On the 38th anniversary of the "Miracle on Ice," New England Hockey Journal catches up with a local legend for a reflection of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Winter Games and the mission that most global hockey pundits thought was an impossible dream. Contributing writer Steven DiOssi spent some time with 1980 Team USA goaltender Jim Craig to look back on the tournament that forever changed ice hockey history.
Hours after defeating Finland to capture the gold medal in the 1980 Olympic Winter Games, United States goaltender Jim Craig couldn’t hide his emotions at the medal ceremony.
The crowd at the Olympic Fieldhouse in Lake Placid, N.Y., roared as it waited to see Team USA collect gold for just the second time ever. Craig, who was first in line, hopped once as he was called up to the podium to receive his medal.
It’s a snapshot in history that captures the raw emotion Craig and his teammates had after what they’d accomplished together at the Olympics.
"At that moment, I saw everything and everyone who had helped me get to that moment where I was," Craig said. "It was a wonderful reel of emotion that just brought me from childhood to present. It was quite exciting."
Craig was three months shy of his 23rd birthday and he and his teammates, led by head coach Herb Brooks, were two days removed from a thrilling 4-3 victory over the Soviet Union — one that shocked the world and transcended far beyond the confines of the rink where the game had been played. It was the sort of moment that brought together a nation in what was then an uncertain time at home and abroad.
While the victory over the Soviets is often called the "Miracle on Ice" — a seemingly fitting moniker when you look at the accomplishment from the outside — it was the result of a group of talented hockey players who believed in each other, worked hard and made sacrifices to realize their dream of earning a gold medal in the Olympics.
It was the culmination of a journey for Craig and his teammates that began long before they each arrived at U.S. Olympic training camp the year before. They’d each come as individuals who had won at all levels of the game of hockey, but came together as one team to achieve the unthinkable.
Setting goals
Playing in the Olympics was a goal Craig set for himself as a young kid growing up in North Easton, Mass., a town about 45 minutes south of Boston, with his parents, Margaret and Donald, and his seven siblings. He would spend countless hours playing hockey there with his brothers and began to mold himself into the player and person he would later become. "I used to play goal in the driveway but I’d only wear my mask, my gloves, a cup and a stick," Craig said. "My brothers and this guy who was with the Boston Braves, Ray O’Malley, would shoot on me for quickness. What I would try to do is make sure I didn’t take my blocker and hit off the side of the house because it would leave a puck mark."
Craig’s success at keeping pucks out of the net, however, also meant that they would hit the house or go missing from time to time. His father joked that if he had a dollar for every broken window or lost puck, he’d be driving a Lincoln.
"The best part about my dad is that after the Olympics, I did buy him that Lincoln," Craig said. "He painted the house and he got a Lincoln, but what I remember best is the passion of playing and competing."
From a young age, Craig’s passion for the game drove him to set goals for himself, and he made sure others knew about them, too.
"I always tell people, if you don’t tell people what your dreams are, how can they help you?" Craig said. "I had always made it aware of what my dreams were. I wanted to go to college on a full scholarship, I wanted to play in the Olympics and I wanted to play in the National Hockey League.
"When people know what they are, they can help guide you, whether it’s through encouragement, whether it’s through finance, whether it’s through time or whether it’s through really just holding you accountable.
"I really believe that I was fortunate enough to make these things happen because I told people what my dreams were and they cared enough about me to help me."
Craig received a tremendous amount of support from his parents growing up. His father worked hard to help the family financially, while his mother would do just about anything to help Craig realize his dreams, from dropping off his skates to be sharpened to ensuring his equipment was ready and that he had rides to rinks for games and practices.
"Her life was (about) how she could take care of her family," Craig said of his late mother. "I always tell people, the personal sacrifices are never done by the person who is getting the benefit. That’s always done by someone else. I took advantage of all these personal sacrifices that my parents did for me."
Overcoming adversity
One by one, Craig realized his goals on the ice, but his success did not come without major challenges off of it.
