Seperation of church and skate

The other night I watched “Miracle”, the Disney/Kurt Russell version of the story of the 1980 US hockey team.  Actually, I watched it on Monday night, the 30th anniversary of the event.

I’d love to lie and say I remember anything about it but I was only seven years old at the time.  I remember my parents telling me about the Iran hostages and I remember a few other small details here and there but I have no recollection of any hockey games short of me and a few friends knocking around a crushed pop can on a frozen pond while I was wearing my mom’s white figure skates.  I do remember that I caught a lot of flack for those skates…

The reason that game is revered so much has nothing to do with hockey.  It had everything to do with national pride and morale.  The movie opens with a build up of the events leading to the cold war and all the troubles and events leading into the late 1970′s.  We beat the Russians at their game and people felt that was every bit as important as any other achievement in the cold war.  If Team USA went on to lose to Finland, missing the gold medal, would this win have the same gravity?  Did the gold medal really matter or was the important thing to beat the Soviets?

This was before we started using professionals in the Olympics.  They were just a bunch of college and amateur players who came together as a team for the first time just six months before the opening ceremony.  Imagine a freshman year college team beating the New York Yankees at their peak.  On the other hand, these kids were conditioned for one thing and one thing only, beat the Soviets.  For six months the only thing they did was train toward a single goal.  I’m sure that helped, as did the 10-3 exhibition loss to the same Soviet team just three days before the Olympics started.  So, we sprinted, they underestimated…

One of the things I really liked about the movie was that even though Al Michaels re-recorded all his calls of the game, they used the original tape for the final seconds and the iconic call of, “Do you believe in miracles?  YES!”  To me, that would have been a bad choice to redo.  Kind of like a band doing a cover of an iconic song and royally fucking it up.

People point to this game as one of the many factors in America’s turnaround in the 1980′s and that’s probably true.  Politics, war and foreign/domestic policy have more to do with our SuperPower status but when you can energize the people it’s a lot easier to move.  Economic status has a lot to do with the image and the intangible illusion of morale.

So maybe it helped turn around the country in its small way but did it have anything to do with hockey picking up in America?  Not sure.  Most people attribute the increase in American hockey to “The Trade”.  And that’s an entirely different post.  I could go on and on about him but I won’t right now.  For now, I ‘ll just say it was fricking sweet to watch him light the torch at the opening of this year’s Olympics.  We all knew who it would be, there is no greater Canadian sports figure than The Great One.

Ohhh, ideas…  Lovecraftian hockey story…  The Great Old One…  From the depths under the frozen ice…  No… bad idea…