Sports outlook

Film makers can convey the message that went with the unlikely American victory in hockey in the 1980 Winter Olympics, but they can't duplicate the feelings of Americans at that time. That's why I attended the movie about it a while back.

It was a bad time in the U.S.A. Those were known as the "Days of Malaise" when both inflation and interest rates were out of control and most people didn't feel very good about their country in the years directly following the Vietnam experience and Watergate. The Soviets were running rampant in Afghanistan and some pipsqueaks had taken Americans hostages in Iran.

It didn't seem as though folks were smiling a great deal in those days simply because most matters seemed so confused. Along came the Olympics at Lake Placid and naturally most talk was about hockey. The Soviet Union had a powerhouse and the U.S. had a group of college kids who happened to be in the same pool as the Russians. Whoopie! I think now as most people look back that many of them think our victory over the Russlanders was for the gold, which it wasn't. All it did was cinch a medal and put the U.S. in the championship game against another strong team in Finland.

I remember my mother's reaction to the whole thing and I really think she summed it up best by saying, "These people are feeling patriotism for the first time and didn't even know they could feel good about their country. And they like it."

I think that's one reason Ronald Reagan become so popular after he was elected president the next November. He made you feel good about your country, just like that hockey team had. He stood up to the Soviet Union and his detractors called him a cowboy. But he did to the Soviets what our hockey team had done. And, as Yogi Berra supposedly once said, "You can look it up."

Most of us around here, Larron Hurst and Jim Novak notwithstanding, are not big hockey fans. In my lifetime, I've attended exactly one NHL game, that being between the New York Rangers and Chicago Black Hawks in Chicago back in December of 1967. I thought it would be neat to say I watched Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita play. Of course, that was before anyone had heard of Wayne Gretzky.

Then came those Olympics and all that Soviet hype. All we had heard for a week prior to the game was how good the Soviets were and how they had beaten a bunch of NHL All-Stars a couple weeks earlier. So, I watched hockey during the Olympics as the two teams worked into position for the showdown.

Like me, my mother was never much of a hockey fan. Being from South Dakota, she understood that you can have fun outdoors when it's cold, something I have always failed to grasp. But she developed an aversion to hockey when as a youngster, her brother returned from playing hockey one day and slid his skates under something where she had her miniature china stored. The key word here is "had." But even she was watching the U.S.-U.S.S.R. hockey game in 1980.

I called Novak back then and even asked him some technical questions about the game. He explained stuff like blue line and the power play to me. I began to grasp the basic concept of the game.

I remember how great everyone felt after the victory, especially in those closing seconds when the announcer intoned, "Do you believe in miracles?" The next day at work, I was back in composition writing headlines in the old style when publisher Ben Weir Jr. sidled up and said with confidence that put considerable pressure on me, "I can't wait to see your headline." As I sat and wracked my brain, knowing that no matter what I wrote, 10,000 other sports editors across the country would write the same thing. But there was something from the night before that I couldn't erase from my mind. The crowd chanting, "USA, USA, USA." So I wrote the headline in ascending letters: "USA, USA, USA." It's still there in microfilm if you want to check it out. That's one of the few heads I wrote over 30 years that I can still remember because it was so simple and it said it all.

I'm really glad I went to the show one day and watched it all again. I just wish they had dealt a bit more with the win over Finland. Those patriotic moments were certainly memorable. I still remember the one kid looking for his dad in the stands, then locating him. And I recall the guy that draped the flag around himself.

But for all the hype about a miracle, I wonder. If that team wasn't really that good how did it go through the Olympics and not just upset the Soviets, but win the gold medal? Maybe it was that good after all and the miracle was not really a miracle at all but a victory by the better team. Nah!