BU’s 1978 championship run is considered the beginning of goaltender Jim Craig’s glory story, a two-year sports fairy tale that culminated with a gold medal at the Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games. Craig was the man celebrating between the pipes when BU hoisted its 1978 Beanpot and NCAA hardware. But when discussing the topic of goaltending with members of that squad, to a man, every player spoke of not one but two outstanding goalies from that 1978 championship team: Craig and senior cocaptain Brian Durocher.
Fading newspaper clips and statistics in agate type bear out those claims. For much of the 1977-78 season, Durocher was a shutdown goalie who stood tall in big games against top rivals. Twice Craig was shelved with nagging injuries, twice Durocher doubled up on his workload and kept BU on track. It is true that only Craig went undefeated, and he was immense in BU’s three NCAA games, but it is an irrefutable fact that BU goaltending was a two-headed monster in 1977-78. The Terriers had a pair of prodigious talents, co-captain Brian and the gifted Jimmy, combining to fill the most important position in the rink.
Despite being surrounded by a wealth of love in the smalltown suburbs of Boston, Jim Craig grew up below middle class by today’s standards. A town with twenty thousand residents, North Easton was one of those little communities that harbors no secrets. Young Jimmy was a good athlete, but undersized. "I was five-foot-three and weighed 130 pounds going into my junior year of high school." When the lakes froze, he played pond hockey like the rest of the kids, but he owned no equipment other than stick and skates.
When examining history, one can spend hours reviewing the forks in the road that shape destiny, how the most innocuous event can help determine glory or failure. In the case of Jim Craig, one might argue that if not for an offhand remark by local mail collector Phil Thompson, the Miracle on Ice would never have come to be.
"I was on a pond when a mailman told my mom that I was a pretty good player," said Craig. For those who like to speculate on the genesis of history, that is where it all began for Jim Craig. "People within the town and community lent me equipment and brought me places," said Craig, who started playing goal for a local junior team called the Aces. He chose to be a goalie because he wanted to play the entire game and because he heard that goalie equipment was paid for. "I felt as though so many people believed in me that I couldn’t let them down." Jimmy got the hockey bug, but despite living only twenty-five miles from the famed Boston Garden he never attended a Beanpot tourney game; tickets for eight children proved too big an outlay for his father Donald.
Craig’s Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story reached another critical juncture as a high school senior when he was having his goalie mask repaired by specialist Ernie Higgins. Higgins’ son Neil, a former standout goalie at Boston College, was now coaching little Massasoit Community College. Neil made a point of dropping by his dad’s shop during Craig’s appointment and delivered a recruiting pitch to Jim. With no Division I scholarship offers, the eighteen-year-old Craig enrolled at Massasoit. Eight months later Craig helped steal the 1976 junior college championship from powerhouse Mass Bay Community, racking up an astounding sixty saves. The ubiquitous Toot Cahoon, BU’s assistant in charge of recruiting, was scouting the game and sought out the young hero in the locker room. Craig transferred to BU shortly thereafter, and championships followed.
Craig’s counterpart Brian Durocher grew up in the leafy suburbs of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, ninety minutes west of Boston near the Connecticut border. He was a sports-loving kid who carried the same last name, and much of the baseball passion, of his famous great-uncle Leo Durocher. Brian was an all-star in both baseball and hockey at Longmeadow, and Sports Illustrated later called him the favorite nephew of Leo the Lip. "He was my grandfather’s brother," said Brian, setting the record straight. Brian and his father Roland were close enough to Uncle Leo that together they attended his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1994.
It was while Leo Durocher was manager of the San Francisco Giants in 1968 that young Brian first got to see his famous uncle in a major league uniform. The Giants were in New York to play the Mets that August in a three-game series. It was a Saturday morning when Brian’s dad called the visiting clubhouse at Shea Stadium. The skipper wouldn’t come to the phone. It was 11 a.m., and Roland knew Leo wasn’t on the field.
