sporting event of the 20th century. It
packs an extra emotional punch because
of the geopolitical context and the win’s
contribution to national pride at an emo-
tional low point for the country.
I can still get verklempt watching not
just those final seconds but the Mike
Eruzione go-ahead goal halfway through
the third (“Eruzione, he scores! Mike
Eruzione!”), the iconic dog-pile celebra-
tion of the star-spangled players at the
game’s end, and the St. Crispin’s Day pre-
game speech of coach Herb Brooks, in
which he tells his underdog team, “This
moment is yours.” (There’s no video of the
Brooks oration, but it is movingly enacted
by Kurt Russell in the movie Miracle.)
Given my tender emotions around this
event, I found myself misty-eyed a couple
of times reading Eruzione’s new autobi-
ography, The Making of a Miracle.
It is not quite, as billed in the subtitle,
“the untold story” of anything. The details
of Eruzione’s young hockey life may not
be well known, but they run so smoothly
in the ruts of a tale of an unlikely working-
class American sports star that they are
almost a cliché, from Eruzione’s having
to use his sister’s figure skates when he
started playing pick-up hockey as a kid to
the lucky breaks, coupled with grit and
hard work, that got him in a position to
attain hockey immortality.I
’Man aficionado of sports high-
lights and calls, and a repeat view-
er on YouTube.
There are some classics that
never grow old. The Shot Heard Round
the World (“The Giants win the pen-
nant!”). The gimpy Kirk Gibson home
run (“In a year that has been so improba-
ble, the impossible has happened”). The
California Golden Bears’ last-second,
five-lateral kickoff return against Stan -
ford (“The band is out on the field!”).
The classic Texas high-school match-
up, John Tyler versus East Plano, with
the wildest finish of any football game
ever played—look it up (“Oh, no!! Oh,
my God!!”). And because I’m a Yankees
fan of a certain age, Bucky Dent (“Deep
to left.. .”).
But nothing matches the last seconds
of the U.S.–Soviet Olympic hockey
game in 1980, with the great Al Michaels
making the call of a lifetime.
“Eleven seconds, you’ve got ten sec-
onds, the countdown going on right now!
Morrow up to Silk. Five seconds left in the
game. Do you believe in miracles?... Yes!”
Goosebumps.
Every. Single. Time.
The 4–3 U.S. victory in that game 40
years ago was easily the greatest American
SPONSORED BYNational Review Institute 47As for the Olympic team, any some-
what plugged-in sports fan is aware of
the broad outlines of its achievement.
Yet when a story is this good it is worth
constant retelling, and Eruzione’s book
is an enjoyable refresher (an excellent,
more journalistic version from some
years ago is The Boys of Winter, by
Wayne Coffey).
After an accomplished hockey
career at Boston University, Eruzione
bounced around minor-league hockey
a bit. The brawling world of the likes
of the Toledo Goaldiggers took some
getting used to. In his second game
with Toledo, he got in a fight, although
he only realized what was happening
after a brief delay. His coach’s advice
afterwards: “If it seems like it might be a
fight, it’s a fight.”
In the fall of 1979, Eruzione was still
eligible for amateur hockey and made it
onto the Olympic team, which was the
project of Herb Brooks, the inspired
coach whose strategic genius, psycholog-
ical acuity, extremely demanding style,
and idiosyncratic ways made the 1980
team what it was.
As a young player, Brooks had been
dropped from the 1960 U.S. Olympic
team at the last minute. He watched
from home as that team won a gold
medal, his dad commenting, not veryThe Making of a Miracle: The Untold Story
of the Captain of the 1980 Gold
Medal–Winning U.S. Olympic Hockey Team,
by Mike Eruzione with Neal E. Boudette
(Harper, 288 pp., $27.99)The Miracle
That Never
Ceases
RICHARD LOWRYThe American Olympic hockey team celebrates a 4–3 victory over the Soviet Union, February 22, 1980.BETTMANN/CONTRIBUTOR/GETTYIMAGESbooks_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/3/2020 8:11 PM Page 47
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