After one year as a goaltender at Massasoit Community College, he received a full scholarship to play hockey at Boston University. By age 20, he’d been drafted by the Atlanta Flames — 72nd overall in the 1977 NHL amateur draft — and backstopped the Terriers to the 1978 national championship over rival Boston College. After playing well in the 1979 World Championship for the United States, a team coached by Brooks, he was the leading candidate to be the starting goaltender for his country at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
But in 1977, his mother had passed away after battling cancer, and just before the Winter Olympics, his father lost his job. These were two events that shaped Craig’s life and kept his focus on his family, despite the enormous task of representing his country on an international stage against the best in the world.
Craig had been open about the dreams he had for his future in hockey, but he wasn’t the only one. Margaret Craig shared in her son’s dream of seeing him one day represent his country in the Olympics. This helped guide Craig’s decision to play, despite the opportunity he had to forego the Olympics by signing an NHL contract and helping out his family more financially.
"It was a big dream of ours, not just mine (to play in the Olympics)," Craig said. "In life you get certain opportunities and then it’s your job just to recognize them and take advantage of them. She had made so many sacrifices for me — financially, emotionally, time — that to represent our country meant so much to her that it was really kind of an easy decision.
"It was a tough decision in that I couldn’t financially help out, but it was the right thing to do. It was something I’d promised my mother I would do, and that’s what I did."
Connecting with Brooks
Brooks assembled his final roster of 20 players who would represent the United States, and they began a revolutionary sevenmonth training program designed by Brooks to help prepare them physically for a Soviet team that many considered to be the best-conditioned hockey team on the planet.
Brooks, who was known for being an innovative coach and a tremendous motivator, connected with his players in a special way. "Herb had a unique ability to look right inside a person’s soul and really know what he or she needed," Craig said. "His whole life was trying to make people’s lives better.
"When my mother had passed away and my father had lost his job, I had two young brothers living at home and so for me, the desire to go home and be strong for my family was really tough. Herb understood that."
Training in Colorado Springs meant Craig would be away from home for long periods of time, but Brooks recognized the situation and made arrangements to help him out.
"Herb and I spent a great deal of time (together)," Craig said. "He was able to find me a home with the team doctor (Dr. Visvaldis George Nagobads), so I could save money and send the per diem home instead of on rent. He gave me a family atmosphere."
Above all else, Brooks had a lot of compassion for his players — something Craig appreciates to this day.
"He cared for every one of us in such a special way," Craig recalled of the late Brooks, who passed away in 2003 in a car accident. "I always tell people, great coaches don’t make great athletes, they make you great people, and I think that’s what Herb did for each and every one of us."
Facing the best
Brooks knew that to capture gold, the United States would have to beat the Soviets, a team that had won the gold medal in five of the past six Olympic Games, including the past four in a row. He knew the Soviet team well and developed a training system that would help the Americans not just compete with the "Big Red Machine" through superior conditioning, but beat them.
Brooks had been the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. Olympic team and had watched from home with his father as his country captured its first and only gold medal. As head coach at the University of Minnesota, he also knew what it took to win, having led the Golden Gophers to the national championship in 1974, 1976 and 1979.
When Brooks was chosen to lead the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, it was an opportunity to capture the gold that had eluded him two decades earlier.
"Herb Brooks would never ask somebody to do anything more than he wouldn’t do," Craig said. "He was the hardest-working, most innovative guy and he was always looking to create the future, and he always had your best interest at heart. He was a tremendous mentor." Brooks’ unprecedented training program included 61 exhibition games in just more than five months’ time. Opponents included national teams from around the world, college and professional teams from across the United States and a handful of NHL clubs.
The U.S. Olympic team went 42-16-3, but its most important contest came in the final exhibition game — a 10-3 rout by the Soviets at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Feb. 9, 1980. It was just three days before the U.S. opened group play in the Olympics.
If you ask Craig, that game’s place on the schedule was no coincidence.
"The timing was really important because we had never played against the Soviet Union’s Red Army team — the team that would represent them in the Olympics," Craig said. "It was an opportunity for us to see how good they were, be fans and realize, ‘Oh my God, we can’t go in there and be fans!’
"I think it was all part of Herb’s plan. He knew what players were tough enough to be pushed and pulled and how to be motivated. He was a master at motivation."
