Zusatztext A wonderfully detailed enrichment of the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century. Wayne Coffey's fresh perspective artfully takes a twenty-five-year-old story and advances it to the present with an enhanced appreciation of that stunning! breathtaking! still too-amazing-to-believe accomplishment. Al Michaels The 1980 U.S. hockey team has been mythologized in print and on screen for almost twenty-five years. Wayne Coffey's The Boys of Winter goes much deeper than that and! for the first time! gives us a clear picture of who these remarkable boysand menwere . . . and are. It is a very fine book. John Feinstein I celebrated my fifteenth birthday on the very day that the 'Boys of Winter' beat the Russians in Lake Placid. Wayne Coffey brilliantly weaves the behind-the-scenes story that amplifies how improbable this 'miracle' really was. Pat LaFontaine! NHL Hall of Famer The great stories can always be retold! but when they are retold with the emotion! the muscular prose! the freshness that Coffey brings to the Miracle on Ice! they seem new. Robert Lipsyte! New York Times ! and author of The Contender No matter how many times I hear the story of the U.S. Olympic hockey team's heroics in Lake Placid in 1980! I want to hear it again. It is allegory! fable! wonderful drama. Now Wayne Coffey comes to the campfire to tell the tale again! raising the requisite lumps in the requisite throats! adding new details to the familiar pictures. Very nice work. Very nice! indeed. Leigh Montville! author of Ted Williams First came the Hollywood version of the Miracle on Ice. Now comes the real story! rich in context and texture! as only a journalist and author like Wayne Coffey can report it and tell it. Harvey Araton! New York Times Meticulously researched! entertaining! and enlightening as an example of sportswriting and social history! Wayne Coffey has re-created the event that would eventually put the Cold War on ice. The Boys of Winter is the definitive book on a defining moment in American culture. Jay Atkinson! author of Ice Time Wayne Coffey re-creates the excitement of the unlikely run the U.S. men's hockey team made through the 1980 Olympics . . . an adventure that seems even more unlikely now than it felt twenty-five years ago. Bill Littlefield! host of NPR's Only a Game and author of Fall Classics Informationen zum Autor Wayne Coffey is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Daily News and the author of Winning Sounds Like This , among other books. He lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Klappentext The true story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and the Miracle on Ice, which Sports Illustrated called the greatest moment in sports historywith a new afterword by Ken Morrow for the fortieth anniversary of the Miracle on Ice An unvarnished and captivating read. Parade Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach. Their Miracle on Ice has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable. Wayne Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event, giving readers an ice-level view of the amateurs who took on a Russian hockey juggernaut at the height of the Cold War. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americansformulated by their fiercely determined coach, Herb Brooksand seamlessly weaves portraits of the boys with the fluid action of the game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since their stunning victory, examining how the Olympic events affected their lives. Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail, The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday ...

Autorentext

Wayne Coffey is an award-winning sportswriter for the New York Daily News and the author of Winning Sounds Like This, among other books. He lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

Klappentext

The true story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and the Miracle on Ice, which Sports Illustrated called the greatest moment in sports history—with a new afterword by Ken Morrow for the fortieth anniversary of the Miracle on Ice

“An unvarnished and captivating read.”—Parade

Once upon a time, they taught us to believe. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, a blue-collar bunch led by an unconventional coach. Their “Miracle on Ice” has become a national fairy tale, but the real Cinderella story is even more remarkable.

Wayne Coffey casts a fresh eye on this seminal sports event, giving readers an ice-level view of the amateurs who took on a Russian hockey juggernaut at the height of the Cold War. He details the unusual chemistry of the Americans—formulated by their fiercely determined coach, Herb Brooks—and seamlessly weaves portraits of the boys with the fluid action of the game itself. Coffey also traces the paths of the players and coaches since their stunning victory, examining how the Olympic events affected their lives.

Told with warmth and an uncanny eye for detail, The Boys of Winter is an intimate, perceptive portrayal of one Friday night in Lake Placid and the enduring power of the extraordinary.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

WEEDING THE GARDEN

Vladimir Petrov was skating in loose figure eights near center ice, his pace slow, his stick still and horizontal, a predator in wait. He edged in for the opening face-off. His two famous wings, Boris Mikhailov and Valery Kharlamov, were on his flanks. Petrov, No. 16, was perhaps the strongest player on the Soviet national team, with blacksmith arms and a bulging neck, a 200-pound slab of muscle who was possessed of the rarest of Russian weapons: a nasty slap shot. Historically, not many Russian players had one because for years not very many practiced slap shots, sticks being both in short supply and of inferior quality. If you wound up and cranked a slap shot, you stood a good chance of getting a splinter and having no stick to play with. “So we never slap puck,” defenseman Sergei Starikov said. “We make good wrist shot instead.” Petrov was 32, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and nine-time world champion. He didn’t know much of anything about Mark Johnson, the U.S. center whom he was about to face off against, except that he wore No. 10 and he looked small and ridiculously young.

It was 5:06 p.m. in Lake Placid, and 1:06 a.m. in Moscow. Bill Cleary, star of the 1960 gold-medal team that had been the last U.S. team to beat the Soviets, had just finished a brief talk in the locker room. “There’s no doubt in my mind–nor in the minds of all the guys on the ’60 team–that you are going to win this game. You are a better team than we were,” Cleary said. Herb Brooks followed him, standing at one end of Locker Room 5 in the new Olympic Field House, wearing a camel-hair sports coat and plaid pants that would’ve looked at home on the dance floor of Saturday Night Fever. The room was a cramped, unadorned rectangle with a rubber-mat floor and a steeply pitched ceiling, situated directly beneath the stands. You could hear stomping and chanting and feel the anticipatory buzz that was all over the Adirondacks. There was a small chalkboard to Brooks’s right and a tiny shower area behind him, the players on the wood benches rimming the room all around him. On the ride to the arena, Brooks sat with assistant Craig Patrick and they talked about what Brooks was going to say to the team. Brooks loved intrigue, the element of surprise. His whole style of play was constructed on it, moving players around, changing breakout patterns, keeping people guessing about everything. Just when his players were sure he was completely inhumane, he’d throw a tennis ball on the ice for a diversion, or have guys play opposite-handed or in differen…