"Tell him it’s Roland," said Brian’s dad. Once he learned that it was his nephew calling, Leo picked up.
"So we got our tickets and went down," said Brian.
Despite the dicey forecast, Roland and Brian Durocher jumped in the family wagon and pointed south towards New York City. By the time they arrived at Shea, the Mets and Giants were in the midst of a rain delay. Even with the foul weather, it turned out to be a banner day for the wide-eyed Brian. Using the Durocher name, father and son gained entry into the sanctity of a major league clubhouse. "I was thinking they were in there focusing on what they had to do," said Brian, reminiscing about his Make-A-Wish style baseball fantasy, "fixing their bats or their gloves, something like that."
What the Little League all-star absorbed firsthand was a dose of big league reality. His wayward great-uncle Leo was fully engrossed in one of his favorite off-the-field pastimes — poker. "The guys were playing cards, all the money was on the table," said Brian. "I always got a chuckle out of that." In a case of the apple not falling far from the tree, Brian grew up to enjoy card games as well, whiling away long hours on Terrier road trips, risking his meal money with the boys on the back of the bus.
Hockey finally replaced baseball as young Durocher’s primary sports passion, and he became a star goalie for Gary Dineen’s powerhouse junior club, the Springfield Olympics. He was recruited by Boston University and had a sensational freshman year in 1974-75, vaulting to the top of his craft and being named the ECAC goalie of the year. The next year his statistics improved, and he led the Terriers to their second straight NCAA semifinal. Over his first two seasons of Division I hockey, he had a won-loss record that would make a pitcher blush: 31-5. Going into his junior year in 1976-77, the only thing missing from Durocher’s dossier was an NCAA ring.
Jim Craig first arrived Jim Craig first arrived at BU in the fall of 1976, completely out of his comfort zone. "I remember my mother was ill at the time she dropped me off," said Craig. "Going in there I had never been on a trolley, been in an airplane or really been in the city. I was like — ‘What am I doing here?’" Craig’s mother Margaret was suffering from cancer and was in the last year of her life. For a nineteen-year-old so close to his mom, her illness rocked him. "Cancer is a terrible thing," said Craig. "I’d go see her one day, and I’d think she was going to die that night. She might make it another week, and then it was maybe a month, so it was a really tough roller coaster. It really screwed up my head for a while."
Despite playing with a heavy heart, Craig had a breakthrough season, replacing Durocher as the team’s number-one goalie by the fifth game of the year. He rolled through the season with twenty wins, all while his mother’s life slipped away. Craig harnessed his roiling emotions and helped turn around a potentially disastrous season, backstopping the Terriers to their fourth consecutive NCAA Frozen Four. "What I was able to do was really channel the anger and fear into my hockey," said Craig, "and it turned out okay."
Durocher’s performance that year was the exact inverse of Craig’s bittersweet success. He got off to the worst start of his career, getting hung with two losses in the opening weekend at Bowling Green. Returning east, he was shelled in consecutive blowouts to Providence and Dartmouth, unable to finish either game. He hit rock bottom four games into the season when he was replaced by Craig in front of a home crowd at Walter Brown Arena, his record a dismal 0–4. The goalie who owned two ECAC Championship watches, the whiz kid who was named top goalie in the East as a teenager, was now dazed and confused. Like a pitcher who had lost his fastball, Durocher was missing the most valuable asset in sports. "I lost my confidence." His final stat line for 1976–77 looks like a misprint for the former king of college netminding: an .800 save percentage, a 2–6 won-loss record, and a whopping 6.00 goals-against average.
Coach Parker benched Durocher for months at a time during his season of misery, and when he eventually returned, he stumbled. He managed to win a rare start in February, a twenty-save effort against Division II Merrimack. From that point on, Durocher languished on the end of the bench, a spectator for BU’s stirring twelvegame sprint to the Frozen Four.