Completing the mission
Craig describes the path he and his teammates took to earning a gold-medal victory as their mission together. It was one that began many months before they’d arrived in Lake Placid, but culminated when the Olympics began.
After coming back from a one-goal deficit to tie the tournament opener against Sweden, the United States rattled off four straight victories over Czechoslovakia, Norway, Romania and West Germany in convincing fashion. They’d outscored their opponents a combined 25-10 and had earned the chance to advance to the final round, made up of the top two teams in each group.
It set up the game the United States had prepared for all along — a rematch with the Soviets on Feb. 22, 1980. It wasn’t just physical preparation that came with being ready to face a team with an average age of 26 that had not lost a game in the Olympics since 1968. It took strong mental preparation for a young U.S. team, too.
"I think what’s really important is that we believed in each other," Craig said of his team’s approach to playing the Soviets. "For me, I compartmentalized the task. I took the Russian game and I broke it into four or five-minute periods and I concentrated five minutes at a time. I played, what would in my mind, be considered three separate hockey games because they were that good." The United States overcame a 3-2 deficit to start the third period by scoring two goals in a minute and 21 seconds, including the game-winner with 10 minutes left to play by Mike Eruzione (Winthrop, Mass.). But the Americans stuck to their game plan until the end.
"Herb really believed in quick shifts, 45 seconds. He kept the whole bench in play," Craig said. "All the players had a role and they knew what that was. They were expected to execute and people expected them to execute. People trusted them to execute and that’s what we did. We won collectively."
As the minutes turned to seconds, the crowd at Olympic Fieldhouse cheered and a nation erupted with excitement as time expired and the United States had beaten the Soviets, 4-3.
While no one could ever take that victory away from Craig and his teammates, they knew there was one more test separating them from accomplishing their mission of capturing gold. The difference between winning and losing would mean gold or possibly not medaling at all — a harsh reality for United States players coming off the game of their lives.
But just two days later, the United States overcame a one-goal deficit, scoring three goals in the third period, to beat Finland, 4-2, and complete the mission.
Moments after the initial on-ice celebration between Craig and his teammates, he scanned the crowd looking for one of the people who helped him get there. "Where’s my father?" he asked, a TV camera capturing the moment.
When Craig looks back on winning those two games, he describes two very different feelings.
"One is to get to the goal … to be able to compete for a gold medal," Craig said about the victory over the Soviets. "I think the key to our team was to make sure that we understood that there was more hockey to play. In the game against the Russians, we were the underdogs. It was an incredible accomplishment by a bunch of guys — that’s really good and you feel really good about it. The game you win against Finland was a mission — it was to end the mission to win the gold medal … what we had trained so hard for and that was really hard because we were a favorite (in that game).
"One was exhilaration and the other one would probably be relief," Craig said as he compared the emotions he and his teammates had after their last two games of the Olympics.
An important legacy
It’s been almost 38 years since Craig and his teammates captured gold in Lake Placid, but what they accomplished together has been etched in Olympic and United States history.
Today, Craig is 60 years old and using the lessons he learned as a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team to help inspire others to accomplish their own goals. He’s co-authored a book and travels around the world as a mentor and keynote motivational speaker through his company, Gold Medal Strategies, speaking to individuals, major corporations and sports teams, among others.
"I think a great day for me is when someone mentors me or I mentor them," Craig said. "My mission is to use whatever celebrity I have to be in the most positive way. I do a ton of charity work and I really spent a lot of years in sales, so I really hope to help people to understand how to make great teams … telling how and why great teams win."
Craig has accomplished a lot on and off the ice, but people in all aspects of their life can use the advice he offers others.
"The first thing you have to do is to tell people what your dreams are so that they can help you. You have to take advantage of opportunities," he said. "You are what you see in life. You have to envision being successful.
"I always tell people, failing is OK. Failure isn’t fatal, but being afraid to fail is."
While Craig and his teammates might be best known for that historic performance at the 1980 Winter Olympics, it’s perhaps how he’s using that experience to help other people that will be his legacy.
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