pretty special American players—Mike Modano, Brian Leetch, Keith Tkachuk, even Patrick Kane—pre-1960 America wasn't exactly a fertile crescent of hockey. There was high-end collegiate puck, sure, but aside from then-retired old-timer Frank Brimsek and newcomer Tom Williams (who—and this tidbit deserves an essay of its own—was once arrested by Toronto customs officials after telling them, in jest, that he had a bomb in his bag), the NHL contained exactly zero American delegates.

The 1960 United States national team was—and this might sound familiar—made up of a bunch of college players and everymen. Sure, there were some Harvard men—like Robert Owen, Bob McVey, and the Clearys, Bill and Bob—who were bound to do well in life outside of hockey. There were also some regular Joes like Dick Rodenhiser, from Framingham, Massachusetts, who was just kind of living his life.

Advertisement

"We would drive up to Lewiston, Maine [from Framingham], and play Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons," said Rodenhiser, who played for the Lewiston Hockey Club and for a club team called Brockton Estes, which won the US Championships in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1959. "We'd play a bunch of Canadian teams, and the competition made us better…. On the drive back, we'd stop at a restaurant on the Mass Pike and spend whatever we made—I don't know, $25 or so—on a steak dinner."

I'm not sure how familiar you are with New England geography, but Lewiston, Maine, and Framingham, Massachusetts, are not close to each other at all—160 miles apart. Think about that: Rodenhiser drove 320 miles each weekend to find a competitive game and eat a decent steak. This more closely resembles the life of your uncle Ted, who each Christmas tells you how he was "one crossbar away from winning State," than it does the life of a gold medalist.

Rodenhiser, who played for Boston University in the first ever Beanpot tournament, got his U.S. national team break while playing for Lewiston.

"The U.S. team was playing their first exhibition game of the year against Lewiston," said Rodenhiser. "I had a pretty good game against them, and Coach [Jack] Riley asked if I wanted to join the team. I said, 'Sure.' I always wanted to play pro hockey, but this is the closest I could get as an American. He then brought in the two Cleary brothers, and that was a tremendous decision—and how!"

Advertisement

In 1960, the medal round didn't include a knockout stage; instead it consisted of a series of round robin games: get the most points, win the gold. The Americans—without any expectation of success beforehand—won all five of their games, including a clinical 3-2 win on February 27 that knocked the Soviets out of contention for gold. After that game, with a win two days earlier over the Canadians already under their belts, the US just needed to beat the Czechs—thus completing an undefeated sweep through the round robin—and they'd sit alone atop the bracket, gold medals hanging around their necks.

Beat the Czechs they did (for the second time in the tournament). Though basic arithmetic dictated the Czechs couldn't win gold or even silver, a win against the Americans and a Soviet loss to Canada hours later (this happened) would have given them the bronze. This is to say that there were medal implications for each team; this was a big game.

The only problem is that the game between the Americans and the Czechs was played at 8 AM on a Sunday morning—the Canadians and the Soviets were given the premier ice time because it had been assumed their matchup would be something of a de facto gold-medal game. No one saw it, no one listened to it, no one cared.

From usahockeymagazine.com in February, 2010:

"There just wasn't as much coverage back then. Not a lot of people knew what happened," Bob Cleary said. "It was just black-and-white television and our game was early."

Coverage be damned, the U.S. swept the games and left with gold while the Soviets finished with bronze. For any other nation on earth, third place would have been a laudable achievement. For the Soviets, it felt like an indignity.

But indignities often prove to be great motivators. The Soviets got mad. I won't go into the history—there are two excellent documentaries, Red Army and Of Miracles and Men, if you want the full story—but the Soviet national team transformed from a hockey team into the approximation of a military unit (some of their players were actually active duty), led by the brilliant and revolutionary (weird, a revolutionary Russian thinker) Anatoli Tarasov. They went 27-1-1 and outscored their opponents 175-44 (that's 6.03 goals per game to 1.5 goals per game, on average) on the way to the next four Olympic gold medals. Aside from that little hiccup in 1980, the Soviets won every Olympic gold medal from 1964 to 1988. "Superior" doesn't begin to describe what the Soviet national hockey team was, and I doubt there will ever be anything like it again in the sport.

The original miracle on ice was just as dramatic as the better-known sequel, but because the sports media industrial complex hadn't yet managed to make its way into the living room of every American household, no one took notice. The glory boys from 1980 were memorialized with a Disney movie; the OG glory boys from 1960 got medals, a pat on the back, and, if they were lucky, a steak dinner somewhere between Lewiston, Maine, and Framingham, Massachusetts.

That just doesn't feel right.