Finally, after the Terriers were eliminated by Michigan in the 1977 NCAA semifinals, Parker gave Durocher the starting nod for the consolation game against UNH. In yet another nightmarish start, the fragile goalie was lit up for four goals in the first period at the half-empty Detroit Olympia. But instead of yanking Durocher, Parker came into the room and ripped into the rest of the team for sleepwalking through the first period. Out of loyalty to the man who had carried his club in previous years, Parker stuck with Durocher.
Sports operates in a fickle universe; one can only comprehend its unpredictable swings after the fact. A seemingly meaningless game in Detroit turned out to be a critical turning point in Durocher’s career. UNH coach Charlie Holt assembled powerhouse teams during his tenure at Durham, throwing defensive caution to the wind as he prioritized a swarming offense. His 1976–77 club was widely considered his best ever, fueled by the blazing star power of New England hockey legends like Ralph Cox, Tim "Trigger" Burke, and future NHL star Rod Langway. Holt let his horses run that afternoon in Detroit, bombarding Durocher with multiple scoring chances. But given his reprieve, Durocher began to feel the puck against his pads once again, blocking out all the old insecurities and doing what he did best: stop the puck. He held the proverbial fort as seniors Rick Meagher and Eruzione shook off their cobwebs.
By the next intermission the Terriers had pulled within a goal, and Durocher stood tall with the game on the line in the final stanza. Freshman phenom David Silk knocked in his fourth and fifth goals of the two-game tournament, Meagher finished his stellar career with a hat trick, and the Terriers came back to beat UNH 6–5 in a wildly entertaining consolation game.
For the smattering of fans who had wandered into Detroit’s Olympia the afternoon preceding the championship game, they had seen something far more important than the crowning of the nation’s third-place team. They had witnessed the first step in the restoration of Brian Durocher’s fragile confidence. He accomplished a lot that afternoon: twenty-nine saves were his season high; he’d beaten an excellent team desperate to take out BU; and he nailed down the first NCAA tournament win of his three-year career.
Parker referred to Durocher’s performance in Detroit in BU’s 1977-78 media guide. "Brian has always been a pressure goalie," said Parker. "He showed that in the NCAAs against New Hampshire." Durocher now had something upbeat to carry him through the summer months. Every ounce of that positive energy would be required to help him endure an off-season that nearly cost him his life.
In July of 1977, Durocher’s daily schedule was jammed with multiple activities spread across the state: coursework at BU; a summer job at Gary Dineen’s hockey camp in Springfield; recreational softball in Longmeadow. Durocher was spending upwards of five hours a day traversing the Bay State in his mid-sized 1965 Buick Skylark.
He recalls the night that could have been his last. "The temperatures that week were in the 90s, so fatigue had set in when I returned to Boston." A critical fact was that Durocher chose to drive the much heavier family car that night, an eight-cylinder Caprice Classic. "A real tank," said Durocher. He began that fateful day in class from 8 to 11 a.m. at Boston University, then drove to Springfield for a five-hour session on ice helping Dineen run his hockey camp until 6 p.m. Durocher stopped for a bite to eat and then played two hours of softball in Longmeadow’s late-day sun. By the time he got behind the wheel for the seventy-mile return to Boston, his body demanded rest.
Just outside Worcester on the Massachusetts Pike, Durocher fell completely asleep at the wheel. The speed limit was sixty-five miles per hour. "I hit an immovable cement wall that should have killed me," said Durocher. He suffered a fractured right ankle, a severely bruised chest, and a nasty head wound that required seventy stitches to bind. The Worcester hospital staff needed six days to piece him back together. His choice of cars, the Caprice Classic, Chevrolet’s largest sedan, instead of the lighter Buick Skylark, made a world of difference. According to BU Sports Information, "The old car probably saved his life."
The doctors did not expect Durocher to return to the ice until December of 1977, but he accelerated his rehab and returned November 8, in time for the last two weeks of training camp. His injury, however, had cost him three vital weeks in his competition with Craig for precious playing time. Despite being a popular teammate who had been elected co-captain the previous spring, Durocher’s status in the BU nets was dubious.
