I'd never seen the movie “Miracle” until yesterday. I’d experienced the story of the 1980 gold-medal-winning, American underdog Olympic hockey team firsthand my sophomore year, down at the student drinking establishment “The Log” at Williams College, after classes—along with serious amounts of beer and even greater amounts of hooting, hollering, table-banging, and cheering.
“Miracle” went completely under my radar. I'd missed the 1981 ABC docudrama “Miracle on Ice,” starring Karl Malden, figuring it could never recapture the excitement. However—Disney delivers.
“Miracle” is the Hollywood-ized telling of the now-mythical story of how Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) smelted, forged, and honed our gold-medal-winning U.S. amateur team in just seven months. And grew them all the way up, from a motley crew of collegiate, cream-of-the-crop talents who’d all been big fish in their various little ponds, into a formidable juggernaut of world-class warriors.
With a regimen of brutal workouts normally seen only in military special-forces boot camps (and Iowan collegiate wrestling), and a virtuoso ability to manipulate and tweak the emotions of his boys via whatever-means-necessary mind games, Brooks created a team—the only team in the world—that could take on the massive, legendary, Goliath-like Soviet professionals.
This is literally a tale of boys challenging men, but this boyhood-to-manhood rite-of-passage ordeal was not do-or-die serious like that of the Masai tribe (where a 130-pound, 16-year-old boy takes on an 800-pound, adult male African lion until one or the other is dead).
Nonetheless, the political matchup between the United States’ free democratic republic versus the Soviet Union’s communist regime rode heavily on these young men’s shoulders. The 1980 Lake Placid Olympics took place smack-dab in the middle of the America and USSR superpower Cold War that had been underway since approximately 1947 and didn’t end until 1991.
Herb Brooks
What was Herb Brooks’s motivation and how’d he get so good at what he did? Basically this: Brooks was one of the last guys cut from the 1960 Olympic hockey team. That created a powerful need to finish what he started.That said, Brooks wasn’t interested in the political implications particularly, nor the media frenzy—he was a jock at heart, and this was a coach’s dream. As was famously said of storied football coach Bear Bryant, “Bryant can take his’n and beat your‘n, and then he can turn around and take your’n and beat his’n.”
Herb simply wanted to take these college boys and turn them into a massive, armor-piercing tank round, and blow the unstoppable, megalithic Soviet tank to kingdom come, because he was thoroughly fed up with hearing about how the Soviets couldn’t be beat.
Brooks studied film on the Soviets nonstop and figured out that what set them apart was due to “skating, passing, flow, and creativity.” That, and the fact that nobody heretofore had mustered up the willpower to attain the cardio level needed to stay with the Soviets for the duration of the game. In his opinion, this level of play was missing from both amateur and pro American hockey.
Is it perhaps ironic that coach Brooks was able to beat the communists by divesting his players of their American individualism and making them submit to, well … communism? Teamwork for the greater good? But isn’t that the nature of all team sports? Are team sports a form of communism? In a word, no.
A political-philosophical tangent: The basis of communism is that everyone is exactly the same. But sports-wise, that would translate into some nonsense like this: It doesn’t matter who’s hot on a given game night—everyone needs to have an equal opportunity, so don’t pass the puck to the guy who’s on fire; pass it to his less-talented teammate and let him try and score, so everyone can have an equal share.
Who does that? Not even the commies. Nyet. Their philosophy of “skating, passing, flow, and creativity” meant that if one guy is on a hot streak—you pass your comrade the puck with alacrity and creativity and flow. And skating.
Speaking of flow, the American hockey boys hilariously notice that their first-string team of three forwards seems to have developed a hive-mind—a supernormal ability of knowing each other’s thoughts and finishing each other’s sentences—and dub them “The Coneheads” à la the famous “Saturday Night Live” skit about aliens. The hockey Conehead boys take flow and creativity to new heights.
Popcorn & Inspiration
“Miracle” is spectacularly inspirational. During the opening credits, the films runs a montage of news footage of the American invasion of Cambodia, the death of Elvis, America’s 1970s oil crisis, Nixon and Watergate, etc. That’s all to say, America was in desperate need of some inspiration.
The film portrays the full intensity of the body-checking, testosterone-fueled, excellent hockey violence that manly men live for (and it’s not toxic) without exceeding its PG rating. And when footage shows sportscaster Al Michaels asking his now-renowned, rhetorical question—“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”—I felt it almost as strongly as I did sitting beer-buzzed at The Log, back in ’80.
The game remains one of the best moments in sports history and represents a spiritual triumph over the Specter of Communism. Check out the audiobook called “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World” and find out why this showdown was so important in the grand scheme of things.
Noah Emmerich shines as the assistant coach to Brooks, as does Patricia Clarkson as Brooks’s (sort of) long-suffering but proud, supporting wife. Brooks was probably not the easiest man to live with. Talk about your strong, silent types; he has to leave the stadium after the win to allow himself a private, stifled “Yes!!”
The ensemble of hockey-savvy actors (Eddie Cahill, Michael Mantenuto, Patrick O'Brien Demsey, and Nathan West) nail the heart and soul of what might be America’s all-time favorite sports team ever.
