USA Hockey
From Legacy on Ice: Blake Geoffrion and the Fastest Game on Earth by Sam Jefferies. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. © 2023 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
Gloves and sticks scatter across the ice as five men throw themselves at one another, full tilt and reckless. One skater slips, and others pile on top, thumping his back and head and chest with bare fists. Even the goalie joins the fray, his massive pads cushioning the impact as he barrels into the scrum. And yet no whistle is blown. No referee comes skating in to break up the melee. The crowd noise has reached a fever pitch, screaming, stomping, not in anger but in glee and disbelief.
“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” The voice of Al Michaels, ABC’s play-by-play announcer, pumps through the speakers, relaying the ecstasy into millions of television sets and car radios across the nation. Team USA had beaten the Soviets in a game that would come to be called the Miracle on Ice, in the semifinals of the 1980 Winter Olympics, the greatest moment in the history of American sports.
On this night, in the tiny village of Lake Placid, the impossible has happened, victory achieved after three periods of ice hockey, inspiring a nation locked in a crisis of confidence and a seemingly endless Cold War. A group of unpaid, overworked, able-but-untested college kids beat the unbeatable Soviets, launching themselves into the pantheon of sporting lore. Every kid with bright eyes and dull skates raced to their local ponds the next day, replicating Mark Johnson’s stick-side equalizer, Mike Eruzione’s timeless and lead-changing wrister. Mark, Mike, and their righteous brothers weren’t just trendsetters.
They were heroes.
***
Just fifteen years later, American amateur hockey was in the dumps. The 1980 Olympic gold medal should have been a seminal moment for hockey in the United States, inspiring a generation of new players and bringing parity to the top-heavy hockey culture on the North American continent. Instead, it was increasingly looking like an anomaly, a momentary, though glorious, peek into a parallel universe where, every four years, contention for Olympic gold is the norm. “If Canada is hockey's enduring home, U.S. hockey had been a Potemkin village, a facade constructed from the surprising American triumph in the 1960 Olympics and the 1980 Miracle on Ice,” wrote sports journalist Michael Farber.[1] The Canadians didn’t mind one bit.
The Olympic Games had always been strictly amateur, religiously so. No athlete from any nation could compete if he or she had ever been paid any sum of money to compete in any sport. From the lighting of the torch at the first modern Games in 1896, no exception had ever been made.
But everyone has a price, and in 1992, a year after the fall of communism and the triumph of American-led capitalism, the International Olympic Committee finally caved to the pressure of the almighty dollar. An exception to the amateur rule was first made for basketball, and at the ’92 Barcelona Games, a “Dream Team” of American NBA players steamrolled the competition, easily capturing gold. USA Basketball annual revenues reached $100 million once professional stars broke the Olympic amateur barrier. Four years later, NBA annual merchandise sales worldwide topped $3 billion. The NHL owners had seen enough. They wanted their taste, too, and were more than happy to support the inclusion of professional players in the Winter Olympics if they could reap the benefits. On September 30, 1995, the NHL Board of Governors voted to allow professional players to lace up for their home country teams in the 1998 Winter Olympics. At USA Hockey headquarters in Colorado Springs, the alarm bells began to clang.
"There were more pro players from the province of Ontario than from the entire United States at that time,” said Ken Martel, the assistant coach for the Michigan Tech men’s hockey team. If Team USA wasn’t going to just compete, but win, they would need to build a new pipeline all the way from the American youth leagues to the NHL. In Canada, they had made a long-term investment in player development at the national level, a commitment to cultivation that had filled the trophy cases with hardware and Canadian hearts with pride. When Canadian national teams failed to win, coaches and executives were summoned to parliament not just to answer for their losses, but to find answers in time for the next international tournament. When the announcement came that professional players would be welcome in the Olympics, Canadians nodded happily, if a bit smugly, while their American counterparts wrung their hands with worry.
“It became clear that if we wanted to have a bigger impact on Olympic hockey, then we’d need to develop more pros,” recalls Bob Mancini, the newly named head coach at Michigan Tech who was attending the World Hockey Summit in Boston in the summer of ’96. “The national office saw that we were struggling as a nation at the World Junior Championships and were looking for a way to bring together our top players at the age somewhere around sixteen, seventeen…so we could compete on the world stage.”[2]
The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) governs hockey at the international level and hosts a series of age-specific tournaments that bring the best young players into fierce competition with one another every year. The U18s are for players 18 and under and the U20 World Junior Champions are open to 20-year-olds and below. Since inception in 1977, both the World Juniors and the U18s had been dominated by Canada and the Soviet Union. Team USA had come to expect little, and usually got it. “We had been embarrassed for two, three years in a row,” said Jeff Jackson, head coach of the ’95 team. “There was such a lack of pride for American players to play in that tournament.”
The Canadians had professionalized their amateur development system; Sweden and Finland had followed suit, determined to capture talent early and cultivate in sustained and rigorous fashion. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians remained competitive at the IIHF tournaments, medaling at the World Juniors every year but one in the 1990s. Each country was blessed with the long winters that brought restless children out onto frozen ponds and lakes, day after day, year after year. The entire American approach to the game of hockey, in contrast, was decentralized and unfocused on international competition. If Team USA couldn’t start winning, the young talent would just play baseball or basketball or football instead.
Even Blake Geoffrion, the scion of one of the great North American hockey families, spent his spring weekends in the mid-90s fielding grounders and taking batting practice in the Williamson County Youth Baseball league. He was good, too, a natural athlete as comfortable swinging a baseball bat as he was wielding a hockey stick. And the ball fields were a whole lot shorter drive than the Centennial Sportsplex ice rink in Nashville. For Blake and other American kids of his generation, the Miracle on Ice was ancient history. Without new heroes with new medals draped around their necks, they might be lost to hockey forever. Little did he know that changes were being contemplated that might alter not only his future and the futures of his fellow Pee Wee hockey wunderkinds but also the entire future of the sport south of the forty-ninth parallel.
[1] https://www.si.com/vault/1996/09/23/217680/usa-over-dna-canadians-may-be-born-to-play-championship-hockey-but-it-was-the-americans-who-surprisingly-won-the-world-cup
[2] Interview with Bob Mancini, 8/1/2018
