The Making of a Miracle by Mike Eruzione

Author:Mike Eruzione
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

“I Just Have a Feeling”

The other players and I were still celebrating our upset of Czechoslovakia in the locker room when Herb walked across the street to Lake Placid High School. Its auditorium had been taken over temporarily and turned into the media center for the games. Herb took a seat at a table on a stage in front of a microphone and five hundred reporters from around the world. The questions came in bunches. The world suddenly wanted to know about the college kids who had pulled off this incredible win. Who are they? Where did they come from? They wanted to talk to us, the players, too.

Where’s your star, Mark Johnson? Can you bring him out? And the goalie, we want to interview him. What about the captain?

No, Herb replied. He was going to do the talking for the team. The players would not be made available. He knew we had won by playing as a team. We hadn’t relied on just a few guys. It hadn’t been just Mark Johnson or Jim Craig or the captain. It had been twenty guys all pulling for one another. “You start singling out players, and you have a star system,” Herb said. “We have a team rule that we play as a team and as a family.”

He also worried that we would relax amid the sudden fame and media attention. We had come to Lake Placid hungry, with something to prove, with an edge, and he wanted to keep it that way. He didn’t want us to start feeling pleased with ourselves because we had pulled off one big upset. There was still a long way to go toward getting a medal, and we could still blow it. He didn’t want us thinking we were a bunch of “big doolies,” which was a name Phil Verchota used for guys who were big shots, big wheels. I didn’t really care about not talking to the media, and I don’t think anyone else did. We were focused on trying to make the medal round. No one was thinking about being in the spotlight.

The next day, though, it was a frenzy. When a couple of the guys and I left the Olympic Village for practice, reporters were waiting for us at the gate. When we got off the shuttle at the arena for that day’s practice, more were waiting there with all kinds of questions.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Do you have hobbies?”

“How many kids in your family? How old are they?”

“Do you own a dog?”

“Does your roommate snore?”

I kept getting asked if I was going to turn pro after the games. No teams were calling Bob Murray, my agent, so I wasn’t sure. I felt that I had shown in my time with the Olympic team that I could play hockey at an elite level, but the NHL didn’t seem interested.

“If I don’t get an offer after the Games, that’ll be it,” I said. “I’ll retire. Maybe I’ll go home and find a college coaching job somewhere.

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