While Durocher was in the midst of his painful rehab that fall, Jim Craig got his dreaded news. Just as classes began in September of 1977, Margaret Craig passed away from cancer. In Jim’s heart of hearts, he was relieved that his mom’s suffering had finally come to an end, but he was terribly worried about his father. Donald Craig was under enormous stress trying to manage the household on his meager salary as food director of nearby Dean College. In the first month of his junior year, Craig wandered the BU campus in Boston in an emotional funk, his hockey future in doubt.
"Jimmy had to do a lot of soul-searching whether or not he was going to come back," said the first-year sports information director Ed Carpenter. "I remember sitting next to him at the Dugout, having a beer. He said, ‘Geez, my mother died, and I’m really close to my Dad. What’s going to happen to him?’ Jim had siblings, he felt responsible," said Carpenter. "He had a major decision as to whether he was going to come back to school and play."
Two Boston University goalies, both with championship pedigrees, were now in danger of falling off the Terrier depth chart. Both had suffered trauma: Durocher’s physical, Craig’s emotional. BU’s number-three goalie, junior Bob Wels from Buffalo, had never seen a minute of varsity action. Losing their two star goaltenders would be catastrophic to BU’s chances in 1977-78.
Luckily, both players had ample support from the family of Boston University hockey. Durocher went to work with BU team physician Dr. Tom Silva, a leader in sports medicine who also served the Boston Celtics. Together, they attacked the work required for Durocher to recover the mobility in his shattered ankle, spending countless hours together inside the Case Center training facilities.
Half a mile away at the Dugout, Craig spent several afternoons with Carpenter, using him as a sounding board as he agonized over the decision to play hockey while his dad shouldered his weighty burden at home. Jim was the sixth of eight siblings, so Don Craig still had to raise younger brothers Kevin and Danny by himself. Craig, not outgoing like his townie teammates, found solace from laid-back sophomore Billy LeBlond, a teammate who came from a huge family as well. "He was one of the kindest guys," said Craig about LeBlond. "I looked to Billy more like a brother. When my mom wasn’t there, his family was."
"We took a liking to each other," said LeBlond, who found Craig to be a bit of a loner. "Jimmy ended up moving to our floor. He got a single; that was more to his likes, to be all by himself. But we started hanging out." The two began playing a lot of backgammon together. The third Meagher brother of BU hockey, Ontario native Tony, lived down the hall from Craig and LeBlond and shared their mellow temperament. The three teammates formed a kinship.
In order to weather his psychological storm, Craig had gone against his solo nature, befriending his hall mates as well as hockey SID Carpenter. Together, they buttressed Craig during his emotional crisis. So when Parker held his first practice on October 15, Craig was there, a fully committed member of BU hockey. Being part of the team helped him regain his sense of normalcy in a world turned asunder.
Durocher’s near-death experience on the Massachusetts Turnpike appeared to cure his psychological yips between the pipes. He focused and worked tirelessly with Dr. Silva and team trainer Nick Passaretti, living in the cold and hot whirlpools of the BU training room, with jets of water blasting his scarred right ankle. Although he was three weeks late for training camp, Durocher pronounced himself fit to play on November 8, with a full two weeks to regain his timing before opening day. Parker offered conditional praise to Durocher heading into the season. "If he can fully recover from the ankle injury and can get back his confidence, then I think he can once again be one of the outstanding goalies in the East."
Officially, Parker stated that he would split the goaltending duties between the popular co-captain and the individualistic Craig. But as he had demonstrated the year before, Parker had a very short leash. He would not tolerate another subpar year from Durocher.
The loss of graduating superstars Eruzione and Rick Meagher, not only captains but BU’s two all-time leading scorers, forced Parker to shoehorn half a dozen untested freshmen into prominent roles. He desperately needed stability in net. After a tumultuous and nearly disastrous off-season for his goaltenders, Parker entered the 1977-78 season with his two studs back in goal, physically fit and mentally ready for their vital chores in the crease.
